Jan 18 2008 4:14PM GMT
Posted by: Ryan Shopp
DataCenter,
CMDB,
HP Software,
IBM Tivoli,
ITIL,
Symantec,
BMC,
EMC
The second up and coming area goes by many names these days. Some call it next-generation asset management, many others call it CMDB.
I’m calling it resource reconciliation as I would like to see it extend beyond a discovery engine, IT asset database, dependency mapping and the necessary graphical topology and reports. I also believe that these tools not only should communicate directly with the infrastructure outlined in the Data Center Automation Blueprint (DCAB) - but also synchronize and provide reconciliation capabilities with the 5 other DCAB functions.
What I’m saying is I want to make sure that all my other functional products always are 100% accurate to what my IT infrastructure contains. There is no reason my performance & capacity products don’t know about a specific IT resource. Nor, do I want multiple discovery engines combing my infrastructure setting off false alarms in my security products or requiring me to open additional communication avenues making the infrastructure less secure.
Here are a list of the vendors I know of, this space saw some major consolidation during 2006.
BMC
CA (Cendura acquisition)
EMC (nLayers acquisition)
HP (Opsware acquisition)
IBM (Collation acquisition)
Symantec (Relicore acquisition)
Tideway
Another area I’m researching and pondering inclusion in this category are service catalogs (e.g. NewScale) Any thoughts or opinions on how they compare to the players/products above?
Jan 9 2008 7:06PM GMT
Posted by: Ryan Shopp
DataCenter,
BladeLogic,
CMDB,
ITIL,
BMC,
Cisco
Here are a couple more reads as I play catch-up from the holidays. First up, ITIL then some thoughts around a recent interview with John Chambers at Cisco.
10 Reasons why ITIL spooks IT managers, originally written back in October by NetworkWorld, it was noted by another blog I read so I checked it out. One more I would like to add making it 11 is around challenges with “organizational stability”. Companies evolve to fast - i know sounds odd (e.g. reorganizations), technologies keep offering new approaches or benefits (e.g., virtualization), M&A activity that requires trying to blend two different organization and the technical and political challenges that offers Bottom line, there are just way to many things conspiring against something so all-inclusive from the top-down that takes years and years and year to accomplish. It touches ever part of the business and it’s snot elf-contained or focused like deploying a new financial application. Now I’m not saying ITIL isn’t useful, for example CMDB (e.g., configuration management) is something all large enterprises should have in my eyes. The amount of savings could/would be immense around effective utilization of resources, reducing redundancies, keeping every thing/one on the same page and the list goes on (more on that when we talk resource reconciliation next week).
Cisco’s John Chambers interview with Paul Musich titled “Cisco Charts New Course” was an enjoyable read as you attempt to read in between the lines and ponder Cisco’s strategy.
My personal thoughts from this center around Cisco’s push into collaborative applications being about driving bandwidth intensive applications to sell more/protect current investments companies have made in network plumbing (everything but servers, storage, desktops) while trying to find a bigger piece of the IT pie. They have to be careful not to upset the apple cart as they wish to bite off more of that IT budget pie. Since applications aren’t core to the main players that channel/sell (e.g., HP, IBM, EMC, Microsoft) their current cash cow products this ensures only light co-opetition today versus hard head-to-head competition. To date their application choices have been very calculated around unified communications and collaboration, not generalized. So with that said I’m not so sure they are about to just yet take that big jump and go after a more general application strategy (e.g., BEA). I think they have some maturing plans here which include finding a way to more efficiently manage applications, then maybe later in 2008 or early 2009 watch for that next step down the stack from actual applications to enabling the development of applications. I started pondering this back in December where I started making the case for Cisco acquiring BMC. With that said, if they do “go large” in IT management and grab BMC instead of someone like BladeLogic then scrap my thought on them doing the BEA thing.
Dec 17 2007 5:59PM GMT
Posted by: Ryan Shopp
DataCenter,
CMDB,
eTOM,
FCAPS,
IT Process Automation,
ITIL,
Application monitoring,
Network monitoring,
Performance management,
Security,
Storage,
Virtualization,
RBA,
Run Book Automation,
Systems monitoring,
Systemschannel,
WAN optimization
Thanks for the feedback, I’ve incorporated some points that have been made into an updated version of the Data Center Automation Blueprint (DCAB).
As mentioned previous this is a work in progress and I love getting feedback, ideas, concerns etc. with the model. As mentioned previously I’m trying to build a functional model (at the 30,000 foot level) that represents key software functionality to automate the data center towards someday becoming “lights out.”
Also, with that said, it needs to be comprehensive but not overwhelming. I want to keep the yellow DCA functional areas limited in number…if this grows to be much more then the current six I feel it becomes too complex. So to add any new areas I need to assess how do they compare to the current areas and could I combine any areas.
One I’m struggling with right now is I’ve received feedback that analytics itself is an area. The interesting thing is analytics currently fits to some degree within each of the 4 horizontal functional areas (e.g., Configuration/Change, Security/Protection) as each of those products offer advanced reporting and as that progresses they do predictive reporting and analytics around that functional area.
Analytics would also show up at the dashboard level (currently beyond the scope of what I’m defining as the functional areas of the Data Center Automation Blueprint) where you would correlate business intelligence, patterns etc. across not just Data Center Automation functional categories but also across manual task orchestration (e.g., service/help desk) details.
Thoughts?
One more thing to clear up, I know some (many) of these functional categories and their products extend beyond the Data Center. The lens this blog looks through is exclusively focused on the challenges posed by large, complex data centers. For example, I know performance products are also useful in all sized companies (big & small) and also beyond the data center (e.g., headquarters, remote offices, partner networks, etc).
Nov 9 2007 5:54PM GMT
Posted by: Ryan Shopp
ITIL,
DataCenter,
eTOM,
FCAPS
So a quick continuation note on my recent post related to pulling together a reference model for automating our data centers. Once I get the Data Center Infrastructure categories set it’s going to be very important to build out the actual Data Center Automation categories. In the previous post I mentioned Performance, Fault, Configuration & Security - which functionally are part of a now defunct reference model initiated many moons ago. My friend Glen O’Donnell recently wrote about this on his blog R.I.P. FCAPS. He is a proponent of ITIL as the replacement for that. I’m familiar with and have worked with ITIL previously, so let’s take a quick look at what it may add to my Data Center automation categories.
There are 11 functional domains that are core to ITIL, here is a link that describes each of the below items in detail.
- Service Level Management
- Capacity Management
- Contingency Planning
- Availability Management
- IT Financial Management
- Configuration Management
- Problem Management
- Incident Management
- Change Management
- Service / Help Desk
- Release Management
Reviewing these areas points out a major hole I missed in my first post on this topic. A CMDB - no matter what you call it (e.g, IT Asset Management, Inventory) is an automated, up-to-date, capability to have a fresh view of all IT assets and their relationships. Not only is it needed to make decisions but also is a core component of course for configuring your Fault, Performance, Configuration & Security automation solutions.
Another area I need to put more thought into is if/how to incorporate the people/process side of things (e.g., Help Desk/Ticketing). My desire for this model is what it would take to approach the utopia of “lights out” data centers through automation.
Next time on this topic I’ll tackle the above questions and also look at eTOM from TMN (another model I’ve worked with previously). But that will have to wait till next week. Here is a quick note I came across on the internet that compares eTOM to ITIL.
