IT Management 2.0

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

This week, I’m part of a team staffing EMC’s presence at Cisco Live in Las Vegas.  At big industry events like these, the pace is always frenetic:  It seems

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

Cloud, Virtualization Management Cisco Live, EMC, EMC Ionix, Private Cloud

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

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

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