Virtualization saves BMC's own IT organization $5M

By Mark Settle, CIO, BMC Software

BMC Software's internal IT organization began exploring virtualization and automation to become more response to business needs and better understand its IT assets. The group was pleasantly surprised to discover that several side benefits – including dramatic labor savings and productivity improvements through automation – far exceeded the original plan.

The BMC IT organization achieved the typical "virtues of virtualization," such as reducing costs by improving asset utilization. In 2008, reusing servers saved more than $5 million. These efforts also reduced power consumption and requirements for floor space by 20 percent. The financial payback of this investment in virtualization, which was approximately $2 million, was achieved in fewer than six months.

In addition, BMC's ability to meet the service level agree­ments (SLAs) for making assets available for routine development requests improved significantly, and response times for R&D development environments became much faster and very predictable. Software development teams became less possessive of "their" assets, and they accepted the benefits of using pooled resources. We now use standard inventory management metrics, such as fill rates, inventory turns, and inventory working capital, to manage R&D assets in a pooled fashion with temporary rights of ownership for individual project teams.

Developers now enjoy a shorter wait from the time they identify a need for equipment to the time they have the equipment, so they can proceed with their work. They also have realized the advantage of standardized requirements. When people can access resources in a timely manner, they don't feel the need to hoard them. Although it's difficult to precisely estimate the time savings associated with the new process, lead times for individual requests have been reduced by at least 10-15 workdays. This is equivalent to a collective reduction in lead times of 360 work months per quarter.

The Original Objectives
Our IT organization's original objectives were to reduce server sprawl in an environment where IT resources span multiple geographies, and to improve productivity by reducing response time to developer requests. The initiative focused on employing state-of-the art service request management, hardware virtualization, and system monitoring technologies to manage server and storage assets on a pooled basis. This approach created an in-house, on-demand, cloud computing environment for our R&D team and provided them with just-in-time access to data center resources – which include an asset pool of approximately 7,000 physical servers and 30TB of storage – required to conduct product develop­ment projects.

The group implemented IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) V3 processes for capacity management, availability management, service level management, and service reporting to obtain the maximum business benefits from the technologies deployed. These integrated management processes were linked to hardware procurement procedures to ensure that excess server and storage capacity is available to satisfy developer requests. For each project, the developers typically require eight to 10 discrete environments that consist of multiple servers and storage volumes. Without this provisioning capability, more than 100 development projects encompassing a community of more than 1,500 developers worldwide could be impacted by delays in server availability.

The Benefits of Implementing BSM
Business Service Management (BSM) is an approach and unified platform for managing IT according to busi­ness priorities. Our IT organization followed this approach – which was developed by BMC – with BMC technology and processes, and subsequently reduced the number of physical servers by almost 50 percent over two years. In addition, the group exceeded its productivity goal by managing everything in the infrastructure – spread throughout multiple geographies – as a single data center. When IT organizations make decisions to leverage virtualization, it's impor­tant to consider the capacity they provide to various regions. For example, if a company has 1,000 employees in Asia Pacific and 10,000 employees in North America, those regions will need different levels of capacity.

Our IT group can now provision assets for the developer team much more quickly (95 percent of requests that previously took four weeks now are fulfilled in two days). An additional benefit is that data center operators now have a better understanding of how the assets they man­age are being used by individual development teams.

Virtualization also increases efficiencies by enabling automation and self service. With standard configura­tions, developers can automate the provisioning of virtual machines (VMs) with run-book scripts. BMC is striving to have 30 percent of the requests handled through developer self-service by the end of this year.

In addition, the reuse of more modern equipment in the R&D asset pool resulted in the retirement of older and obsolete equipment that was difficult and expensive to support, further improving the productivity of R&D staff members and decreasing support costs.

Key Success Factors
It's important that management commit to making some surplus capacity or headroom available to avoid slowdowns when known spikes could impact access to needed resources. Having this headroom available provides flexibility and ensures IT's ability to fulfill re­quests quickly. In turn, this flexibility enables the business to be more competitive and proactive.

To make this approach to managing access to resources work, internal processes should be automated wherever possible. At BMC, pro­visioning requests are created, monitored, and fulfilled through the BMC IT Service Management Request System. In the past, these requests were routed to the IT Infrastructure Engineering team and were handled on a case-by-case basis. Now, IT offers a standardized catalog of resources to the R&D staff, and members of IT's operations team perform the provisioning process using standard configuration templates whenever possible. In the future, thresholds will be used to automatically trigger the asset recovery process if assets are not used within a specified period of time.

Final Thoughts
If you plan to move to a virtualized environment, it's important to look on your own shop floor for underutilized equipment. Create your own internal "private cloud" to help you respond to business needs. Any IT organiza­tion can benefit from a virtualized environment. If your company operates in multiple geographies, you can run multiple instances of the same package by virtualizing your infrastructure.

Look for unexplored opportunities: If you have spikes in demand – such as at the end of a quarter – but you need permanently assigned hardware to meet those spikes, you could employ virtual servers to limit electri­cal consumption during low-demand periods.

Obviously, virtualization provides an excellent oppor­tunity to reduce server sprawl and improve capacity management. But don't overlook the side benefits: improved productivity and, ultimately, increased respon­siveness to support business requirements.

For more information about BMC solutions, visit www.bmc.com.