With CMS 10, HP puts workload configuration data newly in hands of those who can best use it to manage services delivery

HP today introduced HP Configuration Management System (CMS) 10, a broad update designed to give more types of IT leaders better insight and control over everything from discrete IT devices to complete services-enabled business processes.

Especially important for the operational control of hybrid services delivery and converged cloud implementations, CMS 10 gathers and shares the configuration patterns and characteristics of highly virtualized workloads. The update helps manage dynamic virtualized applications both inside enterprise data centers as well as leading clouds.

"CMS 10 improves control of converged clouds," said Jimmy Augustine, product marketing manager at HP Software. "It sees the virtual machines and updates the Universal Configuration Management Data Base (UCMDB) with the dynamic information from public and private clouds."

With the new software, HP says clients can reduce costs and risks associated with service disruptions while reducing the time spent on manual discovery by more than 50 percent thanks to automated discovery capabilities. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

With the growing adoption of cloud computing, organizations are under increased pressure to deliver new services and scale existing ones. The complexities of cloud-based infrastructures coupled with a lack of visibility have hampered organizations’ ability to efficiently and predictably manage IT performance.

“Service disruptions within complex cloud and virtualized environments are difficult to identify and resolve,” said Shane Pearson, vice president, Product Marketing, Operations, Software, HP. “With the new enhancements to HP Configuration Management System, IT executives now have the configuration intelligence they need at their fingertips to make rapid decisions to ensure consistent business service availability.”

CMS 10 also introduces new capabilities specifically for service lifecycle design and operations, notably within both business service management (BSM) and IT service management (ITSM).

CMS 10 also introduces new capabilities specifically for service lifecycle design and operations.

I was especially impressed by the ability of CMS 10 users to extend the view of operations to business process analysts, enterprise architects and DevOps managers -- all provided by a new browser-based access and query capability. These business-function-focused leaders can seek out the information they need to cut through the complexity of systems data to measure and react to how an entire application or processes are behaving systemically.

What's more, CMS 10 level insights can be extended to security professionals and business architects to gather data on compliance, performance, and even for better architecting the next process or hybrid services mix. The fact that CMS 10 already supports across many VMs and cloud types shows the importance of ensuring configuration conformity as a baseline capability for hybrid cloud uses.

The CMS update broadly supports virtual machines better, has multi-tenancy support to appeal to service providers, and delivers its outputs via web browsers and search interfaces. "You can see the full applications support infrastructure, and discover out of the box the whole workload support," says Augustine.

More specifically, the new HP CMS 10 includes HP Universal Discovery with Content Pack 11, HP Universal Configuration Management Data Base (UCMDB), HP UCMDB Configuration Manager, and HP UCMDB Browser. With the new solution, enterprises, governments and managed service providers (MSPs) can now:

• Quickly discover software and hardware inventory, as well as associated dependencies in a single unified discovery solution

  You can see the full applications support infrastructure, and discover out of the box.

  
  
• Speed time to value with the product’s simplified user interface and enhanced scalability, allowing all IT teams to consume as well as use rich intelligence hosted in the HP CMS
  
• More easily manage multiple client environments within a single UCMDB with improved security, automation and scalability
  
• Automatically locate and catalog new technologies related to network hardware, open source middleware, storage, ERP, and infrastructure software providers
  
• Introduce new server compliance thresholds.

HP CMS 10 is a key component of the HP IT Performance Suite, an enterprise performance software platform designed to improve performance with operational intelligence for many types of users and uses.

HP CMS, currently available worldwide in 10 languages, is also available through HP channel partners. More information about CMS 10 is available at www.hp.com/go/CMS.

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Discover Case Study: Holistic ALM helps Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida break down application inefficiencies, redundancy

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from last week's HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We explored some some major enterprise IT solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

This enterprise case study discussion from the show floor focuses on Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida and how they’ve been able to improve their applications' performance -- and even change the culture of how they test, provide, and operate their applications.

Join Victor Miller, Senior Manager of Systems Management at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida in Jacksonville, for a discussion moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Miller: The way we looked at applications was by their silos. It was a bunch of technology silos monitoring and managing their individual ecosystems. There was no real way of pulling information together. We didn’t represent what the customer is actually feeling inside the applications.

One of the things we started looking at was that we have to focus on the customers, seeing exactly what they were doing in the application to bring the information back. We were looking at the performance of the end-user transactions or what the end-users were doing inside the app, versus what Oracle database is doing, for example.

When you start pulling that information together, it allows you to get full traceability of the performance of the entire application from a development, test, staging, performance testing, and then also production side. You can actually compare that information to understand exactly where you're at. Also, you're breaking down those technology silos, when you're doing that. You move more toward a proactive transactional monitoring perspective.

We're looking at how the users are using it and what they're doing inside the applications, like you said, instead of the technology around it. The technology can change. You can add more resources or remove resources, but really it's all up to the end-user, what they are doing in their performance of the apps.

Overcome hurdles

Blue Cross and Blue Shield is one of the 39 independent Blue Crosses throughout the United States. We're based out of Florida. We've been around since about 1944. We're independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. One of our main focuses is healthcare.

We do sell insurance, but we also have our retail environment, where we're bringing in more healthcare services. It’s really about the well-being of our Florida population. We do things to help Florida as a whole, to make everyone more healthy where possible.

When we started looking at things we thought we were doing fine until we actually started bringing the data together to understand exactly what was really going on, and our customers weren’t happy with IT performance of their application, the availability of their applications.

From an availability perspective, we weren’t looking very good. So, we had to figure out what we could do to resolve that.

We started looking at the technology silos and bringing them together in one holistic perspective. We started seeing that, from an availability perspective, we weren’t looking very good. So, we had to figure out what we could do to resolve that. In doing that, we had to break down the technology silos, and really focus on the whole picture of the application, and not just the individual components of the applications.

Our previous directors reordered our environment and brought in a systems management team. It’s responsibility is to monitor and help manage the infrastructure from that perspective, centralize the tool suites, and understand exactly what we're going to use for the capabilities. We created a vision of what we wanted to do and we've been driving that vision for several years to try to make sure that it stays on target and focused to solve this problem.

We were such early adopters that we actually chose best-in-breed. We were agent-based monitoring environment, and we moved to agent-less. At the time, we adopted Mercury SiteScope. Then, we also brought in Mercury’s BAC and a lot of Topaz technologies with diagnostics and things like that. We had other capabilities like Bristol Technology’s TransactionVision.

Umbrella of products

HP purchased all the companies and brought them into one umbrella of product suites. It allowed us to bind the best-of-breed. We bought technologies that didn’t overlap, could solve a problem, and integrated well with each other. It allowed us to be able to get more traceability inside of these spaces, so we can get really good information about what the performance availability is of those applications that we're focusing on.

One of the major things was that it was people, process, and technology that we were focused on in making this happen. On the people side, we moved our command center from our downtown office to our corporate headquarters where all the admins are, so they can be closer to the command center. If there were a problem that command center can directly contact them and they go down in there.

We instituted what I guess I’d like to refer to as "butts in the seat." I can't come with a better name for it, but it's when the person is on call, they were in the command center working down there. They were doing the regular operational work, but they were in the command center. So if there was an incident they would be there to resolve it.

In the agent-based technologies we were monitoring thousands of measurement points. But, you have to be very reactive, because you have to come after the fact trying to figure out which one triggered. Moving to the agent-less technology is a different perspective on getting the data, but you’re focusing on the key areas inside those systems that you want to pay attention to versus the everything model.

In doing that, our admins were challenged to be a little bit more specific as to what they wanted us to pay attention to from a monitoring perspective.

In doing that, our admins were challenged to be a little bit more specific as to what they wanted us to pay attention to from a monitoring perspective to give them visibility into the health of their systems and applications.

[Now] there is a feedback loop and the big thing around that is actually moving monitoring further back into the process.

We’ve found out is if we fix something in development, it may cost a dollar. If we fix it in testing, it might cost $10. In production staging it may cost $1,000 It could be $10,000 or $100,000, when it’s in production, because that goes back to the entire lifecycle again, and more people are involved. So the idea is moving things further back in the lifecycle has been a very big benefit.

Also, it involved working with the development and testing staffs to understand that you can’t throw application over the wall and say, "Monitor my app, because it’s production." We have no idea which is your application, or we might say that it’s monitored, because we're monitoring infrastructure around your application, but we may not be monitoring a specific component of the application.

Educating people

The challenge there is reeducating people and making sure that they understand that they have to develop their app with monitoring in mind. Then, we can make sure that we can actually give them visibility back into the application if there is a problem, so they can get to the root cause faster, if there's an incident.

We’ve created several different processes around this and we focused on monitoring every single technology. We still monitor those from a siloed perspective, but then we also added a few transactional monitors on top of that inside those silos, for example, transaction scripts that run at the same database query over-and-over again to get information out of there.

At the same time, we had to make some changes, where we started leveraging the Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) or Run-time Service Model to bring it up and build business services out of this data to show how all these things relate to each other. The UCMDB behind the scenes is one of the cornerstones of the technology. It brings all that silo-based information together to create a much better picture of the apps.

We don’t necessarily call it the system of record. We have multiple systems of record. It’s more like the federation adapter for all these records to pull the information together. It guides us into those systems of record to pull that information out.

We’ve created several different processes around this and we focused on monitoring every single technology.

About eight years ago when we first started this, we had incident meetings where we had between 15 and 20 people going over 20-30 incidents per week. We had those every day of the week On Friday, we would review all the ones for the first four days of the week. So, we were spending a lot of time doing that.

Out of those meetings, we came up with what I call "the monitor of the day." If we found something that was an incident that occurred in the infrastructure that was not caught by some type of monitoring technology, we would then have it monitored. We’d bring that back, and close that loop to make sure that it would never happen again.

Another thing we did was improve our availability. We were taking something like five and six hours to resolve some of these major incidents. We looked at the 80:20 rule. We solved 80 percent of the problems in a very short amount of time. Now, we have six or seven people resolving incidents. Our command center staff is in the command center 24 hours a day to do this type of work.

Additional resources

When they needed additional resources, they just pick up the phone and call the resources down. So, it’s a level 1 or level 2 type person working with one admin to solve a problem, versus having all hands on deck, where you have 50 admins in a room resolving incidents.

I'm not saying that we don’t have those now. We do, but when we do, it’s a major problem. It’s not something very small. It could be a firmware on a blade enclosure going down, which takes an entire group of applications down. It's not something you can plan for, because you're not making changes to your systems. It's just old hardware or stuff like that that can cause an outage.

Another thing that is done for us is those 20 or 30 incidents we had per week are down to one or two. Knock on wood on that one, but it is really a testament to a lot of the things that our IT department has done as a whole. They're putting a lot of effort into into reducing the number of incidents that are occurring in the infrastructure. And, we're partnering with them to get the monitoring in place to allow for them to get the visibility in the applications to actually throw alerts on trends or symptoms, versus throwing the alert on the actual error that occurs in the infrastructure.

[Since the changes] customer satisfaction for IT is a lot higher than it used to be. IT is being called in to support and partner with the business, versus business saying, "I want this," and then IT does it in a vacuum. It’s more of a partnership between the two entities to be able to bring stuff together. Operations is creating dashboards and visibility into business applications for the business, so they can see exactly what they're doing in the performance of their one department, versus just from an IT perspective. We can get the data down to specific people now.

Customer satisfaction for IT is a lot higher now than it used to be. IT is being called in to support and partner with the business.

Some of the big things I am looking at next are closed-loop processes, where I have actually started to work with making some changes, working with our change management team to make changes to the way that we do changes in our environment where everything is configuration item (CI) based, and doing that allows for that complete traceability of an asset or a CI through its entire lifecycle.

You understand every incident, request, problem request that ever occurred on that asset, but also you can actually see financial information. You can also see inventory information and location information and start bringing the information together to make smart decisions based on the data that you have in your environment.

The really big thing is really to help reduce the cost of IT in our business and be able to do whatever we can to help cut our cost and keep a lean ship going.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

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Rethinking virtualization: Why enterprises need a sustainable virtualization strategy over hodge-podge approaches

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Download a pdf of this transcript.

Attend a virtual web event from HP on July 28- July 30, "Technology You Need for Today's Economy." Register for the free event.

Enterprises today need a better way to prevent server sprawl and complexity that can impact the cost of virtualization projects. Three important considerations are instrumental for effective enterprise virtualization adoption, and they often amount to a rethinking of virtualization.

For example, one important question is, How do enterprises manage and control how network interconnections are impacted by widespread virtualization? Second, how can configuration management databases (CMDBs) help in deploying virtualized servers? And third, how can outsourcing help organizations get the most bang for their virtualization buck?

Rethinking virtualization becomes necessary to attain a sustainable enterprise virtualization strategy because virtual machines (VMs) present unique challenges.

To get to the bottom of the larger, pro-active means of virtualization planning, I recently interviewed three executives from HP: Michael Kendall, worldwide Virtual Connect marketing lead; Shay Mowlem, strategic marketing lead for HP Software and Solutions, Ryan Reed, a product manager for EDS Server Management Services.

Here are some excerpts:

Mowlem: Certainly, many companies today have recognized that consolidating their infrastructure through virtualization can reduce power consumption and space utilization, and can really maximize the value of the infrastructure that they’ve already purchased.

Just about everybody has jumped on the virtualization bandwagon, and many companies have seen tremendous gains in their development in lab environments, in managing what I would consider to be non-mission-critical production systems. But, as companies have tried to apply virtualization to their Tier 2 and Tier 1 mission-critical systems, they're discovering a whole new set of issues that, without effective management, really run counter to the cost benefits.

... For IT to realize the large-scale cost benefits of virtualization in their production environments they need to prove to the business that the service performance and the quality are not going to be lost. ... The ideal approach should include a central vantage point, from which to detect, isolate, and prevent service problems across all infrastructure elements, heterogeneous servers, spanning physical and virtual network storage, and all the subcomponents of a service.

We provide tools today that offer native discovery and dependency mapping of all infrastructure, physical and virtual, and then store that information in our central universal configuration management database (UCMDB), where we then track the make-up of a business service, all of the infrastructure that supports that service, the interdependencies that exists between the infrastructure elements, and then manage that and monitor that on an ongoing basis. ... Essentially a configuration database attracts all of the core interdependencies of infrastructure and their configuration settings over time

Kendall: When you consolidate a lot of different application instances that are normally on multiple servers, and each one of those servers has certain number of I/O for data and storage and you put them all on one server, that does consolidate the number of servers we have.

[It also] has the tendency to expand the number of network interface controllers (NICs) that you need, the number of connections you need, the number of cables you need, and the number of upstream switch ports that you need. ... Just because you can either set up a new virtual machine or want to migrate virtual machines in a matter of minutes, it isn’t as easy in the connection space. Either you have to add additional capacity for networks and for storage, add additional host bus adapters (HBAs), or add additional NICs.

We did some basic rethinking around how to remove some of these interconnect bottlenecks. HP Virtual Connect actually can virtualize the physical connections between the server, the data network, and the storage network. Virtualizing these connections allows IT managers to set up, move, replace, or upgrade blade servers and the workloads that are on them, without having to involve the network or storage folks or being able to impact the network or storage topologies.

Reed: Business services today demand higher levels of uptime and availability. Those data centers, if they were to fail due to a power outage or some other source of failure, are no longer able to provide the uptime requirements for those types of business services. So, it’s one of the first questions that a virtual infrastructure program raises to the program manager.

Does the company or the organization have the skill set necessary in-house to do large-scale virtualization in data center modernization projects? Often times, they don’t, and if they don’t, then what is their action? What is their remedy? How are they going to resolve that skill gap?

... [And there's] a hybrid model, which would be one where virtual infrastructures and non-virtual infrastructures can be managed from either client or organization-owned data center -- or the services provider data center. There are various models to consider. A lot of the questions that lead into how to plan for this type of virtual infrastructure also lead into a conversation about how an outsourcer can be the most value-add.

Outsourcers nowadays are very skilled at providing infrastructure services to virtual server environments. That would include things like profiling, analysis planning, mapping of targets to source servers, and creating a business value for understanding how it’s going to impact the business in terms of ROI and total cost of ownership.

Choose the right partner, and they can grow with you. As your business grows and as you expand your market presence, choosing the services provider that has the capability and capacity to deliver in the areas that you want to grow makes the most sense.

The traditional outsourcing model is one where enterprises realize that the data center itself is not a strategic asset to the business anymore. So they move the infrastructure to an outsourcer data center where the services provider, the outsourcing company, can provide the best services with virtual infrastructures during the design and plan phase. ... We’ve been doing this for 45 years, and it’s really the critical piece of what we do.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Download a pdf of this transcript.

Attend a virtual web event from HP on July 28- July 30, "Technology You Need for Today's Economy." Register for the free event.