Speaker
Description
Current e-infrastructures are going through the complex process of transitioning from research based funding to sustainable service provisioning and funding structures. This involves not only defining new governance and funding models but new management approaches that can support long term, reliable service provision.
In the public and commercial sectors, IT Service Management techniques have been developed to make the complex process of service provision more repeatable, predictable and controllable. These include the international standard ISO/IEC 20000 and the ITIL best practice framework. While powerful, these are based on assumptions that do not hold true for federated e-Infrastructures, so they must be interpreted for the emerging federated environments. The FedSM project is developing techniques to implement these idea in federated e-Infrastructures, and working with three real infrastructures to do so: EGI, FGI and PLGrid.
This workshop will introduce the FedSM approach, which is based on a set of requirements for standard federate service management based on selecting relevant aspects of the ISO/IEC 20000 standard. This will define a target level of service management for federated e-Infrastructures as well as intermediate steps in reaching them.
This workshop results from initial discussions between FedSM and EGI to define an implementation plan for the first set of ITSM processes needed to make changes. After introducing the ITSM requirement it will look at which processes are needed to begin controlled management of EGI's existing core services, and explain what this means for EGI operations staff. Following this it will look at what additional processes will be needed in order to support more complex federation scenarios such as EGI-led resource allocation or Pay Per Use experiments.
Summary
In order to make EGI's services, more sustainable and predictable, some form of the IT Service Management (ITSM) is necessary. This workshop will describe how this can be achieved in the EGI community.
The approaches to be implemented will be based on the work of the FedSM project, which works with EGI and NGIs PLGrid and the Finnish Grid Infrastructure to develop and introduce ITSM techniques appropriate for e-Infrastructures. The techniques proposed are aimed at achieving a set of requirements based on the international service management standard ISO/IEC 20000. These requirements are selected to reflect the needs of federated e-Infrastructures, and are tuned to the management challenges they face.
After introducing the approach and requirements, the workshop will cover plans to implement service management processes for core services of EGI.
This workshop will give operational staff context for the ITSM improvement, a general understanding of how the service management initiative supports EGI's plans for sustainability and a specific understanding of what is going to change to improve service management in EGI. The outcome of this workshop is:
- The understanding of service management
- The understanding the importance of ITSM for quality, efficiency, user-orientation and sustainability
- The awareness of the role of the FedSM project in this context
- The knowledge of the EGI general plans for change to improve service management
Impact
This workshop has two key impacts: to introduce EGI operations staff to the basic concepts needed to introduce ITSM processes for EGI core services and to explain in real terms what changes this will require for the first stage of implementation.
Through explaining these concepts and plans the workshop will show operations staff that ITSM is needed, but also that it is realistic and can be achieved in a reasonable timescale to show positive results.
In the longer term this will support better management of EGI services, which will improve customer experiences, thus making users more satisfied and helping to attract new user communities. It will also lead to opportunities for EGI operations staff such as FedSM run professional training in federated service management skills.
| URL | www.fedsm.eu |
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