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

Service Providers:  An Eye To the Cloud

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

Cloud, Private Cloud, Service Management, Virtualization Management EMC, Ionix, IT Management, Private Cloud, Virtualization

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

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