How Intelligent Operations Enables Proactive Data Center Management

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Business innovation depends on excellence in IT

These days, you’d be hard pressed to name a business strategy or goal that doesn’t rely on IT to a large degree.

• Hospitals intent on improving quality of care install virtual desktops

so doctors and nurses can call up charts and ensure continuity of

service as they move from room to room and patient to patient

• Retailers with aggressive sales goals send employees onto the

retail floor with mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) devices to ring up

purchases, and send the info immediately to the cloud, where it

updates a just-in-time inventory management system residing on

a virtual server in a distant data center

• Manufacturers committed financially and socially to greener operations globally virtualize all their servers worldwide to

reduce power and cooling usage—saving millions annually as well

as helping save the planet

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Business value creation has a new equation that upends traditional thinking

Today, the vast majority of CEOs believe that investments in technology create

value for their business.1

But truly savvy CEOs realize value is not created by reducing the cost of IT for

each dollar of revenue. Instead, they concentrate on increasing revenue for

each dollar of IT cost.

This reversal of traditional thinking is critical if organizations want to thrive in

the digital age, according to CSC, which performs an annual survey of c-suite

attitudes toward business and IT innovation.2

1. PwC 18th Annual Global CEO Survey, 2015 2. CSC Global CIO Survey 2014-2015, CSC, 2015

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Transcending the “keeping the lights on” mentality in IT

Although conventional wisdom is that “keeping the lights on”

accounts for a full 70 percent of an organization’s IT budget,

the reality is probably worse4 —especially with so many IT funds

being siphoned off by lines of business.

Case in point: Gartner has predicted that by 2017, chief

marketing officers (CMOs) will spend more on IT than CIOs.5

CIOs themselves, when asked what stood in the way of

IT helping to drive business innovation, named the difficulty

in managing infrastructure as a roadblock second only to

budgetary constraints.

Budget constraints

Resources are primarily focused on managing existing IT workloads/

keeping the lights on

Difficulty finding staff qualified to execute the technology

to drive innovation

Difficulty deploying technology to facilitate innovation

Too much time and too many resources are used to handle urgent

incidents and problems

Lack of strategic vision at the corporate level to drive innovation

Source: CSC CIO Global Survey 2014-2015

52%

39%

38%

33%

31%

29%

4. CSC Global CIO Survey 2014-215, CSC, 2015 5, By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO, Laura McLennan, Gartner, webinar, January 2012

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Data center metrics: The good, the bad, and the ugly

CIOs often live and die by the data center’s performance and availability numbers.

Nine out of 10 respondents to a 2014 survey of data center professionals showed

that service availability is highly critical to their performance.6

But at the same time, 41 percent of organizations missed their service availability

goals for mission-critical systems in 2013. Not surprisingly, organizations with higher

service availability goals were significantly less successful in meeting their goal.7

But here’s a new way of thinking about improving data center metrics: IT

departments should no longer be concerned with improving system performance

and reducing downtime for its own sake. Rather, consider these as metrics for

enabling IT to deliver more of what the business needs, when it needs it.

In other words, it’s time to transform infrastructure and application measurements

from tactical to strategic metrics.

6. 2014 Service Availability Benchmark Survey, Continuity Software 2014 7. 2014 Service Availability Benchmark Survey, Continuity Software 2014

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Time to regain lost ground

This transformation, from being a tactical cost center to a strategic partner can’t happen too soon, as numbers point to some backsliding in this

area in recent years.

39% 40%

2014 2013IT is considered a cost center

33%20%

2014 2013A formal client/service provider relationship

28%41%

2014 2013A collaborative partnership

Source: CSC CIO Global Survey 2014-2015

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The virtual data center is key to transforming IT into a strategic partner

There’s one proven way to improve data center performance

and availability metrics as related to business goals: virtualize

the data center. A significant proportion (41 percent) of

respondents in a recent survey said that the reason they were

virtualizing was specifically because they needed to increase data

center availability.8

Virtualization passed a significant milestone back in 2012, when

51 percent of x86 corporate workloads were virtualized, according

to the 451 Group.9 Two years later, that number had surpassed

70 percent, according to Gartner.10 Virtualization is now

a key component of IT infrastructure and, more recently, of IT

transformation.

Virtualization of X86 Workloads:

51%

2012 2014

70%

8. The Age of the On-Demand Data Center, Brocade, December 2013. 9. Survey: 51 percent of X86 Servers Now Virtualized, by Pedro Hernandez, IT Business Edge, January 17, 2013. 10. Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, Gartner, July 2, 2014

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Why vSphere 6 is the right virtualization platform

On the one hand, corporations have choices when it comes to

choosing a virtualization platform. On the other hand, if they

want to be successful at transforming IT into a driver of business

innovation, they really don’t have many alternatives. VMware

vSphere is the only logical choice.

In a 2014 poll by Gartner, more than 90 percent of organizations

said that VMware was their primary server virtualization hypervisor.11

And that was before the introduction of vSphere 6, about which

reviewers have said:

the leading virtualization platform doesn’t disappoint

Virtualization Review

InfoWorld

The Register

will transform your environment

struggled to find a flaw

11. VMware, Microsoft Rule X86 Server Virtualization, by Timothy Prickett Morgan, EnterpriseTech, July 8, 2014.

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A three-pronged CIO strategy is required

IT departments need to consider:

Strategic imperative No. 1: Consistently provide solutions at the speed that business operates, quickly delivering reliable services and applications and being more flexible to business requests

Strategic imperative No. 2: Be more proactive in ensuring high performance and availability of infrastructure and applications

Strategic imperative No. 3: Act as a strategic partner to the business rather than a cost center, delivering not just operational efficiency, but improving business innovation as well as operations

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Strategic imperative No. 1: Quickly and flexibly serve the business

First, the IT infrastructure needs to be designed to ensure secure delivery of cloud, mobile, analytics, and big data applications.

This means virtualization. There’s simply no other way for businesses to stay secure and ahead of the competition.

CIO’s 2015 investment priorities

Then, IT needs to find a way to consistently automate and manage the virtual data center. This is necessary to free up

resources that can then be used for more strategic initiatives.

Rank

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

2014

41%

31%

27%

26%

24%

17%

13%

12%

11%

9%

7%

6%

2015

50%

37%

32%

34%

36%

11%

11%

12%

8%

10%

7%

2%

Investment Priority

BI/ analytics

Infrastructure and data center

Cloud

ERP

Moblie

Digitalization/ digital marketing

Security

Networking, voice and data comms

Customer relationship/ experience

Industry-specific applications

Legacy modernization

Enterprise applications

Source: Gartner CIO Agenda Report, Gartner, 2015

n = 2,793

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Strategic imperative No. 2: Ensure high performance and availability of IT resources

This imperative requires IT to be exceedingly proactive. No

more waiting for reports from users that a system is unavailable

or performance has slowed.

This proactivity is simply not possible without a dashboard that

monitors and analyzes how all IT infrastructure and application

resources are performing, and presents insights to IT staffers

from one place.

This insight into the entire stack must include visibility into

dependencies of application and infrastructure components.

This enables IT to avoid extended troubleshooting because of

unintended side effects of changes.

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Strategic imperative No. 3: Act as a strategic partner to the business

To regain lost ground and again begin to be treated as a full

collaborative partner, IT needs to be able to safely automate a broad

range of manual tasks.

Additionally, IT needs customizable and adaptable tools to automate

more dynamic environments using policies and control. IT also requires

the capability to optimize the placement and balancing of workloads.

Finally, to improve business operations, IT standards and security

guidelines must be enforced across the virtual infrastructure.

• IT leaders who currently report directly to the CEO: 44 percent• IT leaders consulted by their CEOs frequently about strategy: 64 percent

Source: State of the CIO 2015, CIO Magazine, 2015

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vSphere with Operations Management: Strategic suite aids IT transformation

Designed for businesses of all sizes to run application at high service levels, vSphere with Operations Management can maximize

hardware savings through achieving higher capacity.

vSphere with Operations Management can help you achieve your unique business needs by delivering virtualization with consistent

management, purpose-built to help you get the best performance, availability, and efficiency from your infrastructure and applications.

vSphere

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Virtualization with consistent management

vSphere with Operations Management is designed for your business.

Your business is unique—and your virtualization and

management platform should be designed to fit your needs.

VMware introduced intelligent operations management that

adapts to your environment and gives you richer insights in

time to take proactive action.

64%

2015 2013

46%

Source: CSC Global CIO Survey 2014-215, CSC, 2015

IT Spending Outlook Improves

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Intelligent Operations from Apps to Storage

vSphere with Operations Management is designed for better insights.

What’s so smart? The tools leverage both structured and unstructured IT

data across a variety of disciplines as well as an extensive list of third-party

extensions to identify and remediate issues proactively before they cause

outages that impact users or revenue.

vSphere

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Automation with Control

vSphere with Operations Management is designed for better IT.

Safely automate management of your infrastructure with guided remediation, fine-grained controls, policies, and customizable

actions. Do the same to place and balance workloads. Finally, perform capacity optimization, planning and modeling to improve

resource utilization and get more done in less time.

All this leaves your teams to work where they add most value—and have the power to say “yes” to your business more often.

Top ways CIOs spend their time

Aligning IT initiatives with business goals: No. 1

Improving IT operations and systems performance: No. 2

Source: State of the CIO 2015, CIO Magazine, 2015

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Tangible results you can count on

In a 2014 VMware vSphere with Operations Management Customer Benchmark Study by Management Insights, comparing

the added benefits of vSOM vs. the standard vSphere, customers saw a:

53 percent reduction in the cost of managing IT infrastructure

54 percent decrease in downtime of Tier 1 applications

2.4x ROI within 12 months

30 percent or higher improvement in visibility across layers, apps availability, capacity utilization, VM’s per admin, user satisfaction with IT, and other metrics

Intelligent Operations

Find out more about vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management