Third-Party White Paper by EMA: Managing Business Service Performance in a Virtual Environment

Managing Business Service
Performance in a Virtual Environment
®An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMAT) White Paper Prepared for ASG April 2008
IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and ConsultingManaging Business Service Performance
in a Virtual Environment
Table of Contents
Executive Summary..................................................................................................................................................... 1
The Importance of Business Service Management.............................................................................................. 1
Business Service Implications of Virtualization.................................................................................................... 2
Virtualization Inhibitors to Business Service Performance................................................................................. 3
Ensuring Virtual Business Service Performance.................................................................................................... 5
Monitoring Virtual Business Service Performance with ASG............................................................................ 7
EMA Perspective.......................................................................................................................................................... 8
About ASG.................................................................................................................................................................... 9
©2008 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and ConsultingManaging Business Service Performance
in a Virtual Environment
Executive SummaryBusiness Service Management (BSM) is of growing importance in the IT world. By managing IT systems according to the business services they support - like order entry, online sales, shipping, or customer service - IT is able to deliver on real business goals like providing competitive advantage, improving customer satisfaction, driving revenue growth, and increasing shareholder value.Virtualization is a rapidly growing technology that can help deliver these business goals. As well as providing productivity and cost benefits to IT, it can provide significant busi-ness benefits like greater agility, improved performance, high service availability, and bet-ter return on IT investments. However, virtualization also creates many new challenges. Virtual systems are highly dy-namic, and if they are not properly managed can result in severe negative impacts like failed audits, compliance breaches, performance and availability problems, service down-time, security exposures, productivity losses, and drastically rising operational costs.The answer is to use appropriate solutions and capabilities to prevent these problems from occurring. With a focus on Business Services, it is especially important to ensure a high level of performance and availability for those services. This requires integrated discovery and monitoring of the complete physical and virtual operating environment, connecting the pieces across a complex, heterogeneous enterprise, correlating key data points, and presenting business-oriented indicators in high-level, busi-ness-focused dashboard.
Take a moment to think, not This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) white paper explores these issues in greater depth, highlighting the core problems and EMA about what you are trying to recommended solutions, to give IT the ability to ensure high-qual-accomplish, but why you are ity business service performance in a virtual environment. Finally, it trying to accomplish it. briefly reviews one such solution, ASG's Business Service Platform (BSP), and highlights how ASG delivers features to satisfy these key EMA recommendations.
The Importance of Business Service ManagementMany IT people are looking to make their IT systems better - thinking about service levels, response times, provisioning, and system recovery. With the 'ordered chaos' of a typical IT environment, it is sometimes difficult to take a step back, and to take a mo-ment to think, not about what you are trying to accomplish, but why you are trying to accomplish it.Ultimately, IT exists to deliver business goals - to beat the competition, to satisfy in-ternal ... [download for more]