What is a Tideway Foundation Baseline?

  by Charles Rattray | 26 Nov 2008 | Permalink |

I’ve been asked this question many times recently and thought I’d add a note here to clarify. A baseline from a Tideway perspective is two things: a concept and a tangible result.

What does this mean?

In terms of a concept a baseline is a snapshot of the configuration which is validated and locked. It is also a verification of the current configuration. What this means conceptually is that by having established a baseline you can spot gaps or variations to the last known state or baseline.

Nice theory, but often considered hard to do and repeat in many IT environments. To be effective, baselines must be deliverable quickly and be repeatable without incurring high data collection costs and without scrimping on data quality.

With Tideway Foundation (TWF) baselines are very easy to generate and simple to repeat. Baselines can also be established for different information needs and some examples are given below.

Server inventory and CPU count: This level of baseline is useful as a starting point for establishing what you have when negotiating service contracts, for example.

Detailed Inventory of Servers and Software: useful when establishing or redefining IT strategy, searching for areas of technology risk or identifying where further cost control may be beneficial – a real area of value when responding to the current economic climate and taking cost out of IT. This level of baseline is also equally useful in establishing whether you have the right technology to support the business.

In terms of spotting the gaps, a detailed inventory of servers and software baseline makes an ideal starting point, and the automatically discovered information can be used to feed data center move projects, disaster recovery planning and testing, mapping power and BTU consumption to technology, planning for consolidation, standardization and virtualization, assessing EOL/EOS scenarios, and so on,

Actual configuration data: When undergoing internal IT reviews or external SAS-70 audits, you may have to prove that you know your IT configuration, and that you have control over changes in the environment. You may also need to understand the type of changes and their frequency in order to put in place the correct level of control and governance across IT.

Application Dependency Maps: A baseline of Application Dependency Maps will underpin application stabilization, or the analysis required to support a move toward shared IT services, or indeed provide a starting point in planning which business IT services to keep in a merger and acquisition scenario.

These are just a small subset of possible baselines uses. Tideway delivers baselines through a packaged service approach, often delivering the results during the first few weeks of the engagement and enabling the customer to spot changes to the baseline while they continue to benefit from using Tideway Foundation. Tideway Foundation dashboards then make reviewing the summary baseline information a simple task while facilitating a launch point for a deep dive into the underlying data.

The key point to remember about Tideway Foundation baselines is that the package service approach is results driven. They are delivered quickly and provide a repeatable IT baseline solution without incurring those high data collection costs and without scrimping on data quality.