Arados Consulting Cloud Service: Service Catalogue

The Storage Service Catalogue

Want cloud like storage services? You may start with defining your storage

services needs and capabilities!by

Thomas Metzeler

Arados Consulting 2010 All rights reserved

What is this session about?

• Develop a storage services catalogue• Practical advise• Concepts• Pitfalls • Reporting on service levels and storage assets • Aligning IT Storage delivery with business

needs


• User Satisfaction– Service Level– Elasticity– Agility– Speed of provisioning and

changes– Impactless

• Risk– Eliminating the risk of

failure

• Costs– more with less– Sourcing– Stop buying that expensive

stuff

Competing Priorities


The challenge of unconstrained demand

Data growth; Regulatory Pressure; infrastructure budget

Demand

Budget

If businesses do not get the service at the right cost within IT they will go external



Need Structure: No Service Catalogue, No Service

• Standardization of configurations• Clear offerings for differing environments• Clear resource and workload definitions• Service lifecycle management• Basic resource accounting and

charge back• Service level reporting


Service Catalogue Life Cycle

• Create Storage Service Catalogue Model• Agree Service Level Requirements• Capture financial model and add to catalogue• Map against Storage Service Catalogue Model• Define Service Level Agreements• Define reports needed • Map with forecast model• Ongoing review of achievements• Review and renew


Value

The Storage Service Catalogue Model:• Provides a central source of information• Ensures an accurate, consistent picture of all

storage services, their details and status• Contains user-facing view of storage services in

use, how they are intended to be used, business processes they enable and quality of service to be expected.

• Maps the reference architecture to the services it enables


Challenges and Pitfalls

• Maintaining accurate Storage Service Catalogue Model as part of a Service Portfolio

• Culture of the organization needs to accept that the Catalogue and Portfolio are essential sources of information that everyone within the organization needs to use and help maintain

• Is not a CMDB, but can be complementary• Get your metrics right• Have a reference architecture

http://www.foocus.com/siteimages/Novelties/Warning-Challenges.jpg


The Infrastructure Service Catalogue

• Defines and communicates infrastructure service offerings– customers can express what they need– infra team can express what they are offering– both are happy with what is being delivered

• Expectations are understood– And managed and then met

• Infrastructure service offerings are defined primarily in business terms– Provisioning SLAs– Performance– Availability– Continuity– Protection– Service Groups

• Hosting Services, Storage Services, Infra-Apps services, ..– All individual alinged to provide a common set of infrastructure services


How does it all tie up?

Business Storage & Backup

Requirement

Costs Acceptance ?

Costs accepted, Technical Solution to be deployed

Metrics Reports

Availability 100%

PerformanceTransaction/se

c

Planned downtime

4 X 4 hours/years

Business Continuity

Full DR

Data Protection

Any day within last month

Recovery Point

Objective15 minutes

RTO Standard 2:00 hours

RTO DR 4:00 hours

Metrics Report

WeeklyMonthly

Mapping Service

CatalogueTo

Technical Solution

Storage Service Catalogue

GoldSilver

NewRequest

NewService

Service Development

ProcessRequirement clarification Available technology

Technical Solution, costs,

metric definitionTiers 1 Primary

Tiers 2 Secondary

Planned Availability 99.999%

DR CopyHost based replication

Data Protection

Snapshot daily to VTL

MetricsAvailabilityDowntime

Performance

Cost TBD/GB

Infrastructure Details

72GB / 146 GB

RAID5(7+1)

11


The Storage Service Catalogue

• Defines and communicates storage service offerings– customers can express what they need– storage team can express what they are offering– both are happy with what is being delivered

• Expectations are understood– And managed and then met

• Storage service offerings are defined primarily in business terms– Performance– Availability– Continuity– Protection– Service Groups


The Big Picture

Storage SLAm =

Storage Service Level Agreement management applicationBy Arados Consulting


SLAm – My Catalogue• Services organized in a

customizable hierarchy.

• Top level reflects business requirements.

– Aligned with other infrastructure and application services

• Browse and then drill down

• Select service that meets the business and technical requirements


SLAm – Service Class

• Defines technical configuration

– Storage Tiers– Tape Tiers– Replication– Primary &

Secondary Sites

• Defines OLAs– Availability– Performance– RTOs & RPOs

• In terms storage customers can understand


SLAm – Data Protection• Data Protection (Backups)

expressed in RPO and RTO terms

– Terms that storage customers can understand

– To be aligned with business requirements

• Incorporates disk backups as well as virtual and physical tape


SLAm – IllustrationEasy to understand technical summary can be displayed for each service class.


SLAm – Infrastructure Analysis• Infrastructure

required to deliver each service class can be analyzed

• Base costs can be rolled up to provide overall cost and charge details

• Infrastructure requirements can be displayed per data centre


SLAm – Forecast View• Quarterly forecasts

can be entered against the service catalogue

• For each quarter’s forecasts can be summarized by:

– Service Class– Service Group– Storage Tier


SLAm – Rolling ForecastStorage requirements for the upcoming quarters can be analyzed


Export to Excel for Chargeback reports

• Cost model based

• Cost can be listed by:

– Hosts– Service Class– Service Group– Storage Tier– Business Line


SLAm – Storage Probe SLA Reports

Storage reports can be automated to report on service levels


Key Takeaways

• Develop a Storage Service Catalogue• Establish a methodology for continuing to develop

and maintain the Storage Service Catalogue.• Include the cost model • Include capacity planning• Include reporting