Hewlett-Packard opened its Software Forum with an
overview of rewards and challenges of developing a "services
management" framework.
HP’s Adaptive Enterprise strategy and its Darwin Reference
Architecture can serve as catalysts for building a services
management framework, said Nora Denzel, senior vice-president and
general manager of the software global business unit at HP.
An organisation’s infrastructure layer must be virtualised to
quickly adapt to the myriad business changes that occur, she
said.
"There is no easy answer," Denzel warned. "The ultimate state of
fitness in an IT environment is optimising your resources so supply
and demand [is] matched."
Every single business process triggers an event, which requires
automation, she said.
Denzel said customers should adopt a flexible infrastructure
model that can work on any piece of hardware and easily tie to
outside software applications to reduce the cost, time, and
personnel required to manage and maintain existing IT
infrastructure.
In order to successfully implement Adaptive Management, the HP
executive told her customers first they must get the full range of
resources, including storage, servers, monitoring, inventory,
provisioning, and planning under stabilised control.
Next, they must begin to think about daily operations and
connections as services.
"Everything is integrated and clustered together rather than
discrete partitions," Denzel remarked.
"This is not a vision, these are [HP] products that ship today
and feed into adaptive management," she added.
Brian
Fonseca writes for InfoWorld