The right tools for network management
Richard Thurston looks at how networking technology has evolved to accommodate the latest advances in enterprise IT
IT departments are expected to be more business-literate than ever
The demands of network management have changed radically. No longer do IT departments just face the relatively simple task of ensuring the availability of network devices and providing adequate bandwidth. Now they are expected to be more business-literate than ever, providing a better service to end users while taking advantage of opportunities for cost savings.
Fundamental business shifts mean that the workforce is becoming more mobile, more knowledgeable and more demanding of their IT. The sheer number of applications – those rolled out by the IT department and those downloaded by users – is adding to the complexity, particularly real-time IT applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), video communications and customer relationship management (CRM).
These trends make network management more complex than it has ever been. “Constant, 24/7/365 availability and uptime and performance are becoming more critical... to ensure customer [employee] satisfaction,” says Patrik Bihammar, research manager for infrastructure software at analyst IDC.
“The behaviour of users is driving the strain on the usability of the network,” adds Rob Johnson, head of solutions at Dimension Data, the systems integrator. “[Network management] may have been seen from an enterprise perspective as very network-centric, but now it is more user-centric because of developments in the applications space. Network people are having to understand more about how the applications work.”
Fortunately for the IT department, the technology to meet these complex demands has progressed rapidly and many companies are investing in the latest solutions, despite the economic recession. According to Forrester Research, global business expenditure on network management software grew nine per cent during 2009 to $3.57bn (£2.33bn).
Integration of wired and wireless
One of the most significant trends in enterprise networking in recent years is the way wireless networks have become a more integral part of the corporate LAN.
“Originally, it was about element management – it was about managing the switch. It stopped there,” says Andy Sawyer, technical consultant at HP Networking. “The business now demands that you are capable of managing the wired and wireless world seamlessly from the same interface.”
Integration is easier said than done, however. Wireless networks grew up architecturally separate to the wired LAN and vendors created their own wireless management platforms.
Though vendors such as HP with its Network Management Centre (formerly HP Openview) and Cisco with its CiscoWorks software, have since worked hard to give IT departments visibility of their equipment from a single network management interface, this does not help firms that have multiple vendors’ equipment on their network.
Johnson says that network management is itself often poorly integrated with other IT activities, largely because of the quantity of network management products available.
The problem is magnified when requirements for visibility of VoIP traffic and security are added to the equation. Martin Voelk, a self-employed network consultant, argues that the number of management systems required is causing a problem.
“There are four management areas – traditional routing and switching, wireless, voice over IP and security – and people are managing them separately,” he says. “They all run on a separate management platform. One of the biggest obstacles is there is not a platform that is vendor-independent.”
Multiple functions, one product
Another big network management trend is the move by vendors to build hardware that carries out multiple functions. Multi-functional devices can simplify network management and reduce capital costs for IT departments because there are fewer appliances to buy and manage.
One example is Cisco’s growing range of Integrated Services Routers, which now include switch modules, WAN optimisation functionality and security features such as VPN acceleration, stateful firewall and content filtering as well as the ability to run a scaled-down version of Cisco’s call manager software.
Other networking vendors, such as Aruba Networks with its Remote Access Point (RAP) products, offer an integrated router, wireless access point and WAN acceleration appliance in one device.
“What we have seen is massive consolidation. Organisations are looking to cut down on the number of products they have, and they are looking at manufacturers to consolidate their own products, instead of having myriad products. A lot of the products were overlapping,” says Stuart Parham, a consulting engineer at Cisco.
But there is a downside to having all the features in one box: if the device or its power source fails, all its functions and the services it supports fail too.
Voelk says: “They [multifunctional devices] make network management a lot easier because you receive information from the same IP address, the same box and you save on rackspace. But if there is a power supply failure, all the services go down at once.”
Voelk warns that multifunctional devices do not necessarily simplify things. “Even if everything is in one box, all the alarms are different. If a firewall is integrated into a router, it still gives firewall alarms,” he says. “Cisco is trying to integrate everything into Cisco Works [to give] a single point of administration. At the moment, we’re not there.”
New breed of convergence
Infrastructure rationalisation is also enabled by a new type of convergence. This is not the convergence of voice and data (nor fixed and mobile) that has been on the agenda of many businesses, but the convergence of storage, servers and networking in one architecture.
Those vendors that are selling or developing new converged equipment – such as HP, Cisco and Hitachi Data Systems to name three – argue that convergence can reduce enterprises’ power consumption (providing cost savings and helping drive their green agenda), reduce capital expenditure in the datacentre and decrease server footprint.
Though each vendor’s plans differ, HP’s vision is the convergence of Fibre Channel and server Ethernet I/O onto a common Ethernet-based network infrastructure running Fibre Channel over Ethernet.
“The compelling message for converged infrastructure is you can reduce the number of network ports,” says HP’s Sawyer. “I can reduce the footprint and power consumption and make a simpler environment to manage.” However, Sawyer warned that interoperability issues and unratified protocols remain. This could mean a multi-vendor converged infrastructure might continue to prove troublesome.
The right tools for network management
Richard Thurston looks at how networking technology has evolved to accommodate the latest advances in enterprise IT
Consolidation and virtualisation
Another means for the IT department to cut costs is server consolidation, which has become an increasing trend. Interest in server consolidation has been fuelled by the ongoing development of virtualisation software and by increasing wide area bandwidth – and the ability to manage it. These factors have enabled IT departments to create efficient centralised datacentres.
Datacentre virtualisation enables companies to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine. Each virtual machine can run a different operating system and multiple applications that can reduce the number of physical machines a business requires.
“Customers are increasingly looking to virtualisation to dramatically improve the performance and flexibility of their existing IT systems. Virtualisation is becoming a cornerstone for customers’ IT strategy,” says Paul Maritz, chief executive officer of VMware, the market leader in virtualisation.
VMware provides businesses with software to virtualise their applications (VMware ThinApp), individual machines (VMware Workstation and VMware Player) and complete datacentres (vCenter and vSphere among others).
VMware is not going it alone. Since November 2009, VMware, Cisco and EMC have been working together on producing a converged infrastructure, called the Virtual Computing Environment, that is based on virtualisation, networking, compute, storage and security technologies. Cisco and VMware are also releasing a bundled offering to their channel of two products from Cisco – its unified computing system and Nexus virtual software switches – with VMware’s vSphere. Both groups of offerings should make it easier – and reduce the risk of interoperability problems – for businesses considering the deployment of virtualised datacentres.
There is little doubt that greater numbers of companies are virtualising their infrastructure, but the technology is not without its pitfalls for the IT department. IDC’s Bihammar warned of complexity, cost and the lack of visibility.
“Virtualisation technology is putting pressure on network management administrators,” he says. “Virtualisation can add complexity to network management – to such key areas as monitoring, fault, problem, root-case analysis. Without the right tools, virtualisation also adds a layer of abstraction and therefore a potential blindspot for network administrators,” Bihammar says.
“Virtualisation also requires virtualisation-aware virtual switches,” he adds. That could add considerably to the initial cost of a virtualisation project.
WAN optimisation
Of course, if servers are consolidated into centralised datacentres, the load on the WAN increases and performance of applications can worsen because of increased latency, especially for chatty applications that produce a lot of round trips between the client and server.
“As you start to virtualise and consolidate applications, you are putting more distance between users and the cloud, which could mean detrimental performance,” says Dan Poulter, senior marketing manager at BT Global Services.
Fortunately, technological advances in WAN optimisation have helped to reduce the impact of these issues. To stop performance degrading, Poulter advocates that enterprises identify the effect on the network of consolidation before it takes place.
“The first thing we would recommend is an assessment to gain visibility before you consolidate. After that, there is WAN optimisation. It’s a real enabler for server consolidation: you can speed up inefficient protocols and remove unnecessary data [from the network],” Poulter says, adding that performance could be boosted by 60 per cent depending on the type of applications used.
WAN optimisation involves making more efficient use of bandwidth and reducing latency across a link. It includes techniques such as bandwidth shaping, TCP acceleration and local caching.
WAN optimisation offerings are available in both a product form from the likes of Riverbed, Cisco, Juniper and Ipanema, and from service providers such as BT Global Services and Orange Business Services, for example, that offer a combination of network-based and product-based acceleration.
Network-based acceleration includes the use of classes of service. Product-based acceleration sees a service provider install equipment from a vendor such as the examples mentioned, and manage the link end to end.
Originally, WAN optimisation equipment was required for both ends of every link where acceleration was required. This proved expensive, particularly for companies that have a lot of branch offices.
However, the technology has now evolved so similar features can be achieved with virtualised software, meaning a new appliance is not necessarily required to accelerate traffic to branch offices.
A small handful of vendors, including Riverbed, also offer client software, which will accelerate traffic for mobile users or home workers. This same software can be used for branch offices. However, the best performance improvements are normally achieved by installing appliances at each end of the link.
There is, therefore, a trade-off between cost and performance in choosing WAN optimisation technology. “To get the performance management you have to have an appliance at each end,” says Ian Abbott, lead management consultant at Orange Business Services.
He says Orange has seen considerable numbers of consolidation projects, which have driven up demand for WAN optimisation. “There is a lot of drive to consolidate and virtualise, and the other side [benefit] – to drive cost out of the business,” Abbott says.
Maturing and converging technology
Many IT departments are keen to understand what today’s trends of consolidation, convergence and increasing mobility and complexity will mean for the future. IDC’s Bihammar says he expects the future will bring a convergence of network management tools.
“The convergence of system, network and application monitoring, configuration and management will become more important. Technology will continue to mature in this space,” Bihammar says. “The dependency on the network will continue to increase and integration between internal and external networks and the cloud will also continue,” he says, referring to the need for enterprises to be able to move applications between their own datacentre and cloud providers.
Bihammar adds that IT departments should ensure they “plan for scale and bandwidth/latency requirements” from infrastructure virtualisation and the converging management of networks, systems and applications.
Network management continues to evolve rapidly. Critical to taking advantage of this evolution will be making the right technology choices.
The right tools for network management
Richard Thurston looks at how networking technology has evolved to accommodate the latest advances in enterprise IT
Five points to bear in mind when planning your strategy
Reset savings expectations.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Condensing the I/O of servers into a single, shared, or virtual fabric greatly simplifies hardware provisioning by converging multiple traffic types. Switches and adapters are fixed but virtualised so that when you need to make changes, it's a software configuration exercise to modify virtual adapters and addresses, not a significant physical re-cabling effort. HP, IBM, Cisco and others promise huge cost savings by integrating server, storage, network and management tools with element managers. The goal is to handle the entire management workflow in a single system. However, there’s a good three years before much of this architecture is fleshed out and cost savings are realised.
Ratchet up visibility to understand the side effects of virtualisation and cloud computing.
Since traditional network monitoring focuses on layer 2-4 protocols to understand key metrics such as latency, jitter and packet loss, vendors are evolving their software to manage a virtual and converged world. New software tracks application performance by examining flows and deep inspection of packets to measure the same performance metrics on an application-by-application basis. As once was the case with wireless, vendors will try to sell you specialised products, only adding complexity to your infrastructure. Fundamentally, the technology exists already within the infrastructure to provide the visibility. Current network management needs to be updated with the granularity to handle the new traffic samples.
Increase IT’s visibility and help to control energy costs.
With so many devices hanging off a switch port that draws power, there are ripe opportunities for organisations to reduce equipment footprint, resource consumption and PC power management systems by simply turning off devices when not in use. It should work in tandem with operations and security teams to take advantage of the scheduling features within network management as a step towards going green.
Look to new datacentre solutions that minimise compatibility issues.
Vendors, such as Cisco and HP, are delivering complete infrastructures in a box, which include servers, storage and networking components. As you lay your five- to 10-year IT strategy foundation, look for network management software that supports multi-vendor products.
Stay away from shiny new software.
Network management software is the operating system for networks. Much like a smartphone operating system, it’s responsible for delivering applications and therefore needs to be available and performing well at all times. Firms should purchase software that melts into network management software while providing new capabilities through the platform.
Andre Kindness, senior analyst, IT Infrastructure and operations, Forrester Research