Seven keys to managing your business-critical cloudSuccessful cloud management demands knowledge, skills, and strategy

Business white paper

3 Executive summary

3 The authors

3 Substantial benefits—and challenges

4 Case Study: understanding pitfalls with the cloud

4 Seven best practices in successfully managing a cloud: gaining benefits, avoiding pitfalls

5 1. Organize your operation to manage a customer-oriented service

5 2. Adapt your staff and processes to run a resilient infrastructure

6 3. Integrate manual and automated tasks

6 4. Manage software and firmware interdependencies

7 5. Synchronize performance and capacity with demand

7 6. Step up security in a shared environment

8 7. Build in continual service

8 Conclusion

8 Appendix

Table of contents

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Executive summaryIt’s widely recognized that a well-run cloud provides you with flexible, fast, inexpensive, and secure access to IT resources. It enables your IT organization to dramatically improve service quality and the efficiency of resource utilization. But, while such benefits dominate the headlines, stories of major service outages are beginning to surface as more companies operate clouds. This paper delivers a set of best practices essential for getting the most from your cloud.

As an end-to-end service, a cloud service model puts an end to traditional silos of IT management. The business value of the IT organization rises and plays a more visible role. When you operate a cloud, you become a critical part of the business process. You become a front-line partner rather than a back-end supplier to your business and customers. This transformation creates a wealth of new opportunities for IT, but it also creates stiff challenges to your cloud adoption and management.

Clouds give you new ways to provide access and IT services. As the cloud experience becomes the new standard for IT service providers, its customers expect easy, on-demand access to resources. But, to meet such ease, convenience, and performance requirements on the front end of a cloud requires plenty of expertise and mature processes behind the scenes. On-demand cloud services create new patterns of resource consumption and they raise your customers’ expectations to get new services even faster, and with higher levels of availability and performance.

One interesting by-product of cloud adoption is that seemingly small problems can become quickly magnified in the cloud’s scalable, complex, and dynamic infrastructure. Managing the specialized environment of the cloud requires proven best practices. These best practices must be adaptive so an IT organization’s people, processes, and technologies are fully aligned to meet the complexities of managing a cloud. Although you may require fewer IT professionals to run a highly automated cloud, it’s a certainty that they’ll be counted on to assume larger, more strategic and complex roles.

So, if the path to cloud computing is laden with potholes, how do you avoid them? How do you manage a business-critical cloud that delivers on the promises and avoids the pitfalls?

This paper is designed to help you answer these questions by offering advice on getting the most out of your cloud while avoiding common cloud deployment mistakes. Using a case study, we’ll pinpoint potential pitfalls that you may encounter. And to help you manage a business-critical cloud that meets your business objectives and customer expectations, we’ve created seven best practices that will serve as your guide.

The authorsEwald Comhaire, MS, Computer Science, is a global director in the HP Technology Services Chief Technology Office with responsibility for cloud, data center, and IT infrastructure architectures. Ewald leads the development and execution of the HP cloud strategy and service portfolio.

Ashley Hanna is a global business development manager within HP Mission Critical Services. Focused on operational IT Service Management (ITSM), Ashley helps companies meet the day-to-day challenges of running quality IT services. Ashley is a co-author of the ITIL v3 Glossary of Terms and Acronyms and was Technical Continuity Editor of the most recent ITIL update. In 2010, Ashley received the itSMF UK Paul Rappaport Award for Outstanding Contribution to ITSM.

Martin Yates is a business development manager responsible for the growth of HP Mission Critical Services across the Central United States. Martin is a certified ITIL Expert in ITSM and for more than a decade he has been a leader in the development of the HP worldwide portfolio of operational ITSM services.

Substantial benefits—and challengesAs mentioned earlier, the move to cloud computing provides substantial opportunities and benefits to an organization. While reducing overall IT costs, a cloud offers you pay-per-use efficiency, self-service ease and convenience, and a key advantage to test and run new business models with increased transparency and flexibility. Today, the cloud offers different models, such as private, public, and hybrid, each offering a variety of benefits and tradeoffs. Whatever cloud computing model you select, best practices in service management will help you gain the superior service, visible business value, and lower costs that you expect from the cloud.

The cloud leaps beyond virtualization by integrating IT resources—servers, software, storage, and networking—into a service that businesses can access any time, any place. When you adopt cloud architecture, you typically incorporate such components as a self- service portal, a service catalog, and metering, chargeback, or billing devices. All these components are backed by an integrated management framework (people, processes, and tools) that centrally controls deployment and management of the resources. By sharing infrastructure and shifting work among virtual and physical resources, an IT organization can benefit from a private cloud that’s competitive with a public model in terms of business continuity, quality, efficiency, and flexibility.

Yet in order for you to achieve these benefits, IT must be ready to adapt its people, processes, and technologies to run a cloud environment as a complete, customer-oriented, end-to-end service. It’s important to understand that a cloud is a far more complex, integrated, and dynamic system than a traditional configuration, and with deeper implications if mismanaged. IT must manage many interlinked layers, from blade servers and storage networks to operating system variants, orchestration tools, and hypervisors that virtualize resources. In this highly consolidated and shared environment, an incident can affect far more users than a problem in a traditional configuration; and customer demand can trigger or turn off hundreds of resources in minutes.

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While redefining the role of IT as a service provider, a business-critical cloud also adds new dimensions to many IT processes, particularly demand and capacity management. You may not be aware of this, but demand is more difficult to predict in a cloud, because, by design, the cloud is a flexible infrastructure that can adapt to dynamic needs. The IT organization has to provide sufficient capacity to meet the constantly changing patterns of usage while also achieving high-resource utilization to lower overall costs.

Some organizations may adopt a cloud by starting with a proof- of-concept pilot at a low-risk or specialized application that doesn’t affect the company as a whole. Others may launch a business-critical cloud with the management fundamentals in place to anticipate and meet the challenges. Our case study looks at a company that misjudged the full scope of what it takes to achieve the benefits of a cloud.

Case Study: understanding pitfalls with the cloudA large medical equipment company consolidated its IT operations as part of a companywide mandate to cut costs. The IT organization implemented a virtualized environment and, believing that the automated infrastructure would greatly decrease its management tasks, downsized its staff by 80 percent. The remaining IT personnel were expected to do little more than install systems and replace failed units.

Seeing the potential of cloud computing to further reduce expenses, the IT organization proposed to supply infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to its customers. Working with their peers in procurement, the IT organization was preoccupied with cutting costs. They expected continuous availability, but they were unprepared to meet the challenges that loomed ahead.

A perfect stormThe new service soon became a prime example of how seemingly small problems can quickly get out of hand when running a cloud.

As the IT staff installed and changed components, they failed to track versions. Soon, blade servers with firmware several versions apart coexisted within the same enclosures. The mismatched firmware hindered the IT group’s ability to distribute work among blade servers and enclosures for maintenance or recovery and obstructed their attempts to keep up with demand or prevent outages. Since the dated firmware did not recognize new CPUs, IT couldn’t upgrade hardware or add capacity.

The IT organization also had a hard time scheduling planned downtime because its practice was to install applications with different availability and performance requirements in the same enclosure. Software under development ran on the same server as business-critical applications connecting suppliers and customers in a 24x7 just-in-time environment.

As customer demand rose, problems escalated from poor performance to multiple outages that culminated in a 48-hour service shutdown. The company endured $18 million USD in lost revenues and penalties as well as strained relationships with suppliers and customers, whose operations came to a standstill during this period.

Instead of cutting costs, the company had to spend large sums to resolve the crisis. And having lost confidence in its IT organization, the company fired its CIO and transferred its operation to a public cloud provider.

Lessons learnedFirmware and software incompatibilities turned out to be only part of the problem. The IT staff was overwhelmed by the complexities of managing a cloud and had few processes in place to run such an interdependent environment. The IaaS operation was plagued by outages that could have been avoided by proactive management practices as well as basic procedures to track and manage changes in infrastructure components.

Above all, this story demonstrates how important skilled people and robust processes are to achieving a successful cloud operation. Virtualization and automation do not diminish the role of IT staff nor lessen the need for sound processes. In a collaborative partnership with its customers and vendors, an IT organization can deliver a service that doesn’t just lower costs, but also adds business value. In our case study, business value was never a factor in the equation.

Seven best practices in successfully managing a cloud: gaining benefits, avoiding pitfallsAlthough standardized and modular, clouds are also intensely consolidated, shared, and complex infrastructures that integrate many software components across multiple technology domains. Clouds are highly dynamic and scalable infrastructures that undergo constant change, both in customer demand and back-end, IT-initiated adaptations.

A number of recent, highly visible public cloud outages have tarnished the trust, reputation, and revenue associated with the failure to meet expectations of continuous, resilient service while implementing both customer and back-end changes.

The following set of best practice fundamentals will help you nurture a sound cloud operating environment, and avoid pitfalls. These guidelines will help you adapt your people, processes, and technologies to the day-to-day challenges of running a cloud-based service that becomes integral to meeting the needs of your customers.

Seven keys to success in

managing your business-critical

cloud

1. Organize your operation to manage a customer- oriented service

2. Adapt your staff and processes to run a resilient infrastructure

3. Integrate manual and automated tasks

4. Manage software and firmware interdependencies

5. Synchronize performance and capacity with demand

6. Step up security in a shared environment

7. Build in continual improvement

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1. Organize your operation to manage a customer-oriented service

When operating a cloud, you change your relationship with your customers. Instead of being relegated to the role of a technology order-taker and supplier, as your customers’ front-line service provider and partner, you become more strategic, more visible, and more accountable. Your customers rely on you to provide an end-to-end service that meets their business objectives and service-level agreements (SLAs). They expect easy, agile service and transparency with all the detailed mechanics of server, storage, or network operations hidden from view. In the event of an outage, you cannot transfer blame to other groups or point to technology failures, as customers expect rapid restoration of service.

When evaluating your service, customers have the upper hand so you can ill afford to take your business units and customers for granted as a captive audience. They can and will readily compare your cloud’s performance and value to services offered by public clouds. Architecting your entire cloud infrastructure—people, processes, and technologies—to deliver the quality and efficiency promised in your SLAs is the best way to earn their trust and loyalty.

Your architecture must orchestrate all the interdependencies within the cloud, which is a complex, multilayered and rapidly changing environment. Effective cloud management that includes configuration and change management requires a coherent IT Service Management (ITSM) framework.

When running a cloud, you’re not only responsible for individual components, such as storage, servers, or networks, but you’re charged with running an end-to-end service. You need a set of policies, standards, and processes that encompass the entire operation, from physical server builds and naming conventions to automated provisioning and decommissioning, as well as proactive measures to prevent failure and reactive activities to rapidly restore service. This ITSM framework must be well defined, thoroughly documented, and consistently applied in day-to-day IT operations.

Incident and problem management processes should include timely and thorough customer communication and also detailed root cause analysis of any failure or downtime. By adopting an industry service management framework such as ITIL v3, and by cloud-enabling your policies and processes, you will increase management control and flexibility and reduce the risk of outages. And as you realign your organization to deliver an end-to-end service, you stand to increase both its efficiency as well as customer satisfaction.

2. Adapt your staff and processes to run a resilient infrastructure

Some of your business units and customers may rely on their cloud environment to run a 24x7 business, while others may be able to negotiate planned downtime for maintenance. Your resource allocation strategy must adapt to the varied availability needs of your customers.

Figure 1:Best practices to adapt your people, processes, and tools to the challenges of running a cloud

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Employ a tiered availability model to structure your cloud services. By installing applications with similar availability requirements in the same enclosures, IT staff can more easily orchestrate work among server, storage, and network resources to schedule downtime for maintenance. Dedicating a set of enclosures to the same business unit can further simplify the process of negotiating service-level objectives such as downtime while increasing options for backup and recovery.

The IT organization needs to understand how to maintain service availability while partially shutting down the underlying hardware for maintenance. This dynamic and flexible approach to resource allocation capitalizes on the cloud’s virtualization capabilities, which allows IT personnel to redistribute tasks and take selected infrastructure components offline for maintenance.

This strategy requires a mature, structured approach to availability management that moves beyond a hardware-driven mindset. Instead, its focus broadens to encompass all that it takes to maintain the level of service required by your customers.

It’s important to conduct a business impact analysis of your environment to determine the potential consequences of failures in every layer of the cloud architecture. It also allows you to develop corresponding mitigation strategies and service continuity plans. Your architects should provide your operational staff with this information and prepare them to perform the activities required to maintain continual operation of the cloud.

3. Integrate manual and automated tasks

In a cloud, manual processes coexist with automated routines. As effective preapproved processes, automated activities are executed with little or no human intervention.

Automation is far more extensive in a cloud environment than in a traditional configuration. However, some tasks are not suitable for automation. Manual processes and reactive incident resolution remain integral to the management of a cloud environment. Even when processes are highly standardized and automated, a business-critical cloud requires continual active management.

When deciding which of your existing manual processes to automate, consider these criteria:

• Is it bulletproof, documented, and 100 percent predictable (a candidate for automation)?

• Is it almost bulletproof (suitable for automation with built-in manual controls)?

Another factor in selecting a process for automation is the amount of specialized know-how required to execute it. When something goes wrong with the automation, you’re likely to rely on manual intervention to solve the problem. If this task uses skills that your staff needs in order to remedy unexpected problems, it may be preferable to handle this task manually or by frequently rehearsing the recovery procedure.

As you come to these decision points, make sure you understand how automation applies to both the processes of concern to your architects and the tasks performed by your support team, such as recovery activities. Whatever level of automation you adopt, your support personnel must be able to intervene without disturbing the automated processes. Automation support documentation will be an essential resource for support engineers, who should be trained to understand the automation steps and their foundational structures, such as naming conventions.

In the highly consolidated, interdependent environment of a cloud, small conflicts between manual and automated processes can trigger far-reaching impacts. Imagine, for example, that a database administrator decides to move a logical storage unit and changes its assigned name and location. Soon after, an automated process designed to replace a disk drive fails because the system can no longer locate the renamed unit. Or consider the user who employs a self-service routine to provision two servers. By accidentally keying in “200” instead of two, the user sets off a preapproved process that overwhelms and shuts down the cloud.

Such mishaps can be avoided by adopting and consistently applying standards for automation and change management that include policies and practices to:

• Determine which processes are preapproved and which are manual

• Build in limits and thresholds on automatic provisioning

• Adapt and test all manual processes to interact with the automation layer

• Continually update the cloud’s configuration management database

• Perform all required software and firmware updates as part of an infrastructure change

4. Manage software and firmware interdependencies

In a traditional, dedicated IT environment, software and firmware updates can be confined with relative ease to the devices specific to a particular customer. In a cloud infrastructure, your customers access shared IT resources and each component is part of an interlocked web of resources. A change in one element can affect many others and potentially degrade or shut down the entire operation.

If you update an application, you may also need to update the operating system and, with it, firmware and device drivers. If you don’t make all the required adjustments, the update may fail and bring down the application service or, worse, it may cause serious problems later on when you attempt to allocate more resources or transfer work to a different device.

Your approach to software management must adapt to the great quantity, variety, and interdependencies of these interlinked parts, including applications, operating systems, cloud/infrastructure management software, device drivers, and firmware. Make sure you keep track of each software asset, its interdependencies and its update history. And since a majority of these products are from third parties, license management requires up-to-date documentation

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and tracking to ensure compliance. Adding to the management complexity is the potential of overlapping roles between the IT organization delivering the service and the cloud’s users. In the standalone world, IT controls the software and firmware. In a cloud, basic infrastructure services such as firmware management remain the domain of IT, but other activities may be shared with multiple groups.

As IaaS users, application developers may require an active role in the operating system layer and above. For example, a particular development project may require a nonstandard version of an operating system. However, if the developer modifies software shared by multiple groups, the change could unintentionally disrupt services to other business units.

IT must educate users about these risks and determine if and how to handle such exceptions. It must also establish standards and procedures that allow the desired flexibility, but within specific parameters. When negotiating policies and procedures for handling exceptions, specify the respective responsibilities of users and IT personnel and train users to ensure their compliance with these processes.

5. Synchronize performance and capacity with demand

In a traditional operation, the IT organization plans its budget around the anticipated projects of the business units and customers while factoring in a three-to-five year depreciation lifecycle for its capital assets.

In a cloud environment, customers expect to access resources on demand. Your provisioning and configuration management processes must be in sync with delivering IT as a service. By providing self-service and cutting the cost and time of starting or dropping a project, a cloud fosters innovation, but it also generates an unpredictable workflow and peaks in usage. Some projects succeed and expand while others fail. Your cloud must meet the fluctuating demands of multiple customers, each with an array of projects that are continually coming on and off line.

Your approaches to demand and capacity management must anticipate and adapt to these highly dynamic workflows. Your customers’ forecasts of user and transaction volumes can only be partial indicators of your performance and capacity requirements. You also need advance notification of special events that may spike usage. If a spur-of-the-moment campaign quadruples usage over a weekend and you’re not prepared for that spike, it could severely degrade the performance of your cloud. The key to rapid and efficient provisioning and re-provisioning is to maintain direct involvement in your customers’ plans and projects, and proactively gain insight into the peaks and troughs of their usage. By partnering closely with your customers through effective management of your business relationship, you can project capacity needs based on current information and a history of actual behavior.

You can also guide your customers in better understanding and projecting demand by metering and analyzing their actual usage patterns over time. Become an advisor and proactive partner; rather than just expecting customers to predict their demand, offer an array of tools to help them assess and meet their needs. Tools such as chargeback mechanisms can measure and control usage on behalf of your customer, who may favor a metered or pay-per-use model to track utilization and cost. These tools can also help to educate your customers and guide them in making informed decisions based on the cost of their usage.

As you partner with your customers, you should also develop collaborative business-focused relationships with your IT vendors and procurement team. Together, with your customers, you can introduce flexible, on-demand acquisition strategies. For example, under a utility pricing agreement, your vendor can preinstall equipment that you’ll be able to purchase and activate within hours rather than weeks or months. With close coordination among all of these stakeholders, you can maintain a just-in-time model that enables you to provide capacity on demand, without acquiring a lot of underutilized technology.

6. Step up security in a shared environment

Customers of a cloud can access its services anywhere, anytime. Strong security is a must to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information stored in the cloud.

Even within a private cloud, security is a priority. Accustomed to their own exclusive technology, business units are now sharing IT resources such as storage and applications with other groups. Security requirements can vary widely among business units, applications, and projects. For example, the management of some groups’ data may be subject to governmental or industry regulations. Your policies, tools and procedures for encryption, authentication, and intrusion detection must maintain these different levels of security.

Your security practices should include the education of customers in your cloud’s policies and available options so they can make an informed choice about the level of security that suits their project.

Frequent auditing and active management are key parts of a robust cloud security regimen. For example, routinely examine log files to identify and analyze violations. One company’s operations team had intrusion detection tools in place that logged attempts at unauthorized access. Although the tools were doing their job well, no one read the logs for several months and the support team was unaware of multiple hacking attempts.

Your security regimen must also extend to policies and procedures for back-end activities, such as disposal of data on retired or faulty disks and the cleansing of data when moving customers between different storage devices. These processes occur with far greater frequency in a cloud than in a standalone environment and require more control to preserve security. When a group no longer requires a set of disks, those disks must be reliably cleared of data before they are re-provisioned to other customers.

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Whatever level of security is required, consumers, business units, customers, users, and the company as a whole need to have complete confidence in the privacy and integrity of their data. Setting up the right policies, processes, and tools is a major step toward enabling information security. However, these measures won’t be effective unless they are applied on a consistent basis.

7. Build in continual service

When you first implement your cloud, you may believe that the need for major improvements or changes is many months away. You’ve trained your people, properly installed the technology, and put sound policies and processes in place. But change is a constant when managing a cloud environment. A cloud must continually adapt to evolving business requirements and new technologies if it is to deliver superior service, higher business value, and lower costs. In fact, the most potent force of change is the open market of public clouds. Your private cloud is always in competition with the options available to your business customers, including the service capabilities of other suppliers as well as vendors’ advances in functionality. By continually improving your service, you can remain your customers’ cloud provider of choice.

When managing a cloud, you also need to ceaselessly monitor and measure your operation and compare how it works against your SLAs and other business commitments. Actively develop service improvement plans to address any gaps and potential areas of risk. Continual service improvement—identifying and closing gaps in quality and efficiency—must be an ongoing process. Unfortunately, few IT organizations take a formal approach to continual service improvement. If you make this process fundamental to the way you work, you will save time and resources in the long run and avoid costly problems. Above all, you will earn your customers’ satisfaction and loyalty.

Embed attention to quality and continual improvement into every process. Make it a basic discipline that is a routine part of your IT organization’s culture. Every member of the IT staff should be encouraged to log any issues they observe along with opportunities for improvement. Reviews of these logs should be part of your regular team meeting agenda. Appoint someone to lead these reviews. Together, assess how your cloud services measure up to your business objectives, commitments, and SLAs—your pact with your customers—and how your operation compares with constantly evolving industry best practices.

ConclusionThe aforementioned seven best practices can help you meet the challenges and lower the risks of managing a business-critical cloud. Each is a fundamental principle of effective IT service management (ITSM) drawn from expert advice and experience. Taken together, they can guide you in controlling the complexities of a cloud and its many interdependent elements. Building these practices into the culture of your IT organization will help you provide your customers with services that continually operate, improve, and adapt to changing markets and technologies. How you apply these best practices in ITSM will dictate how you can achieve the promises of the cloud, such as superior service, visible business value, and lower costs.

AppendixHP Datacenter Care Service, to help you operate and evolve the data centerWhile some organizations may have the expertise, resources, and time to implement the seven best practices outlined in this white paper on their own, others may prefer to engage external experts.

HP Datacenter Care Service can assist you in building, operating, and continually improving your cloud/hybrid IT environment. We provide a comprehensive set of offerings that are tailored to meet your specific business requirements and help you to achieve the most from your IT investment. This tailored, personalized service can help you to:

• Free up resources for innovation

• Reduce complexity, risk, and worry as you rely on us to support your whole environment

• Improve agility and scalability as you react at the speed of business

• Save time and costs

To support the cloud, a paradigm shift in support is requiredSupport must: be flexible and tailored for where you are on your IT journey, scale cost-effectively to your environment, embrace multivendor software and hardware and external service providers, proactively monitor and improve performance, and keep everything current and operating together as a solution for your business needs. You need a trusted partner that can support the whole environment, and that can help you reduce complexity and guide you on your journey to the cloud.

People with multivendor expertiseWith their knowledge of best practices and technologies—from tools and software to storage and networking—HP support professionals can help you prevent outages and reduce the impact of issues that do occur.

Basing its support processes on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices, HP Technology Services is an organization of more than 12,000 certified ITIL professionals. Your assigned resources are an extension of your IT staff and resolve complex issues by drawing upon the global multivendor expertise of HP.

Through extensive collaboration with partners, HP Datacenter Care Primary Service Provider reduces the complexity and risk associated with interoperability issues by providing a single point of accountability to support heterogeneous environments such as clouds. HP provides services from proactive assessments and patch recommendations to collaborative support agreements that support your end-to-end IT environment.

With an HP account support manager (ASM) as your trusted support advocate and technical advisor, your HP team works proactively with you to develop account plans, select services that meet your goals, implement process improvements, and adopt the latest best practices.

Processes and tools tailored to your environmentThe best way to avoid unplanned downtime is to prevent it. HP offers more than 100 services spanning all of the elements that can affect cloud performance—from firmware, virtualization, and storage to power and cooling. By tailoring services to your particular environment, HP Datacenter Care teams can help you target key areas for enhanced support, education, or process improvement. And, drawing on all of the resources that HP offers, your team can select the right consulting services to help guide you on your journey to the cloud.

Proactive preventive servicesAdvanced technology underlies HP Datacenter Care Service, delivering precise, efficient monitoring, and incident prevention. HP Insight Remote Support delivers proactive services through:

• 24x7 remote monitoring

• Automatic incident and event detection

• Data capture for proactive services

HP Insight Remote Support has a proven track record of providing faster, more accurate incident resolution. You can achieve up to 66 percent faster problem resolution1 and up to a 95 percent first-time fix rate2.

Fast, informed reactive responseUsing HP remote support technology and comprehensive management tools, our experts can help you optimize your IT management practices and obtain rapid, informed response to problems. Staffed by 3,000 mission-critical specialists, our 33 Global Mission Critical Solution Centers support customers in 174 countries.

As a Datacenter Care customer, you have designated professionals responsible for your reactive support with immediate access to current and historical information about your environment. Upon call-in, your HP specialists can immediately respond to your issue based on thorough knowledge of your environment and business priorities.

Manage a business-critical cloud with these seven best practices. To know more about how HP can help you with your cloud infrastructure, visit: hp.com/go/cloud

HP Datacenter Care Service for your journey to the cloudHP Datacenter Care Service offers a relationship that can help you gain the most from your cloud environment. From targeted assistance to full-fledged service partnerships, you can select the service plan that offers the most cost-effective support for your business-critical environment.

Find out more about HP Datacenter Care Service at: hp.com/services/datacentercare

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© Copyright 2011–2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

4AA3-5167ENW, Created July 2011; Updated October 2012, Rev. 1

1 HP internal call center data, Q4, 2011

2 HP Insight Remote Support Operational Metrics (internal data), Q4, 2011