IT Management 2.0

The Wait Is Over…

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

Brian Lett Cloud, Virtualization Management Cisco, Cisco Live, Cisco UCS, EMC, Private Cloud, Vblock

How relevant are infrastructure management solutions to service providers

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

Suhela Dighe Cloud, Service Providers Cloud Computing, EMC, IaaS, Ionix, Private Cloud, Service Providers

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

Kevin Gray 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

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