HP's winning strategy for systems management

Systems management hinges on the design, build and operating function, saysHewlett-Packard.

The company's business service automation (BSA) platform was designed to make IT systems management more effective and efficient. By automating change and audit processes across every technical aspect of the business service - clients, servers, applications, network devices and storage elements, for example - BSA encompasses two major functional areas.

HP's product strategy was to bring together its Data Center Automation Center (DCAC) and Client Automation Center (CAC). The former manages technology within datacentres and networks, ande the latter automates key IT processes across the management lifecycle of client devices, no matter where they are.

"Our concept is business technology optimisation," says Alex Wilson, software manager for HP. "It's the framework for understanding the breadth and depth of systems management. We say there are three key areas within IT - design, build and operating functions."

HP tries to embody this strategy in three major areas of functionality in its business service management (BSM) products Operations Center, Network Management Centre and Business Availability Center.

Operations Center monitors, controls and reports on the health and performance of mixed IT environments, including networks, systems, databases, applications and core services. It has features to fine-tune performance and availability.

NMC - including the newly ndeveloped HP Network Node Manager i (NNMi) - performs network node discovery, information filtering and root-cause analysis. It employs visualisation to enable network components to be integrated with wider management policies.

Business Availability Center is another tool that monitors the health of business services and applications, but from the perspective of the service user. This brings in new dimensions, such as business impact, risk and service levels, with incident and problem-management processes.

The strategy is to build a model that looks beyond collaboration across all the different silos of information, says HP's Wilson. "Everything we do is measured against the yardstick of business outcomes: what is the service that the business wants, what are the metrics, is the project being designed to meet them?"

By purchasing systems management companies and bringing their automation and network management features into the fold, HP has added to its legacy strengths, says Roy Illsley, senior research analyst at Butler Group.

"In some of these areas, it has broadened its coverage of customer needs considerably," he adds.

BSA, along with BSM and ITSM (IT service management), is one of the primary functional areas defined by HP to group together service management capabilities according to the ways organisations use them. But rather than keep these areas separate, many are already interlinked and HP is developing further integration.

The CMDB (configuration management database) is an important part of HP's overall approach, because it enables data to be shared and a single version of any piece of information to be available across all functionality. HP's own Universal CMDB product can be used, or rival systems can be integrated. Indeed, integration capabilities are available within all the components that allow legacy management (or other) tools to be leveraged, if required.

Automation has long been the ideal approach to IT operations, but it is a vision shrouded in technical jargon and long-winded, unreadable language, says Illsley. But BSA offers powerful capabilities for managing IT systems which operate together to create a vital aid for IT managers looking to serve their organisations with the best of modern technology and IT management practice.

Companies can therefore adopt a more visible and accessible automated approach to systems management. There is good potential for efficiency gains and further benefits. It could help to make business policies the drivers of IT management processes within datacentres and networks, extending to client devices.

HP could add further enhancements to integrate this broad range of capabilities. But this is not necessary in the area of heterogeneous technology coverage, where BSA has been able to address, "out of the box", most organisational challenges. The added benefits of compliance assurance and operational consistency can be extended to wider management processes if organisations want to commit more fully to HP's range of business-oriented technology.

After buying and integrating a number of rival start-up companies with technology in or around the systems management (and the associated service management) space, BSA proves that, from the enterprise customer's perspective, HP has made good investments.

Software originating from multiple sources has caused some integration issues, which HP has not resolved in this first release, CMDB integration being the most important.