HP Service Health Optimizer – “Business Aware” Capacity Management for the virtualized datacenter

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Another guest post from Hari Kannan, product manager for HP Service Health Optimizer.

-Peter

Capacity Management – what is it?

ITIL v3 defines capacity management as “A discipline that ensures IT infrastructure is provided at the right time in the right volume at the right price, and ensuring that IT is used in the most efficient manner”. In other words, Capacity Management ensures meeting Business Service demand with IT Supply “Just in Time”. Capacity management and planning were specialty functionalities within the IT departments during the mainframe era. During the Unix era, this specialty waned due to changing needs of a client-server paradigm and the introduction of lower cost Unix/x86 servers. Over the past few years, virtualization has become common in datacenters and Capacity Management is seeing resurgence due to new complexities of virtualization.

Capacity Management – what are we missing today?

While there are many tools that have popped up in the market to address issues related to Capacity Management, for a HP BSM/Ops Center customer, we identified several shortcomings. Specifically, many Capacity Management tools today view the datacenter as a collection of VM’s running on a set of hosts – in other words, these tools typically provide a one-sided, infrastructure focus view of the datacenter. These tools do not know how the resources are linked to each other as Business Services. Nor do they have any knowledge of the SLAs and KPIs associated with these Business Services or if there is any violation of those metrics. Due to this, these Capacity Management tools are not “Business Aware”. Specifically,

-          These tools are unable to provide a datacenter dashboard with a Business Service view

-          These tools are unable to recommend optimal capacity utilization from a Business Service perspective, taking business constraints into account

-          These tools are unable to holistically consider Business Service related metrics, such as the “End User Experience” and correlate those with the datacenter resources utilization 

-          These tools are unable to forecast the impact on a Business Service due to a change in capacity or demand

There is yet another category of tools, mostly originating from the Mainframe capacity era that provide a lot of complex modeling capabilities, but adapting them in a HP BSM environment is easier-said-than-done!

HP’s Service Health Optimizer

HP’s Service Health Optimizer (HP SHO) is being launched to address the issues raised above.  To put it simply, for you, the HP BSM customer, we offer an easy, out-of-the-box, well integrated, virtualization focused Capacity Management solution. The 3 broad goals of HP SHO are:

1. Visibility and Understanding: “What you have, What you use, What can fit, What can be improved” - Correlate and report on business service performance with infrastructure performance, identify VM sprawl etc.
2. Optimize: Maximize resource utilization  by “Multi-Dimensional, Time-Varying Analysis and Workload Placement recommendation” (Optimize)
3. Forecast and Plan: Model and predict the required Infrastructure for future business demands via “What-if Scenarios, Trend Analysis”

“The HP SHO is on” – stay tuned for the next episode…

For HP Software, Hari Kannan.

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Hi - I work for a financial instituion on Wall Street (sorry, I am not allowed to say which one). We are a big Openview and Opsware shop. We have been struggling with capacity management for a private cloud (i.e., service based) infrastructure we are building. Is SHO a new product from HP? Or is this a service offering? I couldn't find anything on the external web site and our HP sales team has never heard of it.