Showing posts with label HP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HP. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Big Data Generates New Insights into What’s Happening in the World's Tropical Ecosystems

Transcript of a discussion on how large-scale monitoring of rainforest, biodiversity and climate has been enabled and accelerated by cutting-edge, big-data capture, retrieval and analysis.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Our next big-data case study discussion explores how large-scale monitoring of rainforest biodiversity and climate has been enabled and accelerated by cutting-edge big-data capture, retrieval, and analysis.

We'll learn how quantitative analysis and modeling are generating new insights into what’s happening in tropical ecosystems worldwide, and we'll hear how such insights are leading to better ways to attain and verify sustainable development and preservation methods and techniques.

To learn more about data science -- and how hosting that data science in the cloud -- helps the study of biodiversity, we're pleased to welcome our guests, Eric Fegraus, Senior Director of Technology of the TEAM Network at Conservation International in Arlington, Virginia. Welcome, Eric.

Eric Fegraus: Hi, Dana. It’s great to be here. Thank you.
No-Compromise Big Data Analytics
With HP Vertica OnDemand
Request Your 30-Day Free Trial
Gardner: We're glad to have you. We're also here with Jorge Ahumada, Executive Director of the TEAM Network, also at Conservation International. Welcome, Jorge.

Jorge Ahumada: Great to be here.

Gardner: Let’s start with the trends. Clearly, knowing what’s going on in environments in the tropics helps us understand what to do and what not to do. How has that changed? We spoke about a year ago, Eric. Are there any trends or driving influences that have made this data gathering more important than ever.

Fegraus: Over this last year, we’ve been able to roll out our analytic systems across the TEAM Network. We're having more-and-more uptake with our protected-area managers using the system and we have some good examples where the results are being used.

Fegraus
For example, in Uganda, we noticed that a particular cat species was trending downward. The folks there were really curious why this was happening. At first, they were excited that there was this cat species, which was previously not known to be there.

This particular forest is a gorilla reserve, and one of the main economic drivers around the reserve is ecotourism, people paying to go see the gorillas. Once they saw that these cats are going down, they started asking what could be impacting this. Our system told them that the way they were bringing in the eco-tourists to see the gorillas had shifted and that was potentially having an impact of where the cats were. It allowed them to readjust and think about their practices to bring in the tourists to the gorillas.

Information at work

Gardner: Information at work.

Fegraus: Information at work at the protected-area level.

Gardner: Just to be clear for our audience, the TEAM Network stands for the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring. Jorge, tell us a little bit about how that came about, the TEAM Network and what it encompasses worldwide?

Ahumada: The TEAM Network was a program that started about 12 years ago and it was started to fill a void in the information we have from tropical forests. Tropical forests cover a little bit less than 10 percent of the terrestrial area in the world, but they have more than 50 percent of the biodiversity.

Ahumda
So they're the critical places to be conserved from that point of view, despite the fact we didn’t have any information about what's happening in these places. That’s how the TEAM Network was born, and the model was to use data collection methods that were standardized, that were replicated across a number of sites, and have systems that would store and analyze that data and make it useful. That was the main motivation.

Gardner: Of course, it’s super-important to be able to collect and retrieve and put that data into a place where it can be analyzed. It’s also, of course, important then to be able to share that analysis. Eric, tell us what's been happening lately that has led to the ability for all of those parts of a data lifecycle to really come to fruition?

Fegraus: Earlier this year, we completed our end-to-end system. We're able to take the data from the field, from the camera traps, from the climate stations, and bring it into our central repository. We then push the data into Vertica, which is used for the analytics. Then, we developed a really nice front-end dashboard that shows the results of species populations in all the protected areas where we work.

The analytical process also starts to identify what could be impacting the trends that we're seeing at a per-species level. This dashboard also lets the user look at the data in a lot of different ways. They can aggregate it and they can slice and dice it in different ways to look at different trends.

Gardner: Jorge, what sort of technologies are they using for that slicing and dicing? Are you seeing certain tools like Distributed R or visualization software and business-intelligence (BI) packages? What's the common thread or is it varied greatly?

Ahumada: It depends on the analysis, but we're really at the forefront of analytics in terms of big data. As Michael Stonebraker and other big data thinkers have said, the big-data analytics infrastructure has concentrated on the storage of big data, but not so much on the analytics. We break that mold because we're doing very, very sophisticated Bayesian analytics with this data.

One of the problems of working with camera-trap data is that you have to separate the detection process from the actual trend that you're seeing because you do have a detection process that has error.

Hierarchical models

We do that with hierarchical models, and it's a fairly complicated model. Just using that kind of model, a normal computer will take days and months. With the power of Vertica and power of processing, we’ve been able to shrink that to a few hours. We can run 500 or 600 species from 13 sites, all over the world in five hours. So it’s a really good way to use the power of processing.

We’d been also more recently working with Distributed R, a new package that was written by HP folks at Vertica, to analyze satellite images, because we're also interested in what’s happening at these sites in terms of forest loss. Satellite images are really complicated, because you have millions of pixels and you don’t really know what each pixel is. Is it forest, agricultural land, or a house? So running that on normal R, it's kind of a problem.
No-Compromise Big Data Analytics
With HP Vertica OnDemand
Request Your 30-Day Free Trial
Distributed R is a package that actually takes some of those functions, like random forest and regression trees, and takes full power of the vertical processing of Vertica. So we’ve seen a 10-fold increase in performance with that, and it allows us to get much more information out of those images.

Gardner: Not only are you on the cutting-edge for the analytics, you've also moved to the bleeding edge on infrastructure and distribution mechanisms. Eric, tell us a little bit about your use of cloud and hybrid cloud?

Fegraus: To back up a little bit, we ended up building a system that uses Vertica. It’s an on-premise solution and that's what we're using in the TEAM Network. We've since realized that this solution we built for the TEAM Network can also be readily scalable to other organizations and government agencies, etc., different people that want to manage camera trap data, they want to do the analytics.

So now, we're at a process where we’ve been essentially doing software development and producing software that’s scalable. If an organization wants to replicate what we’re doing, we have a solution that we can spin up in the cloud that has all of the data management, the analytics, the data transformations and processing, the collection, and all the data quality controls, all built into a software instance that could be spun up in the cloud.
In many of these countries, it's very difficult for some of those governments to expand out their old solutions on the ground. Cloud solutions offer a very good, effective way to manage data.

Gardner: And when you say “in the cloud,” are you talking about a specific public cloud, in a specific country or all the above, some of the above?

Fegraus: All of the above. We'll be using Vertica or we're using Vertica OnDemand. We're actually going to transition our existing on-premise solution into Vertica OnDemand. The solution we’re developing uses mostly open-source software and it can be replicated in the Amazon cloud or other clouds that have the right environments where we can get things up and running.

Gardner: Jorge, how important is that to have that global choice for cloud deployment and attract users and also keep your cost limited?

Ahumada: It’s really key, because in many of these countries, it's very difficult for some of those governments to expand out their old solutions on the ground. Cloud solutions offer a very good, effective way to manage data. As Eric was saying, the big limitation here is which cloud solutions are available in each country. Right now, we have something with cloud OnDemand here, but in some of the countries, we might not have the same infrastructure. So we'll have to contract different vendors or whatever.

But it's a way to keep cost down, deliver the information really quick, and store the data in a way that is safe and secure.

What's next?

Gardner: Eric, now that we have this ability to retrieve, gather, analyze, and now distribute, what comes next in terms of having these organizations work together? Do we have any indicators of what the results might be in the field? How can we measure the effectiveness at the endpoint -- that is to say, in these environments based on what you have been able to accomplish technically?

Fegraus: One of the nice things about the software that we built that can run in the various cloud environments, is that it can also be connected. For example, if we start putting these solutions in a particular continent, and there are countries that are doing this next to each other, there are not going to be silos that will be unable to share an aggregated level of data across each other so that we can get a holistic picture of what's happening.

So that was very important when we started going down this process, because one of the big inhibitors for growth within the environmental sciences is that there are these traditional silos of data that people in organizations keep and sit on and essentially don't share. That was a very important driver for us as we were going down this path of building software.

Gardner: Jorge, what comes next in terms of technology. Are the scale issues something you need to hurdle to get across? Are there analytics issues? What's the next requirements phase that you would like to work through technically to make this even more impactful?

Ahumada: As we scale up in size and  start  having more granularity in the countries where we work, the challenge is going to be keeping these systems responsive and information coming. Right now, one of the big limitations is the analytics. We do have analytics running at top speeds, but once we started talking about countries, we're going to have an the order of many more species and many more protected areas to monitor.
This is something that the industry is starting to move forward on in terms of incorporating more of the power of the hardware into the analytics, rather than just the storage and the management of data.

This is something that the industry is starting to move forward on in terms of incorporating more of the power of the hardware into the analytics, rather than just the storage and the management of data. We're looking forward to keep working with our technology partners, and in particular HP, to help them guide this process. As a case study, we're very well-positioned for that, because we already have that challenge.

Gardner: Also it appears to me that you are a harbinger, a bellwether, for the Internet of Things (IoT). Much of your data is coming from monitoring, sensors, devices, and cameras. It's in the form of images and raw data. Any thoughts about what others who are thinking about the impact of the IoT should consider, now that you have been there?

Fegraus: When we talk about big data, we're talking about data collected from phones, cars, and human devices. Humans are delivering the data. But here we have a different problem. We're talking about nature delivering the data and we don't have that infrastructure in places like Uganda, Zimbabwe, or Brazil.

So we have to start by building that infrastructure and we have the camera traps as an example of that. We need to be able to deploy much more, much larger-scale infrastructure to collect data and diversify the sensors that we currently have, so that we can gather sound data, image data, temperature, and environmental data in a much larger scale.

Satellites can only take us some part of the way, because we're always going to have problems with resolution. So it's really deployment on the ground which is going to be a big limitation, and it's a big field that is developing now.

Gardner: Drones?

Using drones

Fegraus: Drones, for example, have that capacity, especially small drones that are showing to be intelligent, to be able to collect a lot of information autonomously. This is at the cutting edge right now of technological development, and we're excited about it.

Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been learning and exploring how large-scale monitoring of rainforest, biodiversity and climate has been enabled and accelerated by cutting-edge, big-data capture, retrieval, and analysis. And we've seen how quantitative analysis and modeling are generating new insights into what's happening in tropical ecosystems worldwide.

So a big thanks to our guests, Eric Fegraus, Senior Director of Technology of the TEAM Network at Conservation International, and Jorge Ahumada, the Executive Director of the TEAM Network, also at Conservation International.
No-Compromise Big Data Analytics
With HP Vertica OnDemand
Request Your 30-Day Free Trial
And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this big data innovation case study discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how large-scale monitoring of rainforest, biodiversity and climate has been enabled and accelerated by cutting-edge, big-data capture, retrieval and analysis. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

at 1:17 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, September 09, 2015

How HTC Centralizes Storage Management to Gain Visibility, Reduce Costs and Implement IT Disaster Avoidance

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on why bringing a common management view into play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Our next storage management innovation case study highlights how communications cooperative HTC centralizes storage management to gain powerful visibility, reduce storage costs, and implement IT disaster avoidance capabilities.

We’ll learn more about how HTC has lowered total storage utilization cost while bringing in a common management view to improve problem resolution, automate resources allocation, and more fully gain compliance -- as well as set the stage for broader virtualization benefits.

To learn how HTC gains better total storage management, please join me now in welcoming Philip Sellers, Senior System Administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Welcome, Philip.
Storage Operations Manager
Reduce Total Costs -- Increase Productivity
Try It Now
Philip Sellers: Good morning, Dana, thanks for having me. 

Gardner: Tell us about HTC.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/psellers
Sellers
Sellers: HTC is the largest telephone cooperative in the nation. We serve the Myrtle Beach and surrounding South Carolina area. We started out as a telephone company, but at this point, we're a full-line telecommunications company, doing cable TV, internet security, home automation, and through our partnership with AT and T, we also do wireless service. 

Gardner: Now, you are not HTC, the handset maker from Asia; you are an entirely different company.

Sellers: A completely different company, although we do sell a few of those handsets with our wireless division.

Gardner: You told me when we talked earlier that you are a reluctant storage administrator. You started out as a VMware in virtualization admin. How did you get from one to the other, and why is it important for your organization?

Common story

Sellers: It’s probably a common story in a lot of shops. As VMware became more prolific in our environment, the line started to blur between networking and VMware, and storage and VMware. So I was pulled more into those directions as the primary VMware admin for our company. That gave me the opportunity to dig in and start to learn an area of IT that was new to me.

Gardner: Philip, tell us a little bit about the scale: how many virtual machines (VMs), how many employees, what sort of a size organization are you?

Sellers: We have 700 or so employees at this point, and almost that number of VMs that we're managing. We have a couple of different storage platforms today with the HP EVA and HP 3PAR StoreServ in-house.

We also use lots of other things. We have HP StoreOnce for backup and HP StoreVirtual for some of our smaller needs, such as remote offices. 

Gardner: What kind of storage workloads are we dealing with here? Is this all of the apps across the company? What set of IT workloads are you addressing? 
One of the great benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test and development platform to mirror what we have in production.

Sellers: The group that I'm a part of is actually the internal IT group. So we're running line-of-business applications, not the things that our customers are delivered service across, but the things that run our business to take orders, support financial operations, and those sorts of things.

And we're running a mixture of test and dev and production. One of the great benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test and development platform to mirror what we have in production. So it runs the gamut for internal IT.

Gardner: When you start to think about progressing to a better utilization and the rationalization of storage, rather than have overlapping or disjointed storage capabilities, what sort of philosophy do you have about storage? How do you think that you can make the whole greater than sum of the parts and get those utilization benefits over time?

Deeper insight

Sellers: It’s something that I learned back in my virtualization days. For me, it’s huge to have visibility into what’s going to in your storage. One of the benefits of our transition to HP 3PAR storage is that we've been able to realize much deeper levels of insight into what’s going on inside of the arrays.

You know, as we were making that switch, we evaluated other third parties, ultimately deciding on the mid-range 7000 3PAR series for our environment and for our needs. That visibility has been key for us.

But it’s also come with a set of challenges, because we now have multiple storage consoles that we need to manage from. We have different places that we need to check. One of the keys for us is having somewhere where we can see it all, or get a better idea of the entire environment from an end-to-end perspective.

One of the other huge benefits that we've realized is some level of disaster avoidance.
That’s one of the things we learned from our VMware days. We were flying blind early on, and that caused us problems and potential problems, because we didn’t know something was going on. One of our main goals is establishing good visibility into our storage environment.

Gardner: So, it’s not just enough to modernize your storage and improve your storage capabilities, but at the same time you really need to address the management issues and consolidate management. In doing so, what have been some of the payoffs that you can recall? How has this helped your organization better provide IT services internally?

Sellers: From a performance standpoint, our former primary storage platform was not great at telling us how close we were to the edge of our performance capabilities. We never knew exactly what was going to cause a problem or the unpredictability of virtual workloads in particular. We never knew where we were going to have issues.

Being able to see into that has allowed us to prevent help desk cost for slow services, for problems that maybe we didn’t even know were going on initially. One of the other huge benefits that we've realized is new levels of disaster avoidance.

Gardner: And what do you mean by that, rather than disaster recovery (DR), which is taking care of business after we have had some terrible thing happen? How do you head that off?

Disaster avoidance

Sellers: I know that’s not an industry term, but that’s what I like to call it, because in our environment, we have two data centers that are fairly close together. What we've implemented is the HP 3PAR StoreServ metro storage clustering feature, which they call peer persistence, but it's VMware’s metro storage clustering. We've also done that with Windows clustering as well.

We have two sets of 3PARs in different data centers, and they act as one. So, they replicate synchronously between the two locations and they fail-over "automagically." I don’t know how else to say it. It just seamlessly fails-over between the two sites.

For our environment, we were at a particularly vulnerable state if we lost a data array, because so many things were pointing at it. Now if we lose a single data array it’s not a big deal. It fails-over and it continues running.

Gardner: And when you say vulnerable, I think you're talking about hurricanes?

Sellers: A lot of times we plan for those large natural disasters, but sometimes it’s the small ones that get us like UPS maintenance or something as simple as a power outage. Maybe your generator doesn’t kick in in time. Sometimes, that can be a disaster of almost the same scale as a hurricane to your business operations -- just from something simple.
Storage Operations Manager
Reduce Total Costs -- Increase Productivity
Try It Now
Gardner: So the storage management capability has provided "automagically," as you say, this disaster avoidance. That’s a pretty important metric. Do you have any idea of the value of that to your business, and maybe start to put that in dollar terms? It seems a pretty profound difference.

Sellers: I can’t necessarily put it into dollar terms. That’s not the world that I work in, but I know that anytime there is downtime to our customer relationship advisers, and the people in the field, that’s bad for business.

So we're avoiding those kinds of situations as best we can. We could lose an entire data center site and, with technology built into the VMware layer and into the HP 3PAR layer, it will come back up. It may be reboot of a server, but we try to do everything we can to avoid disaster situations today, rather than just plan for needing to fail a data center over to "site B," and go through all of that testing.

Gardner: Let’s get down to some more brass tacks on actual storage utilization benefits. Any thoughts or recollections about what this means in terms of utilization, so  no more worries about running out of storage base or capacity?

Seeing benefits

Sellers: Yeah, the HP 3PAR platform has been really great inside of our environment because we realize the marketing term of the "two-to-one thin provisioning." We're seeing that benefit.

When I looked at the console before I came here, we were seeing around a 2.3 to 1 compaction, and that’s without deduplication and some of the other newer technologies that are capable in the 3PAR platform. We may be able to realize better than that in the future.

Gardner: We've talked about disaster avoidance. We've recognized some significant savings in the provisioning and utilization. Let’s go back to management. What sort of benefits are you getting now with a more holistic approach and how does that help, perhaps on a data lifecycle basis?

Sellers: One of the ways that we're approaching that set of problems is with storage resource management software. We've traditionally used a piece of software called Storage Essentials, which HP makes. It’s heterogeneous storage-management software, so it can look at all of our different arrays and looks at our backup arrays and our primary storage arrays, as well as our back-up environment, and pulls all that information together.
We've been able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard view.

We've been able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard view. Over the last six months or so, I've been working in an early-release program for a product called HP Storage Operations Management.

This software is the next iteration of Storage Essentials. It’s got a much more approachable and modern user interface, which brings up and aggregates our total environment so that we can get a full picture of what’s going on there. Then, we can drill down and see at specific levels how things are performing, what our utilization trend is, or how much time we have until a device or a storage pool is full.

Those are things that keep us out of the really dangerous situations in getting down to a time where you're in a mission critical season, maybe the holidays or something where it’s heavy sales, and you run out of disk space and you can’t get your procurement cycle to get storage quickly enough.

Those things are just as dangerous as the hurricane that we were talking about earlier from a business operations perspective. Tools like this help us to manage and see what’s going on in the environment and help us plan and act proactively.

Gardner: I could really see why your philosophy is visibility and management oversight. It comes back again and again as a huge force multiplier benefit. 

Room to grow

Sellers: Absolutely. There's a saying that ignorance is bliss. When you're flying blind, that’s true, until it catches up with you, and it eventually overtakes you. We have lots and lots of room to grow and capabilities where we're at today. This new version of management storage resource management product has lots of great potential, too.

It’s an initial release. So, it’s got somewhat limited support for different storage families and that kind of thing, but they're working to bring in additional support and make it all that the previous product was, and much more -- and that’s visible from the initial release.

So we're excited about seeing where that can help us, particularly because one of the switches in this new product is that it’s not just a collect, an analytics reporting system. It’s a dashboard system where it takes that analytics and brings it back to a dashboard to let you drill down in to it and see it real clearly in near-real-time. I won’t say in real-time, but within whatever amount of time you configure.

Gardner: How about your future business activities? How well you can support them? I know that media is a fast-changing business. Do you feel confident now that when your superiors in your organization come to you and say, "We need this," that you're in a better position to hop-to quickly? Is there a sense of confidence that you can take on market change better?
We feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in shorter terms.

Sellers: I certainly believe so. We've been able to adapt and change more quickly because of changes that we've made with VMware, with HP 3PAR. We feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in shorter terms. We've been able to try and look at new things like VDI deployments to help us with compliance-type issues, where we're under regulations and have to patch and have to ensure that our systems are secure.

And so we are looking at things like that now that we were afraid to put on to primary storage in the past. It's something where we think we have a good mix today for the future.

Gardner: What advice might you might provide others who would be approaching a disparate storage environment? And maybe share your philosophy about visibility and anticipation being better than reaction. Maybe they are also seeking disaster avoidance, rather than disaster recovery. For those folks that are not quite as far along in this journey as you are, what might you suggest for them to be thinking about -- or that you wish you knew about earlier?

Sellers: There is definitely some low hanging fruit, and that’s what visibility will bring to you -- the ability to handle some of that low-hanging fruit. If you have a situation where your storage team is siloed away from your server team, bringing something in that can see both of those sides and map together that whole environment is a real easy way to identify inefficiency.

Those are LUNs that maybe are provisioned -- but not in use. There is no I/O on them. That’s a dollar amount immediately reclaimed. Finding VMs and things with visibility. These tools can look in to the VMware environment where you can see that you have lots and lots of VMs that are shut down.

There are easy things that you can do to start that process, no matter what your storage platform is. I think that’s a universal thing. If you have something that can gain you visibility in to the environment there are some easy things and easy wins that you can bring back.

Further improvements

Gardner: And those of course provide grist for the mill of further improvements and further budget to accomplish even more.

Sellers: Absolutely. If you want to make a storage platform switch or if you want to do other improvements and gain more efficiency, this gives you a little bit of extra room, some wiggle room, to make those things reality. We spent an awful lot of our budget just in keeping the lights on, keeping things up and running. Anytime you can gain some wiggle room from that budget, it certainly allows you the ability to look at innovation.

Gardner: Great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning about how HTC centralizes storage management to gain powerful visibility, reduce storage costs, and implement a disaster avoidance capability.

And we have heard why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully -- and therefore gains better compliance and sets the stage for broader virtualization benefits.

So join me in thanking our guest, Philip Sellers, senior systems administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South California. Thank you, Philip. 

Sellers: Thank you, Dana.
Storage Operations Manager
Reduce Total Costs -- Increase Productivity
Try It Now
Gardner: And I would like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this data and information governance innovation case study discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP Enterprise.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on why bringing a common management view into play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

at 2:31 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Focus on Data, Risk, and Predictive Analysis Drives New Era of Cloud-Based IT Service Management, Says Expert Panel

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect panel discussion on how agile ITSM plays an essential role in IT today.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Our next data center innovation panel discussion focuses on the changing role of IT service management (ITSM) in a hybrid computing world. As IT systems, resources, assets, and information are more scattered across more enterprise locations and devices -- as well as across various service environments -- how can IT leaders hope to know where their "stuff" is, who’s using it, how to secure it, and then accurately pay for it?

Well, it turns out that advanced software asset management (SAM) methods can enforce compliance, reduce risk, cut costs, and enhance end-user productivity -- even as the complexity of IT itself increases.
HP Service Desk Software
Brings Together ITSM Capabilities
Get Your Free Trial
We'll hear from four IT leaders about how they have improved ITSM despite such challenges, and we'll learn how the increased use of big data and analytics when applied to ITSM improves inventory control and management. We'll also hear how a service brokering role can also be used to great advantage, thanks to ITSM-generated information.

To learn more about how ITSM solves multiple problems for IT, we're joined by our panel, Charl Joubert, a change and configuration management expert based in Pretoria, South Africa. Welcome, Charl.

Charl Joubert: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Julien Kuijper, an expert in asset and license management based in Paris. Welcome, Julien.

Julien Kuijper: Thank you. Good afternoon.

Gardner: We're also here with Patrick Bailly, IT Quality and Process Director at Steria, also based in Paris. Welcome, Patrick.

Patrick Bailly: Thank you. Good afternoon.

Gardner: And lastly, Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric, based in Harrogate, UK. Welcome, Edward.

Edward Jackson: Thank you. Good afternoon.

Gardner: Let’s talk about modern SAM, software asset management. There seems to be a lot going on with getting more information about software and how it’s distributed and used. Julien, tell us how you're seeing organizations deal with this issue.

Complicated circle

Kuijper: SAM has to square quite a complicated circle. One is compliance in a company, compliance with regard to software installation and usage, and also ensuring that while doing this, we must ensure that the software that is entering a company isn't dangerous. It's things like not letting a virus come in, opening threats or complications. Those are three very technical and very factual environments.

Kuijper
But, you also want to please your end-user. If you don’t please your end-user and you don’t give them the ability to work, they're going to be frustrated. They're going to complain about IT. It’s already a complicated enough.

You have to square that circle by implementing the correct processes first, while giving the correct information around how to behave in the end-to-end software lifecycle.

Gardner: And asset management when it comes to software is not small, there are some very big numbers -- and costs -- involved.

Kuijper: It’s actually a very inconvenient truth. An audit from a publisher or a vendor can easily reach 7 or 8 digits, and a typical company has between 10 and 50 publishers. So, at 7 digits per publisher, you can easily do the math. That’s typically the financial risk.

You also have a big reputation risk. If you don’t pay for software and you are caught, you end up being in the press. You don’t want your company, your branding, to be at that level of exposure.

You have to bring this risk to the attention of IT leaders at the CIO level, but they don’t really want to hear that, because it costs a lot. When they hear this risk, they can't avoid investment, and the investment can be quite large as well.
Typically, if this investment is reaching five percent of your overall yearly software spending, you're on the right level. It’s a big number, but still it’s worth investing.

But you have to compare this investment with regard to your overall software spending. Typically, if this investment is reaching five percent of your overall yearly software spending, you're on the right level. It’s a big number, but still it’s worth investing.

Coming with this message to IT management and getting the ear of a person who is interested in the topic and then getting the investment authorization, you've gone through half the journey. Implementation afterward will be defining your processes, finding the right tool, implementing it, and running it.

Gardner: When it comes to value to the end-user, by having an understood, clearly-defined process in place allows them to get to the software they want, make sure they can use it, and look for it on a sanctioned list, for example. While some end-users might see this as a hurdle, I think it enables them eventually to get the tools they need when they need them.

Smart communication

Kuijper: Right. At the beginning, every end-user will see all those SAM processes as a burden or a complication. So you have to invest a lot in communication, smart communication, with your company and make people understand that it’s everyone’s responsibility to be [software license] compliant and also that it can help in recovering money.

If you do this in a smart way, and the process has a delivery time not longer than three days, then you're good. You have to ensure, of course, that you have a software catalog that is up-to-date, with an easy access to your main titles. All those points from the end-to-end software lifecycle are implemented -- from software tool, then software delivery, then software re-usage, software, and also disposal. When all this is lean, then you’ve made your journey. Then, the software lifecycle process will not be seen any more as a pain, but it will be seen as a business-enabler.

Gardner: Now, asset management doesn’t just cover the realm of software. It includes hardware, and in a network environment, that can be very large numbers of equipment and devices, endpoints as well as network equipment.

Edward at Redcentric, tell us about how you see the management of assets through the lens of a network.

Jackson: We have more than 10,000 devices in management from a multitude of vendors and we use asset management in terms of portfolio management, managing the models, the versions, and the software.

Jackson
We also have a configuration management tool that takes the configurations of these devices and runs them against compliance. We can run them against a gold or a silver build. We can also run them against security flaws. It gives us an end-to-end management.

All of this feeds into our ITSM product and then also it feeds into things like the configuration management data base (CMDB). So we have a complete end-to-end knowledge of the software, the hardware, and the services that we're giving the customer.

Gardner: Knowing yourself and your organization allows for that lifecycle benefit that Julien referred to. Eventually, that gives you the freedom to manage and extend those benefits into things like helpdesk support, even IT operations, where the performance can be maintained better.

Jackson: Yes, that's 360-degree management from hardware being delivered on-site, to being discovered, being automatically populated into the multitude of support and operational systems that we use, and then into the ITSM side.

If you don’t get it right from the start and you don’t have the correct models defined for example a Cisco device or the correct OS version on that device, one perhaps where it has security flaws, then you run the risk of deploying a vulnerable service to the customer.

Thinking about scale

Gardner: Looking at the different types of tools and approaches, this goes beyond thinking about assets alone. We're thinking also about scale. Tell us about your organization, and why the scale and ability to manage so many devices and information is important?

Jackson: Being a managed service provider (MSP), we have about 1,000 external customers, and each one of those has a tailored service, ranging from voice, storage, to data, and cloud. So we need to be able to manage these services that are contained within the 10,000 plus devices that we have.

We need to understand the service end-to-end. So there’s quite bit of service level management in there. It all ties down to having the correct kind of vendor, the correct kind of service mapping, and information needs to be accurate in the configuration items (CIs), so support can utilize this information.

If we have an incident that is automatically generated on the management platforms, it goes into the ITSM platform. We can create an effective customer list within, say, five minutes of the network outage and then email or SMS the customer pretty much directly.
We need to understand the service end-to-end. So there’s quite bit of service level management in there.

There’s more ways of doing it, but it’s all due to having a tight control on the assets that are out there in the field, having an asset management tool that can actually control that, and being able to understand the topology of the network and where everything lies. This gives us the ability to create relationships between these devices and have hierarchical logical and physical entities.

Gardner: You have confidence that you work with tools and platforms that can handle that scale?

Jackson: All the tools that we have are pretty much carrier-grade. So we can scale a lot more than the 10,000 devices that we currently have. If you set it up and plan it right, it doesn’t really matter how many devices you have in management. You have to have the right processes and structure to be able to manage them.

Gardner: We've talked about software, hardware, and networks. Nowadays, cloud services, microservices, and APIs are also a big part of the mix. IT consumes them, they make value from them, and they extend that value into the organization.

Let’s go to Patrick at Steria. How are you seeing in your organization an evolution of ITSM into a service brokering role? And does the current generation of ITSM tools and platforms give you a road to that service brokering capacity?

Extending services

Bailly: What’s needed for becoming a service broker that is we need to offer the ability to extend the current service that we have to the services that are available today in the cloud.

Bailly
To do that, we need to extend the capability of our framework. Today, our framework has been designed in order to run the operation on behalf of our customers, to run the operation on the customer side, or the operation on our data center, but more or less, traditionally IT. The current ITSM framework is able to do that.

What we're facing is that we have customers who want to add short-term [cloud capacity]. We need to offer that capability. What's very important is to offer one interface toward the customers, and to integrate across several service providers at the same time.

Gardner: Tell us a bit about Steria. You're a large organization, 20,000 employees, and in multiple countries.

Bailly: We're an IT service provider, and we manage different kinds of services from infrastructure management, application management, business process outsourcing, system integration, etc., all over Europe. Today, we're leveraging the capabilities that we have today in India and in Poland.

Gardner: Now, we've looked at what ITSM does. We haven’t dug into too much about where it’s going next in terms of what analysis of this data can bring to the table.

Charl, tell us, please, about how you see the use of analytics improving what you've been doing in your setting. How do baseline results from ITSM, the tools we have been talking about, improve when you start to analyze that data, index it, cleanse it, and get at the real underlying information that can then be turned into business benefits?

Joubert: Looking at inadequacies of your processes is really the start of all of this. The moment you start scratching at the vast amount of information you have, you start seeing the errors of your ways, and ways and opportunities to correct them.

Joubert
It's really an exciting time in ITSM. We now have the ability to start mining this magnitude of information that’s being locked inside attachments in all of these ITSM solutions. We can now start indexing all that unstructured data and using it. It’s a fantastic time to be in IT.

Gardner: Give me an example of where you've seen this at work -- maybe a helpdesk environment. How can you immediately get benefits from starting to analyze systems and IT information?

Million interactions

Joubert: In the service desk I'm involved in, we have about a total of a million interactions over the past few years. What we've done with big data is index the categorization of all these interactions.

With tools from HP, Smart Analytics and Smart Ticketing, we're able to predict the categorization of these interactions to a accuracy of about 84 percent at the moment. This assists the service desk agents to more accurately get the correct information to the correct service teams the first time, with fewer errors in escalation, which in turn leads to greater customer satisfaction.

Gardner: Julien, where does the analysis of what you're doing with software asset management, for example, play a role? Where do you see it going?

Kuijper: SAM is already quite complex on-premise and we all know today that the IT world is moving to the cloud, and this is the next challenge of SAM, because the whole point of the cloud is that you don’t know where your systems are.

However, the licensing models, as they are today, refer to CPU, to on-premise, to physical assets. Understanding how you can adapt your licensing model to this new concept -- not that new anymore now -- this new concept of cloud is something to which even the software publishers and vendors have not really adapted their model.
This is the next challenge of SAM, because the whole point of the cloud is that you don’t know where your systems are.

You also have to face some vendors or publishers who are not willing to adapt their model, especially to be able to audit specific customers and get more revenue. So, on one hand, you have to implement the right processes and the right tools, which are now going to navigate in a very complex environment, very difficult to scan, very difficult to analyze. At the same time, you have to update all your contracts, and sometime, this will not be possible.

Some vendors will have a very easy licensing model if you are implementing their software in their own cloud environment, but in another cloud environment, in a competitor, they might make this journey quite complicated for you.

So this will be complex and will be resolved by correct data to analyze and also some legal workforce and purchasing workforce to try to adapt the contracts.

Gardner: In many ways right now, we never really own software. We only lease it or borrow it and we're charged in a variety of ways. But soon we'll to be going more to that pay-as-you-use, pay-as-you-consume model. What about the underlying information associated with those services? Would logs go along with your cloud services? Should you be able to access that so that you can analyze it in the context of your other IT infrastructure?

Edward, any thoughts as a managed services environment and a management of networks provider. Do you see that as you provide more services that you are providing insight or ITSM metadata along with the services?

IaaS to SaaS

Jackson: Over the past five or six years, the services that we offered pretty much started as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but it’s now very much a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, managed OS, and everything up the technology stack into managed applications.

It's gotten to a point now that we are taking on the managing of bespoke applications that customers wanted to hand over to Redcentric. So not only do we have to understand the technology and the operating systems that go on these platforms in the cloud, but we also have to understand the bespoke software that’s sitting on them and all the necessary dependencies for that.

The more that we invest into cloud technologies, the more complex the service that we offer our customers becomes. We have a multitude of management systems that can monitor all the different elements of this and then piece them together in a service-level model (SLM) perspective. So you get SLM and you get service assurance on top of that.

Gardner: We've recently  heard about HP's IDOL OnDemand and Vertica OnDemand, as part of the Haven OnDemand. They're bringing these analytics capabilities to cloud services, APIs as well. As I understand it, they're going to be applying them to more IT operations issues. So it’s quite possible that we'll start to see a mash up, if you will, between a cloud service, but also the underlying IT information associated with that service.

Let’s go back to Patrick at Steria. Any thoughts about where this combination of ITSM within a cloud environment develops? How do you see it going?

Bailly: The system today exists for traditional IT, and we also have to have the tooling for designing and consuming cloud services. We are running HP Service Manager for traditional IT, legacy IT, and we are running HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) for managing and operating in the cloud.

We’d like to have a unique way for reconciling the catalog of services that are in Service Manager with the catalog of services that are in CSA, and we would need to have a single, unique portal for doing that.
HP Service Desk Software
Brings Together ITSM Capabilities
Get Your Free Trial
What we're expecting with HP Propel is to offer the capabilities to aggregate services that are coming from various sources and to extend that by also offering them. When we're serving this live, we need to offer some additional features like collaboration, incident management, access to the knowledge base, collaboration between service desk and end user, collaboration between end users, etc.

There's also another important point and that is service integration. As a service provider, we will have to deliver and control the services that are delivered by some partners and by some cloud service providers.

In order to do that, we need to have strong integration, not only partnership, but also strong integration. And that integration should be multiple point, meaning that, as soon as we're able to integrate a service provider with this, that integration will be de facto available for our other customers. We're expecting that from HP Propel.

And it’s not only an integration for provisioning service, but it’s also an integration for running the other processes, collaboration, incident management, etc.

Gardner: Patrick mentioned HP Propel, do any of you also have some experience with that or are looking at it to solve other problems?

Single view

Joubert: We're definitely looking at it to give a single view for all our end users. There are various supportive partners in the area where I work. The end user really wants one place to ask for fixing a broken light, to fixing a broken PC, to installing software. It's ease of use that they're looking for. So yes, we are definitely looking at Propel.

Gardner: Let’s take another look to the future. We've heard quite a bit about the Internet of Things (IoT) -- more devices, more inputs, and more data. Do you think that’s something that’s going to be an issue for ITSM, or is that something separate? Do you view that the infrastructure that’s being created for ITSM lends itself to something like managing the IoT and more devices on a network?

Kuijper: For me, as asset management experts and software asset management experts, we have to draw a line somewhere and say, "There is this IoT, and there is some data that we have to say we don’t want to analyze." There are things that are here on the Internet. That’s fine, but too much engineering around that might be over-killing the processes.

We also have to be very careful about false good ideas. I personally think that bring your own device (BYOD) is a false good idea. It brings tremendous issues with regards to who takes care of an asset that is personally owned by a person in a corporate environment, who deals with IT.

Today, it’s perfect. I bring the computer that I'm used to in the office. Tomorrow, it’s broken. Who is going to fix it? When I buy software for this machine, who is going to pay for it and who's going to be responsible for non-compliance?
We also have to be very careful about false good ideas. I personally think that bring your own device is a false good idea.

A CIO might think it’s very intelligent and very advanced to allow people to use what they're used to, but the legal issues behind it are quite complicated. I would say this is a false good idea.

Gardner: Edward, you mentioned that at Redcentric, scale doesn’t concern you. You're pretty confident that the systems that you can access can handle almost any scale. How about that IoT? Even if it shouldn’t be in the purview legally or in terms of the role of IT, it does seem like the systems that have been developed for ITSM are applicable to this issue. Any thoughts about more and more devices on a network?

Jackson: In terms of the scale of things, if the elements are in your control and you have some structure and management around them. You don’t need to be overly concerned. We certainly don’t keep anything in our systems their shouldn’t be in there or doesn’t need to be.

Going forward, things like big data and smart analytics layered on top would give us a massive benefit in how we could deliver our service, and more importantly, how we can manage the service.

Once you have your processes is in place, and can understand the necessity of those processes, you have the structure, and you have the kind of management platform that your sure is going to handle the data, then you can basically leverage things like big data, smart analytics, and data mining to enable you to offer a sophisticated level of support that perhaps your competitors can’t.

Esoteric activity

Gardner: It's occurred to me that the data and the management of that ITSM data is central to any of these major challenges, whether it’s big data, cloud service brokering, management of assets for legal or jurisdiction compliance. ITSM has become much more prominent, and is in the position to solve many more problems.

I'd like to end our conversation with your thoughts along those lines. Charl, ITSM, is it more important than ever? How has it become central?

Joubert: Absolutely. With the advent of big data, we suddenly have the tools to start mining this information and using it to our benefit to give better service to our end-users.
With the advent of big data, we suddenly have the tools to start mining this information and using it to our benefit to give better service to our end users.

Kuijper: ITSM is definitely core to any IT environment, because ITSM is the way to put the correct price tag behind a service. We have service charging and service costing. If you don’t do that correctly, then you basically don’t tell the truth to your customer or to your end user.

If you mix this with the IoT and the possibility to have anything with an IP address available on the network, then you enter into more philosophical thoughts. In a corporate environment, let’s assume you have a tag on your car keys that helps you to find them, and that is linked on the Internet. Those gizmos are happening today.

This brings some personal life information into your corporate environment. What does the corporate environment do about this? The brand of your car is on your car tag. They will know that you bought a brand new car. They will know all this information which is personal. So we have to think about ethics as well.

So drawing a line of what the corporate environment will take care and what is private will be essential in this IOT. When you have your mobile phone, is it personal, it is business? Drawing a line will be very important.

Gardner: But at least we will have the means to draw that line and then enforce the drawing of that line.

Kuijper: Right. Totally correct.

Gardner: Edward, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever or not so much?

Bigger than ever

Jackson: I think it’s bigger than ever. It’s the front end of your business, and the back-end of your business its what the customers see. It’s how you deliver your service, and if you haven’t got it right, then you are not going to be able to deliver the service that a customer expects.

You might have the best products in the world, but if your ITSM systems and your ITSM team aren’t doing what they're supposed to be doing then you know it’s not going to be any good, and the customers are going to say that.

Gardner: And lastly to Steria, and Patrick, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever? How do you view it?

Bailly: For me, the role of IT Service Management (ITSM) won't change. We did ITSM in the past and we still continue to have that in the future. In order to deliver any service,  we need to have the detailed configuration of the service. We will have to run processes and not have the service change. What will change in the future is the diversity of service providers that we use.

As a service provider, we'll have to walk with a lot of other service providers. So the SLA will be more complex to manage for service management. It will be critical. For the customer, you will have to not only manage — but to govern — that service even if it is provided by lot of service providers.

Gardner: So the complexity goes up, and therefore the need to manage that complexity also needs to go up.

Bailly: What is also very important in license management in the cloud is that very often the return on investment (ROI) of the cloud adoption has ignored or minimized the impact of software cost. When you tell your customers, internal or external, that this xyz cloud offer will cost them that amount of money, you will most likely have to add up 20-30 percent because of the impact of the software cost afterward.

Gardner: I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been talking to a panel of experts about IT service management and its role in a hybrid computing world. We’ve found out how the future of analytics plays into ITSM, big data included, as well as many of the other scaling issues around mobility, IoT, and the licensing and legal issues around all assets in IT.
HP Service Desk Software
Brings Together ITSM Capabilities
Get Your Free Trial
So a big thank you to our panel, Charl Joubert, a change and configuration expert based in Pretoria, South Africa; Julien Kuijper, an expert in asset and license management based in Paris; Patrick Bailly, IT Quality and Process Director at Steria in Paris, and  Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric in the UK.

And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion. I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining us, and don’t forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP Enterprise.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect panel discussion on how agile ITSM plays an essential role in IT today. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

at 1:07 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)