A large internet services provider who was experiencing rapid growth of their IT infrastructure had twin challenges. They needed to support IT without growing their IT staff, while also increasing the time spent on enhancing and improving services rather than “keep the lights on” activities. This is a condensed version of the analysis Evergreen Systems (www.evergreensys.com) performed to develop a roadmap and ROI to achieve their objectives.
2. IT Infrastructure Challenges
• Excessive firefighting with little time to plan/innovate
• Windows patching process is extensive and time consuming
• LINUX patching process not on a standard cycle and needs to be
• Lack of consistency in provisioning process is costing us time. (As
much as 3 days/server)
• Cannot effectively track compliance and remediate
• Some failed changes in the infrastructure have taken us 4 weeks to
recover
• High cost of storage due to a lack of capacity management
capability
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3. What is Infrastructure as a Service
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a
provisioning model in which an organization
(business unit) can request from Global IT
“on demand” the services used to support
operations, including storage, hardware,
servers and networking components.
Server, storage, and network resources
delivered in days not weeks
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5. Why other organizations are moving toward IaaS
• Reduced errors in performing routine management tasks
• Bare-metal provisioning shrunk from up to 97 days to
hours or less
• Reduced time for (post-provisioning) hardening tasks per
server from over 2 hours to 60 seconds
• Health-check time reduced from 90 minutes to 14.4
seconds
• No longer requires human intervention to complete
• Reduce time for end-to-end provisioning from weeks to
less than a day
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6. The Approach
We recommend that IT move toward IaaS in a stepwise fashion, automating
specific domains first, in order to gain near term savings while preparing for IaaS
Orchestration of
Components
Storage Automation • IaaS Provisioning
• Storage Reclamation • Server
• Capacity Planning • OS
Network Automation • Event/Alerting • Network
• Patching • Storage
• Physical/Logical
• Audit/Compliance Relationship Mgmt • Re-provisioning
Server Automation • Troubleshooting/ • Reporting
Repair
• Patching
• Software
• Audit/Compliance
updates/config
• Troubleshooting/
• Reporting
Plan and Analyze Repair
• Develop final approach • Software
updates/config
• Confirm Benefits
• Reporting
• Define Architecture
• Develop Plan
Achieving ROI Along the Way
7. Automate Operations Tasks
Replace routine manual tasks
Automation targets
• Use cases with high ROI • servers, networks, storage,
• Element provisioning
• Configuration management
• Patch management
Example results with of other customer deployments:
• Server-to-admin ratio increased from 30-to-1 to 200-to-1
• Time to update server configurations decreased from 2 weeks to 15
minutes
8. Automate IT Processes
Combine multiple tasks to automate workflows
• apps
• workflow
• Use cases with high ROI
• Standardize on best practices
• Automated remediation
• Compliance reporting and management
• Change management
• Application deployment – Automated
workflows enable
collaboration while
Results with HP in customer deployments: enforcing
• Reduce time to repair from 2-3 hours to best practices
seconds
• 80% improvement in application deployment
time
9. IaaS Organizational Impacts
Activity % of Labor Automated Labor
Current State Savings
Patch & Monitor 10% 2% 8%
Troubleshoot & Repair 34% 15% 19%
Audit / Compliance 6% 1% 5%
SW Updates & Config. 10% 6% 4%
Reporting 3% 1% 2%
Provisioning 14% 4% 10%
Total 77% 29% 48%
Source: HP Interview & Analysis of 40 customer environments
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10. Patch & Monitor and Audit & Compliance
Patching/Monitoring Audit/Compliance
CIS
compliance
benchmarks
PCI
compliance
Sample Results benchmark
s
SOX
compliance
benchmark
s
Compliance 80% reduction in time to perform audit and
management achieve compliance (SOX, PCI, ITIL…)
“Patching used to be our biggest challenge. We have to patch over 1000 machines in more than 300 locations with
very tight patch windows. HP SA, it’s straightforward, even though we only have staff in 3 locations.”
Proven customer success
Automate compliance on 99%
800 servers 32 weeks 2 days improvement
11. Example Server Automation ROI
• Assumptions
– Total Employees affected – 54 in Operations
– Total Hours/Employee/year– 2000
– Total Operations Hours – 108,000
– Fully Loaded Hourly Rate – $70
– Estimated Labor Cost/Year – $7.56 Million
– Estimated Labor savings with SA – 37%
– Potential SA labor savings annually – $2.8M
• SA total investment – license, maintenance,
services – $1.6M
• ROI First Year = 138%
• Payback – <8.7 months
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