The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform™

Challenges in IT Service Delivery

IT operations organizations face a myriad of challenges in their mission to provide timely, high-performance, easy-to-access computing services to the enterprise. Of these, four challenges have surfaced in recent years as critical barriers to service delivery:

• The tenuous economy is forcing significant and immediate cost-cutting measures, staff reductions, and budget restrictions.
• The existing islands of infrastructure across the enterprise are under-utilized, over-provisioned, and out of control, driving the exponential problem of resource sprawl.
• Efficient IT Service Delivery is hampered by manual, semi-automated, and infrastructure-centric resource management processes and tools.
• With hundreds of globally distributed users using a wide range of complex services and applications, IT is hard pressed to effectively meet the demands of the business.

In many cases today, IT Operations supports user resource and service requests through a manual or semi-automated process. Users submit requests via phone, email, or possibly a trouble ticketing system. Often there is not sufficient understanding by the user of what is required of IT to support the request – resulting in a time-consuming iterative dialogue. Once the requirements are understood, IT must find, recover, or purchase the needed systems and configure the infrastructure for delivery to the user, which takes even more time. Next, the resource is delivered to the user, and there are typically problems that require some degree of rework before the request can be considered complete. Afterwards, when the desired initiative has been finished, the hardware is not always recovered due to a lack of IT resources, priority, process discipline, or user unwillingness to release these resources, contributing to server and VM sprawl. This manual approach does not scale, takes too much IT Operations effort, and does not meet the needs of users.

How does IT simultaneously cut its fundamental operating cost structure and increase its overall value to the business? While there’s no silver bullet that can transform an enterprise overnight, many companies today are realizing rapid and significant ROI by focusing on a powerful and rapidly growing area of innovation: IT Service Delivery Automation.

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform™ optimizes IT resource utilization, maintains IT policies and control, and minimizes IT labor and infrastructure costs with comprehensive self-service capabilities that reduce overhead and accelerate time-to-market for business users.

Automating IT Service Delivery with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform

Existing solutions designed to address the challenges above still reveal significant drawbacks in practice, particularly around VM sprawl, inefficient utilization of resource pools, and unnecessary labor overhead. Companies have been looking for a platform that combines robust infrastructure automation capabilities, policy-driven self-service resource access for users, and automated enforcement of IT policies. A proven platform with all of those capabilities is available today:

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform™ is the leading IT Service-based solution for optimizing the IT Service Delivery process through dynamic resource provisioning and heterogeneous infrastructure management. With its patented virtualization automation and enterprise cloud technology, Surgient helps enterprise IT organizations save millions of dollars in capital and operating expenses, while driving unmatched efficiency across a wide range of IT Service Delivery functions:

• IT Service Lifecycle Management
• Self-Service Data Center Automation
• Private/Enterprise Cloud Enablement
• QA/Test Lab Automation
• IT Service/Application Rapid Provisioning
• Dynamic Resource Management & Automated Recovery

With Surgient, enterprise IT infrastructure and operations organizations drive efficiency and innovation on three levels:

• Infrastructure Optimization & Management
• Administrative Process Automation
• Self-Service Resource Administration

Infrastructure Optimization & Management

TECHNOLOGY	DESCRIPTION	ENTERPRISE BENEFITS
Dynamic Resource & Capacity Management	Manage pools of computing resources – RAM, CPU, storage, network, and software licenses	Maximizes utilization and efficiency of computing resources Eliminates resource sprawl Ensures sufficient resources to meet IT Service performance requirements
IT Service Configuration and Library	Define and manage complete IT service topologies – including servers, network, configuration, and associated computing capacity footprint	Centralized management simplifies administration, ensures IT service component reuse, and optimizes storage usage
Virtual & Physical Server Lifecycle Management	Manage the complete server lifecycle – definition, creation, deployment, and de-provisioning for both virtual and physical servers. Provides snapshots and cloning of virtual environments.	Enables business agility through dynamic infrastructure management
Heterogeneous Infrastructure Support	Orchestrate the deployment of complex multi-tiered IT services across both virtual and physical resources, simultaneously leveraging virtualization platforms from Microsoft and VMware and data center automation tools from BMC, HP, and Symantec	Provides infrastructure optimization and management across a significant portion of enterprise IT infrastructure Enables flexible IT service definitions combining physical and virtual resources within a single IT service

Administrative Process Automation

TECHNOLOGY	DESCRIPTION	ENTERPRISE BENEFITS
Reservation & Scheduling Management	Guarantee resource reservations and tightly manage resource usage with unique policy-based scheduling system	Eliminates administrative overhead for resource requests Prevents resource request conflicts Maximizes resource utilization with 24x7 scheduling
IT Service Provisioning	Rapidly provision defined and certified complex multi-tiered IT Service configurations from a central library	Significantly simplifies and speeds up the deployment process Improves quality and reduces errors
Role-Based Access & Policy Management	Define access permissions and allocations to resources, set quota policies for usage, and enable administrative delegation using a hierarchical model	Controls user access and consumption of computing resources Enables administrative delegation Serves multiple groups and organizations simultaneously
Usage Reporting	Track resource usage, client adoption, and quality of service delivery trends with built-in and custom reporting tools	Leverage usage information for billing and chargeback Improve planning for future hardware and software purchases

Self-Service Resource Administration

TECHNOLOGY	DESCRIPTION	ENTERPRISE BENEFITS
Self-Service Portal	Easily reserve and access resources from the library via a standard web browser	Empower users and increase business agility through self-service Minimize IT involvement for resource requests
Persona Based User Interfaces	See only the functionality, options, resources, and data relevant to a particular user type	Reduces training and time to value Improves adoption through familiar user experience
Secure Remote Access	Reliably request and securely access resources 24x7 via a standard web browser; firewall-friendly remote access technology seamlessly supports Microsoft Remote Desktop, Citrix ICA®, VNC, and native virtualization console connections	Worldwide users can access resources without requiring VPN access to the physical or virtual servers
Comprehensive Platform Integration	Open access via web services and command line interfaces. Packaged integrations with leading industry solutions	Worldwide users can access resources without requiring VPN access to the physical or virtual servers

Additional Resources

• Download the Surgient Platform Datasheet