Cost Effective IT: Virtualization, Service Management Converge

The top issue confronting CIOs and senior IT managers is how to demonstrate that IT is functioning as efficiently and cost effectively as the other lines of business within their company. Making this all the more imperative is the growing trend of funding IT capital growth out of savings garnered by making IT operations more efficient and cutting costs. Significant reductions in IT operating costs from process improvements will be needed to meet growing capital expenditures. Left with a mandate to do more with less, many CIOs are turning to two very different, but very complementary, notions on how to manage a rapidly changing environment: virtualization and service management.

Primary research conducted by IBM reveals that changes to the computing environment account for 85% of IT problems. Today, IT must be able to devise, configure, and—most importantly—manage systems in a way that supports continuous adaptation. Since the only systems designed for change are logical systems, a critical strategy is to separate the logical functions of systems, storage, and network hardware from their physical implementations under the mantra of virtualize more and manage less.

The IBM Systems Director family of systems management products provides IT operations with the necessary solutions to view and manage broad heterogeneous arrays of component-level devices as homogeneous pools of virtualized resources. With both a common way to manage physical and virtualized resources, and a larger context showing the relationships between the physical and virtual resources, IT operations managers have a unified approach for managing all resources, which can dramatically boost IT productivity and lower IT costs.

"IT credibility is the cornerstone on which every IT initiative, from operational cost cutting to strategic line-of-business development, rises or falls."

IT Credibility Counts
IT operating costs, however, are only part of the overall IT problem. IT credibility is the cornerstone on which every IT initiative, from operational cost cutting to strategic line-of-business development, rises or falls. Unfortunately, that credibility is shrouded by the fact that many business managers see IT as a cost-generating black box. How serious of a problem is that perception? A 2001 Gartner Research Note, "Key Competencies for Service-Based IS Organizations," warned that IT departments were "losing their franchise to deliver IT solutions" to a variety of specialized consulting and outsourcing firms.

That perception of line-of-business managers is compounded by misconceptions of simplicity of computer management fostered by the desktop PC as a sole frame of reference. To make matters worse, 80% of all IT problems are now discovered by end users, which leave them with the general consensus that they are the IT "test team." Needless to say, that puts IT under a very unflattering corporate spotlight.

The end goal for IT is clear: it must be transformed from an opaque, reactive, technology provider into a transparent, strategic, service provider. The launch pad for transforming IT from a technology manager to a business enabler is through a governance process that is often dubbed "IT Service Management (ITSM)" that comes out of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

ITIL is considered the most comprehensive source of information about IT processes needed to implement IT as a managed service. ITIL started as a project that the government of the United Kingdom assigned to the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in order to develop innovative ways to improve IT service efficiency. A team of consultants, vendors, and users documented a set of best practices using a common glossary of terms—recently updated and repackaged as seven books. In addition, consulting and educational firms around the world now offer ITIL training and certification programs for IT professionals.

Practice Meets Theory
While theory is important, CIOs and senior IT managers need to know how to take what they have today, how to integrate it, and then how to fill any gaps that may exist in a practical and—more importantly—actionable plan. In that regard, IBM Service Management is intended to help any business that delivers a service—whether to customers, supply chain partners, or employees—do so at a quality level that meets expectations.

For CIOs and IT managers, the IBM service management portfolio provides a complete solution to deal with constantly changing business demands, tougher government and industry regulations that require IT support for compliance, and rising IT labor costs on two distinct levels: short-term operations and long-term strategies. The goal of service management is to refine operations and then automate them as processes that can be repeated consistently in order to rapidly solve similar problems.

As a result, the IBM Service Management solution is characterized by three tiers of software. At the base are operational management tools. These tools set the boundaries on solution effectiveness. Automating a process makes it no more effective as a process per se. What automation does do is ensure that the process will be optimally implemented each time it is used. At the top tier, the process managers automate best-practice use of the operational tools based on setting business policies.

Point of Convergence
The pivotal link sitting between the operational management and strategic process management tiers is the IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB). The CCMDB provides the foundation for the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) based notion of service management. Featuring fast, automated, non-intrusive discovery of applications, the ability to store deep configuration details, and the ability to integrate this data with workflows and business policies, the CCMDB plays a critical role in automating the IBM Service Management solution.

That is precisely where service management and virtualization converge. The rich knowledge that pervades the Systems Director family, particularly the interrelationships between real and virtual systems can be stored in the CCMDB. That sets a very high baseline for best-practice operational management of systems, storage and networks. When integrated into the CCMDB, that information can be shared with other operational management software and leveraged by a much broader array of tools. More importantly, the use of that information can be automated into processes that consistently execute operational software in the most effective manner.

In this light, the broad continuum of virtualization becomes a cornerstone for efficient, low-cost, and accurate systems management. What’s more, it provides a very high-level threshold of availability—especially for complicated IT environments. This is particularly important in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment, where Service Level Agreements with end users are an important mechanism for measuring IT accountability. With virtualization and service management working together, IT can achieve new levels of efficiency.