Platform

Business stakeholders today require that IT organizations deliver on cost reduction strategies while creating flexible and adaptable software architecture that supports next-generation application strategies, such as SOA, enterprise Web 2.0, and software as a service (SaaS).

Every IT organization has a specific set of steps they take for moving applications from development and testing teams into the data center. A rationalized view of these steps would clearly include packaging the applications for deployment, and then provisioning and activating applications into the data center. Some organizations also attempt to scale and monitor application service levels. As illustrated in the diagram below, these steps form a static, siloed, fragmented process—involving multiple organizations and tools. This ad-hoc and disconnected process drives up complexity and costs, drives down performance, and impedes agility.

Additionally this static, siloed process provides no standard approach to defining and managing application service level policy, no way to bill or chargeback for shared services, and limits capacity planning to a worst-case only scenario.

Clearly a new approach is required to improve application service levels, address business user demand, and automate the application service management process.

Today in the data center, most companies have a common set of infrastructure investments: they include network and storage infrastructure, compute resources and management tools. This list is not universal, but it does create a framework for datacenter planners, architects, and managers charged with buying decisions and architecture. With the advent of virtualization, the compute layer of the standard data center architecture stack has evolved into a virtual layer. And while the evolution of compute resources moves from physical to virtual - application service levels are not addressed by virtualization. In fact most CIO’s view application service levels to be the number one concern when adopting virtualization in the data center. To address the definition and enforcement of application service levels, enable business / IT alignment and cost-cutting priorities, what is needed is a dynamic application service management (or DASM) solution for "always on, always responsive" application services. A DASM platform provides business policy driven application service level management and execution, plus an integrated view of application service levels and reporting for utility billing models of shared services.

Unified Process for Automating Application Service Management and Performance Optimization