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

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