A holistic outlook is essential for effective en-terprise management. Any organization can reap the benefits derived from integrating management of all IT resources by overlaying a common object-oriented infrastructure across multiple lines of business. The goal is to be able to manage all of your IT resources from anywhere in your operation at any time. It should be easy for administrators or, ideally, non-technical management personnel to behave as if they are on a single large computer, or to focus only on those resources that are relevant to their specific jobs. This envisions a truly heterogeneous system that really does allow the management of anything from anywhere.

Standard infrastructure management products are based on frameworks. The capabilities of such products encompasses: automated software distribution, distributed application management and performance tuning, database administration, network management, output management, storage management, automated back-up and recovery, help-desk services, and security amongst others. The idea behind the frameworks is to gather all these functions under a single umbrella. Individual modules manage and automate the above functions. All the modules then plug into the framework which provides a centralized management console which becomes the infrastructure management cockpit.

While enterprise systems management is the most complete form of managing IT infrastructure, one can also look at the concept in discrete parts – application management, performance management, asset management, back-up management, mail management, server management, desktop management, storage management, security management, network management, and the like. Of these, we would look at storage and network management, two large chunks of infrastructure, in bit more detail.

Storage management
As a background one knows about the three types of storage: direct attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), and storage area networks (SAN). Estimates are that storage can account for anywhere from 22% to over 50 % of the total IT budget. Hence, senior management has been paying more attention to the area of storage within the IT plan. For one, storage requirements are rapidly scaling up. Next, with mission-critical applications like ERP, SCM, CRM, BI in place, the dependence on data and information available online is higher than ever before. Therefore, companies have started to have a planned approach for storage, a 3 -year plan or a 5- year plan. They are seeking answers to questions like : how much would storage grow by next year, what technologies would help manage this growth, how can I have two-fold increase in storage without adding headcount, what technologies would give me the headroom for growth, how much should I budget for storage in my disaster-recovery site, etc. Networked storage, more often the SAN, is coming out as the answer. There are three technological advantages: tools can dynamically allocate more capacity on the network to specific applications, tools can map all devices on an SAN and monitor errors, and tools can make various devices and their storage capacities seem like one logical unit. The last one is a powerful concept called as storage virtualization.

The hardware part of the storage resource aside, from a management standpoint, there is wide range of capabilities possible through software. At one end of the software function range, file systems provide basic tools to sustain some degree of data and application availability. For example, file-system utilities (e.g., Chkdsk) let you scan all file metadata to look for inconsistencies in the file system and take action where necessary. Because such system utilities maintain some degree of data coherence, they comprise a form of storage management.

At the other end of the range, failover management software, or server-clustering software, monitors applications, restarts application components, and redirects I/O to appropriate alternate locations if one server fails to perform its functions. Clustering software synchronizes data and applications between clustered servers by mirroring data, metadata, and application-related registry entries. Good failover-management software should notify you when a failure occurs and should provide information about any changes in the state of the environment. These tools should be able to resume business processes without manual intervention. Tools that let you view and configure the environment, either locally or remotely, add to the ease with which you can resume processes and applications.

In addition, storage management tools such as hierarchial storage management (HSM) software and data-replication software contribute to high application and data availability. HSM based on application-specific policies lets you move critical data to protected secondary storage while also ensuring transparent access to the data. Clustering HSM servers increases the speed with which users and applications can get to their data in the event of most types of server failures.

Software-based data replication technologies add a level of intelligence to basic hardware replication. You can manage copies of data independently and according to the needs of the application. Good replication technologies should not only replicate files but also directories, volumes, shares, and select registry keys, from one to many servers. Deploying replication software should ensure rapid recovery of the most critical servers.

Network management
Network management should function as a cohesive whole, just as the network itself functions as a single entity, even though it may be made up of many parts. A single tool should manage all of those parts. No matter how many nodes, sites or standalones, a single network management tool can provide seamless and invisible oversight, interaction and response. In order to truly manage your network, you need a tool that can analyze historical performance data and create a unique "system personality profile." This will allow for advanced warning of critical situations affecting your most crucial systems. Obviously, predicting system failures before they occur helps to maintain and even increase revenue-generating activities while minimizing the costs associated with system downtime.

The core set of management functions needed for network and systems management includes security, scheduling and workload, storage, performance, output, resource accounting and charge-back, problem management and complete event control. Your network management tool should provide all of these, as well as virus scan capabilities to ensure the safety of the environment. It must track, filter, correlate and forward events, as well as take automated action in response to those events. Any response should also be contained at the lowest possible level.

The network management tool should chug along in the background. And all of this should go on while your customers and employees conduct business as usual. Having identified the most critical functions and predicted the most probable locations and types of failures, your network management system will have been built to respond with as little human intervention as possible. It will notify your systems personnel when it is in need of their assistance. It will only warn higher levels of management on an as-needed basis. There is no need for the CIO to be called in for every incident.

As your business grows and expands, so must your network. End users must have access to increasing numbers of applications, and this increased data exchange will put pressure on bandwidth. You will need both a common user interface and advanced traffic-flow/bandwidth management. You want to work with someone knowledgeable and experienced in designing long-term network management strategies. The marketplace is becoming increasingly "networked", with e-business becoming the rule, rather than the exception. Not only those organizations on the worldwide Web are impacted, either. Internal systems management is as critical as anything external. Neither the CIO nor the end user cares whether the problem is with an interface card, a router, a frame relay link or an ATM backbone. The system’s just "broke." They look at and use the network as a cohesive whole, delivering applications and services to end users who have specific business-related tasks to perform.

Is there a choice?
As a white paper on the BMC Software website says, infrastructure management is the management of "platforms, databases, storage, networks, security and middleware technologies." BMC would like you to consider, of course, its Patrol product for such monitoring, but you don’t have to use that one. In fact, before you decide that you need to go with a very expensive infrastructure-management product, you should consider that you can start small, with a management system that you roll on your own, using some easy programming and simple network management protocol (SNMP) that can alert you when something is going wrong with your network infrastructure. Then you can, in effect, instrument your applications, and especially your databases, using tools built in to your operating system, and gathering the information for later analysis.

Computer Associates, however, points out that investing in infrastructure management will reap big benefits. In a white paper on the company Web site authored by consultants IDC, the conclusion from a study of 30 companies that employed CA’s Unicenter product for infrastructure management was that these multi-billion-dollar companies averaged savings of over $8 million and that they experienced a payback period of 55 days with an return on investment of 663%.

Easwardas Satyan