Cloud helps cut through uncertainty

[Nick]

Published: 1/09/2010 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: Database
 
With uncertain business climate outlooks, companies are looking towards cloud computing as a way of increasing agility and reducing costs.

However, the management of on-premise servers and off-premise cloud resources becomes a new challenge, one HP is addressing in its new software and service hybrid delivery model.

Damien Wong, HP General Manger, Southeast Asia, Software & Solutions, Enterprise Business, explained how 92 percent of businesses say they will continue to face unpredictable business cycles, 84 percent say that innovation is critical in the new economy, 75 percent say success is based on managing technology in a rapidly changing environment.

Yet, despite this, half say their IT department cannot make rapid changes.

Virtualisation and cloud are increasing the challenges.

With virtualisation it is now easy to create virtual machines, but managing virtual resources across private, public and hybrid clouds will pose additional challenges.

Wong said many large conglomerates are now looking at private clouds. Many have disparate businesses with very different needs.

For some of these organisations, consolidating and virtualising resources across their groups can cut costs and increase the ability to roll out new applications. In fact, he says the logic is more like a mini-public cloud.

HP has three major announcements to help IT departments meet these challenges: HP Business Service Management 9.0; HP Test Data Management, which includes an announcement with Collabnet; and HP Solution Management Services.

HP Business Service Management 9.0 helps accelerate the adoption of hybrid delivery models. BSM 9 is cloud-ready, supports virtualisation and gives businesses the confidence to adopt across virtualised, physical, on-premise and off-premise resources.

Wong says the key differentiator between BSM 9 and the competition is the industry's first automated run-time service model, a dynamically generated service map that lists all the services, underlying processes, software and infrastructure (virtual or physical) that underpin it. Traditionally IT would need a week to generate a map.

For instance, at the top level, the Service Map might have a business function which automatically discovers various related applications such as core banking and payments. A level down, it identifies system software and the infrastructure (virtual or physical) that underpins it.

It can also work the other way and say which applications, which services will be affected if a piece of hardware fails.

The idea is to resolve problems before customer impact. Today, 75 percent of incidents are reported by the customer. It would be best to pre-empt a customer calling in to complain, reducing troubleshooting costs and repair times.

The next announcement is HP Test Data Management, which aims to break the test data log jam. HP TDM helps reduce risk and speed up innovation. Preparing test data takes up to two thirds of the actual testing time. HP TDM claims it can cut that time by half.

Preparing test data means there is a high risk of breaching data compliance, as IT cannot simply copy production data over. Account numbers and other sensitive information needs to be masked and data often needs to be extracted from multiple sources. All of this is automated with HP TDM.

Finally, HP Solution Management Services is a converged portfolio of software and services. SMS allows customers to help define service levels as opposed to just aligning with existing level metrics.


About the author

Writer: Don Sambandaraksa
Position: Database Reporter



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