Infrastructure Management Software Blog : Software Universe

Software Universe in Hamburg sneak preview

pspielvogel — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:53:00 GMT

Software Universe is only five weeks away. We hold this event twice each year, alternating between a United States and European location. The upcoming event is in Hamburg at the Congress Centre Hamburg (CCH) from Wednesday, December 16th – Friday, December 18th 2009.

(If you missed our last Software Universe in Las Vegas, you can download some of the presentations here.)

I’m very excited about this year’s show, as it gives me a chance to connect with many European customers and colleagues, many of whom I have only “met” through email and phone calls. In addition, there are many interesting presentations. Some highlights* (based on their relevancy to managing IT infrastructure - both physical and virtual) include:

Wednesday December 16

16:00-16:45	Optimizing cost by automating your ITIL v3 processes Jeroen Bronkhorst, Hewlett-Packard
17:00 - 17:45	“Monitoring ....inside the Cloud" Vincenzo Asaro, Telecom Italia
18:00 - 18:45	Orchestrating Virtual Infrastructures with HP OO Ralph Capasso, Hewlett-Packard

Thursday December 17

09:00 - 09:45	Automating operations management with HP Operations Orchestration Ralph Capasso, Hewlett-Packard
09:00 - 09:45	HP management of VMware vSphere: How does VMware fit in with your HP Software Infrastructure? Terry Lyons, VMware
10:00 - 10:45	The all new Operations Center licensing model: escaping the hardware bonds Jon Haworth and Peter Crosby, Hewlett-Packard
11:45 - 12:30	HP Operations Manager i: Best practices and lessons learned at CMT Kai-Uwe Jensen, Hewlett-Packard
15:15 - 16:00	BTO Impact of Virtualization on IT Management Dennis Corning, Hewlett-Packard
15:15 - 16:00	Operations Center, the road ahead Norm Follett, Hewlett-Packard
16:30 - 17:15	HP Operations Manager on Linux Lillian Hull and Hans-Peter Schmollinger, Hewlett-Packard
16:30 - 17:15	Capabilities in a Virtualized environment Lutz Bartsch, Hewlett-Packard

Friday December 18

09:00 - 09:45	Virtualization SPI - VMware management plug-in for HP Operations Center Jagannath Harish Gangaiah, Hewlett-Packard
11:45 - 12:30	HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping: a solution to regain control on your infrastructure Thomas Wirtz, Hewlett-Packard
11:45 - 12:30	Integrated approach to monitoring and the challenges encountered and overcome Mark Laird and Romain Maitret, Steria Ltd

* dates, times, and speakers subject to change

Hope to see you there.

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.

HP Software Universe Recap - The Show must go on!

pspielvogel — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:44:00 GMT

I just returned from a week in Las Vegas attending HP Software Universe. It was time well spent due to the priceless face-to-face interaction and open dialog we had with our customers and non-customers (over 2,000 attendees).

I believe the attendees left the conference pleased with HP’s decision to proceed with the event in light of the economic downturn, while many of our competitors cancelled their events. HP could have easily pulled the plug but again demonstrated its unwavering commitment to our customers by proceeding full speed.

I like to thank the strong number of attendees who had been scrutinized by their finance teams for wanting to attend (In Las Vegas nonetheless). I like to think the large number of attendees cemented HP Software's position and strength in the market similar to the number of text votes received by contestants on American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, etc... Thank you to each of our customers and partners who attended!

Many of the customers I spoke with also gave me the impression they felt our competitors are more focused on their bottom line than the customers’ bottom line. Every customer I spoke with wanted to know how HP can help them save money and position themselves for the upswing. They know that their choices will determine how their company will be positioned when the economy turns around.

Webinars and virtual tradeshows can only go so far to share critical information that customers require to make sound investment decisions. I for one am proud that HP executives made the decision to invest in our customers’ success. I believe this investment will help our customers get through the tough times and give them a competitive advantage to ride the wave when the tide turns.

IT is similar to HP Software’s decision to hold this event because in both cases doing nothing is not an option! Companies must innovate and invest in bad times to become the champion during good times.

HP’s customers have spoken - The show must go on. Thank you!

For Operations Center, Dennis Corning.

Customer meeting summary - consolidated event console (Software Universe - Day 2)

pspielvogel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:19:00 GMT

Today was a packed day of sessions, roundtables, and demos in the solution center.

The highlight of the day was a breakfast meeting that Dennis Corning and I had with a customer. He works for a large services company, employing over 100,000 people. Their IT infrastructure is pretty typical: several silos of servers, each of them managed by a different enterprise console. One set of about 100 servers runs SAP and Oracle. Another set of 600 servers runs other business-critical applications. They also use parts of the BAC suite, including SiteScope and Business Process Monitoring.

The quick summary is that he is very unhappy with the current arrangement. He lacks visibility across the silos. His Operations Bridge runs 24x7 in a single room with large monitors on the wall. The operators perform event correlation manually, by looking at the screens and making their best guess on who is the right person to escalate to. The front-line operators generally lack the skills to diagnose and correct problems on their own.

But, there is hope. He is following the Consolidated Event and Performance Management prescription. They will be adding an OM console to monitor events from all the different domain managers. Once this monitoring infrastructure is in place, they will begin to replace the non-HP monitoring with HP agents. Next step is to remove the competing consoles. Along the way, they will start using the uCMDB to track all the infrastructure items to help with correlating infrastructure events to key business services.

Overall, a very strong meeting and another example of how companies are using OM to consolidate and correlate events across their enterprise to reduce the cost of monitoring their IT infrastructure while improving the quality of service.

There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow as well as the hashtag #HPSU09

HPITOps – Covers BSM, Operations, ITSM, ITFM and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel

BSM incognito (Software Universe - Day 1)

pspielvogel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:37:00 GMT

What a great start to Software Universe. The keynotes were great, and the speech by Dick Hoyt on “Yes you can!” was inspirational.

I had the pleasure of moderating one of the customer roundtable discussions. The topic was Consolidated Event and Performance Management. Ten customers joined three HP product experts for a guided discussion about their concerns. The goal of these discussions is to provide a forum for customers to share best practices about how they are using HP products.

We started the session by listing all the topics that people wanted to discuss. My expectation was that we would spend our time discussing Operations Manager, given the track. To my surprise, we spend less than half the time on Operations Manager. The majority of the time we discussed uCMDB and discovery, monitoring applications with Business Availability Center, agentless monitoring with SiteScope, integrating events from Network Node Manager, and of course managing virtualization.

Interestingly, not once did anyone mention Business Service Management or BSM. What does this mean? My interpretation is that customers don’t buy BSM, they buy solutions for monitoring events, applications, or networks. But, vendors of these types of solutions better have ways to integrate all these events together and provide a unified view of the entire infrastructure and how they impact business services. Fortunately, HP provides such solutions, and based on the demos I observed, people are very impressed.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel

Customer Advisory Board for BSM at Software Universe

pspielvogel — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:24:00 GMT

Today was the first day of Software Universe. I attended the parts of the Customer Advisory Board meeting that pertained to Operations Manager.

Some common issues emerged from the discussions:
Customers still face challenges regarding integrating information from disparate IT silos. They are looking for a manager of managers to consolidate events into a single console. One customer from the health care industry said in his presentation “a single pane of glass does not mean the same pane of glass”. The implication is that front-line operator need an event console, second tier subject matter experts need advanced diagnostic tools, and executives need a dashboard that just shows what is running.

In jest, someone from the financial services industry suggested that business executives could use the event console, just on a 30 minute delay, analogous to a stock ticker that runs on a delay. This would give the operators time to fix problems before the execs panicked and started calling people in the middle of the night. Eliminating these calls was a high priority of the IT executives in the room.

What got people excited:

OMU 9.0, especially the new Web-based admin GUI that allows multiple operators to work in parallel in different roles.
OMi, especially the ability to connect BAC end-user events to business services and more quickly identify the root cause of problems.

More from the show floor during the week.

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

Software Universe - Initiatives that Deliver Rapid ROI

pspielvogel — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:51:00 GMT

I just learned that I will be presenting two sessions at Software Universe, which runs from June 16-18 in Las Vegas. The overall theme of the conference is “focusing on initiatives that can deliver immediate improvements and rapid ROI.” Both of my talks fit squarely within that charter.

Here are the two topics on which I will be speaking.

Automating operations management with HP Operations Orchestration
My colleague, Ralph Capasso, an expert in runbook automation, will be co-presenting the talk and running a live demo.

Abstract:
As your infrastructure becomes more complex, you’ll experience more IT events—many of them symptoms of the same root cause. And you probably have limited staff resources to manage and route incidents. The solution? Consolidation and automation. We’ll tell you how to automate event management and remediation with HP Operations Orchestration. Using case studies and workflow examples, we’ll show you how a typical enterprise can drive out millions of dollars in costs, and we’ll present a live demonstration of how HP Operations Manager and Operations Orchestration work together to resolve common issues.

Leveraging agent-based and agentless monitoring to drive down TCO
I’m presenting this session with Alex Ryals of Pepperweed. He has extensive field experience implementing complex IT solutions.

Abstract:
In today’s economy, a mixture of agent-based and agent-less monitoring techniques can be the key to effective infrastructure monitoring within tight budget constraints. Attend this session and learn how two customers combined HP Operations Manager agent-based techniques and HP SiteScope agent-less technologies to reduce their TOC while optimizing their infrastructure monitoring. Presenters will take a deep dive into the integration of these two HP solutions and will explain how you can create both IT value and business value. You’ll also hear how Operations Manager and SiteScope integrate into the overall HP BTO portfolio.

If you have any topics you would like us to cover in our talks, or questions on these topics you want answered, please leave a comment on the blog or contact me directly.

In a future post, I’ll have speakers from other sessions preview their topics.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.