The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud

An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) White Paper Prepared for EMC June 2011

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH, INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud
Table of Contents
Executive Summary..............................................................................................................................................1 Network Management 2011: New Challenges, New Opportunities...........................................................1 Keeping Pace: Evolution of Network Management Technologies and Practices....................................2 The EMC Ionix Approach..................................................................................................................................4 EMA Analysis........................................................................................................................................................6 About EMC............................................................................................................................................................6

2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud
Executive Summary

Major IT innovations such as server virtualization and Cloud services promise great rewards in efficiency and agility; however, to capture the full potential, all aspects of operations must adopt new approaches and methods. Network management and operations, long an area of strength and stability, must change as well to accommodate accelerated rates of change and new topologies and relationships between connected virtualized elements. To keep pace, network managers must focus on key best practices and management technologies, particularly those that deliver automation and integration between functional task areas. This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) paper details some the greatest challenges network managers will face in dealing with server virtualization and Cloud services and presents priorities and options for getting (and staying) ahead.

Network Management 2011: New Challenges, New Opportunities

Never a dull moment thats the way most network managers describe their day-to-day work. If theres one constant you can count on when managing an enterprise network, its going to be change. Theres always change going on within IT, but with the latest disruptive innovations, the rate of change is accelerating like never before. There are changes happening within the network layer, with the continued rollout of technologies such as MPLS in the wide-area, converging storage and data networks via unified fabrics such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or Data Center Ethernet (DCE), and virtualized network infrastructure within virtual computing environments. And with the fast-growing adoption of Cloud services, even more changes are coming as network management and operations professionals are expected to understand and monitor highly flexible and dynamic infrastructures. Networks have long been entrusted with connecting and assuring quality performance between a rapidly expanding universe of servers and clients of all shapes, sizes, and purposes, from mainframe to mobile and from physical to virtual. Along the way, networks have achieved stability through standardization and maturity, as well as best practices for redundant network architectures. Thus, the primary challenge of network management is less about availability and more about the performance of applications and services as they traverse the network. There are some advantages to the changes that are happening, such as the consolidation around IP transports and the convergence on Ethernet at layer 1. This standardization reduces the number of technologies that need to be understood and managed, and also bodes well for achieving mature, industrialized levels of reliability. And without standardization it would not be possible for the other changes, the ones that will shape the future of network management, to take hold. Server virtualization is The relatively recent introduction of server virtualization is revolutionizing the ways in which IT services are deployed, and networking is not immune from impact. Many networks were built on a basic set of assumptions, such as the fact that servers lived in one place at a time, with a specific address and a specific worldwide name and could not create their own virtual subnetworks. This was necessary not only for planning optimal

revolutionizing the ways in which IT services are deployed, and networking is not immune.

Page 1

2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Page 1

The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud
performance but also for regulatory, security, and compliance purposes. But all this has changed now servers can be moved dynamically at any time, as needs or operational conditions dictate, and somehow network and operations management must keep pace. Cloud services, which are largely a new virtualization-enabled form of long-standing technology options, make this challenge even greater particularly when resources reside with a service provider, beyond the direct control of the network operations team. Despite this, EMA research indicates that the network operations team is commonly being held responsible for assuring service availability and performance for Cloud services.1 These two disruptive innovations, server virtualization and Cloud services, affect network managers in some key ways: New virtualized network elements have come into existence, such as vNICs and vSwitches, allowing a new aspect of logical network topology to be created between virtual machines and the hypervisor which hosts them. All external Cloud services must be reached via non-LAN network links, either dedicated or public/Internet, and some, particularly Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), may also include virtual networking constructs inside the providers environment. Since everything is being done in an abstracted, virtual setting, configurations can be changed rapidly and are often altered automatically or on the fly, without direct notification of the network management team. In parallel with the technology shifts are another set of changes that are transforming IT from a tactical to strategic role within the organizations they serve, and which have significant impacts on the role of the network manager. Service management initiatives such as ITIL, COBIT, and Six Sigma are working their way through organizations large and small, changing the focus and landscape of everyday operations. The aim of these changes is to create a unified, service-oriented IT operations climate, and the growing transformation of internal IT infrastructure and organizations into Internal Cloud Services is accelerating the shift. Network managers have a role to play in this evolutionary process and to play that role they need to focus on reliable, repeatable management practices, businessaware management processes, and a proactive rather than reactive mindset. Further, all this must be done while paying close attention to the greatest threat to IT service quality inadequate change and configuration management.

Keeping Pace: Evolution of Network Management Technologies and Practices

In order to keep up with the accelerating pace of change and the new, dynamic reality of virtualized servers and Cloud services, both network management technologies as well as practices must be transformed. From a practice perspective, new attention must be paid to well-known and proven approaches and methods for reducing risk. From a technology perspective, the focus must turn towards
1

Network Management and the Responsible, Virtualized Cloud, Enterprise Management Associates, March 2011

Page 2

2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Page 2

The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud
tools that can help operations personnel to embrace new layers of abstraction. On the best practices side, EMA advocates three elements that hold significant opportunity for improving the effectiveness of network management professionals by lowering risk and improving efficiency: 1. Attention to change: EMA research indicates that as many as 70% of service impacting incidents and problems have their roots in unanticipated side effects resulting from deliberate infrastructure configuration changes. Increased rigor and repeatability in change and configuration management may represent the single greatest opportunity for improving quality in highly dynamic environments, particularly for network managers who are trying to keep pace.

Increased rigor in change and configuration management may represent the single greatest opportunity for improving quality.

2. Effective collaboration: Across all aspects of IT planning, engineering, and operations, clear and objective communications are essential. In small shops, where a few people wear many hats, this is a manageable challenge. But in larger shops, where multiple organizations using multiple management tools and methods must come together to deliver IT services, collaborative communications, or the lack thereof, can quickly become a formidable barrier to success. Since the network is the ultimate delivery mechanism for IT applications and services, it is also advantaged as a central point of reference for gathering essential operational intelligence, putting network managers in a key role for facilitating effective collaboration. 3. Management across the lifecycle: One of the greatest challenges for managing any new technology, service, or application being deployed is figuring out how it will behave in the production environment. The best opportunity to develop this understanding lies with monitoring and characterization during preproduction quality testing and pilot deployment phases. During these times, network impact can be assessed and network-based service quality monitoring goals can be defined and verified, while the cost and risk of change is very low. From a technology perspective, management tools have been evolving to help networking professionals establish and maintain essential visibility and control. EMA recommends focusing on three key aspects of management technology innovation for helping to deal with todays dynamic infrastructures: 4. Integration: There are two forms of integration that can be highly beneficial in keeping pace with change data/model integration and workflow integration. Sharing management data, and more importantly model representations of the managed environment, means that everyone can work off the same song sheet rather than argue about whose information is correct. Workflow integration improves efficiency and effectiveness of management tasks and procedures when moving between management tools. Both of these techniques should be applied within the network management practice area, but also for tying together management of the network with other domains, such as servers, storage, desktops, applications, and even Cloud services. Perhaps

Page 3

2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Page 3

The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud
the greatest immediate opportunity for integration impact is to bring together change control with event management and root cause analysis. 5. Automation: The steady introduction of automated capabilities within management tools has been going on for years, and never has automation become more essential than today, in the face of rates of change which cause manual work processes and data analysis to wither and fail. There are many forms of automation in network management, but several are specifically helpful with current challenges, including automated discovery (especially for updating models and monitoring regimes when virtualized environments change), automated configuration auditing and compliance analysis, automated root cause analysis, and automated actions in response to well known issues and problems. Each of these functional areas can deliver improved agility and effectiveness in the face of constant change, helping network managers keep pace. 6. Service Awareness: In order to be certain that their efforts are having the greatest impact and are yielding the greatest value, network managers must understand the context of their tasks, responses, and activities versus the priorities of the organizations they serve. This awareness helps with prioritizing work process as well as improving communications with other constituencies, whether within or beyond the IT organization. Network management technologies are evolving to include service awareness in a number of ways, whether by extending and expanding internal data models to include service definitions and relationships, adding service quality metrics to monitoring regimes, or integrating with central service management systems such as ITILs CMDB/CMS (Configuration Management Database/System). All of these approaches improve network managers ability to communicate, collaborate, and best prioritize their efforts.

The EMC Ionix Approach

EMC has long been a provider of leading edge, advanced network management products, under the Ionix solution portfolio. Within those products, as well as through integrations, the Ionix portfolio covers substantially all of the management needs across the many domains within IT, spanning network, storage, applications, and servers, whether physical or virtualized. Specific to network management, EMC offers enterprise-class solutions within the Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence and Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance product lines which are designed to help meet the changing needs of network engineering, management, and operations professionals. Specifics products of interest here are: Ionix Service Assurance Manager Ionix IP Availability Manager Ionix Server Manager Ionix Network Configuration Manager Ionix MPLS Manager Ionix Multicast Manager Ionix Network Protocol Manager

Page 4

2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Page 4

The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud
Ionix Application Connectivity Monitor Ionix VoIP Management Suite Within this group of products, EMC has been adding specific capabilities for keeping up with the changing roles and responsibilities of network managers. Recent new functionalities along these lines include: Expanded Support for Virtualized Infrastructure: New capabilities for discovering and monitoring both VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V computing environments means better visibility into the health of and relationships between virtual and physical servers as well as more definitive automated root cause analysis. Capabilities include detailed discovery and visualization of virtual networks within VMware hosts, including virtual network topology between vSwitches and VMs, detailed connectivity attributes, such as VLAN properties, and full integration with VMware vCenter. New Performance Analytics: The well-established availability analytics and correlation functions within Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence has been expanded with complementary analytics and correlation for performance metrics, improving service awareness as well as putting operators in a more proactive position to troubleshoot performance issues and assure quality of experience. Improved Scalability & System Performance: As managed environments continue to expand, so must the capacity of the management tools. EMC continues to tune and improve their management tools in this regard, for instance recently improving one of the most difficult areas discovery performance across high latency links by more than 20%. In parallel with these recent enhancements, EMC has continued to focus on delivering automation that keeps up with the changing and evolving managed environment. Most recently this has included expanding automated discovery and root cause analysis capabilities across converged Ethernet and IP network infrastructures, supporting standards such as FCOE and MPLS, as well as new converged compute/ The Ionix portfolio network/storage data center infrastructure architectures such as the fully covers monitoring EMC/Cisco/VMware Vblock solutions. The solution goes further to and analysis of the all discover active applications and actively monitor their availability and common network and responsiveness. EMC has also continued to address intelligent root network-supported cause analysis within the upper layers of the stack, including VoIP and technologies in use today. Multicast. Collectively, the Ionix portfolio fully covers monitoring and analysis of the all common network and network-supported technologies in use today. As mentioned earlier, one of the most powerful capabilities offered within the Ionix solution portfolio is the close integration between events management and root-cause analysis offered within Ionix Service Assurance Manager and the tracking of change activities provided through Ionix Network Configuration Manager. By funneling change events into the root-cause engine and including them in intelligent analysis, vast efficiencies can be realized in shortening the time required to recognize causal relationships between changes and any unanticipated service impacts. This integration has actually been in place for over two years, and EMC has continued to refine and improve it throughout the intervening time. While other technology vendors are now taking note and adding this capability, EMCs foresight and maturity in this area continues to lead the industry. Overall, the EMC Ionix portfolio of network management solutions is designed to provide the

Page 5

2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Page 5

The Changing Role of Network Management Keeping Pace with the New Demands of Virtualization and Cloud
capabilities that network managers need to keep up with change. Through integration, the EMC portfolio provides workflow and collaborative efficiencies. Through automation, that same portfolio optimizes effectiveness and reduces operational risk. And by supporting service awareness, the portfolio puts network managers in harmony with the needs of their served constituencies.

EMA Analysis

The role and responsibilities of the network manager have never been static, but they have never been forced to evolve more rapidly than today, as virtualization and Cloud services combine to create a new level of challenge for dealing with constant, accelerating rates of change. EMA believes these challenges can be met by adopting proven best practices and embracing the full potential of the latest management technologies and tools. By continuing to focus on the state of the art, the needs of their customers, and leveraging their relationships with leading technology providers such as Cisco Systems and VMware, EMC has been able to successfully address the challenges faced by todays network managers. Their portfolio solutions use automation and integration, combined with service awareness, to deliver better change control, more effective collaboration, and the opportunity for improved lifecycle management approaches.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver Information Technology as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is Cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to Cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset information in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Information about EMCs products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise IT professionals, lines of business users, and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or follow EMA on Twitter. This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. EMA and Enterprise Management Associates are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries. 2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. EMA, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES, and the mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 5777 Central Avenue, Suite 105 Boulder, CO 80301 Phone: +1 303.543.9500 Fax: +1 303.543.7687 www.enterprisemanagement.com
2299.062811

Page 6

2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Page 6