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Lokomo Servicenter is a
productivity tool designed to operate in any
server-based environment, independent of architecture, brand and
OS-types. It is capable of making use of existing systems
(Configuration Management Databases, Inventory Systems, etc.) and
it is adaptable to the work processes of each organization.
By using Lokomo Servicenter, a data center is able to
reach unprecedented cost and time saving in the operation and
management of services. This is equally valid for internal
IT-departments as for organizations offering services to external
customers.
Lokomo Servicenter is the focal point for
all service managment aspects. So, in general, the categories of personnel
that interact with Lokomo Servicenter are installation personnel,
operation personnel, service managers, and application developers.
Lokomo
Servicenter organizes
and facilitates work for many categories of staff
Lokomo Servicenter is built on three
cornerstones: Service-centricity, process support and automation.
Service-centricity
gives operational staff the possibility to interact with the
production environment with a service perspective in two ways:
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Aggregation
Status reports and information about the effect of changes
in the production environment are aggregated and presented with a
service perspective. For instance, it is possible to preview the
impact of a service capacity update and estimate the actual cost
of the action before it is performed. This is very useful as it is
often difficult to conclude how errors or changes in the
production environment will impact a specific service.
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Propagation
Each action initiated for a given service is decomposed
into multiple sub-actions targeted at the software components that
build up the service. Each such sub-action is executed in a
pre-defined order and takes relations and dependencies to the
production environment into account. Even the smallest change
often has a cascading effect on numerous of components in the data
center. Realizing the service capacity update described above, by
introducing an extra server means that numerous of applications on
other servers must be reconfigured along with load balancers and
storage components.
A graphical user interface in Lokomo Servicenter shows
all reports in a user-friendly way and information is available at
an eye glimpse. Service visibility has never been so clear. The
same user interface allows operational personnel to initiate
actions on the services. With a simple mouse click it is now
possible to increase capacity on the fly or apply the latest
software patch.
An example of Servicentric
view
Many efforts to rationalize data center work have
been initiated within the IT industry. The Information Technology
Infrastructure Library, ITIL, is one of them. ITIL is gaining
momentum as a standard model for IT service management processes.
Lokomo Servicenter offers support for processes defined by ITIL,
such as for Release Management and Service Delivery.
Positioning Lokomo Servicenter with ITIL processes
Lokomo
Servicenter takes care of release planning, validation, execution
and rollback for test and production environments.
Roles are
assigned to different persons or groups of persons and are mapped
to functions and privileges. All personnel involved get assistance
on what to do, how to do it (via tailor-made manuals) and when to
do it (via a notification service). This ensures that information
flow is streamlined and that mistakes are avoided, increasing
efficiency and service quality.
Once an action is
completed, Lokomo Servicenter compiles an action report and
notifies the person responsible. If the action was successful and
validated, the next action can then begin. Of course, the
Configuration Management database, CMDB, is instantly updated as
soon as changes occur.
Similarly, during service operation and optimization,
Lokomo Servicenter organizes a team’s work to perform patch
rollouts or capacity and availability updates.
Lokomo
Servicenter supports the Service Delivery processes by providing
meaningful and up-to-date information about the services.
Lokomo
Servicenter aggregates information from various sources (CMDB,
inventory systems, Network & System management systems, etc.)
and compiles a number of task specific reports. Using Lokomo
Servicenter, Service Managers are in control and can check status,
production cost, fetch data to calculate business offers, give
permissions for operational changes, release of new versions, etc.
Examples of
reports are:
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Calculation of cost-by-service
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Estimation of cost of change (e.g. how much will a
capacity update cost, including the cost of new hardware and
software but also the costs related to installation and
integration)
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Service availability report based on Component
Failure Impact Analysis (CFIA)
-
Capacity report with history and
trend
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SLA/OLA monitoring, including breaches report
The reports can
be exported to various formats for further processing in a legacy
planning system or a spreadsheet, like Excel.
Lokomo
Servicenter can be configured to send alarms (email, SMS, etc.)
when certain combinations of conditions are met. Hence, it is
possible to track critical and crucial situations from a service
perspective, as opposed to the traditional way of monitoring unit
by unit in the production environment.
Service Managers
can also specify policies on how to resolve issues in critical
situations. For example, the loss of an essential service
component could trigger the automated deployment of a replacement
until the root cause of the problem has been identified and dealt
with.
Lokomo
Servicenter controls and monitors the execution of automated tasks
during deployment, operation, optimization and withdrawal, all
from a central location.
With Lokomo
Servicenter it is easy to deploy a complex, multi-tiered and
multi-server-based service in minutes. Through simple
drag-and-drop, the capacity of any service can be increased or
decreased. It is so easy that it can be used for resource
allocation on a daily basis as a way to increase utilization of
the data center resources.
Lokomo Servicenter provides a library of standard
automated tasks that covers the most common tasks required during
service operation. The library contains for instance ready-made
scripts to configure global and local load balancers (Cisco, F5),
firewalls (ipchains, ICF, IPSec), clusters, SAN, etc. Customers
can extend the library with their proprietary tasks.
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