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December 10, 2003

It's Cobbler Time

Forever overlooked, IT management is now the focus of autonomics and next-generation technology

by David Stodder

As interest intensifies in performance management, process management, customer relationship management, and other initiatives aimed at helping businesses achieve competitive objectives, it's easy to overlook the essential engine behind the scenes: IT management. Too often, IT is like the cobbler's children, watching as line-of-business organizations find money to acquire advanced technology solutions — whether or not they are able to support them. IT, meanwhile, has had to struggle with growing demand and complexity with little in the way of technology to upgrade its own management ability.

Back when mainframes ruled the earth, IT organizations could deal with one "stack" of hardware, software, and storage, often from one vendor. The client/server boom in the 1990s, followed by the Internet explosion, has most organizations dealing with a heterogeneous, networked collection of technology. Problem determination and resolution easily become mired in costly, stressful confusion. At best, IT managers draw from their information silos and expertise to divine a single version of the "true" problem. At worst, they listen for the squeakiest wheel — or maybe the CFO's or CEO's footsteps — and respond accordingly.

"We've moved to a point where, with the Internet, organizations are trying to manage more servers than they had endpoints just a few years ago," says Alan Ganek, vice president of IBM Autonomic Computing. "Think of Charles Schwab or Fidelity Investments, with people logging in all over the world to perform transactions, at any time. Their users don't connect to a bank of mainframes, but to a whole raft of machines. Scale and complexity have increased dramatically. Companies can leverage somewhat what they've done in the past, but they're dealing with a different animal."

To meet goals for end-to-end business process management, strategically driven performance management, or financial transparency, IT will need to tame this animal. Of course, for most organizations today, "taming" means figuring out how to do more IT with less — or at least, less expensively — and maximize return on current IT investments.

In 2003, the intense focus on driving down costs caught the attention of the IT management vendor community. With visions of economic doom written on the wall, major IT solution providers and their market research partners such as Gartner pitched big next-generation ideas: IT resource management, business systems management, and so on. As we head into 2004, these initiatives are worth watching. If they bear fruit, IT could have the stuff to manage its domain more intelligently.

Leading with Business

IT management's original orientation was defined simply as getting the technology itself to work. Next, IT tuned the infrastructure for big applications, transaction systems, and databases, which continues to be the maintenance balancing act. Looking ahead, it's clear that the reference point for intelligent IT infrastructure management will be alignment and optimization of business processes. Given the percentage of revenue that large organizations spend on IT, businesses increasingly will want to see exactly how IT resources contribute to strategic processes and objectives.

"IT will finally become truly business-driven," says David Hochhauser, vice president of Unicenter Management at Computer Associates. "Our focus is on enabling automatic and continuous discovery and mapping of the infrastructure to business processes. This will have profound effects. IT will be able to monitor the infrastructure for compliance to business-oriented service-level contracts. Business impact analysis will drive proactive provisioning of resources; IT will prioritize problems based on analysis and be able to resolve them rapidly, often automatically."

With Unicenter as its solution foundation, CA maps out IT resource management as way for IT to move from a cost center to a value center, and "step up to business relevance." CA is developing a Web services-oriented architecture to bring role-based services and information delivery to IT managers. Inside the technology will be a "self-managing infrastructure" that can correct problems and reconfigure itself for better performance.

CA is also a contributor to the new Data Center Markup Language (DCML), an XML-based standard designed to ease interoperability among heterogeneous IT systems (other key supporters of DCML are Electronic Data Systems and Opsware). Such standards will be critical to enable on-demand utility computing, in which IT must flex to meet business demand and integrate heterogeneous offshore and outsourced resources invisibly to business users.

According to Larry Shoup, senior technology strategist at CA, "customers want to treat the IT infrastructure as a big 'black box' that reallocates its resources and associated expenses to adapt to changing business conditions. Customers also do not want to achieve this capability through a proprietary solution from one vendor. To make this possible, we believe that a standard language is necessary to describe the parts of the black box and how they work together. The effect will be lower costs, perhaps reducing the appeal of moving IT resources offshore."

Autonomy for All

CA, Cisco Systems, EMC, IBM, BMC Software, and most of the other major IT infrastructure vendors are working as fast as they can to put autonomic, self-healing, and self-managing features into their systems. In part, this is the natural evolution of all technology — to create standard systems that require less and less manual administration. Obviously, the more "auto" inside systems, the fewer personnel IT will require to tend to them. IT professionals can then focus on the bigger, more strategic task of implementing advanced analytics and event-driven performance technology to align IT resources with business processes.

EMC's $1.7 billion acquisition of Documentum not only positions the company as a heavyweight in enterprise content management but also tips the scale in terms of its growing identity as a software provider. The company has been steadily providing more storage management software solutions, including its Automated Networked Storage products and services. EMC's big-picture theme is "Information Life Cycle Management," which will now cover content management, both physical and logical. This integration will be critical as businesses look to unify data resources for end-to-end process management.

Virtualization is a key technical concept, which is also embraced by Veritas Software as a means of managing storage resources at a logical level independent of an underlying physical layout that could be distributed and heterogeneous. Establishing virtualization is essential to enabling autonomics and embedded intelligence throughout the storage network.

Beyond just storage networking, Cisco Systems is driving autonomics into network management itself with its Adaptive Network Care solution. The company is working with IBM on the Adaptive Services Framework (ASF), which looks ahead to determine the interfaces and formats required to enable autonomic computing across a network. "The progress toward IP [Internet protocol] networking is a double-edged sword," a Cisco/IBM white paper states. "On one hand, IP networks provide greater opportunities for an enterprise to incorporate new and dynamic business capabilities and customer services; on the other hand, they become massive and unwieldy to manage as they are expanded to offer more functionality." ASF aims at the highest level of intelligence that could be driven into the network to enable the infrastructure to move in sync with business requirements. As a framework, it can help IT managers set a direction even as they implement less grandiose objectives to decrease costly maintenance.