Information technology (IT) plays a a vital part in any business. It is therefore important to safeguard all your IT and data assets. The correct infrastructure management solutions will help you to keep your systems running and maximise both IT and employee productivity. There are many risks and dangers that might potentially threaten the integrity of your company’s IT, but whether it’s downtime or threats that can result in lasting financial loss, brand damage or legal liabilities – efficient infrastructure management ensures that you’ll be all systems go no matter what happens.
Part of infrastructure management is a systems engineering process that includes the maintenance of all the business’ stored data and information. This includes listing the installed software, the network addresses of the computers and the configuration of different pieces of hardware. It also means creating updates or ideal models that can be used to quickly update computers or restore them to a predefined baseline.
Configuration management software makes it easy for a system administrator to check which programs are installed and when upgrades need to be done. For example, if a user needs to run a program that is incompatible with the newest operating system, the system administrator would note this when looking at the record for that user’s computer and know not to upgrade the operating system.
As your business grows, so do your IT requirements. As dependence on IT grows, it becomes vitally important to efficiently manage and safeguard IT and data assets. Strategix Infrastructure Management solutions can help keep your systems up and running and maximize IT and employee productivity. We also assist your IT team to efficiently roll out new software solutions or upgrade existing ones.
Our Infrastructure Management solutions will assist to protect your business against downtime and threats which can result in lasting financial loss, brand damage, legal liabilities and other extremely unpleasant consequences.
Differences between hardware and software configuration management
Also known as application lifestyle management versus product lifetime management, setting the two apart is becoming increasingly complicated as software and hardware are having more and more interaction with each other. This could be because of the fact that more and more software is creeping into traditional hardware solutions, people realising that software cannot be treated simply as being part of hardware and also because, as hardware becomes more affordable, software further impacts hardware requirements.
Despite the increased synthesising between software and hardware, some fundamental differences that affect the configuration management of each remain.
- Hardware is built to last; software is designed to change.
- Hardware costs tend to be production-oriented; software costs tend to be development-oriented.
- Hardware changes are typically part-centric, while software changes are usually function centric.
- Hardware has a simpler hierarchical design and assembly with well-defined interfaces; software tends to be more complex, at least from a design perspective, with fewer standard parts, more complex interfaces and vast amounts of code.
Now, we need to look at the commonalities within configuration management in software and in hardware. and how best to approach configuration management when software and hardware are concerned.
There are a lot of commonalities between software and hardware when it comes to configuration:
- Requirements.
- Test cases design documents.
- Customer requests.
- User documentation.
- Problem reports.
- Engineering activities and requests.
- Waivers and deviations.
- Item hierarchies.
- Production/build.
- Impact analysis.
- Change packages/ECNs.
- Test results.
- As-designed and as-built baselines.
These elements are quite similar in both disciplines, but also have many differences.
Taking the above into consideration, it becomes clear that a two-prong approach in configuration management is needed to accommodate both the differences and the similarities between the two. For example, let’s look at problem reports.
The key is to be able to reproduce a problem based on the problem report itself. Software problem reports are virtually always functional in nature: “The feature doesn’t work the way it should”, e.g. a display may have more bad pixels per unit than specified. With hardware, “feature” is usually replaced with “specification”.
As your business grows, so do your IT requirements. As dependence on IT grows, it becomes vitally important to efficiently manage and safeguard IT and data assets. Strategix Infrastructure Management solutions can help keep your systems up and running and maximize IT and employee productivity. We also assist your IT team to efficiently roll out new software solutions or upgrade existing ones.
Our Infrastructure Management solutions will assist to protect your business against downtime and threats which can result in lasting financial loss, brand damage, legal liabilities and other extremely unpleasant consequences.
Hardware problems are generally about a part; they’re part-centric. They might be initially described functionally, but a quick diagnosis can lead you to a defective part.
For software, the problems are almost always functional and the diagnosis can lead you to anything from finding a typo in the software, discovering a problem in the design, stumbling on a logic issue or misunderstanding the interface semantics. There are numerous ways to go about fixing these problems, and so there is no defective part, just a defective function.
So, from a configuration management perspective there are many differences between software and hardware configuration management. Consider how we track the problem and its resolution. In hardware, you may track the problem against the defective part; in software, you do this against the generic functional category. Your process must allow you to deal with hundreds or thousands of software problems each month. You would likely have difficultly processing that many hardware changes.
It is possible to use the same or at least a closely intertwined configuration management solution for both. Just remember that whereas you may try to attain zero-defect hardware, your goal in software will be to move from 1 000s to 100s to dozens of problems per million lines of code per month.
CONTACT STRATEGIX FOR ASSISTANCE WITH THE FOLLOWING:
- Monitoring and management of network, server, storage and user devices, including proactive management of threatening activities, capacity issues and other systems and network management services.
- Hardware and configuration management including operating systems and related license management
- Application software management
- Security management
- Automated backup and restore management services
