Autonomy as a Service

White Paper: tier44

INTRODUCTION This document shows organizations using ServiceNow a way to configure a complete DCIM solution using only their ServiceNow environment with native and “Built on NOW” applications. ServiceNow handles an organization’s workflows, user experiences and day to day tasks. Tier44 is a premier ServiceNow technology partner and has worked with PayPal and other organizations on using ServiceNow as a platform and main component of a DCIM solution that has been released on the ServiceNow store for everyone to use and setup. For organizations committed to ServiceNow, this is a significantly more cost-efficient and user-friendly solution than any standalone DCIM product (integrated with ServiceNow or not) can ever provide. This document provides a outline on how to do it yourself, what to ask your ServiceNow implementation partner, and the required and optional components used to build the solution. DCIM, SDDC – WHAT DO THEY MEAN? For everyone who has worked in and around data centers, Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is a well-known term. It represents an application category used to manage the data center in terms of capacity, space, power and network. Gartner defines DCIM as “tools to monitor, measure, manage and/or control data center utilization and energy consumption of all IT-related equipment (such as servers, storage and network switches) and facility infrastructure components (such as power distribution units [PDUs] and computer room air conditioners [CRACs])”. Another term you may hear is the software-defined data center (SDDC). The SDDC refers to how you manage your IT resources. Traditional servers, storage and networks run operating systems and are provisioned device by device. Software defined equipment is managed by using it as a hardware pool with virtual servers, virtual storage and virtual networks being configured on the fly. This allows IT organizations to reconfigure the use of hardware as needed using automated deployment and management, pool configurations with dynamic workload allocation and eliminates a lot of the individual limits of single hardware configurations. Typical examples are VMware hypervisor based physical servers providing numerous virtual servers as needed. Network and storage virtualization work similarly. Additional terms you might see are Data Center Service Optimization (DCSO), and Data Center Management (DCM), which combines everything. Tier44 calls it “Holistic Data Center Management®”. Regardless of terminology; there is a set of functionality, both on the facility/physical layer and logical layer that needs to be covered. Such functionality includes the management of physical and virtual assets in a single CMDB (configuration management data base), tracking and monitoring of physical and virtual assets including utilization, power, cooling, efficiency, environmental conditions, availability, and cost, along with all the management workflows required to keep the application services up and running reliably at all times. Taking everything together, DCIM for the data center → hardware and SDDC for the hardware → application gives your organization the most flexibility. That is where ServiceNow comes into play.