IT Management 2.0

Rise of the Machines

The movie “The Terminator” paints a picture of computers and automation

Don't Panic: Machines and Automation Don't Mean Termination

 as a bad thing.  But nothing can be further from the truth…Unlike the bleak future portrayed in the movie, one thing is becoming perfectly clear:  machines do things faster, more efficiently, and with fewer mistakes.  And that’s good news - especially when you’re managing IT resources.

A Brief History

From the first time our ancestors wrapped their opposable thumbs around a stick and used it for increased leverage, reach or impact - humans have been figuring out how to build machines to make life easier.  Some will claim to miss the “good old days” but there’s a reason why everyone eventually ends up adopting forms of automation that are effective.  The most successful machines are the ones that introduce a fundamentally different way of doing things.  This is true even when it takes a long time for people to discover those new ways of doing things. 

For instance, the first cars were literally “horseless carriages.”  They looked just like a normal carriage, but instead of a horse, they had a motor with a chain driving the rear wheels.  Since you couldn’t steer the motor like you could a horse, the early cars adapted the tiller concept from a boat.  The tiller was pretty quickly swapped for a new feature - the steering wheel.  However, it took a long while for the “body-on-frame” construction technique of horse drawn carriages to give way to the more effective monocoque construction with its low weight and low center of gravity.  Computer systems, and how we build them, are no different.

A New Revolution:  Automating Computer Systems

When RAID storage arrays became the dominant storage approach, IT organizations pretty quickly stopped trying to manage and control the low-level formatting of the disks.  However, it took a long time for those same IT organizations to stop freaking out about where exactly on the disk their LUNs were located.  Honestly, it also took array manufacturers a while to figure out that striping everything to make all I/O average was not what people were looking for.  Eventually, vendors figured out that it really was better to tell the array what the I/O requirements where and let the array decide where to place the data (not coincidentally, EMC’s FAST technology takes this to a whole new level).

The Next Revolution:  Unified Computer Platforms

Unified platforms (those that combine network, storage and compute elements) represent another opportunity for doing things differently.  There are some benefits to be gained from the hardware integration alone - just like there were benefits from replacing a horse with a motor.  There are further benefits to be gained by using and automating the provisioning capabilities of the platform.  For instance, you can use software to logically configure a blade with the needed resources when it’s required rather than designing and procuring a physical server.

It’s only when you rethink your overall process of managing capacity and allocation of that capacity that you can truly achieve exponential gains in efficiency and agility.  To that end, EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0is introducing a service-driven automation approach to managing and provisioning capacity leveraging the VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform.  It allows you to “grade” your Vblock resources according to the services you want to offer, then provisions from the infrastructure according to the requirements you specify.  Not only does this execute provisioning faster and with fewer errors, it reduces the amount of time figuring out what to provision in the first place.

Wrapping it Up

As you take your journey to the next-generation of the computing infrastructure, you should embrace the revolution taking place and not be put off.  The reality is not portrayed by movies like The Terminator.  The fact of the matter is, this next-generation of automation is going to make your lives better.

And as you approach this next-generation, you really have to ask yourself - do you want a tiller, or a steering wheel?  Do you want to trade time spent executing tasks for time spent micro-managing provision decisions?  Or would you like to spend your time on more productive things like managing resource capacity. 

Whatever you do, make sure you don’t try to manage your next-generation infrastructure with an outdated approach to automation.

I’d love to know what you think.  Let’s keep the conversation going!!!

I’ll be back,

Phil

Change and Configuration, Cloud, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Population, Data Center Automation and Compliance, Dependency Mapping, Network Management, Private Cloud, Service Management, Service Providers, Storage Resource Management (SRM), Virtualization Management EMC, Ionix, Ionix UIM, VCE, VMworld

Changing the Way IT Manages Change

Bob Dylan said it best:  “The times, they are a changin’.  While he may not have been talking about virtualization (hey, you never know), the saying rings true nonetheless.

There’s no question that virtualization has redefined IT.  In his blog, Chuck Hollis outlines a comprehensive discussion on the forces at work with virtualization and how it’s changing the face of information.  If virtualization In a physical, environment, an application or server team typically puts in a request to the storage team for new capacity to meet the needs of a new application installed on one or more physical servers.  They usually receive some guidance or have their own insight into the service-level requirements, and then provision storage in accordance with those requirements.  Once the capacity is provisioned and configuration best-practices validated, the configuration usually doesn’t change all that much.

Virtualization Changes Everything

is changing everything, it’s also going to change the way things are managed.  Take storage management. 

With virtualization, it’s truly a whole new ballgame.  Capacity is often allocated to an ESX server (with VMware) or cluster of ESX servers in large chunks called “datastores.”  The application or VMware team then allocates capacity to meet the needs of new applications.  This provides a more versatile environment where compute and storage resources are allocated on demand.  What used to take a day or two can now be performed in a matter of minutes.  By moving the allocation of storage for each new application from the storage team to the application for VMware team, the end-to-end process of provisioning is significantly streamlined.

But this also introduces new challenges to the storage team.  They often lose sight into how capacity is being applied to new applications and if the best-practices required to ensure service levels are being met.  In addition, technologies like VMotion and Storage VMotion enable the VMware or application team to dynamically move storage to meet changing business conditions. 

This places an increased burden on the storage team to ensure the configuration best-practices are met in order to consistently meet service levels.

Harnessing Change in Virtualization

A recent EMC survey found that approximately 70% of its customers use Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools like Ionix ControlCenter to visually collect and validate configuration information when planning and executing changes to their storage environment.  Another 15% use automated tools ranging from home-grown solutions, to Storage Area Network (SAN) vendor applications, to SRM tools.  And 15% use just trial-and-error. 

A separate EMC survey found that over 50% of its customers still use spreadsheets to record changes to their environment!!!  These manual processes have proven to be time-consuming and error-prone.  It’s no wonder that Enterprise Strategy Group found that more than 50% of all SAN outages are due to improper configuration.

The more dynamic and fluid environment introduced by virtualization creates a critical “tipping point” where manual processes for validating compliance with configuration best-practices begin to break down.  What is required is an automated method of end-to-end discovery and best-practice validation.

With this in mind, EMC recently introduced EMC Ionix Storage Configuration Advisor 2.0.  The solution leverages agentless technology to discover the end-to-end configuration of the storage infrastructure.  It discovers all physical and logical relationships from virtual guest to target LUN validating compliance with industry or your own best-practices.  It tracks policy compliance at the guest level to help ensure application service levels are met as VMotion and Storage VMotion move resources to meet changing business conditions.

Ionix Storage Configuration Advisor is one of a new set of tools helping customers harness the high rate of change in virtualized environments.  The solution gives customers an automated tool to help maintain visibility and control as virtualization changes the way your organization manages changes to the storage environment.  As virtualization continues to change the face of the data center and companies accelerate their journey to the private cloud, automated change management solutions will grow in importance.  It will be tools like Ionix that help companies get a handle on these changes.

Dylan was right about the changing times.  There will always be change.  It’s how we prepare for and deal with these changes that will determine whether or not we can harness the power that virtualization brings.  Who knew Bob Dylan knew so much about storage????

Would love to know what you think.  Please post your comments so we can keep this conversation going!!!

Kevin

Change and Configuration, Virtualization Management Configuration Management, EMC, Ionix, Storage Management, Vmotion, VMware

Rock Solid Foundation

Real-estate developers, architects, and builders all know that when you’re looking to construct something in a challenging location or environment, you need to make sure you have a rock-solid foundation on which to build.  Anything less, and you’re setting yourself up for big problems down the road.

The same holds true for IT:  As you make the transition from pure physical computing  environments to virtualized IT infrastructure — and eventually to private cloud – you need a solid foundation on which to build.  Increasingly, it’s apparent that foundation is your network.  If your network fails or is impacted, services go down, the infrastructure cannot stay virtualized, and cloud environments start to dissipate.

The problem is, in the IT realm, developers, architects, and builders aren’t that interested in helping you make sure there’s a solid foundation in place for all the neat new architectures, services, and applications.  In fact, they’re more likely already building into their plans and models certain assumptions about network availability, performance, and compliance.  And those assumptions may not mesh well with reality - and what you can deliver and guarantee - in network and IT operations.

Enter Management

Effectively monitoring and managing your IT environment - that is,

Virtualization: It takes a solid foundation

proactively identifying and responding to problems and properly managing configuration and change so these processes don’t create unintended problems for - can significantly impact quality of service, efficiency and costs.  As virtualization deployments become more pervasive and IT complexity continues to increase, the burden of monitoring  and management must shift away from people and manual processes and into automated analytical systems.

Leveraging the power of automation to ensure your network is a strategic business asset - and not a liability to the business - has been EMC’s approach to management with EMC Ionix.  Building on that, we’ve made a set of announcements recently that highlight recent enhancements to our flagship IT infrastructure monitoring an analysis portfolio.  Aimed at helping customers solidify their “foundations” so the network can seamlessly and effectively support and enable current business operations as well as future business and IT models and architectures, these enhancements include:

• Integrated Network Configuration, Change and Compliance and Operations Management:  Although they differ on their exact percentages, all major IT analyst firms concur that the vast majority of IT service and network outages are caused by misconfigurations.  So, it should come as no surprise that when something goes wrong, the first troubleshooting question asked tends to be:  “what changed.”  As such, correlation of root-cause analysis, business impact, and network change events is essential.  That’s why our recent integration of our Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence and Ionix Network Configuration Management (formerly Voyence) is so key.
• Expanded Virtualization Support:  Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence’s automated root-cause analysis and impact assessment has expanded to now include a range of virtual infrastructures.  This solution now automatically discovers VMware ESX Servers or Microsoft Hyper-V Servers, maps their relationships to virtual machines and the rest of the infrastructure, and continuously monitors their availability and performance.  That simplifies virtual management complexities and lets you holistically manage virtualized infrastructures across domains.  Additionally, the newest release enables the solution to be deployed on virtual machines.
• Next-Generation Performance and Analytics Management:  Through key partnerships, Ionix now provides performance monitoring and correlation of performance events and alerts, which enhance our existing availability monitoring and correlation.  The result:  you can pinpoint the root-cause of availability and performance issues in an integrated fashion that gives the information you need to restore affected systems and services, and allows you to quickly determine business impact.

Analysts Agree

Enterprise Management Associates Research Director Jim Frey agrees that effective network and IT infrastructure management remains a big hurdle to ensuring value from the deployment of new IT models: 

 ”As companies continue to virtualize IT infrastructures, they are excited by the cost efficiency and agility this model may bring.  The real roadblock is ‘how are we going to manage this new infrastructure?’  To smooth the virtualization transition and truly achieve its potential advantages, they need automated IT management solutions that enable them to discover all of the dynamic elements and relationship while also rapidly identifying and resolving the root-cause of failures and degradations.  With EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, EMC is taking a major step forward in helping customers achieve this goal.”

I’d love to hear what you think about the foundational importance of the network.  Do you agree with me that the window for the “old school” way of network and infrastructure management is closing fast?  I’ve started the ball rolling here.  Please post your thoughts, ideas and comments so we can keep this conversation going.

Brian

Change and Configuration, Virtualization Management EMC, EMC World, Ionix, Network Configuration Management, Network Management, Virtualization, Virtualization Management, VMware

At EMC, we firmly believe that with EMC Ionix Network Configuration Manger, we’ve

Ionix NCM - Best of the Best

 got the best automated network change, configuration, and compliance (NCCM) solution in the business.

Sure, you could make the case that we’re biased…But we’re not alone in our assessment…

Gartner NCCM MarketScope

Recently, IT research industry leader Gartner released its MarketScope report for Network Configuration and Change Management.  In this report — which evaluates the market at and for a specific time, analyzing how certain vendors measure against Gartner’s criteria for that marketplace

EMC received a “Strong Positive” rating.  That’s the highest possible vendor rating Gartner makes in a MarketScope report.  You can view a copy of the report here.

According to Gartner’s report:  “NCCM has primarily been a labor-intensive, manual process involving remote access to individual devices and typing commands into vendor-specific command line interfaces that are fraught with the possibility for human error, or creating homegrown scripts to ease retyping requirements.  With its ‘just get it running’ approach, the enterprise network operations team gave little consideration to rigorous configuration and change management, compliance audit or disaster recovery rollback processes when executing network configuration solutions, although they were often the root-case of network issues.  A new generation of NCCM vendors have created tools that operate in multi-vendor environments, enable automated configuration management and bring more-rigorous adherence to the change management process, as well as compliance audit capability.”

Going Deeper

In addition to Gartner’s analysis, why else is NCCM important?  Simply put, network availability and reliability is fast shifting from a long-term goal to an expected operating assumption.  Business leaders and end-users are increasingly expecting the same levels of network access and availability that they’ve come to expect from the delivery of basic electrical or phone service.  Virtualization, cloud computing, and unified infrastructures all are predicated on the assumption that a viable, available, easy configurable, compliant network environment exists and can be easily maintained.

In short, in a relative blink-of-an-eye, utility-like expectations have been set for the network and built into next-generation IT infrastructures and models.  As the bar is raised even higher for network operations, effective and efficient NCCM becomes more critical than ever to ensuring that these increased expectations and business needs can be met.  And with close to three out of every four network-related outages caused by misconfiguration, getting NCCM “right” is a great way for network operations to yield high-visibility (i.e., much less downtime) and high impact (i.e., fewer outages mean much greater availability) results to the business.

Let me Hear It!

I’d love to hear what you think about the value of NCCM.  Got any good ROI or value stories around NCCM?  Share ‘em, please.  I’ve got the ball rolling with this blog entry;  please post your thoughts, ideas, comments so we can keep this conversation going…

Brian Lett

Change and Configuration EMC, Gartner, Ionix, NCCM, Network Configuration Management, Private Cloud