Home How IT Addresses the Growing Cost of Poorly Planned Changes

How IT Addresses the Growing Cost of Poorly Planned Changes

“I like to describe the roots of all evil being unplanned, or poorly planned, changes,” states Jimmy Augustine of HP Software. “Somewhere between 70% and 80% of all service disruptions are caused by faulty changes. Somebody goes in and makes a security change to a network device, and brings down the service. Downtime equates to costs and, in some cases, lost revenue.”

You would think Step #1, or something close to Step #1, for any kind of asset migration or disaster recovery plan would be to know what it is you have that you may want to recover when a disaster happens. There’s an art to this, it turns out, and it’s called dependency mapping. Last December, a VMware engineer we talked to listed it as #2 among his ten tips for disaster recovery planning, just after running a business impact analysis.

What your business has and why

Dependency mapping is a complete inventory of the software that runs your business, and the components and resources upon which they rely. What dependency mapping software tools do is quite complex, especially now that more critical business assets reside in public and hybrid clouds. Many enterprises invest in dependency mapping without even knowing what it is or why it’s there. As a result, an HP software engineer tells RWW, they’re racking up enormous, unnecessary costs, especially as they transition from a traditional data center to a cloud-based environment.

When the CIO or the VP of Operations discovers these costs, there typically follows a lot of cleanup having to do with fans and something hitting them. Why didn’t we see this coming, they ask?

Augustine is HP’s group manager of product marketing for configuration management systems (leaving just enough room on the business card for a phone number). He talked with RWW about yesterday’s release of HP’s latest update, called Content Pack 10, for its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) tool. The new update addresses the ability to map assets deployed to Amazon’s primary public cloud services: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS) and volumes and snapshots stored with Elastic Block Store (EBS).

“There’s a mentality that, when you go through a service provider, you’re going to want to have this visibility, whether it’s a public cloud or an outsourcing agreement or what have you. In most cases, the trust level is implicit,” explains Augustine. By that, he means the reliability level that many enterprises expect when they trust their assets to the Amazon cloud. They often assume the reliability question is out of their hands. And that’s actually not the case.

“So having this appropriate level of visibility allows IT managers and CIOs to make sure that service providers are doing what they spelled out in the service-level agreements, and it allows them to have peace of mind,” Augustine explains. It also enables a business to respond to performance issues that do crop up by adding capacity or compute power from within their own data centers.

Now you see it

“The dynamic nature of a cloud environment, whether it’s a private or public cloud, lends itself to the thinking of what we had over the last 10 or 15 years with automated discovery. You still need visibility to get to performance availability, and probably more so with the dynamic environment.”

HP’s management tool for configuration is called Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB). The dependency mapping tool discovers software components that are stored here. The visual form of UCMDB’s contents is what Augustine calls a topology – like a network configuration map, only with software. Some 18 months ago, he tells us, HP started implementing a dynamic service model for UCMDB, the upshot of which was that the management tool could see whenever a new virtual machine was spun, or a new application provisioned. Since HP’s monitors are already in place on customers’ systems anyway, he said, it only made sense to officially begin implementing them for measuring dynamic performance and reliability issues associated with virtualization and cloud deployments.

In an HP/TechValidate survey of 13 of HP’s existing UCMDB customers, 8 of those customers reported that DDMA with UCMDB reduced their time spent in the auditing process by as much as 30%.

Revealing the kind of engineering knowledge that makes him a perfect fit for HP, Augustine divides the use cases for UCMDB into the “change” group and the “steady state” group. For the latter, the transition to virtualization and/or cloud has already taken place.

“Let’s say the router goes down, or we have a problem with an application. The UCMDB, by virtue of automated discovery, will allow me to understand how important that application or router is, in terms of the service it delivers to the business,” he explains. “So it matters to me if I’m facilitating an e-commerce service or a back office service – the way that I respond to that performance or event is going to be different for those two examples.” In other words, it’s easier for you to craft separate strategies for responding to “negative impact” events – responding in different ways depending on how your customers will be affected by your response – when you have greater, more granular, visibility into what’s going on.

Whereas in the case of the “change” group, Augustine repeats his warning about the root cause of all evil, which, contrary to Internet rumors, is neither money nor patents. “We’ve helped companies avoid disruptions altogether because they now have the visibility to understand how things relate to each other, so they’re not making this change at certain points in time during the day. They’re also able to respond to central issues much faster because they understand the context of mundane things like routers. When teams don’t have the underlying technology or foundation that we provide, they spend a lot of time trying to understand, ‘Okay, who owns that router? And how important is it?'”

He says the service maps that DDMA provides chart, from a high-level perspective of the business service, the underlying application, database, servers, storage elements, and network elements.

“IT is not getting more simple; it’s getting more complex,” HP’s Jimmy Augustine remarks. “You add virtualization, private cloud, public cloud, mobile applications. What this is doing is increasing the layers of complexity. We have some clients with hundreds of thousands of configuration items in their UCMDB, we have some clients with millions. You have to keep everything up to date; it doesn’t automatically happen. Having the discipline to go out and discover these items, either on a daily or weekly basis – an up-to-date view of how these things relate to each other – is fundamental. It’s a prerequisite to managing IT as a business.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock


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