IT Management 2.0

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

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

Ionix:  The New Frontier

Late last week, EMC and VMware announced a major milestone in the

The Evolution of Ionix

 evolution of Ionix.  Announced February 25, VMware and EMC announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for VMware to acquire certain software products and expertise from EMC’s Ionix IT management business.

Under terms of the agreement, VMware will acquire all of the technology and intellectual property of:  Ionix Application Stack Manager (FastScale), Ionix Application Discovery Manager, Ionix Server Configuration Manager, and Ionix Service Manager.

EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware.  Additionally, EMC will continue to develop the Ionix portfolio, and will focus on such products as:  Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence (Smarts),  Ionix Network Configuration Manager (Voyence), Ionix Data Center Insight, Ionix ControlCenter, Ionix Storage Configuration Advisor and Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager.

This focus will enable EMC to concentrate on on providing ground-breaking solutions that simplify the management of the information infrastructure - specifically for network, storage and private cloud environments (including Vblocks). 

There’s a great post from Chuck Hollis on the announcement and what it means.  Stay tuned to this blog for more exciting updates on the evolution of Ionix.  Much more to come…

Would love to hear what you think…Please post some comments to keep the conversation going…

Change and Configuration, Cloud, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Population, Data Center Automation and Compliance, Dependency Mapping, Service Management, Storage Resource Management (SRM), Virtualization Management EMC, Ionix, Ionix Application Discovery Manager, Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager, Vblocks, 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