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IT Operations and Business executives face many challenges keeping labor costs down, providing adequate service levels, and driving operational efficiency, espe-cially in critical data center operations such as Service Level Monitoring, Event Lifecycle Management, and End-User Service.
EMA's research shows that complexity, manual management, and non-integrated operational tools cause significant problems to enterprises. Data Center Automation and Integration can substantially address these issues and help IT organizations to reduce labor costs, improve service levels, and ensure more efficient resource utilization in critical areas of data center operations. Opalis Integration Server provides a solution for Data Center Automation and Integration that is likely to deliver significant benefits to IT and to the business.
Critical Problem Areas in Data Center Operations
IT organizations face many challenges in providing and maintaining quality service to their business users and customers. Three critical problem areas for data center operations include Service Level Monitoring, Event Lifecycle Management, and IT Self Service.
Service Level Monitoring
Service level monitoring is the measurement of key metrics ? such as user response times, application availability, storage availability, CPU use, network I/O, and exception events ? in order to assure end-users have consistently high service levels. EMA research shows that service level monitoring is a high priority for CIOs. In a recent survey of 100 CIOs, almost 80% listed it as either their first or second highest IT management priority.
However, over half of these CIOs said they experienced problems that affected service levels at least once or twice a week, and a quarter experienced them almost daily. Around 90% rated the impact of these service failures as either critical or important.
Part of the problem is that most IT organizations must integrate metrics from multiple sources, including management tools, monitors, logs, and services. In the 100 organizations surveyed, EMA found 40 different monitoring tools in use, with an average of over five different tools per organization. Manually monitoring and integrating this disconnected, silo-based environment reduces the visibility of important metrics, and increases management complexity. Scripting and other ad-hoc management techniques are fragile, error-prone, and costly to create and maintain. These critical problems result in:
- Higher staff levels and training costs
- Higher service desk costs
- Increased risk of errors and downtime
- Slower remediation and missed service levels
- Increased business pressure on IT service
Event Lifecycle Management
EMA's research shows that when problems do arise, it takes a long time to process them through the event lifecycle, driving up IT costs, and directly affecting busi-ness users. EMA surveyed the typical times taken in each of the four stages of the event management life cycle and found the following results:
Step 1 ? Alerting: For almost one third of IT organizations, it takes between 15 minutes and an hour to realize they have a problem. Another third take over an hour to realize they have a problem. In almost half of these organizations, IT only realizes a serious problem exists after business users have reported it. Only 18% of organizations use auto-mated tools in this step ? roughly the same number that detect problems in less than 15 minutes.
Step 2 ? Identification: Identifying the cause of a problem, and the likely solution, takes between 15 minutes and an hour for over a quarter of IT organi-zations. 40% take over an hour, and 13% take over a day. Over half of the organizations surveyed identified both the problem and the solution manually, based on previous experience or expert opinion.
Step 3 ? Correction: 23% of IT organizations spend on average between 15 minutes and an hour on cor-rective actions to fix a problem. However, over half of the organizations surveyed take over an hour to correct a problem, and 20% take more than 8 hours. Over 80% of IT organizations resolve their service problems manually.
Step 4 ? Validation: Validating that the problem is fixed typically take between 15 minutes and 1 hour for 20% of IT organizations. However, almost half of the respondents take over an hour, and over 20% take over a day to verify that a fix has worked. Almost 50% of organizations validate their solutions either manually or not at all.
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