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Mission-Critical IT Still Drives Mission-Critical Business John Brand, VP and Principal Analyst, CIO Group
March, 2012
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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?”
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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
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More Than A Third Of Applications Are Deemed Mission-Critical
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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
organisations are here
Less than 5% of
organisations are here
(and most of these are service
providers)
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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”
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The Seven Qualities Of Extraordinary Software
Forrester Research, “The Seven Qualities Of Wildly Desirable Software” - January 2011, Mike Gualtieri
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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
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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)
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Evolving “backup and restore” towards “resilience and recovery”
October 2011 “2012 IT Budget Planning Guide For CIOs”
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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
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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
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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
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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
www.forrester.com
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