The only constant in large IT environments and data centers is change. Changes in business needs, whether they are driven by new business opportunities or changes in regulatory and compliance requirements, necessitate changes to the server and application infrastructure on an almost daily basis. An organization's ability to efficiently approve changes then package and distribute releases has a direct impact on the quality of its IT services, the satisfaction of its customers, and the fulfillment of its service level commitments.
Look at the Big Picture to Tie Together Both Ends
Windward has been looking closely at the set of solutions that address the distribution of server and application releases into the production environment. Specifically, we are focused on addressing the major challenges organizations face in deploying integrated change and release solutions.
Organizations today are seeking a closed loop management process that starts with either a customer order or a request for change (RFC) and ends with a validated update, delivered service, and sometimes a delighted customer. Today, this level of integration requires multiple software packages, often from multiple vendors. Taking a service-oriented architecture to closed loop management, here is a rundown of the services that must be in place:
- CMDB: At the core of closed loop management is the configuration management database. Whether it’s consolidated or federated, organizations cannot achieve this objective without the identification of configuration items, their relationships and their support for IT services.
- Service Design and Provisioning: Organizations must be able to design their services and provision underlying resources (or configuration items) for specific instances of each service.
- Change Management: Integrated into the CMDB, a workflow or orchestration technology must step through the request, impact analysis and approval processes involved in managing a change to IT services or infrastructure.
- Packaging: Changes in the environment must be organized into discrete packages that can be rolled back if necessary and tracked for future changes.
- Release Distribution: To push changes into the environment, a service is required to distribute packages to disparate technologies then validate successful installation.
- Discovery and Audit: To close the loop from release back to configuration management, a discovery and audit capability is critical to ensure that the services environment of record matches the real one.
What Can Go Wrong?
Lots of things, which is why both experience and environment knowledge matters. Here are three major challenges that we see repeatedly:
Diverse Technology: All large IT environments today have a wide array of server, application, network and other technologies that combine to deliver services. Many people believe that common discovery, packaging and release tools will address all of these technologies. The reality is that diverse technologies require different discovery, packaging and release tools. We see this situation continuing as infrastructure and application vendors continue to push the envelope. In the face of this reality, it is important is that you choose management software that is closely aligned and is keeping up with the specific managed technology, whether it is from Cisco, Sun, Microsoft, EMC or Oracle.
Front and Back-end Integration: Lack of integration between your ITIL process-oriented tools and infrastructure-facing tools forms a major "air gap" today. We believe that companies should standardize on CMDB and process management (i.e., change, incident and problem) technologies and should buy into one leading vendor for these. However, this solution must possess openness to applications that interact directly with the technology environment and must provide extensibility to capture external data models. Similarly, organizations should select the best of breed technology-facing tools that integrate well into the CMDB and process managers.
High-volume v. custom changes: Customers/users want and expect more control in their push for services on demand. To support this, end to end order to activation should be as automated as possible. But technologists know that services don't magically appear - they arise from a change in environment to some level. Technologies that support change automation like virtualized servers and bandwidth on demand are becoming more common, and they are replacing change & release functions of traditional management tools. As this occurs, the role of IT designer and IT operator needs to be more integrated as human activity shifts from change & release tasks to ones of capacity and business continuity.
For years, organizations have been taking a continuous improvement approach to end to end management of IT services. However, as your IT environment may be undergoing radical changes, it may be time to re-evaluate your closed loop management system.