BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY OPTIMIZATION
Challenges in the Modern Data Center
Growth, past IT spending, and the evolving nature of applications and services have all contributed to
today’s extremely complex modern data centers. This complexity remains a major impediment to
success and agility, with an ever-expanding list of heterogenous hardware and software to manage and
m
onitor both the legacy and new application deployments. In addition, the pace and volume of change
needed to keep IT infrastructure current with business requirements is increasing rapidly. In this
environment, small, seemingly unrelated changes in one area of the data center can have wide-spread
ramifications for application performance or functionality.
Echoing the trend towards ITIL adoption, META Group anticipates that through 2005, more than half of
IT organizations will invest in formalized IT business plans governed by service-level agreements (SLAs).
Unfortunately, fewer than 10 percent of IT organizations have a well-defined service-level management
process in place today that can accurately and consistently communicate relevant service levels to the
business units. The need to fill this void is driven by the increasing dependency on IT Services and its
underlying applications and IT infrastructure. Businesses are faced with the need to compete, manage
outsourcers, and ensure IT services support the business.
Leveraging ITIL to Reduce Complexity and Increase Agility
Organizations today recognize modern data-center challenges require a comprehensive approach to
process and best practices. Though ITIL is not new, it is increasingly popular with organizations striving
to get a handle on their IT operations. The benefits of business-aligned IT services include:
• Sustainable business-critical services.
• Increased agility to respond to new business challenges.
• Minimized risk and reduced operational and support costs.
• The ability to anticipate and respond to changing internal and external conditions.
• An increased ability to predictably meet deployment targets.
• An increased ability to meet SLAs.
• Reduced technical support staff requirements.
• Increased customer satisfaction.
A 2004 META Group study showed that 75 percent of Global 2000 organizations are expected to use
some portion of ITIL by 2006. In another META Group survey performed in February 2004, one-third of
the responses indicated that the most strategic issues facing IT were the implementation of standards-
based processes. Unfortunately, many existing silo- and system-management tools are unable to deliver
ITIL’s service-centric and process-centric approach while coping with modern data-center complexity.
While applications represent an automated, efficient mechanism for accomplishing tasks, their
management is manual and inefficient.
WWW.MERCURY.COM
4
评论0