The IT infrastructure library—more affectionately known as ITIL—has been around in theory for a couple of decades, but has recently gained some traction among IT shops. A framework for providing IT services that support the business, ITIL is a collection of books aimed at helping IT hone its processes for everyday activities such as problem management, capacity management and service management. As IT becomes more complex—think virtualization and service-oriented architecture—it’s natural that a vendor neutral framework like ITIL is attracting attention.

But attention is a far cry from full-scale adherence as a recent survey conducted by managed services provider Dimension Data indicates. In the survey, which queried 370 CIOs around the world, 66% of respondents said their organizations are evaluating ITIL or implementing aspects of the framework while 17% described themselves as card-carrying ITIL practitioners.

Among the 100 U.S.-based CIOs, 59% said they are dabbling in ITIL while 8% said they are big-time ITIL practitioners.

U.S. companies have consistently lagged behind their global counterparts in implementing ITIL, and that makes sense considering that ITIL originated in Europe. Still, Wes Johnston, executive vice president and COO at Dimension Data sees another dynamic at work. “Many U.S. CIOs said that ITIL is driven by grass roots initiatives,” Johnston said. Without a high-level executive sponsor—think how then-CEO Jack Welch propelled GE to adopt Six Sigma—grass roots ITIL efforts will remain just that.

Though “data center documentation” and “fun” sound like oxymorons, The Lone Sysadmin provides a humorous example for us.

As data centers continue to grow in importance within an organization, writing down the data center operating procedures becomes crucial. Having detailed, step-by-step plans for dealing with every day and rare occurrences can make your facility run more efficiently, reduce downtime and help grant some peace of mind.

But yeah, it can be boring. Unless you decide to provide references to Fight Club within. Repeat after me: “His name was Robert Paulson, his name was Robert Paulson …”

I’m writing a story right now based on a study by the Aperture Research Institute showing the majority of data center managers have poor configuration management, and they don’t trust their infrastructure management tools.

The poll shows less than a third of data center managers are implementing ITIL; 30% are working on introducing ITIL initiatives and 9% are making plans to implement ITIL. Then there were the 20% who said they were merely investigating ITIL and 12% confessed they were not familiar with it at all.

Where do you stand with ITIL adoption?

Being “green” has become such vendor-speak now, as nearly every company is touting products with green features and ability to reduce your carbon footprint.

With that being said, IBM is on its green mission as of late. It announced Project Big Green in May, which includes the investment of $1 billion into producing more energy-efficient data centers. Part of that was its revelation two weeks ago that it would consolidate 3,900 of its own distributed servers onto 30 mainframes. A big win for the mainframe, for sure, but for “green” IT? According to IBM, a yes also. Running fewer than one-hundredth the number of servers as before will drastically reduce energy costs.

And now this week at the SHARE conference in San Diego, IBM is talking about how its Tivoli monitoring software can help organizations be “green.” Really?

Let’s first go over a few of the new features in Tivoli software (there are about 22 in all), which are scheduled to be generally available by the end of the year:

• Policy-based event filtering for workload automation.
• Enhanced network operator tasks to drill into an individual device’s configuration.
• A fully ITIL-compliant solution for service desk, problem and incident management.

How can Tivoli make you “green?” Well, it does have energy management added to its monitoring software, so that companies can optimize energy use based on a policy set by the business and followed through using the software. But Al Zollar, the general manager for Tivoli, says it goes further than that.

He insists that simply having Tivoli monitor your systems can improve energy efficiency. If it can help you to consolidate workloads, put servers on standby when they’re not being used, or even show that you can toss some hardware that’s unused, then it has helped you reduce your overall energy consumption by using less CPU power.

What do you think? Can monitoring software help you become more energy efficient, or is this just more “green” vendor-speak?

The IT Skeptic says the CMDB tidal wave is actually a ripple. This blogger has called CMDB software a bloated dead elephant, among other things. Normally the phrase “IT Service Management” sends me into a narcoleptic coma, while the marketing person spends the next several minutes trying to revive me. But this Web site could change all that.

If ITIL or CMDB implementation have you in tears, this is the site for you.

From a recent blog posting: One wonders how many people “doing” CMDB are in fact putting in an asset database, or license management, or some other user-defined version of CMDB. Or how many are there where “doing” means Fred has been told to come up with something in his spare time with no budget. Or where “doing” means we bought a tool that says CMDB on the brochure but we haven’t got past implementing network alerting or incident tickets yet.

 Admittedly, recent research from SearchDataCenter.com shows increasingly more people are “doing” something with CMDB. Keep your eye out for mockery from the IT Skeptic once we publish it. I’ll be looking forward to it.

Opsware Inc. has upgraded its Server Automation System software to help in ITIL adoption, virtualization management and security automation.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has products to help IT managers automate and keep track of processes on their data center servers. It works on Windows, Linux and Unix.

The new version’s features include:

• The ability to integrate with PowerShell, a command-line scripting tool on Microsoft Windows, so that any information about a system managed by Opsware software can be viewed in PowerShell.
• Integration with Opsware’s Process Automation System to help in ITIL compliance.
• The ability to manage servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and integration with Red Hat Network to automatically download the appropriate upgrades and patches as they become available.

Here’s the full press release.