Study on supporting technology for operational procedure design of IT systems in cloud-era datacenters

Datacenters are now widely used, and their sizes are increasing due to the rapid spread of cloud computing. Meanwhile, the cost of IT-system operations occupies 60% of the total cost in a datacenter. So far, improving operations has been focused on automating operations with operation management middleware. However, designing operational procedures, including composing and modifying operational manuals and checklists, is also a big issue since it is time consuming. Supporting technology that improves the efficiency of IT-system operational procedure design has been studied by focusing on the commonly used procedural parts. Existing checklists were analyzed to extract the iterated patterns of the procedures in order to evaluate the technology. The evaluation results showed that common operations such as the ones on management middleware and the remote log-in were extracted as procedural parts. The number of checklist composition steps was reduced by 45% on average and that of the modification steps was reduced by 87% on average by using these procedural parts. A prototyping tool was developed, and the checklists of a sample system different from the analyzed one were implemented on the tool.