By Stefan Hochuli Paychère published: Friday, May 18 2007
Virtualized datacenters need operational excellence
These are the top tips for choosing the right solution to face today’s data center operation challenges:
Implement a virtualized datacenter to use resources efficiently, respond faster to business needs and increase availability.
Leverage the technology to serve business needs by choosing an appropriate business process automation tool.
Ensure compliance by using a tool that has proper audit trail and security features.
Make sure you yourself can capture and modify your own processes and best practices. This will reduce time & risk and therefore costs, ultimately allowing you to maintain business agility in fast changing markets.
Choose a tool that is deeply integrated with virtualized resources in order to gain control over the technology.
Make sure the tool has a browser based front-end for ease of use and abstraction of the complexity for the end-user.
Virtualized datacenters are a key factor in answering top challenges encountered by IT administrators in recent years. They maximize utilization of existing resources, ensure faster response to business needs with shorter and simplified provisioning processes, and increase availability as a result of hardware independence and mobility of the virtualized resources. This also allows zero downtime maintenance and very fast recovery times in case of failure or disaster.
The virtualized datacenter is mainly about technology. The real challenge of leveraging virtualized datacenters comes when you introduce the “Human Factor.” The technology is still operated by humans that need to acquire the proper skill set. Infrastructure teams, under higher pressure from shorter process cycles, often perform in reactive mode, which causes degradation of service quality. The only way to ensure service excellence in today’s environment is to implement business best practices and enforce operational procedures.
Quality, processes and compliance
Every Quality Management System (QMS) promises quality and performance improvements as well as more business opportunities once key processes have been identified, documented, measured and improved. However industries subject to specific regulations will expect much more from their QMS. Companies want their QMS to help them comply with the IT control section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the FDA’s validation requirements or the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices for example.
As a result, corporations usually end up deploying Business Process Automation (BPA) systems, in order to automate, track and improve the required processes. The difficulty resides in the level or technology depth of the automation.
Different levels of integration
Purely “work order” based systems, with e-mail or web order delivery, usually improve process efficiency by 50% compared to purely manual and paper run book based systems. But this level of integration does not really reduce the operational risk and complexity of the process. The risk of human errors is still high since the process is actually only tracked by the process automation system and still relies on people to manually perform operations. The complexity is not reduced, since the process operator still has to be knowledgeable about the technology and is only partially alleviated from working in reactive mode.
At the other end of the spectrum, fully automated and integrated systems, usually using a service-oriented architecture (SOA), provide the best technical solution. They considerably reduce the time, risk and therefore cost of the process. They also nullify the complexity, since the technology is completely abstracted from the requester with an automated process usually bypassing IT resources. Infrastructure teams can then deploy their talents on more strategic activities. The problem with this solution is in the complexity of the implementation, which most of the time requires additional tools, time and external expertise. Very often implementation of a new process or change of an existing one requires too much time and highly skilled resources, which contradicts the business agility requirements of today’s corporations.
Optimal level of integration
So where is the optimal depth of automation? The solution is in systems that allow both a deep technological integration of an SOA solution and the ease of change of a classical “work order” BPA solution. You definitively need automated processes that provide audit trails required for compliance. You also need to be able to implement the most technical, sometimes low level, processes of a virtualized datacenter and still have an IT team member, with no scripting or developer background, changing it. The solution should enable you to present these processes in a web site that integrates fully into your corporate intranet, thus abstracting the complexity for the end-user and effectively turning most of your IT requests into self-service operations. Finally you want a packaging and distribution mechanism for the processes that complies with your internal security policies and allows proper change management procedures to be applied in production environments.
This optimal solution will address all quality and compliance requirements, and achieve and sustain the most stringent cost, time and risk reduction objectives. More importantly it will maintain the agility needed for in house process implementation and maintenance in a short change cycle environment.
Stefan Hochuli Paychère is CTO and co-founder of Dunes. Under Stefan's technical leadership, Dunes created the first true open framework to perform full business process automation of virtual and physical datacenters. Stefan has more than fourteen years experience in computer hardware and software development areas going from real time embedded systems to multi-tiered enterprise business systems.
