One function often left out of the network and systems management fold is simulation. This area usually is reserved for military and government entities and larger service providers, but vendors are looking to help enterprises try out network designs before building. Opnet Technologies, for example, is adding functionality to its IT Guru product to ease the task of setting up simulations, by gathering and learning existing traffic patterns from the network. Making it easier to create the initial setup of network simulation will put this tool within the technical grasp of more IT shops.
Utility-computing mania is spreading like peanut butter and jelly at a kindergarten play date. What's not to like? Ratcheted up by IBM's and HP's utility-computing initiatives--On Demand and Adaptive Computing, respectively--the market hype for this no-human-intervention IT model is over the top (see "Utility Computing: Have You Got Religion?").
The downside: Someone has to transfer the lessons learned to the computers so that automated response is possible. Of course, IBM, HP and plenty of other management vendors have service groups ready, willing and able to jump in and utility you and your budget to death.
When you get right down to it, the root of the utility-computing vision is the reality of understanding your network and having policies to manage it. This doesn't have anything to do with computing at all: It's good old-fashioned organization. It's planning and procedures. It's all the stuff that IT has done for years to manage what goes in and out of production. Boring and more boring, but essential.
It's no surprise that Cisco Systems, BEA Systems and Computer Associates have utility-computing strategies that are integrated into either or both of HP's and IBM's visions. But smaller vendors have also jumped on the bandwagon. Singlestep Technologies, a promising start-up born out of the music business (it designed controls for light and sound boards for big-hair rock bands in the '80s), has garnered much attention, notably from Ipswitch and IBM. Singlestep's Unity platform is a quick-development application IBM thinks will fill the gap between the automation in its Tivoli management products and the practicality of what operators have to do. Unity will automate data gathering at the time of a failure by quickly creating an application that matches events to actions. This might be as simple as logging on to a network device and pulling the existing configuration and interface status when a downstream device registers a failure. Such functionality could guarantee timely information and free operators from having to drop what they're doing to assure best-practice compliance.
It may seem that big-vendor utility computing is a beacon of automated control for IT departments in search of network and systems management simplification. But beware of below-the-surface complexity--think Titanic versus iceberg.
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