Dell Management Console: Implementing ITIL Best Practices

Reduced budgets and growing demands on IT departments are forcing businesses to find ways to cut costs, increase IT resource productivity and optimize existing investments. One strategy organizations can use to meet these goals is simplifying and standardizing their IT management based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines and policies.

The Dell™ Management Console (DMC) is based on ITIL principles and was designed to facilitate the adoption of industry best practices in data centers based on Dell systems. Companies can use the console to support ITIL processes and help streamline and simplify their IT management.

With businesses more dependent on technology, ITIL addresses the need for process standardization. Developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce, ITIL is available in a series of books that contain recommended best practices, workflows, templates and terminology. ITIL has become the worldwide standard for IT management implementation.

The DMC provides organizations with ITIL-aligned processes, presentation of relevant data and tools for executing IT support activities. The key to a successful implementation of ITIL processes starts with knowing what assets are available and how they are functioning. This helps organizations proactively strategize, allocate resources and make accurate decisions.

Many vendors of service and asset management tools provide applications that support the implementation of ITIL processes, but they lack the architecture and ability to help organizations act on the delivery and execution of ITIL tasks.

The DMC offers robust, automatic discovery and collection of detailed asset information, which is then correlated to display resource associations and service-level views of discovered assets. Associating service activities with assets helps IT departments understand the true total cost of ownership of IT assets. Process management tools also help them align processes with ITIL principles, leading to a more successful management of IT resources.

At the heart of the ITIL process model is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). ITIL stipulates that the CMDB perform four critical functions:

• Account for all IT assets and configurations within an organization and its services
• Provide accurate information on configurations and their documentation to support service management processes
• Provide a sound basis for incident management, problem management, change management and release management processes
• Verify configuration records against the infrastructure and correct any exceptions

The DMC integrates an extensible CMDB designed to accelerate potential benefits and help reduce initial and ongoing costs. Installed as part of the complimentary Dell hardware management tools at no extra cost, the CMDB can be extended automatically as other solutions are added to the system. No complex or costly services are needed to integrate Dell modules into the CMDB.

The key to the Dell management approach lies in providing powerful, easy-to-use management tools organized around a CMDB. The DMC offers a comprehensive management platform that embraces standardized ITIL principles and can scale far beyond the Dell hardware management. Using the console to support ITIL processes can help organizations streamline and simplify IT management tasks, optimize resources and control costs.