IT Management 2.0

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

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

Over the last few months of 2009 and into 2010, there has been a perceptible shift — from both data center customers and industry leaders that I’ve spoken to — signaling a new focus on not just visualizing or evangelizing but in practically achieving the vision of the next-gen data center.  The vision:  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), virtualization acceleration, and private clouds.

Customers we’ve been talking to are pushing hard for a reality-check.  Is the buzz real?  As we have presented and demonstrated Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), we can safely and confidently confirm that the need is there, the time is ripe and THE BUZZ IS REAL…

We are helping drive towards a new model for the data center that relies on a much more unified infrastructure - the VCE Coalition Vblock being the prime example - and this in turn requires a new IT management model to leverage that infrastructure as a service.  Today’s tools won’t cut it.  You need a new approach designed with IaaS in mind with the following checklist capabilities as requirements:

• Multi-Tenancy
• Self-Service
• Service Orchestration
• Policy-Based
• Infrastructure Unification
• Practical Automation

Multi-Tenancy

New abstractions are required to achieve IaaS that include the ability to create, edit, activate, control, and assign services to customers - whether they are internal or external customers, chargeback or showback customers, it doesn’t matter.  But beyond the ability to create and manage services from the infrastructure, you also need to be able to manage the concept of multiple customers or tenants accessing these services, with granular role-based access control and visibility.  Multi-tenant management has to be built into the design of the product from the beginning - this is core to the architecture of UIM.

Self-Service

Fundamental to the power of IaaS is the ability to open up access to infrastructure services to different communities for self-service.  UIM has been focused on this at two levels:  (1) integrating with end-user vCloud portals for coordinated orchestration (where cloud end-users access a vCloud portal which in turn requests infrastructure services through UIM) and (2) providing data center IT teams a provisioning center for simplified interaction with a complex infrastructure.

Service-Orchestration

There is no IaaS without the “S” and the ability for the management systems to abstract services out from the infrastructure is a management imperative.  As UIM is the element manager for the Vblock, this is an essential part of what makes UIM unique and powerful.  That requires taking pools of compute, network and storage resources and mapping them to templates, tiers, grades or categories of services - cataloging these services - and then managing their configuration, compliance, activation, and delivery.  But doing this automatically and correctly requires policies for compliant configuration.  Read on…

Policy-Based

The unified infrastructures can present new and complex configuration challenges.  Many analysts estimate that over 70% of outages in a traditional data center are caused by misconfiguration.  Imagine what that could look like for new infrastructures that are not protected by configuration compliance checks.  There are too many new concepts and new integration layers to keep track of in any one engineer’s head anymore.  UIM provides out-of-the-box best practice-configuration and compliance checking to ensure critical missteps don’t bring you down, like Duplicate MAC Address tests and configuration checking for new Cisco UCS configuration elements such as service profiles, vNics and vHBAs.

Infrastructure Unification

The core concept of Ionix UIM is element management of Vblocks - bringing together network, storage, and compute configuration management into one system.  So that means in UIM 1.0 managing Nexus devices (including Nexus 1000V, 5010, 5020, C7010, and C7018 models), MDS devices (including MDS 9222i, 9124, 9134, 9216, 9216A, 9216i, 9509, and 9513 models), and Cisco UCS systems (from managing UUID, WWN, MAC address pools to building LAN and SAN connection templates to managing Ethernet adapter and fibre channel adapter profiles) under one manager - and extending support for storage infrastructure in the next releases.

Practical Automation

If you are looking to manage multiple Vblocks, you’ll want 1-to-many management (one UIM for multiple Vblocks) to get scale and consistency across your configuration policies.  If you want to schedule a configuration push, you’ll need a system to schedule, push, then validate success.  If you want to compare configuration across Vblocks, run enterprise-level reports, track changes, and ensure best practice configuration changes, then you’ll need a friend like UIM.

Checklist Your Infrastructure Tools for IaaS

So that’s an IaaS checklist to grade infrastructure management tools going forward.  Both the infrastructure and management systems have stepped up to make IaaS a reality. 

So it’s real…Check it out.

Would love to hear what you think.

Bob Quillin

Cloud, Virtualization Management EMC, EMC Ionix UIM, EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), IaaS, Ionix, multi-tenancy, Private Cloud, UIM, Vblock, VCE