ENTERPRISE EQUIPMENT NETWORK MANAGEMENT: Adopt It, Optimize It

Network management (NM) has today, matured way beyond what it used to be a
few years back. Earlier, network management was looked more from the device
management perspective, wherein the tools provided by the network device vendor
were used to primarily configure and administer the network. These tools also
had some in-built monitoring mechanism, which was fairly adequate.

However, in the last few years, there are clearly two trends that are
emerging in the market. For one, network management is clearly heading towards
highly integrated management solution sets, with an emphasis on pre-emption
rather than reaction. Organizations are increasingly looking at network
management as a sub-set of enterprise management systems. This would enable
customers to deploy and manage networks based on policies and also move towards
‘on-demand computing’.

Secondly, organizations are considering remote management, through the
Internet or through an external managed service provider, to manage complex
network infrastructure. These service providers are measured against the service
levels committed to and the service fee payable towards the service providers is
directly linked to the uptime maintained by the respective service providers.

TECHNOLOGY
TRENDS

l Network Management
Functions: Organizations deploying various network and communication
technologies are often forced to look at the following key management functions,
often referred to as FCAPS, to effectively administer and manage their networks.
FCAPS, the ISO model for network management stands for

Fault: Network problems or faults are found and fixed.

Configuration: The network is monitored and controlled. This includes
keeping track of hardware and software on the network and any modifications to
them.

Accounting: Network resources are distributed and used equitably; end
users and departments are charged for their network use.

Performance: Network congestion and bottlenecks are minimized. Current
trends and capacity planning for future needs are taken care of.

Security: Only the people who really need access to specific network
resources are allowed to use them. This applies equally to outside hackers and
internal users.

l Functionality Levels: NM
tools have four basic levels of functionality, each having a set of tasks
defined to manage the objects in the network.

Managed Objects: Devices, or any network element, like routers, hosts,
servers require some form of monitoring and management.

Element Management System (EMS): EMS manages specific
portions of the network like async lines, multiplexers or EPABXs.

Manager of Managers Systems (MoM): MoM systems
integrate the information associated with several EMSes.

User Interface: The entire log of the network
monitored is distributed to the entire MIS of an organization.

l Network
Management Protocols: There are many network management protocols available.
The two mainstream protocols however are SNMP (the Simple Network Management
Protocol) and CMIP (the Common Management Information Protocol).

Generally, SNMP works under TCP/IP and CMIP works under OSI.

The information the SNMP and CMIP can attain from a network
is defined as a MIB (management information base). The MIB is structured like a
tree. At the top of the tree is the most general information available about a
network. Each branch of the tree then gets more detailed into a specific network
area, with the leaves of the tree as specific as the MIB can get. For instance,
devices may be a parent in the tree, its children being serial devices and
parallel devices. The value of these may be 6, 2, 4 accordingly; with the
numbers corresponding to the number of devices attached (4 parallel + 2 serial =
6 total devices). Each node in the MIB tree is referred to as a variable. The
top of a LAN MIB tree is usually the Internet.

l On Demand or
Utility Computing: Organizations have to adopt some form of policy-based
management tools that will dynamically manage resources based on demand. These
are often referred in the industry as ‘managing on demand’ or ‘on-demand
computing’. The whole concept will revolve around understanding current demand
by various self-learning techniques and re-prioritizing existing activities in
such a way that the business does not suffer due to poor infrastructure, while
at the same time taking care of immediate needs.

Utility computing rests on different pillars like business
agility metrics, virtualization software for automated resource utilization and
self-healing software for network management tools that address technical issues
before machines go down, a practice also known as autonomic computing. In
addition, utility computing makes it possible to virtualize data center
resources such as servers, networking elements, storage and applications and
reallocate them according to need.

BUYING TIPS

l Network Complexity:
Growing spread and complexity of networks makes manageability difficult. In case
the IT infrastructure is geographically distributed in a totally heterogeneous
environment, there can be total IT management chaos. In that case, a good
network management tool from a central location is necessary.

l Improving
Network Infrastructure Performance: In organizations where infrastructure
deployment has reached critical mass, network management tool is necessary to
see the entire infrastructure in one view to improve the performance of the
various network elements.

l Moving
Towards E-business: In case, enterprises are automating their supply chains
or their retail network, network complexity increases manifold. NM tools are
then imperative to efficiently manage this complexity.

l Monitoring
Network Traffic: CEOs and CFOs are increasingly demanding information on the
nature of network traffic from network managers and CIOs. When CIOs need to
distinguish business traffic and monitor the infrastructure, NM tool is a good
buy.

l Policy-based
Management: In some cases, to meet growing organizational demands,
policy-based management is the only solution that will allow organizations to
prioritize networking resources such as bandwidth, application access and
security clearance based on individual users. These policy-based management
tools will have to be self deploying, self configuring and self healing,
automatically discovering any changes taking place in the network infrastructure
and dynamically building and altering policies for accessing resources based on
needs.

l Optimal
Network Utilization: NM tools could give the ability to monitor and
configure the network so as to optimally utilize it. It is essential once
organizations go beyond monitoring, but are looking at areas like OS and image
management on a network.

l RoI Factor: Vendors
need to take care of the approach in addressing RoI. The RoI factor depends on
how important network-based applications are to an organization. If all the
branches are connected to the network, then RoI is far easier to calculate.

l Available
Skillsets: In US and Europe, a huge variable is the cost of manpower, which
is high. By contrast, the cost of manpower is not an issue in India. Here, it is
the gap between skills and technology. It is the absence of necessary skill-sets
to manage the network that often drives NM adoption.

l Increasing
Cost Sensitivity: With increasing cost awareness, CIOs should go for
service-level driven network management through appearance of the ITIL framework
and ITSM (IT service management) philosophy; as well as network management
beyond devices. There is an increased focus on adaptive infrastructure to suit
business demands; better integration into performance management systems; and
charge back systems.

l Service-level
Agreements (SLAs): CIOs should focus more on vendors with end-to-end service
level commitments rather than islands of guarantees.

MARKET INFORMATION

India Inc. continues to be in the adoption mode as opposed to the evolution
mode as far as NM tools are concerned. Right now it is more an issue of getting
people to adopt and use NM. Even awareness levels are not very high, so vendors
will have to work on this. As awareness (NM functionality and its impact on
business processes) improves, businesses will start demanding more in terms of
enhancements and evolution. Till then, it is a matter of sticking to the basics
and getting them right.

The key functionality of network management, which will drive
business in 2004, will be the ability to monitor and configure the network so as
to optimally utilize it. The primary component of the NM solution in 2004 will
continue to be network availability management. Last year, this comprised almost
55—60 percent of the total NM market, followed by the network configuration
management component. Most enterprises are still pursuing the monitoring areas,
but have not thought about areas like OS and image management on a network. Even
today, for a majority of enterprises, security features are not high on their
priority list. But as the market matures, awareness about security will rise.
Security has seen increased visibility and will gain further prominence since
secure and trusted computing platforms are essential for the realization of Web
services and wireless networking.

There should be an emphasis on the ‘total solution’ and
‘customer-centric’ approach. The year 2004 will see a growing movement away
from box-selling towards creating an end-to-end solution, with an effective
portfolio of services built around the software. In the past, the key service
has been that of setting up a network; it ended there with little demand for
additional services. The complete services approach will gain prominence during
the year since continuing customer relationships will become critical. This
trend will be further driven by the skills shortage and the growing complexity
of networks. From the vendor perspective, it is going to be extremely important
to build services on top of software; it will bring them to a different level
since it will position them more as consultants rather than mere box-pushers.

The main bottlenecks for NM in India are

• Size of most networks is still small

• Dependency on networks is not high

• Criticality of networks is not high enough to warrant the
  need for managing them effectively

• Low awareness levels among enterprises.