BT Global Services achieves 100 percent availability with business service management solution.

Overview

Challenge
Ensure the highest level of availability, performance and quality of a critical telecommunications provisioning service while keeping costs down

Solution
A business service management approach based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices that provides real-time visibility and control of services, applications, transactions and processes according to service level agreements (SLAs)

Key Benefits
Achieved 100 % availability of critical service; met SLA requirements for performance and quality; avoided additional staffing and infrastructure investments

“Tivoli Netcool is helping us move to a new business model, one in which we can manage enterprise-to-enterprise applications, guarantee availability and performance, and charge for usage rather than a set fee.”
–Peter Hascher, Head of Development, BT Global Services

“Tivoli Netcool is essential in helping us simplify our implementation of ITIL recommendations for incident and problem management to increase operational efficiency.”
–Peter Hascher

“Without Tivoli Netcool, we would have had to deploy more servers for increased redundancy and would have needed more IT engineers to manually monitor component parameters.”
–Peter Hascher

BT Global Services (BT) provides multisite organizations with the global connectivity to help their employees and customers communicate and collaborate, any time, any place, through any device. With 20,000 locations across 70 countries, BT has built one of the most advanced global Internet Protocol (IP) networks in Europe and provides a wide range of connectivity options for voice, video, data and converged communication services.

To help manage customer access to services, BT recently launched SAMSON, its second-generation service access management solution that enables BT employ­ees and service partners to quickly and cost-effectively provision network access rights and privileges.

Managing this service is a significant task as BT engineers must ensure uninterrupted operations for both the core SAMSON system and the thousands of systems on which SAMSON depends. If SAMSON were unavailable, BT and its partners could no longer remotely access the 10,000 core network nodes that make up the network. Field engineers would have to be dispatched, which would significantly slow response times and increase costs. BT estimates that the cost of downtime for four hours could exceed 29 million EUR (37 million USD). “In building the SAMSON application, our approach was to create a robust and stable design from day one,” explains Peter Hascher, head of development for BT Global Services. “This meant factoring in proactive monitoring and management from the start.”

Gaining an end-to-end view
Given the high cost of downtime, executives set aggressive goals for service quality including 99.999 percent availability, detection of service outages lasting five seconds or more, customer notification within five minutes of an incident and a maximum time to repair a problem of 30 minutes.

Achieving these goals required an approach that would collect, correlate and analyze information for all management domains, and from the end user’s perspective, and then align that information with business goals. This would enable engineers to understand whether a service was available and quickly locate the root cause of a problem. It would help them proactively identify issues, such as performance degradation, that could potentially cause an outage. And it would help them cost-effectively manage service against service level agreements (SLAs) to avoid financial penalties.

“Managing infrastructure domains alone does not show whether a service is really available and performing correctly,” says Hascher. “To gain full visibility, we needed a business service management solution that would manage performance, availability and quality of service according to our SLAs.”

Real-time business and service assurance
BT selected IBM Tivoli Netcool software to help deliver real-time business and service assurance. According to Hascher, it was an obvious choice given the significant savings BT had previously realized using Tivoli Netcool software in a separate project that helped the company reduce its number of network operation centers (NOC) from eight to two. “Tivoli Netcool software delivered a single network management platform that enabled us to achieve proactive and preventa­tive network management,” explains Hascher. “We were able to realize over 1 million EUR (1.2 million USD) per year in operational savings and almost 250,000 EUR (300,000 USD) annually in reduced support and maintenance costs.”

With this success, executives recognized that Tivoli Netcool software also provided the capabilities required to shift to an IT service management model for managing SAMSON. According to Hascher, BT used a “top-down” and “bottom-up” manage­ment model. Tivoli Netcool software is used to monitor and report on the server infrastructure, key application parameters and LAN, WAN and security compo­nents. This provides staff with a view of changing conditions, historical trends and performance problems so potential problems can be proactively identified and resolved before users are impacted.

The software then integrates this information with key performance indicators, operational metrics and SLA information and displays it on a single screen. As a result, BT staff can effectively manage its SLAs based on service capacity, usage, performance and availability. In the future, the company will use this information to deliver tiered SLAs, such as offering guaranteed response times along with availability. Additionally, BT will leverage this information to develop new services and billing methods, such as its pay-per-usage-based offerings. “Tivoli Netcool is helping us move to a new business model, one in which we can manage enter­prise-to-enterprise applications, guarantee availability and performance, and charge for usage rather than a set fee,” Hascher adds.

BT’s model is based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. “As we integrate ITIL processes at every level of our service—from the supply-side to the demand-side—we can deliver more services and do so more quickly and cost-effectively,” says Hascher. “Tivoli Netcool is essential in helping us simplify the implementation of ITIL recommendations for incident and problem management to increase operational efficiency.”

Understanding the user experience
Location-specific problems can often be caused by components which are not wholly owned or operated by BT, such as local area networks. As a result, company executives also needed to understand the end user’s experience. To do so, BT deployed Tivoli Netcool application managers in its service centers in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Atlanta, London and Brussels. The Tivoli Netcool applica­tion managers run key SAMSON transactions (logging on, selecting and connecting to a device, and admin­istrative tasks) which are replayed every five minutes to create a more accurate picture of the end user’s experience. Additional tests are run every 24 hours for an expanded view of the user experience. BT staff also deployed a probe next to each SAMSON server so core application performance could be compared with network performance. This information is then sent to the Tivoli Netcool dashboard which correlates the information to determine if action is required. If one location fails, the software automatically checks the status of the other four locations. “By understanding the user experience, we now have a comprehensive view of problems and their causes, rather than a simple alarm or call from a user,” says Hascher. “As a result, our engineers can immediately begin work to fix a problem.”

Optimizing business and service continuity
With just five engineers responsible for ensuring 24x7 availability of the SAMSON service, BT has achieved 100 percent availability along with high levels of performance and quality. In fact, according to Hascher, Tivoli Netcool software helped the organization avoid a significant out­age by alerting staff to an increasing volume of activity on a Web server. Left unchecked, this issue would have caused SAMSON to crash. Additionally, Tivoli Netcool software has been vital in helping BT keep operating costs down. “Without Tivoli Netcool, we would have had to deploy more servers for increased redundancy and would have needed more IT engi­neers to manually monitor component parameters,” says Hascher.

Key Components
Software
IBM Tivoli® Netcool®

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For more information about BT Global Services, visit: www.btglobalservices.com