If you are in the Salt Lake City, UT, area please join us for a seminar. We are doing this with our partner Greenlight Group. We will be covering the HP Automated Network Lifecycle Management (ANLM) solution.  The event is this Thursday 11 Dec 2008; the invite is here.

I haven't covered ANLM yet in the blog so let me provide some background.

The product most folks know us for is Network Node Manager, no surprise - it has been around for 15 years. But we have done a lot more since NNM came out, even beyond the NNMi re-write. The integration of these other products are what we call ANLM.

We built a Smart Plug-in for NNMi called the iSPI for Performance; it provides unified fault and performance. It collects interface and device metrics and reports on them. The "so what" about this iSPI is it can show you the performance information on the NNMi map and a in a path view.

We have a product called HP Route Analytics software or RAMS. This product connects to the network like a router. It listens to and records the router-to-router messages. With this information, RAMS can show a complete network, detect changes in real time and do "what if" analysis

We purchased Opsware and got NAS, now called HP Network Automation (NA). This is a network change and configuration management (NCCM) system. As part of ANLM, we have a tight integration between NNMi and NA.

We also got Opsware Process Automation, now called HP Operations Orchestration (OO). This is IT process automation (or Run-book automation) software. We have built a Smart Plug-in for NNMi called iSPI for Network Engineering Toolkit (iSPI NET) that uses an embedded version to OO to implement run-books for troubleshooting network problems.

HP Performance Insight reporting software has been around for a while and integrates with NNMi as well.

HP Universal Configuration Management Database (uCMDB) came from a combination of organic investment and acquisitions. The integration with NNMi makes NNMi the authoritative source of network Configurations Items (CIs) and allows NNMi to determine the potential impact of a network device on an upper level service (ex: order entry).

NNMi is also integrated with HP Business Availability Center's Real User Monitor and Operations Manager (formerly OVO). The connection with Real User Monitor allows the detection of an application slowdown to directly launch an NNMi path view to see the performance along the path. This quickly tells the operator this is likely a network problem or likely not a network problem providing faster problem isolation.

These are all the components that make up ANLM; we will be talking about how their integration helps folks do a better job managing their networks at reduced cost and showing demonstrations. I'll do a post next week on how the event went.

For the Network Management Center - Michael Procopio