A Simple Guide To Building A Dynamic Infrastructure

When it comes to building a dynamic infrastructure, firstly you need to understand what's right for your business and there are a few ways you can go about this, in the first instance there are executive briefing documents, white papers, and client case studies etc which all document what others have done before you. Next need to work out what your business priorities are and understand where you're trying to get to, look at where you are today and map out a series of steps that improves your IT services in line with your business goals.

When it comes to building a dynamic infrastructure there are four main steps,

Step 1: Consolidate you services

Step 2: virtualise those services - firstly within the bounds of a server, and then across multiple servers so you start to then have the concepts of shared services

Step 3: Automate across those services

Step 4: Optimise so you build in a dynamic closed loop capability that allows the resources to responds according to business demand and do so in align with predefined business rules.

Dynamic infrastructure is not just for large enterprises either, there are organisations of all sizes implementing dynamic infrastructure capabilities today, midsized companies in retail, manufacturing, universities for example. However, it is worth bearing in mind that not all aspects of dynamic infrastructure are suitable for all organisations in every case, but all organisations are going to be looking to streamline their operations, they're looking to reduce costs and they're looking to improve services so the benefits run across enterprises of all sizes.

If you are a smaller business with a simple IT infrastructure, there are more simple tools for more efficient control built with you in mind. There are two foundation appliances that are aimed at helping organizations have better visibility and better control across their infrastructure. Firstly the Tivoli Foundation Application Manager helps provide monitoring across your resources (your servers, your storage, your network, your applications, and your data bases), it has automated discovery, real time reporting and historical trends to give you better visibility of how your assets are supporting your business, secondly, Tivoli Foundation Service Manager is a service desk function so it gives you typical services, problem change and incident management to able you to have better governance across your infrastructure.

Dynamic infrastructure's energy efficiency component helps address the new UK carbon reduction commitment too. The carbon reduction legislation is primarily around reporting your carbon emissions, but that's just the first step, the scheme is designed to give financial and reputational benefits to those who do well in terms reducing their emissions in comparison to others in the scheme. While the first step is to report, the second step is to understand how you're using your energy and where can you can make savings. Dynamic infrastructure is specifically designed to be energy efficient so that you're monitoring and measuring in real time which business services are using how much business energy (i.e. which servers are the most efficient etc). You're able to use that information alongside the rest of the IT environment, to be able to optimize that IT environment minute by minute according to energy efficiency so that you're always meeting your business service but you can be sure it's been done automatically in the most energy efficient manner.