Physical Infrastructure Management Basics Transcript

Physical Infrastructure Management Basics
Transcript
Slide 1
Welcome to the Data Center University TM course on Physical Infrastructure Management Basics.
Slide 2: Welcome
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normal play of the course. Click the attachments link to download supplemental information for this course.
Click the Notes tab to read a transcript of the narration.
Slide 3: Objectives
At the completion of this course, you will be able to:
Identify physical infrastructure challenges for incident, availability, capacity, and change
management
Summarize physical infrastructure management strategies for Enterprise Management Systems
(EMS) and Building Management Systems (BMS), you will be able to
Recognize physical infrastructure management standards, and you will be able to
Provide examples of physical infrastructure management solutions
Slide 4: Introduction
The key to managing physical infrastructure is to employ the same strategies used in the management of
servers, storage, switches, and printers. The core issues of maintaining system availability as well as
managing problems and change are similar, although each device may have specific problems based on its
unique characteristics.
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2013 Schneider Electric. All rights reserved. All trademarks provided are the property of their respective owners.
Essential categories of management for physical infrastructure include Incident Management, Change
Management, Capacity Management, and Availability Management. Implementing the strategies,
suggested in this course, will contribute to a successful application of the ITIL (Information Technology
Infrastructure Library) framework to all aspects of data center operations.
The purpose of this course is to demonstrate a systematic approach to identifying, classifying, and solving
the management challenges of next-generation data centers.
Slide 5: Physical Infrastructure Overview
Physical infrastructure is the foundation upon which Information Technology (IT) and telecommunication
networks reside.
Physical infrastructure includes:
Power
Cooling
Racks and physical structure
Cabling
Physical security and fire protection
Management systems
Services
For more information about physical infrastructure, please participate in the DCU course: An Overview of
Physical Infrastructure
Slide 6: What is Management?
Any discussion of management issues must first define what is meant by management. The topic of
management is a broad one, which is easy to get lost in without a logical framework for discussing it. The
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is one such framework that many customers and
equipment suppliers have found helpful in understanding the various aspects of management.
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ITIL is a set of guidebooks defining models for planning, delivery, and management of IT services, created
by the British Standards Institute and owned by the UK Office of Government Commerce. ITIL is not a
standard but a framework whose purpose is to provide IT organizations with tools, techniques, and best
practices that help them align their IT services with their business objectives.
IT organizations typically select and implement the pieces that are most relevant to solving their business
problems. The categories and guidelines defined by ITIL can be extremely helpful in determining and
achieving IT service management objectives, and many IT vendors such as HP, IBM, and Microsoft have
used ITIL as a model for their operations framework.
ITILs Service Support and Service Delivery models each include several processes, and although they
are often depicted in introductory presentations as having a simple organization with just a few connections
(as seen here in this image), when one reads the ITIL documentation in detail, it becomes clear that all the
processes are interconnected via a myriad of process flows.
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Although the ITIL processes are all related in one way or another, it is not necessary to analyze the entire
spectrum of processes and flows. Identifying which ones are critical and relevant to managing physical
infrastructure is a helpful aid in achieving success in the Zero Layer of the data center hierarchy. ITIL is a
wide-encompassing framework, and a complete explanation of it is outside the scope of this course.
Throughout this course, we will identify the most critical management processes as defined by ITIL for
management of physical infrastructure, and outline key problems as well as requirements for effective
physical infrastructure management in each area.
(You are encouraged to visit www.itil.co.uk for further information on ITIL itself.)
Slide 10: Physical Infrastructure Management Challenges
Although most ITIL methodologies contain useful suggestions and describe various connected processes,
the most important ones to consider when managing physical infrastructure are outlined in here.
The remainder of this course addresses the key management challenges that each of these processes
presents.
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Slide 11: Physical Infrastructure Management Challenges

Using the ITIL process model, the challenges and underlying problems in the physical infrastructure layer
are presented in four charts corresponding to the four key ITIL management processes.
Lets spend some time discussing each of these challenges.

Slide 12: Incident Management
Our first challenge is incident management. This process is concerned with returning to the normal service
level (as defined in a negotiated Service Level Agreement or SLA between the IT group and internal
business process owner) as soon as possible, with the smallest possible impact on the business activity of
the organization and user.
Physical infrastructure, like any other IT equipment, should be monitored, with events fed into an incident
management process, either via a physical infrastructure incident management system or a generalpurpose incident management tool such as a network management or building management system.
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Specific Incident Management challenges include identifying the problem location, identifying the resolution
owner, prioritizing incident urgency, as well as executing proper corrective action. Lets begin with the
challenge of identify problem location.
Because physical infrastructure includes diverseyet interconnected components, troubleshooting is
complicated. A system-level view that indicates the relationships between interconnected components and
that identifies the impact of individual component problems can help identify the problem location.
Once the problem has been identified, the next challenge is to identify the resolution owner. Responsibility
for physical infrastructure availability is often shared, potentially leading to redundant and conflicting efforts
to resolve incidents.
Different people can be responsible for different locations at different times of the day or week. A solution is
to establish a management system that provides the ability to set and assign owner roles.
Managers must also prioritize incident urgency.
A solution is to have a management tool that alerts the user to the impact, urgency, and priority of individual
events that threaten system availability.
The final challenge of incident management is to execute proper corrective actions. Because it can be
difficult for one person to have all the expertise necessary to troubleshoot all issues, a system that provides
recommended actions and guidance can help ensure the proper corrective action is executed.
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Slide 16: Availability Management

The next challenge deals with availability management. Availability management is concerned with
systematically identifying availability and reliability requirements against actual performance, and when
necessary, introducing improvements to allow the organization to achieve and sustain optimum quality IT
services at a justifiable cost
Once physical infrastructure requirements have been established, service levels must be monitored, with
particular care given to understanding the potential downtime that can result from individual components
failing and their impact on the entire system
Specific Availability Management challenges include: availability metrics reporting; advance warning for
failure; planned downtime; and infrastructure improvement. Lets explore each one, beginning with
availability metrics reporting.
Availability metrics are necessary in order to track achievement against service levels agreed upon between
IT and the internal business customer. A solution is to provide a tool that reports uptime and downtime,
physical infrastructure versus non-physical infrastructure downtime summaries, causes of downtime,
incident timestamp and duration, as well as time to recovery.
The next availability management challenge is advance warning for failure.
Easily correctable problems with physical infrastructure often go unnoticed until a failure occurs. A solution
is to use a system that does not require training or expert knowledge, which provides alerting and global
thresholds for UPS runtime, power distribution unit load by phase, battery health, as well as rack
temperature and humidity.
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Moving on we find the third availability management challenge of planned downtime.
Planned downtime is necessary for many data centers, but tools that do not take into account for planned
downtime can have two negative effects. The first being; false alerts leading to incorrect actions by
personnel; followed by maintenance modes left uncorrected after maintenance is complete, such as a UPS
left in bypass, or a cooling unit offline. A solution is to provide a system that allows scheduled maintenance
windows, both suppressing alerts during the window and alerting the user to any maintenance conditions left
uncorrected after the window has closed.
Our final availability management challenge deals with infrastructure improvement. Expertise is often lacking
to improve infrastructure availability. A solution is to use management tools that provide a risk assessment
summary to identify potential areas for improvement, such as insufficient runtime, options for adding cooling
redundancy, moving loads to a different phase, and moving IT equipment to different racks.
Now lets move on and discuss capacity management.
Slide 21: Capacity Management
The third obstacle data center managers face is the challenge of capacity management. This process is
concerned with providing the required IT resources at the right time, at the right cost, aligned with the
current and future requirements of the internal customer.
Power, cooling, rack space, and cabling are all IT resources that require capacity management. Product
architectures that allow incremental purchases of these resources on short time frames are preferable to
legacy architectures that require specifying, engineering, purchasing, and installing over yearlong
timeframes, especially with regards to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) considerations.
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Specific Capacity Management challenges include: Monitoring and recording data center equipment and
infrastructure changes; providing physical infrastructure capacity; optimizing the physical layout of existing
and new equipment; as well as incrementally scaling the data center infrastructure. Lets discuss each one,
beginning with the challenge to monitor and record data center equipment and infrastructure changes.
As additional equipment is added to the data center over time, existing power and cooling capacity may be
inadvertently exceeded, resulting in downtime. UPS batteries age and may need servicing. A solution is to
have a system that monitors current draw for each branch circuit or rack and alerts the appropriate person
to potential overload situations. The system could also monitor UPS runtimes and load thresholds.
Another capacity management challenge data center managers encounter is the challenge to provide
physical infrastructure capacity.
Because IT refreshes tend to be dynamic and are difficult to predict, physical infrastructure capacity
requirements often go unnoticed until it is too late. Physical infrastructure capacity can be managed with a
system that provides trending analysis and threshold violation information on UPS load, runtime, power
distribution, cooling, rack space utilization, and patch panel port availability. Such a system can ensure
adequate advance notice and information necessary for procurement and deployment of additional capacity.
Optimizing the physical layout of existing and new equipment is another capacity challenge.
Sometimes, when a data center is updated, the new configuration is not efficient. A poorly configured data
center may use more space and cost more to operate than is necessary. A management tool can optimize
updates and reconfiguration by analyzing placement and layout of new IT equipment, to meet power, rack
space, cooling, and cabling needs.
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And finally, data center managers need to solve the challenge to scale data center infrastructure
incrementally.
As infrastructure is added to the data center, it can be difficult to reconfigure tools to monitor the new objects.
To avoid these problems, use tools that leverage existing IT infrastructure investment and monitor additional
new physical infrastructure devices in an economical, simple and quick way.
Now lets discuss change management challenges.
Change management is the process concerned with methods and procedures for making changes to
infrastructure with the lowest possible impact on service quality, and is increasingly critical for optimizing
business agility.
Maximizing the ratio of planned to unplanned work in a data center requires a formalized change
management processes for all aspects of operation. Changes such as relocating a server, rewiring a patch
panel, or moving equipment from a warmer area of the data center to a cooler area are examples of
changes requiring preparation, planning, simulation, and an audit trail.
Slide 26: Change Management
Specific Change Management challenges include: executing MACsalso known as moves, adds, and
changesof IT equipment without impacting availability; implementing firmware changes in individual
physical infrastructure components; maintaining all physical infrastructure components, and maintaining
spares at compatible firmware revision levels. Lets start with a discussion of MACs.
Moving servers can cause problems for power, cooling, rack space allocation, etc. These problems can be
avoided by using a physical infrastructure management tool that can recommend workflows for planning,
executing, and tracking changes.
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Implementing firmware changes in individual physical infrastructure components is our next challenge.
Choices need to be made regarding when to perform physical infrastructure firmware upgrades. Some
businesses opt for scheduling upgrades during off hours and weekends. This approach, however, can tax
the personnel who need to work overtime hours and opens the door for more possible human error.
Other businesses opt for scheduling upgrades during normal operating hours. If the data center is not
properly equipped to operate physical infrastructure equipment in bypass mode, the risk of downtime during
peak data center demand could be increased. If, however, the data center is equipped with modern physical
infrastructure equipment and management support systems, that risk is greatly diminished.
Slide 27: Change Management
Maintain all physical infrastructure components is the third change management challenge well explore.
Firmware upgrades are increasingly complex to manage. Using a system that notifies the administrator
whenever new bug fixes or feature enhancements to firmware are available can provide mass remote
upgrade capabilities.
Maintain spares at compatible firmware revision levels is the last change management challenge well
discuss.
When spares are swapped into a modular architecture they may not be at a supported firmware revision or
combination, causing downtime. Resolve this challenge by using a physical infrastructure management
solution that ensures that spares match production equipment.
Now lets put all the pieces together and develop a physical infrastructure management strategy.
Slide 28: Where to Start
Although many organizations implement aspects of all the processes outlined in this course, most will
develop their management strategy in the following order:
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Implement an incident management system

Set and measure availability targets
Monitor and plan for long term changes in capacity
Then, get change management processes in place
Organizations typically focus on fully implementing each management process for three to six months
before moving on to the next one.
Slide 29: Physical Infrastructure Management Strategy
Computing and networking systems that require high availability need a physical infrastructure that is
capable of supporting them. A physical infrastructure management strategy needs to consider:
Deployment cost
Maintenance cost
Adaptability
Functionality, and
Ease of integration
Slide 30: Physical Infrastructure Management Strategy
Physical infrastructure management benefits include:
Systematic identification of factors impacting availability
Easier management
Lower downtime risk, and
Increased IT personnel productivity
Slide 31: Management Focus
Physical infrastructure management ties traditional facility responsibilities and IT department responsibilities
together within an organization. Either the facility or IT may be responsible for physical infrastructure, or
both departments may share the responsibility together. This convergence of responsibilities creates new
questions and conflicts for managing physical infrastructure.
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As mentioned previously, physical infrastructure is the foundation upon which Information Technology and
Telecommunication Networks reside. This diagram shows how physical infrastructure supports Technology,
Process, and People to provide a Highly Available Network.
At first glance, IT management systems for power, cooling, racks, security, fire protection, etc. seem similar
to the operations of building management systems. Almost all buildings have infrastructure in place for
power, air conditioning, environmental monitoring, fire protection, and security. What makes physical
infrastructure different than traditional building management systems is that physical infrastructure focuses
on the availability of computing resources. The primary focus of building management systems is the
comfort and safety of the people in the building. The needs of physical infrastructure and building
management systems are therefore quite different.
Slide 34: Management Systems- Enterprise versus Building
Many IT departments have installed specific Enterprise Management Systems (EMS), such as HPs
OpenView or IBMs Tivoli . They may also have specific device element managers for their servers,
storage, and networking equipment. Facilities departments frequently use a Building Management Systems
(BMS), such as Schneider Electric TAC .
An EMS handles device centric information, based on individual network IP addresses. EMS information
may be the status of a single server, a networking device, or a storage device and is communicated over an
existing IT network.
Slide 35: Building Management Systems (BMS)
A BMS handles data point centric information. BMS information does not monitor the condition of a device,
itself, but rather monitors the information that a device reports. For example, if the BMS device is a
temperature sensor, the BMS does not monitor the how well the sensor, itself, is doing, but rather monitors
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the temperature that the sensor reports. A BMS typically uses its own serial-based network, using either
proprietary communication protocols, or some level of standard protocols, such as MODBUS.
Slide 36: Building Management Systems (BMS)
It is likely that both IT and facility departments will want to continue to use the management systems that
they each already understand and operate. Because Physical Infrastructure management ties traditional
facility responsibilities and IT department responsibilities together within an organization, any Physical
Infrastructure management solution must be able to support both EMS and BMS architectures. It is difficult
to integrate these two management architectures; however, any management strategy must be able to
provide device-level summary information for the IT package while at the same time provide a level of data
point granularity to enable integration with the facility package.
Slide 37: Physical Infrastructure Management Standards
Physical infrastructure management requires more data than what has been traditionally monitored. A
comprehensive strategy should incorporate information at the rack level in order to ensure reliable operation
of the IT equipment. Until recently, this was not feasible. All key devices and data points need to be
monitored. These include all the devices in the physical infrastructure layer and the surrounding
environment.
Best practices dictate that the following list of devices be monitored at the rack level:
A minimum of two temperature data points
Individual branch circuits
Transfer switches
Cooling devices, and
UPS systems
Monitoring devices, such as rack based transfer switches, UPSs, and cooling devices is a well-understood
practice. However, monitoring branch circuits and temperatures at the rack level is a relatively new concept
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in physical infrastructure management. Since branch circuit faults can occur from time to time, active branch
management contributes to increased availability. Investing in a quality brand of circuit breaker also helps to
minimize the instances of downtime. As IT equipment density increases, monitoring cooling devices is also
increasingly critical to availability.
In general, physical infrastructure management should meet the following criteria:
Easy to deploy and maintain:
The system should support centralized management and require minimal training to operate.
Provide advance warning of critical events:
Timely information allows corrective action before equipment is damaged or fails.
Able to analyze performance and predict failure:
At a minimum, event and data logs should be stored, so that manual performance analysis can be
done.
Adaptable to business change:
o
Flexible systems support changes in configuration while minimizing downtime. Examples

of changes that can be anticipated include changing runtime, changing power load and
redundancy requirements, as well as adding support for branch offices or other network
nodes.
Slide 40: Management Approaches

Lets briefly discuss a summary of management approaches, and provide an example of a physical
infrastructure management solution.
Starting in the late 1990s, several organizations quickly installed IT systems to solve urgent business needs.
This quick effort created multiple point solutions. As a result, in many installations, IT departments tend to
manage equipment using element managers for different categories of equipment.
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Slide 41: Element Managers

As shown in this illustration, it is common to utilize a storage manager such as EMC ControlCenter, for
storage, a network manager such as CiscoWorks, for the networking equipment, and a server manager,
such as HP Insight Manager, for servers.
The advantage of these element managers is that they are generally easy to deploy and use since they are
focused on managing one category of devices in many cases devices specific to an individual vendor. The
limitation of this strategy is that there is no coordination of the different element managers.
Slide 42: Enterprise Management System
An Enterprise Management System such as Tivoli or HP OpenView has better visibility across an entire
network. These tools help to coordinate the different types of devices and provide a broad view of
everything occurring on the network. However, neither element managers nor an Enterprise Management
System can handle the management of the physical infrastructure layer.
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Slide 43: Building Management Systems- Data Points

Similar to EMSs, BMSs frequently manage some of the data points of physical infrastructure, such as
building power, comfort air, building environment, or building security. However, in small and medium data
centers, BMS systems are not as sophisticated as physical infrastructure management systems when it
comes to monitoring and controlling devices such as in-rowTM CRACS, PDUs, and UPSs.
Slide 44: Integrating Physical Infrastructure Management

This diagram shows a typical approach to integrating existing Enterprise Management and Building
Management systems into a physical infrastructure management system. Each individual EMS device or
BMS data point is integrated into the high-level management system. The problem with this approach is that
the integration is both complex and very expensive. This approach forces an organization either to buy or to
develop unique systems for handling BMS and EMS information.
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Slide 45: Physical Infrastructure Element Manager

This diagram shows how a physical infrastructure element manager fits into the high-level management
system.
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The physical infrastructure element manager provides detailed information through direct connection the
same way that server, storage, and network element managers provide detailed information through direct
connection.
However, physical infrastructure element managers have the advantages of being easier and less
expensive to install. Physical infrastructure element managers automatically collect all individual device
information and are pre-programmed with select rules and policies to manage physical infrastructure.
Slide 46: Physical Infrastructure Element Manager
A physical infrastructure element manager offers the following benefits:
Cost effective installation and maintenance
Easy integration with existing enterprise and building management systems
Optimized functionality for physical infrastructure management, and
Cost effective management of the large amounts of physical infrastructure data
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Slide 47: Summary

Lets conclude with a brief summary.
Physical infrastructure is the foundation upon which Information Technology and
Telecommunication Networks reside. Physical infrastructure includes power, cooling, racks and
physical structure, cabling, physical security and fire protection, management systems and
services.
The challenge for physical infrastructure incident management is to return systems to their normal
service level, with the smallest possible impact on the business activity of the organization and the
user.
The challenge for physical infrastructure capacity management is to provide the required IT
resources at the right time, at the right cost, and to align those resources with the current and
future requirements of the internal business customer.
The key standards for a physical infrastructure management system are:
It should be easy to deploy and maintain
It should provide advance warning of critical events
It should be able to analyze performance and predict failure, and
It should be adaptable to business change
Two forms of physical infrastructure management include:
1. Integrating each individual EMS device or BMS data point directly into the high-level management
system, as well as
2. Enterprise management and building management systems together through a physical
infrastructure element manager
Slide 48: Thank You!
Thank you for participating in this course.
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