Operational Support Services

HPE DC – OSS provides HPE best practices for operating on-premise infrastructure by delivering 24x7 remote infrastructure monitoring and management services.

The service addresses the service operations stage of the IT service lifecycle. It includes infrastructure such as eligible servers, storage, and networking devices. The service also covers the operating system as well as hypervisor, backup and restore, and security. These remote infrastructure and monitoring services may include the following:

• Reporting of Wintel server incidents (operating system tuning, firmware upgrades, etc.), Hyper-V, and blade enclosures
• Device and resource monitoring by pre-established alerts
• Monitor capacity (against thresholds)
• SAN storage provisioning—allocate, de-allocate, and create LUNs
• NAS storage provisioning—create/delete volume, manage quota, and manage share NFS and CIFS
• Provide 24x7 monitoring support for backups
• Open tickets in HPE IT Operation Center for any missed/failed backups
• Security event logging

DC – OSS is designed according to Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) industry standards, HPE’s best practices, and standardized service-level objectives, which will be mutually agreed upon and set forth in the SOW. Through the use of HPE’s remote connectivity management tools, HPE will establish and maintain access to enable 24x7 remote monitoring on eligible products by a centralized IT Operation Center that includes access to a wide range of expertise to support HPE OSS.

Core features

Core features

IT Operation Center

HPE utilizes an IT Operation Center to respond to in-scope inquiries, service requests, and reports of incidents submitted by the Customer’s organization through authorized technical representatives as detailed in the SOW. The monitoring activity (tooling-based approach) is provided 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.* The service currently holds ISO certification for security (ISO/IEC 27001).

Services provided

IT Operation Center provides the following:

• A 24x7 manned HPE IT Operation Center
• Remote monitoring of physical and virtualized environments focused on health, capacity, utilization, and performance as outlined in the SOW
• Supported service domains that include servers (legacy and x86 based), storage, networking, operating systems (legacy, Linux, and Windows®), hypervisors, backup and batch management, and security
• Delivery model and processes aligned with ITIL activities based upon service levels outlined in the SOW

Event Management

• Event management will be defined in the SOW and covers incidents, problems, and change requests. All events are managed end to end by the IT Operation Center throughout the entire cycle.
• Events include daily routine procedures and system administration services (i.e., installation, upgrade, troubleshooting, resource provisioning, capacity reporting, and more). The service covers various aspects related to the physical and virtual environment.

Services provided

Events handled by the service may include:

• Incidents: These are end-to-end case management, including monitoring, logging, closure, and action items follow-up with service-level compliance.
• Problems: Problem management focuses on identifying opportunities to improve the quality, stability, and manageability of the supported environment(s) and makes recommendations for potential improvement (Continuous Service Improvement). Those recommendations are presented in the form of change requests.
• Changes: The purpose of Change Management is to estimate the risks, implications, charges, and necessary measures of possible changes in scope in such a way that changes are fully evaluated. With HPE as a permanent member of the Change Advisory Board, the HPE account team may help facilitate a request for change (RFC), so that it can be deployed in a planned and well-prepared manner in accordance with the Change Management process in the SOW.

Relationship Management

HPE Datacenter Care service Relationship Management features are supplemented to include OSS. As a result, the assigned account team provided with HPE DC will also address the types of OSS activities described below as part of the regularly scheduled HPE DC account reviews. The goal of the account team and these reviews is to understand the Customer’s business and IT objectives, as well as to provide advice on how these needs may be met.

Services provided

The role of the assigned account team is extended when DC – OSS is deployed to facilitate and govern the activities on different layers (Operational, Tactical, and Strategic). Accordingly, these categorized activities will be included as part of the underlying HPE DC support reviews:

• Operational: disruptive incidents, changes and problems, operational improvement processes, approaching events, ongoing progress, and input for the tactical layer
• Tactical: service reports, improvement processes, user satisfaction, annual plans, annual evaluation, and recommendations for the strategic layer
• Strategic: annual plan, evaluation, SLAs, business-IT developments, and change processes

Transition phase

A transition phase will be completed before HPE is able to deliver remote monitoring and administration services for the infrastructure in scope. The purpose of this phase is to prepare both organizations, the Customer’s and HPE’s delivery team, for the takeover of the operational services, as well as validate assumptions and document existing processes. The transition phase and associated activities will be defined in the SOW.

Services provided

Transition-related services typically include the following activities:

• Exchange required Customer environment information (Joint Verification)
• Formulation of an action plan containing customized transition project from Current Mode of Operation (CMO) to Future Mode of Operation (FMO)
• Testing of the support environment(s) against the acceptance criteria
• Transfer and verification of documentation
• Installation and configuration of the connection and tooling for remote support
• Explanation of HPE or approved subcontractor’s working method
• Introduction of HPE or approved subcontractor’s contacts
• Formulation of daily agreed-upon procedures

Monitor, operate and administer

DC – OSS provides three support level tiers for OSS-covered services designed to allow flexibility in meeting the dynamic needs across the services delivered by the IT organization: Examples are noted below by service level.

• Monitor: Basic monitoring, health checks, report generation, escalation of events
• Operate: Standard remediation, Incident management, change management, backup and restore
• Administrate: Root Cause Analysis, Problem Management, Performance and Capacity Management

Services provided

Customers will be able to choose from the three support level tiers, or select a mix of tiers, for different layers of the infrastructure and/or different system/services.

Service-level objectives are based upon enabling customer KPIs. Based upon the scope of the OSS, the service-level objectives will be developed and mutually agreed upon in the SOW. Service levels are validated as part of the transition phase.

Not all service-level options shown in the examples that follow are available on all products.

OSS service exclusions

The following are excluded from HPE DC - OSS:

• Managed or hosted services that include any combination (or all) of professional services and product support, as they relate to the ongoing management of computing and storage resources (e.g., application monitoring, database management system (DBMS) monitoring and management, and middleware application monitoring and management)
• Any middleware and applications, including any application installation, configuration, and troubleshooting
• Vendor management and coordination
• Management or transformation of business processes
• Design/redesign of infrastructure or architecture or policies