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Service Design provides a blueprint for the services. It not only includes designing of new service but also devises changes and improvements to existing ones.
It also let the service provider know how the design capabilities for service management can be developed and acquired.
Balanced Design
It is necessary for services to be adaptable to changing business requirements on dynamic basis. For this a balance must be maintained between following three factors −
Functionality with the required quality.
Resources i.e. staff, technologies, and available finances.
Timetable
Aspects of Service Design
Service Design focuses on the following aspects −
IT Services designed to meet business objectives.
Services designed to be both fit for purpose and fit for use.
Cost of ownership planed to achieve return on investment.
Balanced functionality, cost and performance.
IT services more stable and more predictable.
Potential risk mitigated, so the IT service is protected from security threats.
Design technology architectures, management architectures, and system management tools.
Design of the measurement systems, methods, and metrics for services, processes, architectures and underlying components.
Design of the service solution including all agreed functional requirements, resources and capabilities.
Service Oriented Architecture
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) refers to developing independent usable services. SOA is defined by Organization for the Advancement of Information Structured (OASIS). SOA provides more flexibility through modularity.
Prerequisites for SOA approach
Here the prerequisites required for implementation of SOA approach −
Definition of services
Clarity regarding interfaces and dependencies between services
The application of standards for the development and definition of services
Use of broadly-based technologies and tools.
Service Design Processes
Following table describes several processes in Service Design −
Sr.No.
Process & Description
1
Design Coordination
It deals with maintaining policies, guidelines, standards, budget for service design activity.
2
Service Catalogue Management
This process is responsible for designing service catalogue containing service specific to the customer for which they are willing to pay.
3
Service Level Management
The goal of this process is to ensure quality of the services meet provisioned quality agreement
4
Capacity Management
Capacity Management ensures optimal and economic usage of existing resources and future capacity requirement planning.
5
Availability Management
Availability Management ensures the operative services meet all agreed availability goals.
6
IT Service Continuity Management
This process ensures continuity of IT services regardless of any disaster occurs.
7
Information Security Management
This process ensures confidentiality, integrity, availability of data.
8
Supplier Management
This process ensures supplier relationship & performance and also ensures management of right and relevant contracts with supplier.
Financial Management deals with accounting, budgeting and charging activities for services. It determines all the costs of IT organization on the basis of direct and indirect costs. This process is used by all three types of service providers – internal, external or shared service providers.
Financial Manager is the process owner of this process.
Benefits of Financial Management
Here are some of the benefits of Financial Management −
Enhanced decision making
Speed of change
Service portfolio management
Operational control
Value capture and creation
Key decisions for Financial Management
Cost centre, value centre or accounting centre?
It is important to decide that how funding will be replenished. Clarity around the operating model greatly contributes to understanding the requisite, visibility of service provisioning costs, and funding is a good test of the business’s confidence and perception of IT.
The IT financial cycle starts with funding applied to the resources that create output which is identified as value by the customer. This value in turn includes the funding cycle to begin again.
Chargeback − to charge or not to charge
A chargeback model provides added accountability and visibility. Charging should add value to the business.
Chargeback models vary based on simplicity of calculations and the ability for the business to understand them. Some sample chargeback model includes the following components −
Notional charges
This address whether a journal entry will be made to the corporate financial systems. Here we have two-book method in which one records costs in corporate financial systems while a second book is kept but not recorded.
This second book gives same information but reflects what would have happened if alternative method of recording had been used.
Tiered Subscription
It refers to varying levels of warranty and /or utility offered for a service, all of which have been priced, with appropriate chargeback model applied.
Metered usage
In this demand modeling is incorporated with utility computing capabilities to provide confidence in the capture of real-time usage.
Fixed or user cost
In this cost is divided by an agreed denominator such number of users.
Demand Management is very important and critical process in service strategy. It helps to understand customer demand for services so that appropriate capacity can be provisioned to meet those demands.
Improper demand management leads to improper use of services and resources. Hence it’s worth to analyze customer’s demand.
Demand Manager is the process owner of this process.
Stratigical Level Demand Management
Under Stratigical Demand Management we focus on two important things −
Pattern of Business Analysis
User Profiles
Pattern of Business Analysis (PBA)
PBA is an extremely important activity achieved by knowing customer how they operate and future requirement they might need.
User Profiles
It is the demand pattern shown by users. It can be processes, people or functions.
Tactical Level Demand Management
Under tactical level demand management we focus on Differential Charging. It is a technique to support Demand Management by charging different amounts for same IT Service Function at different times.
Challenges in Demand Management
Demand Management is critical process of service strategy. Following are the challenges that occur in this process −
Improper analyses of customer’s demand leads to improper use of capacity. Excess capacity generates cost without creating value
Sometimes certain amount of unused capacity is necessary to deliver service levels. Such capacity is creating value through the higher level of assurance made possible with the higher capacity
It is required to have service level agreements, forecasting, planning, and tight coordination with the customer to reduce uncertainty in demand
Service production cannot occur without concurrence presence of demand that consumes the output
Arrival of demand is also influenced by demand management techniques such as off-peak pricing, volume discounts, and differentiated service levels
Service Packages
Core Services and supporting services
Core services are basic services for which customer is willing to pay. They bring actual value to the customer.
Support services enhance value proposition of core services i.e. added feature to key services.
Developing differentiated offerings
Packaging of core services and supporting services has implications for design and operation services. It is required to decide whether to standardize on the core or supporting services. One can arrive with same level of differentiation of in service offering taking different approaches to packaging as shown in the following figure.
Service Level packages
Service packages come up with one or more Service Level Packages (SLP). Each of the service level packages provides definite level of utility and warranty from the perspective of outcomes, assets, and PBA of customers.
Business outcomes are the ultimate basis for service level packages.
A relationship is a connection between two people or things. In case of Business Relationship Management it is connection between IT service provider and the business while in Configuration Management it is a connection between two configured items that are dependent on each other.
Business Relationship Management process ensures good relationship between service provider and the customer. It is generally achieved by identifying, understanding, and supporting customer’s need and appropriate services are developed to meet those needs.
Business Relationship Management generally includes:
Managing personal relationships with managers
Providing input to Service Portfolio Management
Ensuring that IT service provider is satisfying the customer’s need
Business Relationship Manager is the process owner of this process.
Sub-Processes
Business Relationship Management includes following sub-processes −
Maintain Customer Relationship
Identify Service Requirements
Sign up customers to Standard Services
Handle Customer Complaints
Monitor Customer Complaints
Customer Satisfaction Survey
Maintain Customer Relationship
This process ensures that service provider understands customer’s need and set up relationships with new potential customers.
Identify Service Requirements
This process ensures that service provider have complete understanding of output of a service and to decide if the customer’s need can be fulfilled using an existing service offering or if a new service needs to be created.
Sign up customers to Standard Services
This process deals with customer requirements and service level agreements.
Handle Customer Complaints
The objective of this process is to record customer’s complaints and take corrective action if required.
Monitor Customer Complaints
The objective of this process is to monitor the processing status of customer’s complaints.
Customer Satisfaction Survey
The objective of this process is to identify the scopes where customer expectations are not being met.
Service portfolio contains description of all the services engaged throughout the service lifecycle. It also represents the commitment and investment made by service provider across all customers and market spaces.
Service catalogue is subset of service portfolio and contains presently active services in service operation phase. We will discuss service catalogue in detail as part of service design process.
Service Portfolio Management
Service portfolio management ensures that the service provider is offering right combination of services to meet the customer’s need.
Service Portfolio Manager is the process owner of this process.
The purpose of service portfolio management is to provide answer to the following questions −
Why should customer buy this service?
Why should they buy from us?
What form does the pricing structure take?
What are our strengths and weaknesses, priorities and risks?
How should we apply our resources and capabilities?
Sub Processes
Service portfolio management includes sub processes as shown in the following diagram −
Define
The purpose of this process is to define desired results of a service.
Analyze
The purpose of this process is to analyze the impact of proposed new service or changed service on existing services in service portfolio.
Approve
The purpose of this process is to submit change proposal to change management and to initiate the design stage for the new or changed service if change proposal is authorized.
Charter
The purpose of this process is to communicate decisions, allocate resources and charter services.
I will explain why I think that you should consider deploying the now generally available Windows Server 2016 (WS2016) in your network.
Smaller and Faster
Every version of Windows Server makes strides in improving the efficiency of the operating system (OS). Windows Server 2008 (W2008) introduced a new installation option called Server Core; Microsoft removed the Windows from Windows Server and left us with a server OS that only had a command prompt and a PowerShell prompt. This smaller installation required less RAM, had a smaller footprint, and had less of a surface area for attackers to target.
Windows Server 2012 continued this movement, and saw the kernel be improved with old code being reworked or removed.
And in WS2016, yes, we continue to get Server Core as an installation option, but we also get something newer, smaller, and with an increased emphasis on remote management and automation. Nano Server (an installation option, not an edition) doesn’t just remove the GUI, it removes the UI completely! Nano Server is a headless server OS, with the smallest disk requirement I can remember seeing with Windows Server, and consumes less than 200MB RAM when sitting idle!
If you want to run Hyper-V or Storage Spaces/Direct then you can use Nano Server, but where I see Nano Server being best used is for born-in-the-cloud applications, where you want to minimize resource usage, OS patching, and security vulnerabilities the most.
Improved Service Availability
A lot of the improvements in WS2016 were driven by improvements in Azure. Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud, has a lot of service-level agreements (SLAs) that dictate guaranteed uptime, so Microsoft is pretty sensitive to the issues that also affect us:
Transient storage issues that crash virtual machines.
Network glitches that last for seconds, but create minutes of downtime when virtual machines are failed over within a Hyper-V cluster.
OS upgrades that require painful cluster-to-cluster migrations if you want a newer version of Hyper-V.
Microsoft built in several new features to improve service uptime. The first is rolling cluster upgrades, allowing us to painlessly upgrade Hyper-V clusters from WS2012 R2 to WS2016. A cluster can temporarily run both versions of Hyper-V, with virtual machines capable of live migrating or failing over across the mixed-level cluster.
The process of performing a rolling upgrade on a Hyper-V cluster [Source: Microsoft]New resiliency solutions were introduced to deal with transient network or storage errors, thus ensuring that virtual machines don’t crash in the event of a SAN glitch or a network cable being wrongly pulled/replaced, and hosts are automatically quarantined if they start to “flap” between healthy and isolated states.
Storage Resiliency prevents Hyper-V virtual machine crashing during transient storage outages [Image Credit: Microsoft]Availability is more than just a cluster; many mid-large businesses have stretched clusters across sites for disaster recovery (DR) reasons. WS2016, in my opinion (it’s been possible for a long time), is the first version of Windows Server that really is ready for doing DR using failover clustering. This is because clustering now understands the concept of a site/location, and you can constrain storage/live migration/failover to within a site unless a true disaster occurs. Microsoft also made stretch clusters easier with a cloud witness hosted in Azure (instead of having a file share in a third site) and built-in storage replication (see below).
A True Hybrid Cloud
Microsoft argues that a hybrid cloud is more than just a network connection between a customer’s LAN and a cloud, such as Azure. Hyper-V is the common foundation of on-premises private clouds, hosted public/private clouds, and Azure. Software-defined storage and networking abstract the complications of physical infrastructure. In terms of deployment and management, the Azure Portal and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) will be made available to customers via a new product (in mid-2017) called Microsoft Azure Stack. The solution will mean that developers and operators can use the same tools, the same architectures, and the same templates (solutions and virtual machines) no matter where they choose to deploy new services.
The hybrid cloud, according to Microsoft [Image Credit: Microsoft]I am a Hyper-V nerd, so I cannot pretend to ignore the fact that this is the biggest and best release of Hyper-V yet. Microsoft is making it possible to build a software-defined data center, on top of the most secure, open, fastest, and best version of Hyper-V yet.
Secure & Trusted
You are already planning your deployment of WS2016 if security is important to you. Some features have made their way over from Windows 10 Enterprise; Credential Guard hides LSASS in a special Hyper-V partition called VSM, protecting stored administrator rights from malware behind a hardware-supported security boundary. Device Guard protects critical parts of the kernel against rogue software, ensuring that what is running is what is meant to be running.
Those that are running Hyper-V in a sensitive environment can deploy some very interesting functionality. A Host Guardian Service (HGS) can be deployed into an isolated environment; this enables a Hyper-V feature called shielded virtual machines. A host is checked for health (for example, root kit malware) when it boots up, and virtual machines are only allowed to start on or live migrate to healthy and authorized hosts — this prevents virtual machines being run on unauthorized or compromised environments. Shielding can also prevent KVPs (host-guest integrations) and console access to a virtual machine. Owners of virtual machines might be sensitive to unwanted or unauthorized peeking by administrators; virtual TPM allows the tenant to encrypt their virtual machine’s disks using BitLocker so that no one without guest admin rights can peek at the OS, programs, or data in the virtual hard disk files.
The HGS authorizing hosts to run Hyper-V Shielded Virtual Machines [Image Credit: Microsoft]
Solving Storage Challenges
Hurricane Sandy made quite the impact in 2012 on the U.S. and on Microsoft; the software maker noted that many SAN customers didn’t have DR solutions. Microsoft asked why this was, and those affected customers said that the licensing to enable replication for their vendor’s SAN was too expensive. WS2016 adds Storage Replica (SR), enabling you to replicate volumes at a block level from one storage system to another (both the same or different) using synchronous (short distance, no data loss) or asynchronous (longer distances, small data loss) replication. The solution is fully supported by Failover Clustering, so it allows from some interesting stretch-cluster designs. Admittedly, some storage systems (such as those by Dell) include free or very affordable licensing, so SR might not be attractive (at first, but wait to see what Azure might offer later) to those customers, but there are horror stories with other brands of SAN.
The big news in WS2016 storage is Storage Spaces Direct, which is the newest version of Microsoft’s software-defined storage system that was introduced in WS2012 and improved in WS2012 R2. This is a longer conversation, but I’ll keep it short. You can deploy a hyper-converged infrastructure using WS2016 Hyper-V, without giving more than $60,000 to some hardware company for each Hyper-V node, and get better and more stable performing solutions than many have offered in recent years. For example, DataON recently announced that it hit 2.4 million IOPS on a 4-node cluster. If you want simpler, more affordable, and better performing Hyper-V/cloud storage, then WS2016 has something to offer you.
![Storage Resiliency prevents Hyper-V virtual machine crashing during transient storage outages [Image Credit: Microsoft]](https://www.petri.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/10/VM20Storage20Resiliency20Workflow1.png)
![The hybrid cloud, according to Microsoft [Image Credit: Microsoft]](https://www.petri.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/10/image-41.png)
![The HGS authorizing hosts to run Hyper-V Shielded Virtual Machines [Image Credit: Microsoft]](https://www.petri.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/10/Workflow1.png)