Mission critical it still drives mission-critical business

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Mission-Critical IT Still Drives Mission-Critical Business John Brand, VP and Principal Analyst, CIO Group

March, 2012

[email protected]


Enterprise IT is facing

fundamental change.

Mission-critical has now

become a global imperative

for the entire industry.

“Who would have thought that

email would ever have become

mission-critical?”


The public face of mission-critical failures

Major system outages continue to plague the best and brightest

– Blackberry, Amazon, major international banks (HSBC, NatWest, First Direct,

RBS, OCBC and DBS)

Ponemon Institute Study, February 2011

– The cost of a data center outage ranges from a minimum cost of $38,969 to a

maximum of $1,017,746 per organization, with an overall average cost of

$505,502 per incident.

Interconnectedness of systems mean reliability is even more critical than

ever

– It‟s not just you….it‟s who you serve and who serves you

– Data provided and consumed by third parties can disrupt entire industries, not

just your own organisation


More Than A Third Of Applications Are Deemed Mission-Critical


Reality: Three common approaches to implementing “next-generation” infrastructure

Data Centre Refresh

FOCUS: increase capacity/density, increase

power efficiency, maximise floor space

APPROACH: significant use of infrastructure

virtualisation (CPU, storage, network). Optimise use of assets

INVESTMENT STRATEGY: maximise depreciation schedules

and optimise asset value

KPI‟s: IT service level metrics

Data Centre Renovation

FOCUS: reduce operational complexity,

increase flexibility/agility, availability/reliability, optimise

efficiency through policy

APPROACH: significant use of infrastructure and

platform virtualisation. Increased use of automation. Optimise availability of

assets

INVESTMENT STRATEGY: reduce capital investments, focus on

variable operational cost models

KPI‟s: IT service-to-value metrics

Data Centre Transformation

FOCUS: optimise capacity, availability,

flexibility, performance and cost - based on each business requirement

and policy

APPROACH: significant use of infrastructure,

platform and application virtualisation. Strong emphasis on

business service level management and policy automation

INVESTMENT STRATEGY: minimise capital investments,

preference for variable operational costs for all business requirements.

Change of focus from „cost-to-have‟ to „cost-to-do‟

KPI‟s: Business value metrics

At least 80% of

organisations are here

Less than 15% of


Less than 5% of


(and most of these are service

providers)


Reality Bites: Most Organizations Remain at Stage 2

Stage 1

“Acclimation”

Gaining confidence as a

concept and toolset

Stage 2

“Strategic consolidation”

Manageable deployment of

business critical workloads

Stage 3

“Process Improvement”

Using tools to automate virtual

landscape

Stage 4 “Pooling and automation”

Service centres, chargeback, SLAs, QoS

SOURCE: Adapted from Forrester Research Report, July 2009

“Assess Your Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity”


The Seven Qualities Of Extraordinary Software

Forrester Research, “The Seven Qualities Of Wildly Desirable Software” - January 2011, Mike Gualtieri


Mission-critical: evolving to meet changing business needs

High performance mission-critical system

Few moving parts

Little or no change

Large workloads

Highly flexible, scalable system – with in-built reliability

Many moving parts

Rapid and/or random change

Variable workloads

Only the most mature organisations have managed to combine

mission-critical capabilities with the requirement for flexibility at scale

Past ------- Future


Highly Available Applications Are Monitored, Fault Tolerant, And Fixable

"We have been averaging about 20 minutes a year of unplanned unavailability per

year for our primary ERP application, about 1.5 minutes per month. " (Major

aerospace manufacturer, ERP system)


Evolving “backup and restore” towards “resilience and recovery”

October 2011 “2012 IT Budget Planning Guide For CIOs”


Unix still provides a trusted mission-critical environment

Unix kernel implementations for mission critical workloads are typically

“trim and tuned”

– Overall level of kernel maturity is perceived as higher than that of other

operating systems such as Linux, providing better reliability, particularly under

heavy loads.

Better error recovery from transient errors, especially network and I/O

device failures

– Particularly when using hardware partitioning and virtualisation

Predictive diagnostics are perceived as being better

– UNIX perceived to be giving better warning of impending component failure

Seen as having much more mature clustering for both HA and DR than

x86 alternative


HP-UX Users‟ Immediate Plans

January 2012 “Oracle Versus HP: Customers Lose; Oracle And x86 Linux Vendors Win”

Unix

Reliability Scalability Availability Disaster recovery

Immature alternatives

Total cost of

ownership


The OS centric view of the

world is changing…fast.

Effective management of a

platform that supports multiple

OS’s can deliver better

price/performance and flexibility

than standardising on any single

operating system


Three steps to build your always-on, always-available enterprise

Step 1: Understand the costs of downtime of critical services

– Calculate potential impact on revenue, productivity and relationships

Step 2: Focus availability on the end-to-end-service, not on infrastructure

components

– The seamless transition from the old-world of "mission-critical" to the new-

world of "continuous availability" is driven by continuous evolution

Step 3: Match business objectives to the right mix of technologies

– Focus on the capabilities, not the products

– The effective management capabilities of the platform are more important than

any specific feature or function

– It is never an “either/or‟ infrastructure/architecture decision for supporting

mission-critical

© 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Thank you

John Brand

+61 3.902.41703

[email protected]

www.forrester.com

Technology

Mission critical it still drives mission-critical business