Blades best practices

Bladed environments tend to be highly consolidated and extensively virtualized. Components of key applications may be running on multiple blades in several different enclosures. Or an HP BladeSystem may function as a multifaceted “data center in a box”— increasing the likelihood that a single outage could bring your business to a standstill.

These complexities and potential problems are magnified as you move more and more mission-critical business services into your bladed environment.

The upshot: Blade technology needs to be complemented by processes and procedures that help you minimize service interruptions and reduce unacceptable downtime risks. Use the following tips as guideposts for bringing blade-specific management and administration best practices to your mission-critical operations.

A logical first step is to make sure you understand where you are today and how to get where you want to go tomorrow. A thorough audit of your blade management and administration practices can give you an accurate “snapshot” of your current process maturity, uncover critical readiness gaps, and establish a starting point for benchmarking your progress over time.

HP offers service management assessments that start with an exploration of your business requirements and how they are reflected in your service-level objectives and day-to-day operations. We evaluate your processes against ITIL and other best practices. Identify potential availability and performance shortfalls in your mission-critical blades infrastructure. And spotlight high-priority areas for improving management effectiveness, delivering better business value and cutting costs.

When you’re aiming to operate at the speed of business, after-the-fact fixes don’t make the grade. These days, you need to anticipate trouble and head it off before it happens.

Custom consulting from HP can help. HP Proactive BladeSystem Service provides personalized, proactive support from an account support manager who keeps your people up-to-date with the latest best practices. Helps you implement measures to prevent future problems. And gives you specialized advice on topics — including power and cooling, virtualization and security — that are particularly relevant to blade implementations.

The need for change management best practices becomes a constant theme in any sizable bladed environment. As BIOS and firmware level enhancements are made to new blades, existing blades may need to be upgraded to maintain compatibility. The complexity is compounded by the potentially large number of hardware and software components involved in any upgrade or patch — and the often-complex interdependencies between them.

In addition, there’s the difficulty of keeping up with the flood of information about blade firmware revisions, new drivers, new technologies, new tools. Plus the need to create and maintain a federated configuration management database (CMDB) — an essential element of current blades management best practice.

HP’s experienced consultants can work with you to design, implement and continuously improve change and configuration management processes to gain deeper visibility into change, reduce change-management costs, heighten market sensitivity and decrease change-related downtime.

In today’s complex bladed environments, problems with the potential to impact critical business processes can rarely be isolated to a single component or even a single system. More often than not, they involve an intricate web of elements reaching into multiple corners of your infrastructure.

Services such as HP Mission Critical Partnership apply the comprehensive, whole-environment approach today’s bladed infrastructures demand. HP’s ability to address the entire IT “chain” is enhanced by our multivendor support leadership, as well as long-standing service alliances with major players across today’s technology landscape.

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