Building The NextGen Management Brain

I fear I may have been neglectful in my blogging duties. 

I've fallen behind in a couple of areas, specifically regading a few recent developments in EMC's resource management strategy. 

Go ahead and blame me, but there's a lot to cover around EMC, and I still have my day job(s) to get done ...

So, with apologies out of the way, let's dig into a fascinating portion of EMC's portfolio -- resource management.

Have You Heard About EMC's RMSG?

Sorry to throw internal acronyms around here, but it stands for Resource Management Software Group.

They've got a fascinating charter -- to build an end-to-end IT resource management stack that meets tomorrow's requirements.  And, truth be told, they're  much farther along on this task than I think most people realize.

To EMC's way of thinking, resource management is an exceptionally important discipline, as it bridges between what an information infrastructure might be capable of, and what the business actually sees.

And when you look at what many IT organizations are concerned about, resource management is close to the center of several important IT concerns.

- increasing the productivity of IT workers
- reducing errors and risks
- compliance with stricter IT policies
- being fast and flexible to new business requirements

All of this has never been easy to do in IT. 

But, paint a backdrop of virtualization, SOA, Web 2.0 applications and all the new flavors of IT deployment, and it's pretty clear that whatever traditional approaches you're using for these issues today, you might want to consider new approaches in the near future.

Core Tenets

I've written about many of EMC's offerings in this arena before (e.g. ControlCenter, Smarts, ADM, etc.) but it might be worthwhile to cover some of the thinking behind the products.

From my perspective, the heart of the matter is the concept of a model. 

Or, more conveniently, the brain.

Dig down deep into the offering, and the intellectual glue that holds everything together is an extremely powerful federated model that not only describes things, but how they relate together to support higher-order entities, e.g. applications, service delivery, etc.

If any of you have spent time studying how human brains function, you'll find strong parallels here.

I have been convinced for some years now that -- in the future -- all IT management at any scale will require a model-based approach.  Models that self-discover, self-describe and self-correlate. 

Either that, or lots and lots of human brains dedicated to the task ...

Some people when they first think about using models to describe and run IT imagine a single, large instance.  Except in a smaller shop, that'd never be the case.  The models I'm describing here are federated, each covering a portion of the landscape, yet working together as a single entity.

The analogy to neurons and brain function are fascinating, at least to me. 

For example, as a neuron makes more connections, it's more important and more valuable in the brain.  The brain self-discovers its world, and improves its model as it learns more.  Neural processing in the brain is highly parallelized; each specialized region does what it's good at, but -- overall -- the brain has a set of higher-order outcomes it cares about.

In brain function, plasticity (the ability to learn new things in new ways) really matters.  In IT management, the same is true.

Indeed, I think I could write several blog posts around the strong similarities between brain function and how the Smarts model works.

Connecting The IT Brain

It's always the case that there's other management tools at work at most IT shops -- specialized tools for subsets like networks or databases, as well as higher-order consoles that try to monitor everything.  They're useful tools, and they're not going anywhere.

One of the things I really like about the Smarts offering is that it largely works (and adds value) to what people already have.  Smarts provides adapters into existing monitoring tools, and can export useful information from most popular IT management products.

It then incorporates what it can gather from existing tools and interfaces, adds more structure and correlation, and presents its findings either using its native console, or as an adjunct to an existing management framework. 

The Smarts "brain" has a very strong understanding of not only the elements that compose IT (servers, databases, network, storage, application components, etc.) but the higher-order services that the business sees (complex applications, business processes, etc.)

Higher Order IT Functions

With a rich, descriptive model, Smarts then sets out to implement increasingly more abstract IT functions.  The more abstract, the more useful, I'd offer.

The logical starting point is automated discovery -- the ability to passively probe a large, complex IT environment and create a modelled representation of not only all the IT componentry, but how it all relates. 

Last year, Smarts ADM was the surprise product of the portfolio in terms of customer enthusiasm. 

Why?  Forget complex IT modelling for just a second -- the ability to plug in an appliance to your network switch, and have it passively probe your entire environment, and then be able to compare what you thought you had with what you actually had ... well, it opened a few eyes, to say the least.

From an architectural perspective, the ability to keep the model up-to-date -- automatically and passively -- without the need for someone to perpetually enter state changes -- well, that's huge, I'd offer.  And, if you think about it, any model you'd trust is only as good as its accuracy.  Models with incorrect information will lead to bad outcomes.

Service level delivery comes next.  If the core job of IT is to deliver IT services in complex environments, the ability of a model to detect a problem and correlate the root cause in real-time becomes pretty darn attractive.  Using a model to do the correlation work is a big win.

Now Add Voyence

Now, I believe, you can see a method to RMSG's strategy.  Build a powerful model, have it self-update, and progressively add higher-order functions that IT really wants on top of the model.

A recent example is Voyence, acquired last year.  They do IT compliance -- a different sort of compliance than what many of us might be used to.

Many industries have strict rules around how IT is configured -- for availability, for security, etc.  Voyence, when integrated with the Smarts model, ADM's discovery capabilities, etc. -- now provides a compelling answer to IT shops that care about how IT is configured.

Not only can problem areas be spotted more quickly, but it's easier to assess the impact of an out-of-compliance situation.

And, Most Lately, Infra

You're probably familiar with ITIL Service Management, sometimes referred to as ITSM. 

Infra Corporation has carved out an enviable position as a leader in providing web-based capabilities for all aspects of ITSM: configuration management, incident management, change management and workflow, even self-help.  They've been delivering differentiated results for their customers for quite some time.

As part of the Smarts ecosystem, a great technology stack now gets even better.  Infra's products now have access to a powerful, federated (and presumably current!) model of the IT landscape, as well as related higher-order functions such as fault isolation, IT compliance -- and probably more to come.

Use the components in isolation, or in combination -- the choice is yours.

So, What's The Big Idea?

It's simple -- integrate these powerful technologies to provide what EMC calls "closed loop service orchestration" -- the ability to detect a situation, initiate a change, orchestrate the underlying processes, and verify the results.

From my perspective, IT isn't going to get any simpler going forward.  We live in a world of distributed applications, SOA, virtualization, web 2.0 and all sorts of interest permutations. 

Not to mention an ever-increased reliance on the systems that deliver the information we all need.

Being able to have an overall approach to discovering, modelling and acting on the results -- in a consistent, logical fashion -- is going to be more and more important to more and more IT shops. 

It's a trend that's hard to argue with.

So, how are you building your IT "brain"?

Comments

[Ronald]

How do you use Smarts ADM and Infra in combination?
Last time I looked Smarts ADM worked in combination with Atrium?

BTW: I used Infra for some 4 years and it is a good buy.

[Building The NextGen Management Brain]

Chuck,

Wanted to share with you some results of a survey we just conducted with Datamonitor on ITSM, adoption, roadblocks etc. It was conducted with 370 CIO's worldwide. This goes hand-in-hand with the whole discussion around instrumentation etc.

http://www.dimensiondata.com/howdoyoumanage

I realise you might pull this enty, that's fine, I thought you personally would be interested. If you would like to hear more, let me know I can ask for a briefing on the total results.

Cheers,

Greg.