ITIL-CMDB
As IT organizations move to orient around business services, many have tried to implement ITIL but only a few have been successful. Why? They haven’t had the technology foundation to automate their processes and their tasks. Leading IT organizations are now turning to Opsware as the foundation of their ITIL initiative.
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of process standards that enable IT to align itself with the business and operate more efficiently. While ticketing and workflow systems can model these processes, they have no visibility or control over what is actually happening in the IT environment. And with no accountability or enforcement to ensure that processes are followed, they almost certainly aren’t.
Enter Opsware automation. Opsware discovers the IT environment, tracks changes, captures and enforces standards, and makes changes consistently and correctly. With Opsware as the foundation, you realize the benefits of ITIL and business service management without onerous process or technology overhead.
Opsware makes your ITIL initiative successful in 4 steps:
STEP 1: Discovers Your Entire Environment and Establishes a CMDB.
Opsware rapidly discovers your distributed, heterogeneous environment including servers, software, network devices, and storage. In addition to the basic asset information, Opsware discovers the interdependencies and relationships establishing visibility across your business services. All of this information is stored in an Operational CMDB that then makes it available through the Opsware UI and with other CMDBs or systems.
STEP 2: Tracks Changes.
The information in a CMDB is only useful if it is up to date and accurate. Because Opsware tracks the Configuration Items (CIs) on an ongoing basis and keeps a historical record of change, you can be assured that you have an up to date and accurate view of the environment.
STEP 3: Captures and Enforces Standards.
Once you have a good understanding of your IT environment and how it is changing, you can standardize. Standardization will lower maintenance costs, decrease deployment times, improve uptime and improve security. Most organizations define standards today, but they have no way to enforce them because they are trapped in Word documents and Visios instead of enforceable policies. With Opsware, your experts can define standards so they can be automatically imposed on the environment. And, Opsware goes further by providing out-of-the-box standards from industry sources like Microsoft, the National Security Agency, and the Centre for Internet Security.
STEP 4: Automates Change.
With an accurate, complete understanding of the environment and standards established, you are ready to execute changes more efficiently. Opsware automates the actual task execution, ensuring that what is expected to happen is actually what happens, and that large scale changes are made quickly and efficiently. Bringing hundreds of servers up to the correct patch level or changing the ACLs on thousands of network devices has never been easier.
