Carphone Warehouse automates IT services policy

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The Carphone Warehouse is deploying new policy-based IT process automation and management technology to improve systems availability and IT service levels.

Known as run book automation (RBA), the new software will be used to speed the response, reduce administrative burden and increase management control of the company's IT services delievered out of its on its complex data centre environment.

The RBA software platform supplied by Enigmatec has been used in a successful pilot in its test and development environments and will now be deployed on the Carphone Warehouse production systems and, in particular, targeting the procedures and service levels involved in the time taken to provision servers.

Since 2006 the company has invested heavily in new data centres for production and non-production systems, adopting virtualisation by standardising on VMware for its Windows and Linux operating systems (OSs) and IBM System P advanced power virtualisation systems for its IBM AIX environment.

The company's high-availability IT service configurations will use Enigmatecs' Execution Management tool for modelling and fine-tuning processes, as well as managing fail over to the disaster recovery site. And Enigmatecs Virtual Orchestrator will be deployed for responding to requests received through a self-service portal for provisioning virtual machines.

This will mean servers can be provisioned in minutes instead of weeks, IT resources can flex in real time to meet application and user demands and business continuity levels can be raised. Return on investment (ROI) is expected within 12 months.

Simon Post, The Carphone Warehouse chief technology officer, described the investment as "ERP [enterprise resource planning] for IT". He said: "It will improve the utilisation and efficiency of IT equipment and operations staff throughout the IT lifecycle and make sure that IT is better aligned to the business."

The RBA system is also designed to provide an ITIL compliant, process automation layer to manage the Carphone Warehouse's complex IT topology and meets ITIL standards for asset and service level management, using graphical and dashboard tools to represent the time taken to provision a server to both IT and business managers.

The IT infrastructure library (ITIL) is also key to the firm's IT services strategy and the RBA technology will help it towards its goal to achieve accreditation for its adherence to the ITIL IT services framework, as well as improve IT's ability to respond to business needs.

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