@dez_blanchfield

I.T. Asset Management – Nothing Beats A Real World Example

• Requirement

“..reduce our Data Center footprint by 70% within three years..”

• Solution

“..whole of business Cloud Transition..”

@dez_blanchfield

Project Business Goals – Frankly Nothing Short Of A Miracle

• Consolidate own data centers

• Leverage 3rd party data centers

• 3rd party clouds (AWS, Azure)

• X86, iSeries, pSeries, Mainframe

• Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, PSQL

• Windows / Linux / AIX / Solaris

• NetApp / Hitachi / IBM / EMC

@dez_blanchfield

We Had Lots Of Inputs – None Of Them Good Unfortunately

• Incomplete asset registers (5)

• Disparate data sources (90+)

• Multiple core service models (8)

• Conflicting service groups (114)

• Myriad of stakeholders (400+)

• Misaligned business entities (74)

@dez_blanchfield

The Initial Approach – We Simply Threw Bodies At It

• Workshops with domain experts

• Map Business requirements

• Application discovery

• Performance data

• Data validation

• Reporting

@dez_blanchfield

Throwing Bodies At It Didn’t Work – So We Build A System

• Use tools to map the ecosystems

• Automated audits of datacenters

• Automated discover of services

• Capture full scan of applications

• Build a new single source of truth

• Throw automated tools at it

@dez_blanchfield

Our System Was Very Sophisticated – But Who Would Maintain It

• Automated Score Card

• Suitability %’age ranking

• Mapped against AWS baseline

• Mapped against Azure baseline

• Mapped against VMware fitment

• Reporting of exception mapping

• Almost never do manual override

@dez_blanchfield

Great Project Outcome – But Home Baked System Was Left To Die

• We didn’t have a mature managed ITAM solution

• We home baked one but the business wasn’t prepared to maintain it along with existing CMDB and ITSM tools

• The project outcome was a resounding success but we built a Frankenstein, eventually it died, along with all that data !!