Case Study Methodology

IT expenditures for both companies have grown over the past years, and through the acquisition, the CIO wants to make significant cost improvements. The CIO also sees increasing pressures of adding new business services at a very rapid pace. He has enlisted Sun Client Services to look into these issues and to produce a road map and implementation plan.

Sun Client Services usually performs a multi-day workshop to help determine business CTQs, KBDs, existing metrics, use cases, and other information that will be useful for the architecture phase.

Business Drivers

With the help of several key staff members from ZYX-WV, Sun Client Services has defined the following KBDs and CTQs:

1. Reduce cost

   Systems are underutilized, where information is available. Outages cost the business customers and credits. Project costs are very expensive, and purchase decisions are made with little knowledge of actual system capacity. The CIO is currently addressing part of this problem with a "Utilization Improvement Plan," which is focused on service consolidation.

2. Improve time to market

   ZYX-WV business services are under competitive pressures. The business cannot afford to re-architect for each new service offering, and new services take weeks or months to deploy.

3. Improve customer satisfaction

   ZYX-WV experiences several major system outages each year due to hardware failure, staff errors, and software errors. ZYX-WV wants to improve this by significantly reducing the number of customers that drop its services.

Technical Drivers

ZYX-WV has undergone a standardization program for its development standards over the last two years. ZYX-WV uses primarily J2EE applications, with some Microsoft .NET applications in areas that have no other practical solution. The IT department would like to continue to use the Sun™ ONE Server suite of applications and is beginning to upgrade several servers to Sun Java Enterprise System.

ZYX-WV also has standardized on two primary hardware vendors, Sun and HAL Systems. HAL provides Windows-based servers. Sun provides Solaris OS and Linux systems. Every six months, ZYX-WV determines which vendor systems are on the approved list and have standard systems for the following:

• Web servers (Tier 1, one-CPU to two-CPU systems)

• Application servers and middleware (Tier 2, four-CPU systems)

• Database servers (Tier 3, eight-CPU to 24-CPU systems)

It is also investigating using larger 8-CPU to 24-CPU systems for housing many of its Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications.

Management

ZYX-WV has several management systems in place:

• HP OpenView for network management

• Micromuse NetCool for event management

• VERITAS NetBack for systems backup

ZYX-WV management requires all systems to use these utilities. Operations also has very limited methods to determine system utilization and availability, and desires to improve these management areas.

Project Requirements

Based on the key business and technical drivers, the following requirements have been generated for the project (note this is not complete list, but it illustrates the case study). Requirements gathering is an interative process, and even though requirements might be gathered and approved, there are always new ones added as business and technical issues change. This requires a solid but flexible architecture.

TABLE 12-1 lists each requirement; a category such as business or technical, and possible subcategories such as security, operations, and applications; a relative priority (1 to 6, 1 being the highest) to the business; and the source of the requirement.

Table 12-1. Case Study Requirements Summary

Number	Requirement	Category	Priority	Source
R-1	Improve utilization	Business	1	CIO
R-2	Increase application density	Operations	3	Operations manager
R-3	Improve TTM for new services	Business	1	CIO
R-4	Reduce backup time	Operations	3	Operations manager
R-5	Improve availability of services	Business	1	CIO
R-6	Integrate with MM NetCool	Operations	3	Operations manager
R-7	Integrate with NetBackup	Operations	3	Operations
R-8	Implement capacity management tools	Operations	3	Operations manager
R-9	Improve security of multitenent applications	Security	1	Security director
R-10	Develop application change control process	Operations	3	Operations manager

Metrics and Measurement

Metrics are necessary to create a baseline of where a company is at today and to measure performance of an implementation in the future. This baseline might already be captured, based on existing tools, or additional software might be required to capture important information. In the case of XYZ-WV, some of the operational systems require updates, and not all the information is available. For example, the operations manager would like to improve the capabilities of system performance and capacity monitoring.

Today, the company has estimated the following metrics, along with the expected improvements.

Table 12-2. Case Study Metrics

Metric	Today	Improvement
TTM: time to deploy new service after the code or application has been received by operations	8 days	1 day
Utilization: average peak system utilization across all tiers	15.00 percent	75.00 percent
Availability: average platform up-time per month	99.80 percent	99.99 percent
Staff: required staff to install new service (operations)	4	1

Based on the requirements and metrics, the Sun Client Services consultants can design an architectural road map to help guide the implementation.

Architecture

The architecture is perhaps one of the most important deliverables any project can have. It is the road map to help guide the various design decisions and to ensure that the requirements are met. A flexible architecture is the key to reaching strategic flexibility within the IT enterprise.

FIGURE 12-1 shows the architectural design for this project, based on the requirements and drivers.

Figure 12-1. ZYX-WV Data Center Optimization Architecture

Key features of the architecture include:

• Standardized, common platforms for each tier

• Resource management capabilities provided on each server

• Enhanced security for shared servers

• Build and infrastructure provisioning automation

• Application life cycle management and deployment provisioning for the Sun Java Enterprise Server and other applications

• Configuration management for source code and server changes

• Integration with existing management products

• System management update, including server and network capacity management tools

• Automated utilization and availability reporting

• Identity management and other common services, based on company-wide foundation services to reduce the number of different systems and disparate data sources

Project Risks

Just like any new project, an N1 Grid solution has various project risks. The ZYX-WV company has gone through several organizational changes because of the growth and acquisitions that it has undergone. This has resulted in many management changes, and several IT organizations now report to new management. Also, implementing the N1 Grid solution and gathering the correct data requires cooperation across several cross-functional IT departments.

Sun Client Services has recommended that the CIO form a steering committee that enables some of these issues to be addressed and ensures that each department has buy-in of the final solution. The committee also can assist in data gathering and success metrics. ZYX-WV has formed a team made up of the lead architects and managers from each of the following departments:

• Finance

• Marketing

• IT security

• IT application development (including two targeted projects)

• IT architecture

• IT operations

• IT networks

To reduce risk, Sun Client Services has recommended to the steering committee that the implementation of the N1 Grid technology and architecture be phased into production after a pilot period.