IT Management 2.0

Rock Solid Foundation

Real-estate developers, architects, and builders all know that when you’re looking to construct something in a challenging location or environment, you need to make sure you have a rock-solid foundation on which to build.  Anything less, and you’re setting yourself up for big problems down the road.

The same holds true for IT:  As you make the transition from pure physical computing  environments to virtualized IT infrastructure — and eventually to private cloud – you need a solid foundation on which to build.  Increasingly, it’s apparent that foundation is your network.  If your network fails or is impacted, services go down, the infrastructure cannot stay virtualized, and cloud environments start to dissipate.

The problem is, in the IT realm, developers, architects, and builders aren’t that interested in helping you make sure there’s a solid foundation in place for all the neat new architectures, services, and applications.  In fact, they’re more likely already building into their plans and models certain assumptions about network availability, performance, and compliance.  And those assumptions may not mesh well with reality - and what you can deliver and guarantee - in network and IT operations.

Enter Management

Effectively monitoring and managing your IT environment - that is,

Virtualization: It takes a solid foundation

proactively identifying and responding to problems and properly managing configuration and change so these processes don’t create unintended problems for - can significantly impact quality of service, efficiency and costs.  As virtualization deployments become more pervasive and IT complexity continues to increase, the burden of monitoring  and management must shift away from people and manual processes and into automated analytical systems.

Leveraging the power of automation to ensure your network is a strategic business asset - and not a liability to the business - has been EMC’s approach to management with EMC Ionix.  Building on that, we’ve made a set of announcements recently that highlight recent enhancements to our flagship IT infrastructure monitoring an analysis portfolio.  Aimed at helping customers solidify their “foundations” so the network can seamlessly and effectively support and enable current business operations as well as future business and IT models and architectures, these enhancements include:

• Integrated Network Configuration, Change and Compliance and Operations Management:  Although they differ on their exact percentages, all major IT analyst firms concur that the vast majority of IT service and network outages are caused by misconfigurations.  So, it should come as no surprise that when something goes wrong, the first troubleshooting question asked tends to be:  “what changed.”  As such, correlation of root-cause analysis, business impact, and network change events is essential.  That’s why our recent integration of our Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence and Ionix Network Configuration Management (formerly Voyence) is so key.
• Expanded Virtualization Support:  Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence’s automated root-cause analysis and impact assessment has expanded to now include a range of virtual infrastructures.  This solution now automatically discovers VMware ESX Servers or Microsoft Hyper-V Servers, maps their relationships to virtual machines and the rest of the infrastructure, and continuously monitors their availability and performance.  That simplifies virtual management complexities and lets you holistically manage virtualized infrastructures across domains.  Additionally, the newest release enables the solution to be deployed on virtual machines.
• Next-Generation Performance and Analytics Management:  Through key partnerships, Ionix now provides performance monitoring and correlation of performance events and alerts, which enhance our existing availability monitoring and correlation.  The result:  you can pinpoint the root-cause of availability and performance issues in an integrated fashion that gives the information you need to restore affected systems and services, and allows you to quickly determine business impact.

Analysts Agree

Enterprise Management Associates Research Director Jim Frey agrees that effective network and IT infrastructure management remains a big hurdle to ensuring value from the deployment of new IT models: 

 ”As companies continue to virtualize IT infrastructures, they are excited by the cost efficiency and agility this model may bring.  The real roadblock is ‘how are we going to manage this new infrastructure?’  To smooth the virtualization transition and truly achieve its potential advantages, they need automated IT management solutions that enable them to discover all of the dynamic elements and relationship while also rapidly identifying and resolving the root-cause of failures and degradations.  With EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, EMC is taking a major step forward in helping customers achieve this goal.”

I’d love to hear what you think about the foundational importance of the network.  Do you agree with me that the window for the “old school” way of network and infrastructure management is closing fast?  I’ve started the ball rolling here.  Please post your thoughts, ideas and comments so we can keep this conversation going.

Brian

Change and Configuration, Virtualization Management EMC, EMC World, Ionix, Network Configuration Management, Network Management, Virtualization, Virtualization Management, VMware

More good news and momentum for the Ionix suite and its ability to leverage automation to take the costs out of IT, deliver IT as a true service and accelerate the journey from physical IT to virtual IT to the cloud.

SearchDatacenter.com just awarded EMC Ionix Server Manager its “Silver” award for Product of the Year in the area of Systems Management Software. 

EMC continues to build momentum with Ionix Server Manager, targeted at simplifying the ongoing management of VMware and Microsoft environments — quickly determining the root-cause and business impact of a problem in the virtual environment, physical infrastructure, or both.

Another great win for Ionix.  The full text of the article can be found here.

Would love to hear your thoughts…

Craig

Cloud, Virtualization Management Ionix, Systems Management Software, Virtualization Management, VMware

Solving the Puzzle

Is there a doctor in the house?

The other night, I was watching an episode of the TV show House that I taped, because I hadn’t been able to catch it when it originally aired (Hey, my son’s basketball games always take priority!).  The show’s formula isn’t that complex:

• Someone gets sick
• No one knows why - so House gets the case as a diagnostic specialist
• More insight is needed, and a few theories and permutations get tested (and fail) among House’s team
• One or two other unrelated stories arc among the ensemble cast
• Eventually House - usually about 50 minutes into the episode - has his cathartic “a-ha” moment and solves the case

Although the formula works well in Hollywood, it’s not exactly the approach you’d want to see IT organizations taking.  In the end, IT ends up at the same destination that House gets to - that is, solving the problem.  But in real-world IT environments, the “House formula” takes too long to get you there.  Until the data center can get advertisers to sponsor problems and incidents (Imagine:  “This hour of application downtime has been brought to you by Tylenol…”) the hunt-and-peck, try-one-thing-at-a-time, manual troubleshooting method just doesn’t work.

House in the Data Center

Think of how boring a program like House would be if he solved every case in less than one minute into the episode — and did it by just glancing over at a computer screen.  But in the data center, that which would make prime-time TV drama “boring” would be award-winning content for IT.  This is specially true when you throw the need to identify root-causes in virtual environments into the mix of IT management responsibilities.

And imagine if House, with all his analytical and diagnostic skills, had to also deal with hospital orderlies moving around his patients - without telling anyone - every few minutes.  How could he ever efficiently solve the problem if he didn’t even know where the patient was at any given point in time?

But if you’re on the hook for ensuring IT service delivery in a VMware-enabled data center, you face a similar set of challenges.  You need to know exactly where your VMs are at any given point in time.  And since those IT services based on virtualized applications rely on a combination of physical and virtual infrastructures for their delivery, you also need to know the relationships those VMs have to the infrastructure - as well as the IT services being delivered.  Because when a problem occurs, how can you fix it quickly if you’re stumbling on something as basic as where to get started?

An Example - EMC Smarts

One example of a solution that addresses these challenges today is EMC Smarts Server Manager.  The solution builds on the strengths of the core EMC Smarts management platform to deliver automated root-cause analysis from the edge of the network, all the way down to the VM level - and everything in between.  It provides visibility and insight into the management of the virtual data center, saving time and allowing users to maximize critical IT personnel and resources. 

Smarts Server Manager cuts the time it takes to determine the real source of the problem (a.k.a. MTTI) from hours (on average) in a complex virtual data center, to a few seconds.  Basically, the solution takes all the guesswork out of incident and problem management - putting the right person on the right problem right away.  In the end, customers can benefit from faster service restoration, better SLAand OLA compliance, and most importantly, less downtime for the business processes and users impacted by the problem.  More information how companies can increase their IT efficiencies using solutions like EMC Smarts Server Manager can be found here:

A Final Diagnosis

It’s tools like EMC Smarts Server Manager that are helping customers better manage the data centers of today and tomorrow.  It’s almost like having the aforementioned “boring” House in a box.  Working for you…All the insight analytics you need, right when you need it most.  Without the drama and delivering the right answer in just a few seconds. 

An ultra-boring TV program?  Absolutely!  Would it ever win any Emmy?  No way! 

But by solving one of your biggest management challenges - automatically identifying the root-cause of problems in the virtual data center - Smarts Server Manager is just the kind of must-see programming that could make IT operations (and even the business) stand up and cheer.

Dr. House would be proud. 

Let me know what you think…

Brian Lett

Data Center Automation and Compliance, Virtualization Management EMC, EMC Smarts, ITSM, Virtualization, Virtualization Management, VMware