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

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

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