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

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In Part I  of this blog, we began to tackle the issue of infrastructure management solutions, their importance to service providers - especially in the era of cloud services.   As we stated in the first post:

The point is that new services are essential to help all service providers overcome shrinking revenues and compete effectively.  Telco providers, in particular, need to look to new services to bolster their legacy network income.

As always, the issue is helping customers overcome the challenges associated with launching new services and managing this ever-expanding

The Big Question: Service Providers and the Cloud

 and increasingly complexIT infrastructure.  Now we’ll look at how EMC Ionix approaches the situation and offers a solution for service providers.

EMC Ionix Can Help

1. EMC Ionix Eliminates Errors:  Automation allows service providers to remove the manual process from their day-to-day activities as they are both error-prone and time-consuming.  It will help them eliminate the cost of manually making the relationships between components on network and entire service infrastructure, including servers, applications and storage.  This becomes even more important within a growing and highly dynamic infrastructure.  Automation can save up to 70% of the time to isolate the problems, and these resources can then be re-deployed from fire-fighting to supporting the business.
2. EMC Ionix Accelerates Infrastructure Management:  By automating infrastructure discovery and problem identification, service providers can reduce the length of many management tasks by upwards of 90%.  Having a holistic approach to discovery, configuration management and fault management dramatically speeds finding and fixing problems on the infrastructure.  And by being able to execute day-to-day changes on the infrastructure, service providers are able to deliver new services much more quickly and easily.
3. EMC Ionix Optimizes Infrastructure:  Service Providers are able to optimize their infrastructures by avoiding unnecessary outages and service downtime due to mis-configurations and unplanned changes in their environment.  Manual change management causes more than 80% of infrastructure problems, so it’s essential to prevent configuration errors, such as mis-typing or interoperability issues by validating changes before execution.  In addition, it allows them to run “what-if” scenarios to understand what impact a particular configuration change might have on the infrastructure.
4. EMC Ionix Consolidates Silos:  By having a management platform that can work across silos, service providers are able to consolidate toolsets for server, network, storage and application configurations to avoid finger-pointing and a swivel-chair management style.  Proactive fault management allows benchmarking of normal network behavior so that action can be taken if it deviates from the norm.  In addition, the information will be useful to help different entities within the service provider to collaborate together, see their impact and make support handover easier.
5. EMC Ionix Helps in Compliance with Internal/External Regulations:  Finally, automated configuration checking will allow the service provider to ensure their infrastructure is in compliance with both their own IT policies but also with regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, and SOX.  It allows them to improve security by having automatic policy

Participate and See For Yourself

Hopefully by now you have a better idea about infrastructure management and its importance to service providers - especially in the era of the cloud.  But don’t just believe us.  We have some great customer testimonials from such companies as Swisscom and Interoute to better illustrate our point.  In addition, we’re opening up to service providers to tell us what they think.  If you’re a European service provider, we encourage you to take our survey here.

Additionally, I’d love to hear what you think.  Please feel free to send comments and feedback.

Suhela

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EMC Ionix: Taking Cisco Live by Storm

 buffet and how it relates to IT management (not as much of  a stretch as you might think).  We discussed the importance of getting a lay of the land when managing your IT environment and how automated discovery can go a long way to ensure critical information is always accurate and up-to-date.  Now let’s take this one step further.

First Things First

The Vegas buffet dining experience presents you with a major dilemma - and no, I’m not referring to whether or not you remembered to wear the pants with the expandable waistband!  The number of options can be overwhelming.  In short, you have to prioritize.  If, like me, you’re trying to eat healthy, your best strategy is to put those “better” dining choices at the top of your list.  For me, it meant starting each breakfast buffet with a full plate of fresh fruit and oatmeal.  If I told myself I could eat the same amount of fruit and oatmeal after eating other (less healthy) options.  I either would not have eaten the right amount or not gotten to it all.

IT Management Lessons

Much like prioritizing at the breakfast buffet, FIFO (first-in, first-out) for critical processes such as problem and incident management is a recipe for disaster.  Just because a network printer stopped responding before the order entry system went down doesn’t mean that the printer gets addressed first.  If you haven’t already done so, think about how you can add a level of business-impact to your triage process.

Just because you can do something doesn’ t mean you should be doing it.  Again, just because you can pick the unhealthy option doesn’t mean it’s the right answer.  Focus management attention on those items that either need significant improvement or can yield big results fast.  For many organizations, change, configuration, and compliance management still represents a large opportunity to do both.

Solve Your Problems Before They Have a Major Impact

This morning, one of the “fixtures” of any Vegas breakfast buffet - the cooked-to-order omelette station - had a problem.  No customers “noticed” when things were going smoothly at the station, but they all noticed when the line built quickly, omelettes weren’t being served and new orders weren’t being taken.

For some reason, the burner being used stopped working.  The “service” that was custom omelettes was broken.  Then, a very interesting thing happened: an immediate assessment was made by a top-level person, the burner was swapped out with a new one, and the omelette station was back in business again - just like that.

IT Management Lessons

Much like the top-level person who fixed the omelette station, you need a trusted, top-level monitoring system that can filter out the static (usually tangenital, symptomatic event messages) and serve as your compass pointing you exactly to what’s wrong so you can put the right person on the right problem right away.  Automated root-cause analysis can do just that.

Service impacts will occur.  The IT management omlette station will sometimes be broken.  That’s a given.  What you can influence is your response to problems and incidents.  In the omlette example, the service impact was minimal because the system authoratively provided the action needed to resstore service.  But it could have gotten much worse if a non-integrated, serial, one-off approach was taken. 

Someone could have checked the natural gas supply.  Someone else could have checked the supply line.  Another person than could have checked the burner jet for clogs.  But they all would have said “nothing wrong here” and failed to restore service because a crack in the center part of the burner was at fault. 

Now, think about about how you would handle a similar situation in IT operations:  Are you more apt to serially send out domain-specific staff to check on things that might be the root-cause.  Or seek guidance from an intelligent monitoring system.  I’d opt for the latter - as long as it can be easily automated and aligned to the business process IT is supporting and enabling.

Wrapping it Up

I could keep going - but, hey, I’ve got buffets to conquer!  Time to throw things over to you.  Do you like my analogy (didn’t think I could do it, did you?)  What about the lessons derived?  Are they right?  Did I miss something big?

Post a comment and let me know!

Brian

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The Vegas Buffet and IT management: Believe it or not, there are parallels

like never more than two minutes pass before someone comes by the booth, wants to talk about their IT management challenges, seeks information, or attends a theater presentation.

The Magic of the Buffet

One secret I learned long ago to help ensure I have enough stamina to make it through the eight-hour days is to have a really good breakfast in the morning.  It puts enough fuel in my tank to ensure I can last the day.  As such, that puts the breakfast buffet at my hotel a high priority.

Now, I won’t bore you with a complete list of the food options - this isn’t a dining blog, after all.  But for whatever reason, the muse that is the inspiration based on observation visited me at that buffet.  And I kept connecting the dots for me between the buffet and IT management.

That’s right:  IT management - probably the last thing you’d expect to find parallels to at a Vegas-style buffet.  But they’re very much there.  There are a lot of them and if I spent more time pondering it, I’d probably think of more than just these.

You Need a Lay of the Land

As every buffet veteran knows, the first thing to do is not pick up a plate right away start loading up on the first food encountered.  That’s a rookie mistake.  Veterans know to first canvass the entire buffet area - end-to-end and thoroughly - to see what food options are available.  And where the lines might be to avoid, before even thinking about grabbing a plate.  If you don’t do this, you could well miss out having enough room in your stomach for one of the better food options.

I was somewhat guilty the first day.  I did go around and look at everything first.  But I found it surprising that I did not come across donuts or muffins or pastries.  In my mind, I made the assumption that a purposeful decision was made not to offer these less healthy options.  It turns out these bakary items were just hiding in plain sight albeit in a separate, dimly lit section.

IT Management Lessons: Observe

OK, so here it goes.  Let’s link the Vegas buffet to IT management (didn’t think I’d ever get this this, did you?).  It turns out that effective IT management starts with having accurate, up-to-date information about the environment being managed.  Just like taking the time to browse all the buffet options before starting to take food, you should have a complete picture of your environment.  Once you’ve got your baseline, there’s a standard against which you can measure and track (which is important for critical processes such as change, configuration, and compliance management).

Even if you think you’ve got it all covered, you probably don’t.  Just like I missed the donuts, you can easily miss elements of your IT environment (such as end-user-installed wireless access points, rogue servers or open ports).  This is especially true if your process involves some steps of manual information gathering.

Automated discovery can go a long way here, helping provide an accurate baseline of your IT environment, and then help ensure that “go-to” information is accurate and up-to-date.  Given the ever-increasing pace of change in the IT environment - and its expected, almost-ridiculous acceleration as next-generation IT models (such as fully virtualized and private cloud infrastructures) are deployed - automated discovery has quickly moved from the nice-to-have column to a mandatory part of any good infrastructure management tool-set.

OK all this talk of IT management is making me hungry.  Time to head off to the buffet.  In part II tomorrow, I’ll cover the importance of prioritization and the need to resolve potential issues quickly (for both IT mangement and the buffet of course!)

I would like to know what you think.  Please leave a comment and let me know…

Brian

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The countdown is over:  Cisco Live is now if full swing.  This will be my third straight year attending this conference.  Although the venue has changed, the thrust of the conference has remained predominantly on networking.

More than any previous year, I think that’s going to change dramatically for two big reasons:

• Strong interest in Cisco UCS and its compute capabilities brings a whole new “server-oriented” persona to this event that by and large wasn’t there in previous years.
• Unified platforms like Vblocks - which unify network, compute, and storage resources in one package - are now real and in production, amplifying that same “UCS effect” of bringing new people and interest to the event.

Registration numbers back that up.  Cisco says that year over year, overall attendance should increase by 40 percent, and the number of high-level IT execs is expected to jump by more than 33 percent.

Overall, I think we’ll see the embrace of more of a data center focus at Cisco Live - without necessarily shifting the emphasis away from the event’s traditional networking base.

Things I’ll be watching for and asking about:

• Do network operations and engineering teams believe they have a mature enough infrastructure management “foundation” on which to build a next-generation architecture like a private cloud?
• How will cloud computing plans impact current and near-term operations?  For example, will people be curtailing point tool acquisitions or adding a requirement that management tools must be able to port their value into supporting and enabling new, next-generation architectures like private clouds?
• Are people sensing an increase in end-user expectation of the network as a utility (and the service-related expectations associated with that perception) on par with “basic” utilities, like electricity, water and telephone dial tone?
• What management challenges need to be solved today before one can go ahead with increasing their percentage of IT environments virtualized and planning for delivering infrastructure as a service that leverages a private cloud infrastructure (and potentially public or hybrid clouds)?

I’ll also be supporting the EMC booth (#1671) in the World of Solutions, being available as a resource for all things EMC Ionix.  Look for my EMC colleagues and myself at something looks a lot like the rendering to the right- with a lot of people and activity centered around enabling all three phases of

Live from Cisco Live: EMC Ionix!!

the Journey to the Private Cloud!

I’ll be making these presentations in the booth throughout the week:

• Eliminate the War Room (Network Operations and Engineering Command and Control)
• How You Can Regain Control over Network Change

For more specific details on these, come by for a schedule of all of EMC’s presentations, or simply follow the “heads-up” Tweets posted on Twitter accounts @brianlett and @emcionix.

Expect to hear a lot more from me during the week - here at the blog, as well as via Twitter, and maybe some other channels - as Cisco Live unfolds.  Definitely stop by the booth and let me know you saw this post, and what you think.  A direct message (DM) via Twitter would be great too - I’d be glad to “Tweet-Up” somewhere.

Do you agree with my assessment that the attendee makeup and vibe - and overall conference tone - is going to be a lot different this year?  What about those questions I have in mind?  Are they the right ones?  Have I missed anything?  Post a response and let me know.

Brian

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Service Providers Looking Towards the Cloud

in the era of cloud services?  The short answer is:  “Very” - but that would make for a very boring blog post, wouldn’t it?

The telco and service provider sectors are once again at the forefront of technological change, all driven by new business and consumption models.  Fixed, mobile and managed service providers (MSP) alike stand to gain from the offering of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) or enterprise services, such as cloud computing.

Telco service providers are well poised to profit, as they have the skills and often the all-IP infrastructure in place to deliver high-quality IP-based applications and services.

At EMC, we recent examined the new challenges, technologies and market trands in the service provider sector.  You can read this EMC perspective for yourself here.

The point is that new services are essential to help all service providers overcome shrinking revenues and compete effectively.  Telco providers, in particular, need to look to new services to bolster their legacy network income. 

But launching new services is a resource-intensive activity and network operation centers (NOC) have to balance the business demand for new services with their own shrinking budgets.  For example, there is a major opportunity for telcos to sell managed security services along with network connectivity to their customers’ branch sites where there are few in-house IT or security skills.

Unfortunately, these opportunities come at a price.  The problem is one of complexity:  as the network becomes more dynamic, service providers have seen their management challenge increase exponentially.  There are more devices, more vendors and more technologies to manage.  Instead of developing new products, the NOC team spends all its time fire-fighting network problems.  In fact, in our experience of working with operators, we’ve found that 70% of their budgets are spend on maintenance and only 30% on launching new services.

But this is nothing new.  Our customers have been struggling with the challenges of managing distributed, complex and even virtual IT infrastructures for decades.  When we first hit the European market with SMARTS in 2000, and since our acquisition by EMC in 2005, we have continued to help our customers find root-cause problems, business and service impact of the faults, mis-configuration and more across the entire IT infrastructure.

Leading the way is EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence - based on our patented Codebook Correlation Technology, which may be 20-years’ old - but it has certainly stood the test of time.  The technology is by far the most flexible and scalable network management solution on the market today.

Ultimately though, telcos and service providers are businesses - and must operate as such.  The technologies they use to solve their network management challenges are irrelevant unless they can help them on the revenue side.  That’s where Ionix comes in.

In Part II, we’ll take this conversation one step further and discuss how EMC Ionix is specifically helping customers overcome the unique challenges of managing their ever-expanding, ever more complex IT infrastructures.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.  Please feel free to post your thoughts so we can keep this conversation going…

Suhela

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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

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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

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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

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Late last week, EMC and VMware announced a major milestone in the

The Evolution of Ionix

 evolution of Ionix.  Announced February 25, VMware and EMC announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for VMware to acquire certain software products and expertise from EMC’s Ionix IT management business.

Under terms of the agreement, VMware will acquire all of the technology and intellectual property of:  Ionix Application Stack Manager (FastScale), Ionix Application Discovery Manager, Ionix Server Configuration Manager, and Ionix Service Manager.

EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware.  Additionally, EMC will continue to develop the Ionix portfolio, and will focus on such products as:  Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence (Smarts),  Ionix Network Configuration Manager (Voyence), Ionix Data Center Insight, Ionix ControlCenter, Ionix Storage Configuration Advisor and Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager.

This focus will enable EMC to concentrate on on providing ground-breaking solutions that simplify the management of the information infrastructure - specifically for network, storage and private cloud environments (including Vblocks). 

There’s a great post from Chuck Hollis on the announcement and what it means.  Stay tuned to this blog for more exciting updates on the evolution of Ionix.  Much more to come…

Would love to hear what you think…Please post some comments to keep the conversation going…

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