Improved Change Management Drives Availability, Reduces Risk

In the past, much of that investment was targeted towards infrastructure design, including tried-and-true architectural fundamentals like hardware redundancy. But in recent years, the company pursued another priority: implementing management tools and processes to better quantify—and thereby reduce—the risk of application outages. This includes establishing best practices around change management procedures—which is why the company implemented HP Universal Configuration Management Database (CMDB) software.

Complex environment, complex interdependencies

The company’s requirements for more disciplined change management processes stem in large part from the complexity of its technology environment. From a hardware perspective, multiple data centers house a mix of mainframes—plus a few thousand distributed servers. These include a large mix of HP ProLiant BL460c G6 and BL680c G5 server blades, and ProLiant DL580 G5 servers as well as other HP servers; virtually all of the company’s x86 server hardware is HP, for instance.

This architecture, in turn, links to some 25,000 to 30,000 workstations for use by the company’s full-time and contract employees. On the software side, thousands of internet, mainframe and distributed applications serve the company’s internal and external customers. Applications data is maintained within hundreds of thousands of databases.