Auditing a data center

A data center baseline is an audit performed before any large IT project. The extent of the baseline, the inventory (hardware, software, physical, virtual), and the interdependencies must be considered. They are typically difficult and time-consuming, and they rapidly become outdated if not automated. BMC Discovery makes them a lot simpler.

• Automatic grouping
• Manual grouping
• Creating a host profile

What is baselining

No large IT project, especially one that will affect hundreds or even thousands of servers, can be started without a baseline. Such baselines are also referred to as IT audits. Virtualization and consolidation projects also require an understanding of the performance of the infrastructure—how busy the hosts are, how much power and cooling they require, and whether there are any reasons they should not be virtualized or consolidated.

Items that are typically audited

Auditing generally involves an in-depth investigation into the IT infrastructure to discover the following:

• Its extent—Are there hosts that you're not aware of? The answer is invariably "yes." What are they doing?
• Inventory—What hardware and software are the hosts running? Are they physical or virtual? Where are they located?
• Dependencies—This is the longest, most complicated, and most expensive part of the baseline.
  • Which hosts and software provide which services?
  • Which IT staff own and operate the hosts?
  • Which business services (business applications) are provided by which infrastructure?
  • Which business units rely on which business applications?
  • What are the interdependencies between hosts, and therefore between business applications?

Where BMC Discovery can help

BMC Discovery gathers essential hardware and software information quickly and accurately.

BMC Discovery's Baseline Dashboard tells you the progress of your baseline at a glance: how much of the estate you have gathered information about, what the spread of operating systems is on the hosts discovered so far, how many are virtual, graphs of the progress you are making, and more. You can display information on a Baseline Dashboard to help you baseline your project, such as a data center consolidation. Additionally, BMC Discovery helps you determine the relationships and dependencies in your estate only hours after deployment.

Client workshops, interviews, and informal conversations with technical staff are the most common techniques for finding the business dependencies in and on your data center. Before taking up these people's valuable time, you must know which questions to ask to whom. You have to have a lot of detailed starter information about how the estate is structured: which hosts are communicating with which others (with a rough idea of why), which hosts seem to be working closely together, which hosts seem to be relied on by a large proportion of the estate, and so on.

Normally, this initial analysis is done manually by examining lists of processes, the network communications on which the processes are involved in, and the host communications for hundreds or thousands of hosts, which can be a tedious, error-prone exercise that can take considerable time.

After the initial analysis is complete, the workshops are conducted. These involve talking to on-site experts about your conclusions from the analysis. Your conclusions will often be challenged; either your expert is aware of a subtlety that you had not picked up on, or the environment has moved on a bit and they are not aware of some new condition. Either way, you need a way to present your conclusions with clear supporting evidence that can be discussed and further analyzed. Frantically cross-referencing reams of reports under the gaze of an impatient technical architect wastes time and precious goodwill.