Infrastructure Management Software Blog : IT infrastructure

Sonja Hickey has joined the HP Operations Center team

pspielvogel — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:23:00 GMT

My name is Sonja Hickey and I just joined the HP Operations Center team 3 days ago. I will be focusing on the data collection aspects of the Operations Center product line and working with Peter Spielvogel and Jon Haworth as a Product Marketing Manager.

I’m really excited to be working for Hewlett-Packard for several reasons. First, I like HP’s financial strength, which I think is due to its diversification in many different areas. It’s pretty obvious that HP doesn’t put all of its eggs in one basket and that has paid off. You’ll learn through my posts that I am very much into investing and as I read through my latest financial newsletters, I take note of comments like “HP has a pragmatic culture” and “HP was better positioned than most when the recession hit”. I think you can now see why I’m very happy to be part of the HP team.

I also truly believe in the products that I will be representing - products that help IT teams effectively monitor and manage their IT infrastructure and environment. In my opinion, these are not “nice-to-have” products, but rather “must-have” products for any company that want to be successful in today’s marketplace.

On a different note, I’d like take this opportunity to let you know a little about me. From a work/career perspective, I’ve primarily worked in the high-tech space in either product management or product marketing roles for the past 12 years. Outside of work, my free time is spent with my family (3 children and a wonderful husband) as well as reading historical fiction books and honing my investing skills (sorry, I don’t provide stock tips!).

I’d like to end this post with a request. Pease do not hesitate to post a comment should you have any questions, concerns, issues, etc. around the Operations Center products. This will help me understand the problems and issues you face and how our products can help solve them. I may not have an immediate answer or I may not be the right person to answer your question, but I will get back to you. That’s a promise.

Thanks so much for reading my blog and I look forward to hearing from you.

For HP Operations Center, Sonja Hickey.

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Why I love Information Technology (IT)

pspielvogel — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:21:00 GMT

Last night I watched the U2 live concert webcast on YouTube (www.youtube.com/u2). During the show, I just enjoyed the concert, which of course comes with Bono’s philosophizing. (BBC News review of the concert.) Afterwards, I marveled at the technology that made it all possible.

Billed as “the world's biggest band performing on the world's largest stage” (on the YouTube ad for the event). They said that people were watching on all seven continents. I can’t even imagine how much bandwidth this single event consumed.

I cannot recall a live event available in the identical format to people everywhere on the planet. Sure, major news events are followed around the world, but people typically watch on their local news channel or in some local language portal.

There was a similar effort several years back with Live 8, a free concert to “make poverty history”. But, this contained several channels, one for each of the global venues, and I recall the user experience was less than optimal, both in video and audio quality. The U2 show was crisp on my home DSL connection (1.5 Mbps), which is far from speedy compared to what is available here in Silicon Valley or especially in Asia. There were a few sub-second lapses, but overall the experience was amazing.

Think about the U2 event for a moment. Technology (and global standards) made it possible for anyone on earth to experience the same concert at the same time in the same format, regardless of the viewing platform.

To me, this is truly amazing. And that’s why I love IT and am proud to work for a company that makes so much of the infrastructure possible.

Kudos to Google and YouTube (and U2) for pulling this off!

If anyone knows what IT infrastructure they used to do this, please let me know.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

Join the HP OpenView & Operations Management group on LinkedIn.

Free Webinar: 5 Tips to Reduce Incident Resolution Costs

pspielvogel — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:22:00 GMT

On Tuesday July 28, I will be participating in an EMA webinar with researcher and Vice President Dennis Drogseth. The official title “What is New in the Not-so-New Area of Event Management: Five Tips to Reduce Incident Resolution Costs” is very telling. Many people believe that there is nothing new in managing IT infrastructure. The reality is that some of HP’s biggest R&D investments have been in this area.

Displaying disparate events may not be rocket science, but correlating events from different IT domains to determine which is the cause and which are the symptoms certainly is. This is exactly the premise of OMi, which uses topology-based event correlation (TBEC) to consolidate event storms into actionable information.

Here’s the webinar abstract:

Event management may not be the next new thing but it is quietly making dramatic advances that can save your company both time and money. These new approaches rely on understanding up-to-date service dependencies to accelerate problem resolution.

During the 45 minute webinar, we will answer the following questions.

Why should you reconsider your event and performance management strategy?
What is the impact of ITIL v3 and the concept of an operations bridge on your people, processes, and tools?
What innovations can help you more cost-effectively manage events?

We will also leave time at the end to address your questions.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Controlling SiteScope from Operations Manager

pspielvogel — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:04:00 GMT

I have been getting many questions from both customers and colleagues about how Operations Manager and SiteScope work together. This is a very timely topic as we have some new capabilities connecting SiteScope and Operations Manager.

Since many readers will not be attending my talk about this topic at Software Universe, I’ll preview the information here. (Alex Ryals and I will be focusing on customer success stories in our presentation, so it is still very much worth attending, even if you already know the product integration part.)

The main role of Operations Manger is to serve as an enterprise event console or operations bridge, consolidating events from various domain managers for servers, storage, and networks, from both HP and other vendors. It accomplishes this using agents that run on each managed node, monitoring availability and performance. These agents send information to the Operations Manager server based on user-defined policies. The agents can also act autonomously, performing corrective actions without communicating with the server. This is very useful for minimizing network traffic, or even assuring operation if a connection between the server and managed node gets interrupted.

SiteScope complements this mission by monitoring servers and the applications running on them using agent-less technologies. SiteScope too monitors both HP and other hardware. In some cases, enterprises have some servers on which administrators either cannot or will not install agents. In other cases, customers will monitor servers using a combination of both agent-based and agent-less technology. One common example is for monitoring email environments running Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and all the supporting infrastructure.

So, how do Operations Manager and SiteScope fit together?

SiteScope forwards its events into Operations Manager with the full details.
SiteScope targets also appear in the Operations Manger Service Map.
Operations Manager lets you control multiple SiteScope servers, including transferring configuration information from one SiteScope instance to another and synchronize settings between multiple SiteScope servers.

The ability to monitor your IT infrastructure using a combination of both agent-based and agent-less technology lets you simultaneously improve the quality of service and reduce IT management costs.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel

Smart Decisions Today instead of Desperate Ones Tomorrow

pspielvogel — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:45:00 GMT

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to participate in a briefing in which a dozen IT executives from a leading financial institution came to discuss their unique requirements and how we can help them meet their aggressive growth goals. The first slide that their head of technology presented contained the equation “change = opportunity + risk”. This started a six hour discussion about market and technology disruptions and how they affect their quest for increased performance, capacity, and efficiency.

The theme of the day was business value. The customer had recently made several major changes to their IT infrastructure, all to embrace innovations that provided more performance for less money. Some of these upgrades meant dropping vendors of proprietary technologies who have served them well for years in favor of open platforms such as Linux. In financial markets, efficiency rules.

While efficiency was the foundation of many of their technology decisions, innovation was their passion. Advanced technology was the enabler that allows them to be first, best, and fastest in meeting their customers’ demanding needs. The company needs to develop new financial instruments to address rapidly changing and unprecedented (at least in recent history) market conditions. With rising transaction volumes (long-term trend, anyway) and rising customer expectations, there is a constant need to increase system performance and capacity. And, for IT solutions that can manage growing complexity.

In addition to technology changes, the regulatory environment for financial services firms is also shifting rapidly. While some decade-old regulations such as Glass-Steagall are now gone, new ones are taking their place and there will be new regulations to fix perceived free market inadequacies. This places additional load on IT systems as they must track and log every moving part to ensure compliance with new rules.

Reporting granularity is a major requirement for any IT system. While averages provide useful trend information, they fall short in deliverable actionable intelligence for troubleshooting. Generally, it is spikes that cause system outages rather than averages. And, if your data collection times are too broad, you lose the ability to focus on the indecent that caused an outage or lost data. This was a big discussion topic.

Another memorable take away from the day was when one of their executives said “I would rather make smart decisions today instead of desperate ones in the future.” This was the premise for setting up what turned out to be a very productive meeting.

What smart decisions are you making to simplify managing your IT infrastructure?

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel

Making Infrastructure Management Less Taxing

pspielvogel — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:29:00 GMT

I bought my copy of TurboTax over the weekend. While waiting in the long checkout line, it occurred to me that the United States tax code has several similarities to IT infrastructure management. Let me explain.

At the beginning, there was a needs assessment, planning process, growth forecast, and then implementation. When the system went live, everything was simple and all the pieces worked smoothly together. Over time, came growth, “enhancements,” complexity, and some unintended consequences. Current state of affairs: a mess. But at least we know the system’s idiosyncrasies or at least have processes in place to make everything work.

Quick, which am I talking about, your IT infrastructure of the tax code?

In a new datacenter, companies design in the management tools that will help them best meet their end-users’ needs and run the equipment to gain maximum efficiencies. Over time, requirements evolve (expand!) and new technologies such as virtualization proliferate. IT managers keep their environments current by adding new management tools, often with new software focused on the most recent infrastructure enhancement.

Modern datacenters include dedicated tools for their latest rack of blade servers that include environmental and power monitoring, software to dynamically move virtual machines from one physical server to another without the users even noticing, and monitoring consoles that give you metrics based on the actual performance your end-users experience.

But, even with all these innovations, it’s still really hard to keep track of all the moving parts in any IT infrastructure. So, periodically, companies undergo datacenter consolidations to streamline their operations, reduce the number of management tools, and make the whole process less taxing.

If you want help in simplifying the tax code, contact your local member of Congress.

If you want to simplify your IT infrastructure management, HP has a variety of solutions to help you. We’ll talk in depth about datacenter consolidation and server virtualization in future posts.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.