In a dual-state operation and maintenance environment, how does H3C effectively support enterprise IT operation and maintenance upgrades and transformations?

[51CTO.com original article] "Dual-state operation and maintenance" is a new generation of enterprise IT operation and maintenance mode. It provides enterprises with a set of effective construction methods and ideas. The traditional steady-state IT mode meets the high reliability and stability requirements of the business; the agile IT mode meets the more agile business development needs of Internet-based businesses, responds to the market more quickly, and actively promotes and deploys new products and business models. The concept and method of this operation and maintenance mode can help the enterprise IT department achieve accurate matching of stable and agile "dual-state" business and IT, reduce enterprise operation risks, and help enterprises smoothly achieve digital transformation.

On March 1, 2017, the Dual-State Operation and Maintenance Alliance was formally established in Beijing. In order to further demonstrate the results of the implementation of dual-state operation and maintenance and encourage more users to practice it, the alliance recently held a dual-state operation and maintenance user conference. After the meeting, 51CTO reporters had the honor to interview Mr. Jiang Dong, a senior automation expert of H3C Group. As one of the founding members of the Dual-State Operation and Maintenance Alliance, how does H3C help enterprises transform their IT around the dual-state IT environment? Let's take a look.

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Jiang Dong, senior automation expert of H3C Group

The implementation of dual-state operation and maintenance is still full of challenges

Driven by new technologies and innovative business applications such as cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things, users' IT system environments have undergone tremendous changes, requiring enterprise IT operations to be more flexible, agile, automatic, and intelligent. Against this backdrop, promoting the evolution of dual-state operations has become an industry consensus.

Jiang Dong said that the Internet and cloud computing have brought new difficulties to enterprise IT operation and maintenance management. Different enterprises have great differences in infrastructure, IT systems, process systems, talent training, etc. All CIOs hope to be faster, more agile, and more economical. It is necessary to see that agility cannot solve all problems. Agility plus a certain degree of process control may be more in line with enterprise needs. The dual-state operation and maintenance proposed by Gartner is a rational intermediate state choice. Gartner recommends that CIOs not only pay attention to the technical agile state and steady state, but also need to consider that the two types of teams need different organizations, processes, and assessment systems to manage them separately. In the final analysis, it is ultimately necessary to serve the business and ensure the maximization of business value.

There is no "silver bullet" methodology in the field of enterprise operation and maintenance. "Dual state" also needs to be continuously optimized and evolved in practice, and accumulate best practices. What "dual state" brings us is that it points out the way to solve problems: we can neither stick to the routine nor go to another uncontrollable extreme agility. Steady-state operation and maintenance based on ITIL can also be "agile" through automation and process optimization; if agile business involves key business impact and has a large impact, it also needs to control the speed through process control.

Jiang Dong admitted that there are still some problems in the development of dual-state operation and maintenance. For example: many traditional enterprises tried to transform to agile, but finally chose to give up. The common reasons are as follows: First, the previous inherent technology stack is difficult to reconstruct and the transformation risk is too high; second, corporate culture, assessment system, talent training, and team organization are difficult to promote agile transformation. Some companies have successfully implemented agile in one or two small projects, but encountered many obstacles when they were actually promoted, and the hard-trained talents were quickly lost; third, the implementation of dual-state at the enterprise level inevitably requires solving the docking of agile systems and steady-state systems, the docking of agile culture and steady-state culture, and how to ensure fairness in the assessment of the two teams. This process is challenging and requires the control and promotion of senior leaders.

In addition, Jiang Dong emphasized that enterprises with dual-mode operation and maintenance need to solve automation and integration problems at the technical level. Automation solves the comprehensive orchestration automation and intelligence from traditional equipment to virtualization, cloud computing, containers, application automation, process automation, CI/CD to solve the problem of "sensitivity"; integration needs to solve a series of problems such as continuous end-to-end monitoring, continuous business performance and availability detection, fault root cause analysis and recovery, etc., to support the smooth operation of dual-mode business systems and solve the problem of "stability".

In a dual-state operation and maintenance environment, how does H3C effectively support enterprise IT operation and maintenance upgrades and transformations?

In this regard, Jiang Dong said that H3C can provide related services ranging from dual-state transformation management consulting, agile coaching services, DevOps training, agile technology expert services, U-Center and CI/CD platform implementation, automated development and testing, performance and capacity optimization, etc., to assist enterprises in smooth transformation and effectively support the long-term rapid growth and innovative development of corporate businesses.

The reporter learned that H3C's new IT operations focus on agile IT transformation (DevOps), cloud architecture transformation, value operation transformation, and digital management transformation. With the U-Center new generation IT intelligent operation platform as the core, it provides end-to-end full life cycle service solutions around application development and testing, converged architecture transformation, and IT operation and maintenance operations, and builds an integrated (Unified), user-oriented (User-oriented), full industry and full scenario coverage (Universal), continuous expansion (Unlimited), and unique (Unique) 5U platform capabilities.

Among them, the U-Center intelligent operation and maintenance platform helps users build operation and maintenance production systems from a new perspective through five major features: full industry and full scenario coverage, integration, user orientation, continuous expansion, and customization. According to Jiang Dong, the U-Center intelligent operation and maintenance platform has achieved containerization transformation, enhanced traffic analysis and detection and business detection capabilities, upgraded automation product components using a graphical orchestration engine, integrated with CI/CD, and supported dual-state operation and maintenance.

At present, H3C has deployed and applied intelligent operation and maintenance, services and solutions for users in many industries such as government, transportation, finance, operators, and education, and has been highly recognized by users.

H3C also innovatively uses the "cloud" approach to provide remote operation and maintenance services to solve the problem of insufficient IT expert resources for customers. Take Southern Media Group as an example. Since January 2016, Southern Media has enabled H3C's intelligent remote operation and maintenance services to provide remote operation and maintenance services for all network equipment in the data center. In the past two years, H3C's remote experts have achieved zero interruption of Southern Media's business, discovered and handled a large number of hidden dangers in advance, and shortened the traditional emergency fault handling time from hours to minutes. They have output multi-dimensional and rich operation and maintenance reports and provided customers with more than 30 professional operation and maintenance documents. It has provided strong guarantees for the improvement of Southern Media's IT operation and maintenance, and the value of the service has been highly recognized by Southern Media.

In an interview with ***, Jiang Dong talked about the implementation of dual-state operation and maintenance in China. He believed that at the current stage, the dual-state operation and maintenance of Chinese enterprises is mainly a transformation from steady state to agile state. The competitive pressure in different industries and markets determines the different degrees of transformation of enterprises. In comparison, financial enterprises in traditional industries have transformed faster. At present, most large and medium-sized enterprises are developing and testing CI/CD integration and practicing Agile 1.0. Agile 2.0 needs to consider more corporate agile culture, process streamlining, agile team building, talent training and incentives, and management and control between agile and steady state. This will be the next focus.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]