It looks like the bidding war for 3PAR is over, with HP winning with a “superior offer” for $2.4 billion. After a number of back-and-forth bids, Dell announced that it would not increase its proposal. There was speculation that HP’s deep pockets are no match for Dell.

Wondering how to make sense of the multitude of cloud-related news stories this summer? Computerworld’s Ryan Nichols breaks down the numbers for you and pulls out some top cloud trends amid all the noise. He claims that the market for public cloud computing services is large and growing, even if the exact numbers vary widely and that business agility is a critical driver of cloud adoption. But, chew on this “head-scratcher” question over the weekend… “If virtualization is growing and cloud computing is growing, how can the market for private enterprise servers also be growing?”

How many devices are plugged into the Internet? Hmmmm – 5 billion and growing, according to IMS Research, who tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet. Over the next 10 years, they expect that number to quadruple – in addition to “machines”, you have smart phones, tablets, e-readers, digital picture frames, etc. etc. etc.

Planning a data center move? Here are four critical mistakes to avoid: ignoring the data, combining the move with other projects (like a shift to virtualization), poor planning and not having an inventory of equipment, applications and processes.

Who’s having the worst week ever? Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA), which is attempting to restore network service to the last three of 27 agencies (including the DMV which can’t process in-person drivers’ license requests) affected by a network outage. The cause? A memory card failure in a SAN – the backup SAN also experienced problems. VITA, Northrop Grumman and EMC are working furiously to restore service.

In that same vein, “I can wait to implement a backup/recovery plan” is one of the misconceptions SMB sometimes have about their technology needs…along with “My company is too small to consider a virtualized environment” and “I don’t need the latest technology”. See the complete list.

If you’re local to DC, you may be interested in the Gov 2.0 Summit September 7 and 8. Government and private sector come together to highlight technology and ideas to rethink how government agencies perform their mission and serve our citizens.

For those of you interested in going back to school, or hiring graduates, US News and World Report has listed the 10 best graduate information system schools in the US:

1. Syracuse
2. Michigan – Ann Arbor
3. Drexel
4. U. of Washington
5. U. of Illinois Urbana/Champaign
6. U. of Pittsburgh
7. UNC Chapel Hill
8. Indiana U Bloomington
9. Rutgers
10. U. of Maryland

We’re happy to see a hometown school make the list. If you’re a recent graduate looking for a job – you may want to consider learning more about cloud computing. The job market is booming!

Hope everybody has a safe and enjoyable Labor Day weekend!

First up, we created a self-service portal to allow all of the InteropNet vendors to provision monitoring of their own gear. Using the EM7 Integration Server, monitoring configurations are automatically set up in EM7 and vendors can also make configuration changes using the self-service portal. Based on the feedback we’ve received, we believe this has great real-world implications. You may be hearing more about this pretty soon.

Then, there’s the Operational Dashboard for InteropNet NY. To build this dashboard, we thought, “What are the items I would put in one dashboard if I could?” And then we built it using EM7 G3’s liquid dashboards. The dashboard includes:

• Content Verification – External Checks: monitors all external connections between the NOC and the colo sites. This is critical because it’s monitoring the sources of Internet connections available for attendees.
• Network Top-10s for CPU, latency, inbound and outbound bandwidth, physical memory and file system percentage
• Event Summary – at-a-glance view of the distribution of events

Another striking example is how we met Qwest’s request to see the co-los that support Interop located in Sunnyvale, Denver and Newark in one view. They wanted to see bandwidth graphs, errors and discards, in a single pane of glass and as soon as possible. BAM! We did it in EM7 in 5 minutes! They said it would take about a week to configure this in other monitoring tools.

There is always a great deal of excitement around InteropNet. It brings together some of the best technical expertise from many of the top vendors in IT who are always eager and willing to showcase the latest and greatest technologies. Everyone is open to trying new and cool ways – there are no limits as we stretch the boundaries of what is possible. InteropNet is always about interoperability, efficiencies and speed and this year is no different.

The whole point is to help IT operations do their job and for that, I must say that EM7 is awesome!

Check the web for updates on this, but as I’m writing, there are rumors that former HP CEO Mark Hurd may be returning to Teradata, where he ran the data warehouse division before it was spun off from NCR. The speculation has run Teradata’s stock up more than 11% in mid-day trading. You may also want to download Information Week’s report, “HP in Transition”. One of the top 10 challenges is for HP to change the focus from soap opera to customers.

The Data Center Institute, a think tank for data center managers, says only 15% of its member have implemented some form of cloud computing. But, it predicts, “the next five years will see the adoption of cloud computing grow dramatically.” AFCOM (Association for Computing Operations Managers) has issued a position paper meant to provide guidance to the other 85% on why and how to begin their move to the cloud.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) provides some insight on how IT managers should prioritize their network management investments with a keen focus on automation. For companies looking to gain efficiencies, here are five ideas on how to best allocate time and resources, including consolidating tools to reduce redundancy and exploiting untapped capabilities in existing toolsets.

Finally, bedbugs are a gross topic, but they’ve been getting widespread attention. Now, there’s news of an infestation of the file cabinets at the Social Security Administration regional office in Queens, NY. Another reason to go paperless. There’s even a list of the 15 most bedbug-infested cities: NY, Philly, Detroit, Cincinnati and Chicago. Yuck and yikes!

How many management applications do you run into where the process of just installing and initial execution take more than a couple of hours and require a lot of skilled engineers to perform? The complexity has an adverse effect on not only the Sales Cycle but realizing ROI becomes significantly harder. The people assigned are usually multi-tasking across a multitude of projects. Yet there is a concept by vendors that the person implementing at a customer is either a Consultant (dedicated) or an employee (dedicated) assigned specifically toward making the stuff work. In some cases, the vendor is counting on this as it sells consulting services.

When applications require a significant amount of knowledge and skill just to function, many features never get exercised simply because of the added complexity each new feature produces and the long lead time toward learning new functions and how to not only provision, but tune and diagnose said features.

Think about the actual installation process. What steps are required to install the application? Is there pre-planning that must be accomplished? What other pre-requisites are necessary? How much skill is required to get the application loaded and configured?

Next, take a look at how patches are done. Simple or complex? How easy is it? Is there a lot of preparation required? Do the patches enable instant back outs? What about test harnesses? Do they auto-test or do you have to build and test yourself? I can tell you from experience, the less intrusive patching and upgrades are, the more current the installation stays. If its hard, takes too much time, or requires a lot of preparation, changes will only occur at a measured pace.

Check out EM7 G3.
Login to EM7
Go to System –> Updates

From the lightning bolt on the row for the patch you want, click it.

Click the image below for an animated demonstration.

Tells you right there if it passed or not. And if you select the note icon to the left of the lightning bolt, you see all of the installation logs. And if you like, you can schedule the patch at a given time. Just select the calendar icon to the right of the lightning bolt and do the deed. This is all pretty straight forward. Some of the other Management applications require you to shut things down, perform a bunch of steps at the command line, then bring things back up.  EM7 Patches are CAKE!

As applications are surfacing, some of the vendors “get it”. They understand that the engagement cycle of installing the product and getting it up and running makes a HUGE difference. These agile products are displacing legacy applications that have become too difficult to install and too difficult to implement without significant effort.

(Photo Credit: O’Reilly Media)

If you want the details about the case, the best source is Paul Venezia’s articles over at InfoWorld. He chronicles what occurred and even visited Childs in jail to get the story straight from the source.

Several jurors at the trial talked about the culpability of the city’s lack of efffective IT mangement and policies.  One of the jurors at the trial was a CCIE with 13 years of experience and blasted the SF IT management:

Management in the city’s IT organization was terrible. There were no adopted security policies or procedures in place. This was a situation that management allowed to develop until it came to this unfortunately point.

But despite poor SF IT management, Childs’ own actions paint a very different picture from the original one of an everyman hero of sorts, protecting the city’s network from his managers’ own ineptitude at all costs – even to the point of going to jail for it.

Instead what emerges is a story about a socially inept network administrator who “freaked and played aggressive defense” and made some very poor choices that landed him in jail.

What initially seemed like overkill – $5 million bail set for the rogue admin – now is not as clear-cut after more details came out during the trial. Turns out Childs was a flight risk, going to Nevada the day before he was arrested (and under police surveillance) and withdrawing $10,000 in cash.

Was he a disgruntled employee? Yes. Was he abrasive and a control freak in the office? Sounds like it. Did he know that his job was being reassigned before he changed the passwords? According to the testimony at the trial, yes.

Pity Terry Childs – I do. But don’t put him up as an example of a network administrator being wronged for just doing his job. The moral of the Terry Childs story is not that network admins are in danger of being jailed if they make extreme decisions about securing the network, but that people make mistakes and what you do after you’re in the doghouse matters (especially if you’re under police surveillance).

Accenture’s managing director of cloud computing, Jimmy Harris brought up these main points.

• Enterprises are taking a more services-centric view.
• With more robust cloud services, enterprises will not be managing infrastructure from an operational and service delivery perspective but essentially acquiring it (infrastructure) as services.
• Fewer bodies are needed for maintenance, enhancements and operations and there will be an evolutionary maturing of roles and technologies focusing on ITIL-like processes.
• IT’s job will be to define the level of performance expected from service providers and be able to demonstrate that they’re in fact meeting those performance levels — but not necessarily doing the management and monitoring itself.

It is a telling statement that Harris does not see a need to bring in a whole new set of monitoring tools to manage all of these different services. That’s precisely why you DO need a tool that can aggregate between all of the different applications and services to provide one view of your entire IT infrastructure. The ability to see all components using one tool is instrumental in IT service delivery. And, with cloud computing, this has never been more important because the different components that make up a single IT service can reside in a number of places. Whether it’s the enterprise’s data center and in a private cloud, or a hybrid cloud with a web front-end for an application which is then hosted by the public Amazon cloud; you have to have a way to meet service levels and manage performance of your services and applications.

It all comes down to simplifying IT. The cloud has provided a great way for businesses to be able to move faster and scale even better than ever before. Many service providers are far ahead of the curve when it comes to cloud, and enterprises are sure to follow close behind.

In ENMS related systems, it is imperative that you present information in ways that empower users to understand situations and conditions beyond just a single node. While all of the wares vendors have been focused on delivering some sort of Root Cause Analysis, this may not be what is REALLY needed by the users. And dependent upon whether you are a Service Provider or an Enterprise, the rules may be different.

What I look for in applications and User Interfaces are ways to streamline the interaction versus being disruptive. If you are swapping a lot of screens, inherently look at your user. If they have to readjust their vision or posture, the UI is disrupting their flow.

For example, if the user is looking at an events display and they execute a function as part of the menu. This function produces a screen that overcomes the existing events display. If you watch your user, you will see them have to readjust to the screen change.

I feel like this is one of the primary reasons ticketing systems do not capture more real time data. It becomes too disruptive to keep changing screens so the user waits until later to update the ticket. Inherently, data is filtered and lost.

This has an effect on other processes. One is that if you are attempting to do BSM scorecards, ticket loading and resource management in near real time, you don’t have all of the data to complete your picture. In effect, situation awareness for management levels is skewed until the data is input.

The second effect to this is that if you’re doing continuous process improvement, especially with the incident and problem management aspects of ITIL, you miss critical data and time elements necessary to measure and improve upon.

Some folks have attempted to work around this by managing from ticket queues. So, you end up with one display of events and incoming situation elements and a second interface as the ticket interface. In order to try to make this even close to being effective, the tendency is to automatically generate tickets for every incoming event. Without doing a lot of intelligent correlation up front, automatic ticket generation can be very dangerous. Due diligence must be applied to each and every event that gets propagated or you may end up with false ticket generation or missed ticket opportunities.

Consider this as well. An Event Management system is capable of handling a couple thousand events pretty handily. A Ticketing system that handles 2000 ongoing tickets at one time changes the parameters of many ticketing systems.

Also, consider that in Remedy 7.5, the potential exists that each ticket may utilize 1GB or more of Database space. 2000 active tickets means you’re actively working across 2TB of drive / database space.

I like simple update utilities or popups that solicit information needed and move that information element back into the working Situation Awareness screen. For example, generating a ticket should be a simple screen to solicit data that is needed for the ticket that cannot be looked up directly or indirectly. Elements like ticket synopsis or symptom. Assignment to a queue or department. Changing status of a ticket.

Maps

Maps can be handy. But if you cannot overlay tools and status effectively or the map isn’t dynamic, it becomes more of a marketing display rather than a tool that you can use. This is even more prevalent when maps are not organized into hierarchies.

One of the main obstacles is the canvas. You can only place a certain amount of objects on a given screen. Some applications use scroll bars to enable you to get around. Others use a zoom in – zoom out capability where they scale the size of the icons and text according to the zoom. Others enable dragging the canvas. Another approach is to use a Hyperbolic display where analysis of detail is accomplished by establishing a moveable region under a higher level map akin to a magnifying glass over a desktop document.

3D displays get around the limitations of a small canvas a bit by using depth to position things in front or behind. However, 3D displays have to use techniques like LOD or Level of Details, or Fog to enable only more local objects are attended to, otherwise it has to render every object local and remote. This can be computationally intensive.

A couple of techniques I like in the 3D world are CAVE / Immersion displays and the concept of HUDs and Avatars. CAVE displays display your environment from several perspectives including top, bottom, front, left, right, and even behind. Movement is accomplished interacting with one screen and the other screens are synchronized to the main, frontal screen. This gives the user the effect of an immersive visual environment.
A HUD or heads up display enables you to present real time information directly in front of a user regardless of position or view.

The concept of an avatar is important in that if you have an avatar or user symbol, you can use that symbol to enable collaboration. In fact, your proximity to a given object may be used to help others collaborate and team up to solve problems.

Next week, I’ll discuss network layouts, transitioning, state and condition management, and morphing displays. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I’ll take a shot at designing a hybrid, immersive 2D display that is true multiuser, and can be used as a solid tools and analysis visualization system.

This blog was also posted at Dougie’s Enterprise Management World

(Photo Credit: MSDN)
I get emails every week from friends and colleagues facing this, as well as recruiters looking for an Architect that can come in for their customer, round up the wagons, and get everything in line going forward.

Sounds rather daunting, doesn’t it. Let’s look at what its going to take to get on track towards success.

1. You need to identify and map out the Functional Empires. Who’s running what product and what is the current roadmap for each Functional Empire.
2. You need to be aware of any upcoming product “deals”.
3. You need to understand the organizational capabilities and the budget.
4. In some instances, you’ll need to be strong enough technically to defend your architecture. Not just to internal customers but to product vendors. If you’re not strong enough technically, you need to find someone that is to cover you.
5. You need to understand who the Executive is, what the goals are, and the timelines needed by the Corporation.

ITIL is about processes. I tend to label ITIL as Functional Process Areas. These are the process areas needed in an effective IT Service. FCAPS is about Functional Management Areas. It is about the Functional Areas in which you need to organize and apply technology and workflow. eTOM adds Service Delivery and provisioning in a service environment into the mix as well.

The standards are the easy part.

The really hard part is merging the silos you already have and doing so without selling the organization down the river. And the ultimate goal – Getting the users using the systems.

The big 4 Wares vendors are counting on you not being able to consolidate the silos on your own. I’ve heard the term “Best of Breed” is dead and “A single Throat to Choke” as being important to customers. These are planted seeds that they want you to believe. The only way to even come close to merging in their eyes is to use only one vendor’s wares.

When you deviate from addressing requirements and functionality in your implementation, you end up with whatever the vendor you picked says you’re gonna get.

You need to put together a strategy that spans 2 major release cycles, and delineate the functionality needed across your design. Go back to the basics, incorporate the standards, and put EVERYTHING on the table. Your strategy needs to evolve into a vision of where the Enterprise Management system should be in the 2 major release time cycle. The moment you let your guard down on focus, the chances that something thwart movement forward, will present itself.

Be advised. Regardless of how hard you work and what products and capabilities you implement, sometimes an organization becomes so narcissistic that it cannot change. No matter what you do, nothing gets put into production because the people in the silos block your every move. There are some that are totally resistant to change, evolution, and continuous improvement.

And you’re up against a lot of propaganda. Every vendor will tell you they are the leader or market best. And they will show you charts and statistics from analysis firms that show you that they are leaders or visionaries in the market space. It is all superfluous propaganda. Keep to requirements, capabilities, and proving/reproving these functions and their usability.

And listen to your end users most carefully. If the function adds to their arsenal and adds value, it will be accepted. If the function gets in the way or creates confusion or distraction, it will not be used.

This blog was also posted at Dougie’s Enterprise Management World

When you look at other management applications, you end up with a plugin needed for each application.  For example, in Tivoli, you’d have to develop an ITNM/IP module. Then for:

• Performance management you’d have to develop an AppPack for Proviso.
• Event management you’ll be doing Netcool rules and automations.
• Dashboards, you’d need to develop some Impact and TBSM views.
• Ticketing, you have yet another integration point.

All in all, you’re probably looking at 4 (or more) developers with different skill sets.

The multiple problem is exacerbated when you consider supporting patches and upgrades across these various product lines.  And then you have to productize this, sell it and support it.

EM7 makes A LOT of sense here. You develop Dynamic Applications, runbook automations, performance management, discovery, custom dashboards, event management, custom reports, and even Knowledge Management into a nice, exportable, licensable package. And you can sell this as a Dynamic Application, a PowerPack, an Appliance coupled with EM7 framework, or as an EM7 All In One ISO image.

If you need to integrate with other applications, there are many ways to redistribute content as well as reports and events. We know that differentiators in your business and services segregate you from competition.

The first step? Ask somebody about your thoughts, concerns, and direction!  What are your requirements? Timelines? How can we help? ScienceLogic EM7 can be your Differentiator.

In the ENMS card deck, holding the wild card differentiates the rest of your hand. If you have a lowly pair, a wild card changes that into a more formidable 3 of a kind. If you already have 3 of a kind, a wild card morphs that into a full house or 4 of a kind. You choose which way you want to win.  ScienceLogic EM7 is your wild card – the card that fits everywhere.

• The product (EM7) that ScienceLogic designed 7 years ago is a great fit to help IT operations manage their infrastructure in public cloud, build a private cloud and hybrid cloud, as well as manage their traditional IT operations infrastructure.
• Specifically, when we think about the cloud, our customers tell us that there is a series of applications and solutions they have that make sense to be in a variety of locations. Part of it is scalability, part is economics, part is the nature of the application.
• The challenge they are facing is having one consistent, consolidated view.
• When we started the company 7 years ago, the industry was very siloed – network  management in one, security management in another, application management in another.
• We wanted a solution from the beginning that offered a multi-tenant view. We wanted to deliver as a service. We wanted to be a silobuster and provide a complete view to deliver as a service.
• To integrate infrastructure as service, you still want a complete view. One view. No matter where the infrastructure is hosted. You want one view of how that infrastructure is behaving.
• Cloud computing is not just a big deal, it’s a generational thing. We see that in our business. The next generation of technology leaders are looking for innovative, fast ways to deliver meaningful services – for B2B, B2C or internal service offerings within an enterprise.
• Need for agility and speed to give customer what they want – it’s driving IT to change the way they use tools to deliver those services.