Piers Ford offers a guide to the technologies that can liberate
network managers from their current systems bondage and help them
to win back the respect of the business
Ask not what you can do for your network, but rather what it can
do for you. This basic piece of advice for today's besieged network
manager offers a glimmer of hope in the constant battle to make
sense of arguments for and against framework-based management and
point solutions.
There have been too many false dawns and empty promises for a
golden, standards-based future, distracting network professionals
from the fact that the corporate network infrastructure of the 21st
century is a business rather than a technical proposition.
Despite widespread supplier adherence to the SNMP standard and
signs that IP will be the voice/data convergence medium of choice
for the corporate network, the sheer complexity of infrastructures
that are constantly morphing in order to accommodate the new
business models demanded by e-commerce grows rather than
diminishes.
Ironically, the Internet, hailed as the great enabler of
e-commerce, is an unmanaged, frankly anarchic, entity. Its
penetration to the heart of the corporate network has created more
headaches for a tortured breed of IT professionals, who can these
days be forgiven for cynicism on an epidemic scale.
To further complicate matters, they are now being encouraged to
see the network as a component in the grand evolution of the
e-business model. Yankee Group, for example, says the next
generation of communication services will require a comprehensive,
business systems view of the applications, servers and client
devices, as well as the infrastructure provided by the emerging
packet-switched network. Globally, this market will be worth a
massive $100bn by 2002.
"The complexity of modern IT environments has had adverse
effects on enterprise systems management," says Paul Donovan,
managing director of DeskTalk Systems, a supplier of network
management tools. "The first is the lack of comprehensive systems
management tools. The second is the difficulty of justifying very
large software tool expenditures to top executives when IT hasn't
delivered on cost saving promises."
According to Tony Cooper, network marketing manager at systems
integrator Computacenter, the Internet itself hasn't complicated
the purchasing decisions surrounding frameworks and point tools.
Instead, it has emphasised the importance and value of network
management as a business function.
"Hardware technology is starting to become much more intelligent
and self-managing," he says. "Although on the surface this suggests
that addressing the issue of network management should be easier,
the solution is confused by many more suppliers in this market
space. Whereas a few years ago, there were a couple of large-scale
framework suppliers, now there are dozens of organisations
packaging network management solutions under the banner of 'root
cause analysis', performance alerts', 'service level management',
and so on."
Cooper suggests that while suppliers - including traditional
framework proponents who increasingly have to appeal to the SME
community now they've saturated the large enterprise market - are
competing on the merits of their point offering, managers must
focus on the value of the network to the business.
"The issue of managing the total end-to-end user experience is
vital in any form of Internet communication," he says. "Traditional
network management tools have expanded to incorporate this traffic.
The next step for exploiting this area is to take that end-user
availability and performance data and turn it into business data -
for example, to differentiate between browsers and buyers, and
target them specifically. This calls for the ability to understand
where Internet users spend their time within a Web site to place
marketing there."
In other words, network management as a business process has now
spilled into knowledge management - a new twist in the equation
unlikely to appeal to network professionals jaded by their
experiences with unwieldy framework solutions that don't deliver
the right detail, or incompatible point tools.
The good news, though, is that ultimately it should enable them
to pick and choose functionality as appropriate for the business
rather than getting bogged down in a technology debate between
framework and point solutions, either or both of which may be
appropriate for specific circumstances.
"Our approach to delivering value in this area starts with
understanding the objectives and requirements, assessing if these
objectives are realistic and then working with the business to
define a technical solution," says Cooper. "With this approach the
choice of management solution is led by the requirement and not by
the product. We have delivered as much value with minimal cost to
organisations integrating a confederation of point solutions as
implementing a framework, and vice versa."
If it sounds like the old horses for courses argument, at least
it's a theory that's been proved time and again throughout the
history of corporate IT. There's no reason why network management,
whether approached from a technical or a business perspective
should be any different. Nevertheless, framework and tool suppliers
continue to fight it out for the moral high ground.
The answer, says Mick Andrews, principal network management
consultant at ICL, is to look at the types and levels of service
the network will provide for its users and business owners. This
dictates the roles, processes and rules required. "Armed with this
information it will become much clearer if a framework, point
solution or combination of the two is the best for this particular
organisation," he says. "For example, if there is an application
that relies on some Unix servers, an NT server and distributed
client software, then a framework to monitor hardware, operating
systems, applications and the network, collect inventory from
clients and distribute new client software would probably be
appropriate. If there is an urgent, standalone requirement for
marketing to have an isolated Web server, then management of this
by a point solution may be more appropriate."
It's worth remembering that the four major framework suites
(HP's Openview, CA's Unicenter, Tivoli and BMC) are products of the
pre-Internet age. Despite their utopian promise to deliver a
management data repository for all management applications and
provide a single console solution, a lack of trust between
applications and a lack of tools to fill in fine details have
prevented the dream from panning out.
"The reason the repository never happened was that no
application was willing to count on crucial data being provided by
another," says Steven Joyce, director of network technology and
e-business systems integrator NetIQ. "For instance, if I needed to
discover devices in a network, but decided just to read that out of
the repository instead of writing my own code, what happens if the
customer hasn't bought a tool that does discovery? Do I have to
talk them into buying one? People were happy to throw data in, but
few were ever willing to count on anything coming out."
Joyce says the event manager is, in effect, the "new framework",
acting as a single console and repository for all events. There is
hope in this for any network manager who has previously found the
framework an instrument of torture rather than a genuine
support.
"The performance of the network as a whole determines how well,
or badly, applications are delivered from server to client," says
Alan McGibbon, managing director at systems integrator Scalable
Networks. Achieving this requires management tools that enable, and
simplify, the establishment and monitoring of service levels
against a required, known baseline.
"Invariably, point products have given the best functionality
but have required 'human integration', dealing with lots of data
from different sources and attempting to build a meaningful overall
picture. Products that claim this integration have arrived, and at
lower cost than the traditional umbrella management systems. Are
they any good? The jury is still out."
Framework or point tool?
Framework pros
Frameworks take an integrated approach with all functions
supposedly communicating out of the box, and come from a single
supplier, including licensing and support. If you're willing to
invest, you'll be a valued customer as these are big-ticket sales.
They offer consistency and a reasonably unified view of the whole
organisation.
Framework cons
Expensive and require endless upgrades to maintain levels of
functionality offered by individual point tools. Most are products
of the age of large, single-supplier networks and cope poorly with
today's multi-source distributed infrastructures, which may unite
voice and data.
Point-tool pros
Point tools require a smaller upfront investment and have
best-of-breed status for their intended purpose. Generally seen as
more flexible and cheaper.
Point-tool cons
Tend to rely heavily on alliances and agreements between
suppliers for cross- functionality, so there is less central
control over product directions. Some gaps in the architecture and
inconsistencies.
Double trouble: two trends will have a big impact on network
management
Mark Lillycrop, director of research at analyst Xephon, says
network managers should look out for two potential problems: the
impact of the virtual organisation and the tendency of large
suppliers to snap up tool developers.
"The nature of the 'managed object' is changing very rapidly in
the Internet world, because so many devices and users are only
loosely connected to the organisation via laptops, personal digital
assistants or phones," he says. "Finding partners with the right
management tools to plug into your framework or point solution is
very hard. B2B e-commerce and extranets have blurred the boundaries
between organisations, which makes management and security more
complex."
On the bright side, Internet standards should, eventually, help
to simplify network management through the adoption of common
denominators like IP.
"Voice systems will migrate increasingly to IP rather than
circuit switching as the platform, and this single network
rationalisation will allow the use of a much simpler and more
accessible set of management tools," says John Livingston,
portfolio strategy manager at BT. "This may turn out to be one of
the key benefits to be gained from the use of Voice Over IP in a
corporate network."