HP Software Universe is in Vienna, Austria this week.

We have a number of announcements we will make there this week in Business Availability Center, Business Service Automation, Operations Center, Service Center and uCMDB. The title of the news advisory is HP Unveils New Software Solutions for Better IT Operations Management.

Announcements

The Network Management Center (NMC) is announcing version 8.10 of NNMi, NNMi Advanced, a set of Smart Plug-ins and a number of new integrations. NMC is also part of the Better Business Service Management announcement.

NNMi v8.10 adds a number of features:

• Advanced map support - hierarchical container views built from node groups
• Thresholding on device metrics such as CPU and memory. Also checking status on items such as fans and power supplies
• iSPI Performance also adds reporting on device metrics
• Path View is enhanced to support integration (NNMi Advanced only) with HP Route Analytics software (RAMS). This shows directional equal cost multi-paths
• Support for application level failover. This adds to the high availability support using cluster technology.
• A new version of AlarmPoint, 4.0, is shipping in the box with NNMi 8.10
• And an advanced version of NNMi with the creative name NNMi Advanced - which adds HP RAMS integration and support for virtualized networks: HSRP, VRRP and aggregated ports

Also announced are a set of new add-ons called Smart Plug-ins or iSPIs:

• iSPI Network Engineering Toolkit - provides troubleshooting help. An embedded run time version of Operations Orchestration with run-books we wrote. A Find command to 1/ find where a host is connected to the network given an IP address, host name or MAC address and 2/ find all hosts connected to a switch. Trap analytics to help tune the management environment.
• iSPI IP Telephony - discovery and management of Cisco and Nortel IP Telephony
• iSPI Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) - discovery and management of MPLS including L3 VPNs, L2 VPNs and Traffic Engineered (TE) tunnels
• iSPI IP Multicast - discovery and management of IP Multicast networks

And new integrations:

• With HP RAMS for alerts and Path View in NNMi Advanced only
• With HP Network Automation - synch of community strings, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the like. Notification of maintenance windows so that NNMi won't send alerts during scheduled downtime.
• With uCMDB - first NNMi becomes the authoritative source of network CIs. Also, NNMi can query uCMDB to find out which services the selected object rely on. This allows the operator to know, prior to taking a device offline, which important services might be impacted.
• With Operations Manager - bidirectional sync of incidents. This and the uCMDB integration together allow all for complete ITIL closed loop incident process
• With Real User Monitor (RUM) - to determine if an application slowdown RUM detected is more likely to be the network or not

All of this together is what we are calling Automated Network Lifecycle Management that I covered in the last post.

The connection with RUM is a part of Application Aware Network Management (AANM). Our integration with NetScout's nGenius is also part of AANM.

For more information on all of the above, go to the Automated Network Management Lifecycle page.

Vienna

The Network Management Center is also on the demo floor at HP Software Universe Vienna. The NMC training sessions are:

Tuesday, December 9^th

TS-TU-1700/2             HP Network Node Manager i-series: Ready for Primetime, a deep dive presentation

-     Pete Zwetkof, Product Manager NNMi

-     Larry Besaw, R&D Architect NNMi

Wednesday, December 10^th

TS-WE-1015/5            Automated Network Lifecycle Management Technical Blueprint

-     Pete Zwetkof, Product Manager NNMi

TS-WE-1515/A           HP Network Management Center Advanced Workshop

-     Pete Zwetkof, Product Manager NNMi

Thursday, December 11^th

TS-TH-0900/8 HP Network Node Manager i-series: deployment, migration and optimization

-     Kevin Smith, R&D Engineer NNMi

BS-TH-1500/1            Users like simplicity; serve them through automated operations

-     Thomas Edberg, HP

-     Lars Erik Gjervan, NetCom, Norway

This post is getting long so I will end for now but I'll have additional posts on Vienna and the products later.

For the Network Management Center - Michael Procopio