The next generation of IT management
Migration to the cloud offers a range of financial and operational benefits to those involved in IT service management, not least the opportunity to start from scratch with totally integrated, virtualised systems. As EMC launched EMC Ionix to help ease this migration, VitAL editor Matt Bailey spoke to EMC Ionix ITSM specialist John Murnane and the company’s regional vice president EMEA, Colin Murray.
Is migration to the cloud inevitable? Many of the pundits would have us believe it is and the arguments in favour are certainly persuasive. In an early bid to ease the passage of IT service management into the cloud, EMC has launched a family of products for the virtualised data centre that it calls EMC Ionix. It says this range of IT management software will help customers accelerate their migration from physical to virtual IT and on into cloud infrastructures.
Cloud computing means many things to many people, a recent survey turned up more than 22 distinct definitions. McKinsey has coined the most satisfying definition I’ve seen so far. It defines the cloud as a relationship where enterprises incur no infrastructure capital costs, just operational costs and operational costs are incurred on a pay-per-use basis, with no contractual obligations. “Clouds are hardware-based services offering compute, network and storage capacity where: hardware management is highly abstracted from the buyer and can be located anywhere geographically; buyers incur infrastructure costs as variable OPEX; and infrastructure capacity is highly elastic (up or down).”
If IT is moving to the cloud, via virtualisation, the strategic issue is managing everything so you maintain reliability, improve operational efficiency through automation, deploy ITIL without making it too complex and gain control of the virtual data centre. This is where EMC Ionix comes in.
“There is profound and radical change coming to IT,” predicts Colin Murray, EMC Ionix regional vice president EMEA, “where virtualisation and cloud computing will introduce more services than ever before on fewer servers and at a much reduced cost.”
At any time these incentives would be compelling, but with global economics the way they are, the benefits of increased efficiency and reduced cost are impossible to ignore. “Virtualisation is an IT no-brainer,” states EMC Ionix ITSM specialist John Murnane. “But when you do it, it alters the IT infrastructure radically – can you manage it? Ionix gives the same visibility over the virtual space as over the physical. It is specifically designed to make no distinction between them – it joins up the view.”
EMC Ionix IT management software is designed to help accelerate the migration from physical IT to virtual IT to cloud infrastructures. It combines automated server compliance and configuration solutions gained from EMC’s recent Configuresoft acquisition with market-leading and newly unified management software portfolio to provide what the company describes as unparalleled insight and control across physical and virtual IT infrastructures.
Over the past five years, EMC has assembled through acquisition and organic growth an extensive portfolio of technologies that provide IT management across the data centre – including Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter , Configuresoft and most recently FastScale. Ionix represents the culmination of this strategy, bringing together these products under a unified family that offers customers management capabilities across their physical and virtual IT infrastructures – including servers, networks, storage, and applications.
“The situation is becoming more challenging,” says Murray, “and it is offering the opportunity for us to jump ahead of the game. We’ve noticed within the last few months that people within customer companies are making much bigger requirements. It’s time to stop the discussions and get on the case. We need to get back to the essence of ITSM – delivering impact to the business quickly.”
The most demanding virtualisation management challenges can be answered through innovative integrations across what have been traditionally siloed IT management solutions. Ionix software and solutions break through these silos with new levels of integration and automation that can accelerate the virtualisation management journey by exploiting the openness and automation capabilities of each solution.
“Ionix enables service management functions that no one else can,” says Murray. “Many of the solutions out there work very well in the physical environment, but not in the virtual. We collected a series of best of breed technologies that work very well in both the physical and virtual worlds. It’s a complete solution that leads to the destruction of the old IT silos and replaces them with a combined pay-as-you-go infrastructure.
“It really is a brave new world of IT and ITSM has a crucial role in it,” explains Murray. “Many users are sceptical of cloud computing, so service level measurement will be very important in proving that the service is as good as, or better than before. In the world of the private cloud, service levels will have to be proven by the ITSM software, that is, Ionix.”
“More and more organisations are trying to knit together their infrastructures,” says John Murnane. “Their IT infrastructures are made up of thousands of products. We can offer an entire solution or integrate and interlock with the technology you already have. Ionix can wrap around you existing technologies to give efficiencies and best practise control over specific sectors. Or we can provide a complete solution.”
And what better time to make the switch to a complete ITSM solution than when the infrastructure is migrating from the physical world of local servers to a virtualised or private cloud based infrastructure.
The Ionix solution spans four categories, each with benefits for the virtualised data centre:
EMC Ionix for service discovery and mapping provides the visibility into complex applications and their physical and virtual dependencies – supporting and enabling configuration management database (CMDB)/configuration management system (CMS) population, change management, and application troubleshooting, and helping customers meet the challenges of business continuity and site recovery across the physical and virtual infrastructure. The solution also enables customers to accurately map servers and applications prior to data centre moves, consolidations, and virtualisation migrations.
EMC Ionix for IT operations intelligence provides automated root-cause and impact analysis and monitors services across both physical and virtual environments. The solution also enables customers to visualise the relationships between virtual machines (VMs), the VMware ESX servers they reside on and the network. Customers can integrate automated root cause analytics into their service desk to open trouble tickets based on pinpointed problems found through the Ionix patented codebook correlation technology for enhanced incident and problem management.
EMC Ionix for data centre automation and compliance enables customers to scale their virtualised data centre without increasing staff. Through strong compliance management solutions across the IT infrastructure – including servers, storage, application dependencies and networks – customers can assess configuration compliance against regulatory, best-practices, and internal governance policies including VMware vSphere 4 deployment guidelines. Customers can then remediate compliance violations across physical and virtual infrastructures. Through additional integrations with Ionix for IT operations intelligence, customers can view change events from the operations topology map to enable incident and problem processes to leverage change and configuration processes.
EMC Ionix for service management enables customers to rapidly deploy scalable and cost-effective IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management. This solution highlights two key integrations across the portfolio – integration with CMDBs and workflow automation. Customers can build a federated CMDB that is auto-populated with physical and virtual CIs and dependencies.
“Ionix aims to give a granular, end-to-end collection of integrated point solutions,” confirms John Murnane. “IT has exploded over the last few years, it’s about continual improvement, to move forward and get better. It’s no longer a negotiation between IT and the business; everything is delivered through IT these days and our products knit the network management and applications together to facilitate the better running of the business; and service management is the means by which you can run IT as an integral part of the business.”
“As IT technologies have become pervasive, businesses have been striving to use these resources as a utility that can be controlled and measured according to business demands. Virtualisation has emerged as a key technology for allowing the delivery of IT as a service. It allows applications to be rapidly deployed, scaled, optimised and then decommissioned if necessary,” explains Colin Murray. “Good management is necessary to really unleash the power of IT in this new environment.”
Existing management tools were designed for a different era, one focussed on individual domains, particular tasks and the issues and challenges associated with the old infrastructure. Ionix was purpose-built for virtualised and cloud environments with technologies that stretch across domains, integrate and collectively solve the new management challenges. It allows your management solutions to evolve as your IT environment matures.
Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group thinks we are at an important crossroads for IT services and that there will be winners and losers. “At every major disruption point, huge new market opportunities are created and the eventual winners tend to be the ones that are purpose-built for the new world order – not those who bolt-on functions to last year’s model,” he said. “While there are current leaders in this space, they built monolithic software to support monolithic physical infrastructures that weren’t designed to be modular. Additionally, they were built well before anyone ever heard of virtualisation, let alone the cloud.”
Virtualisation is a major step towards the more flexible computing infrastructure approach of the private cloud. Many businesses are driving their infrastructures towards the cloud and virtualisation simultaneously as they pursue an ITSM approach to managing IT.
Your old management tools were designed for a different IT environment and are rapidly becoming outmoded. Can they adapt to the new paradigm of the cloud? Do they offer the insight, control and collaboration you need to make the move into the virtualised environment? Ionix offers the tools and infrastructure to make IT an integral part of the business in the era of cloud computing.
