@dez_blanchfield
I.T. Asset Management – Nothing Beats A Real World Example
• Requirement
“..reduce our Data Center footprint by 70% within three years..”
• Solution
“..whole of business Cloud Transition..”
@dez_blanchfield
Project Business Goals – Frankly Nothing Short Of A Miracle
• Consolidate own data centers
• Leverage 3rd party data centers
• 3rd party clouds (AWS, Azure)
• X86, iSeries, pSeries, Mainframe
• Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, PSQL
• Windows / Linux / AIX / Solaris
• NetApp / Hitachi / IBM / EMC
@dez_blanchfield
We Had Lots Of Inputs – None Of Them Good Unfortunately
• Incomplete asset registers (5)
• Disparate data sources (90+)
• Multiple core service models (8)
• Conflicting service groups (114)
• Myriad of stakeholders (400+)
• Misaligned business entities (74)
@dez_blanchfield
The Initial Approach – We Simply Threw Bodies At It
• Workshops with domain experts
• Map Business requirements
• Application discovery
• Performance data
• Data validation
• Reporting
@dez_blanchfield
Throwing Bodies At It Didn’t Work – So We Build A System
• Use tools to map the ecosystems
• Automated audits of datacenters
• Automated discover of services
• Capture full scan of applications
• Build a new single source of truth
• Throw automated tools at it
@dez_blanchfield
Our System Was Very Sophisticated – But Who Would Maintain It
• Automated Score Card
• Suitability %’age ranking
• Mapped against AWS baseline
• Mapped against Azure baseline
• Mapped against VMware fitment
• Reporting of exception mapping
• Almost never do manual override
@dez_blanchfield
Great Project Outcome – But Home Baked System Was Left To Die
• We didn’t have a mature managed ITAM solution
• We home baked one but the business wasn’t prepared to maintain it along with existing CMDB and ITSM tools
• The project outcome was a resounding success but we built a Frankenstein, eventually it died, along with all that data !!