Network Management Software

Adaptive NMS aligns people, processes and systems

As networks become larger and increasingly complex, and with customer expectations higher than ever before, network management is a key issue. Sunil Jose explains what NMS software is capable of, the challenges, and future possibilities in this space

IT infrastructure, service, application availability and performance are becoming crucial to both service providers and enterprises in today’s networked economy. To remain competitive, enterprises need to maintain high service levels and application availability and performance, as well as optimise the productivity and efficiency of IT staff and end users. Likewise, nothing is more devastating for a service provider than lacklustre service, downtime, and poor application performance. As more services and applications are delivered over IT infrastructure, companies are taking a broader approach to network and service assurance with integrated and proactive fault, performance, and availability management across applications, systems, and networks.

Business models are also becoming increasingly dynamic. Mergers and acquisitions are affecting organisational structures. Uncertain economic environments; with markets that expand and contract with little warning, are wreaking havoc on traditional long range planning processes. As a result, enterprises are constantly being driven to find ways to adapt quickly and wring efficiencies out of everything they do.

The challenges of this environment are forcing companies to reduce IT costs and control complexity, while ensuring that enough of the right resources are allocated to achieve corporate objectives. In order to prosper, a business must clearly prioritise its requirements and find innovative ways to conserve its human and material resources while meeting its objectives. To make matters worse, customer expectations for service have become rigid. Accustomed to the promise of a Web-enabled world, today’s customers expect business information and services to be constantly available, from anywhere, in a way they deem most suitable, and with a guaranteed quality of service. IT organisations must virtually eliminate downtime and should be able to respond immediately to customer issues.

Why network management?

Modern networks are divided, in terms of their operations, into two main categories: enterprise and service provider. Examples of large enterprise networks are government departments, global corporations, and large financial or healthcare organisations. Many such enterprises employ the products and services of service provider networks.

Network management provides the means to keep networks up and running in as orderly a fashion as possible. It includes planning, modelling, and general operation. It also provides command and control facilities. Broadly speaking, the functional areas required for effective network management are:

• Fault: All devices at some point can become faulty, and virtual connections, links, and interfaces can go up or down. These can all cause the generation of network fault data.
  
  
• Configuration: All devices tend to require some type of configuration or tuning. Configuration settings may be both written to and read from devices.
  
  
• Accounting: Billing for services is an important component of enterprise network management (e.g., for departmental service billing). This function can be used for charging for the use of resources, such as dial-up facilities, to individual departments as well as for verifying the bills submitted by a service provider.
  
  
• Performance: As user populations and bandwidth needs grow, it is essential to be able to measure performance, particularly for SLA fulfilment. Performance checks can assist in predicting the onset of congestion.
  
  
• Security: Attacks against networks can include unauthorised access, data modification or theft, and so on.

Why is enterprise network management important? First, it helps keep the overall network running. Secondly, good network management facilities assist in all the lifecycle stages. Thirdly, such facilities should help to reduce the cost of running the network. Sophisticated enterprises are now demanding an automated, agile and disciplined approach to network management. Imagine a network operations centre (NOC) where all network documentation is accurate; where you can identify any network change activity instantly; where all network changes are approved, scheduled and archived. Imagine the increase in operational productivity. Imagine the insight your operations staff will have with a real-time view of network faults and performance that they can immediately co-relate with network changes. Imagine the peace of mind you will have when you know that all unauthorised network changes can be automatically rolled back based on your corporate policies. This is all possible with the right network management software within the right network management framework.

As the Internet and other online transactions become more critical to business success, enterprises and service providers are taking a broader and more proactive approach to network and service assurance. Managers now want to understand the entirety of any problem that may arise and its business implications so that corrective action can be taken as quickly as possible.

Challenges

The challenges are considerable. Optimising the availability and performance of the network infrastructure, for instance, requires continuous monitoring of the WANs, LANs, switches, routers, and other network infrastructure hardware to identify faults and performance degradations, preferably before they affect services. Besides resolving such outages and degradations, network managers must also track usage, size bandwidth accordingly, re-deploy underutilised resources, and accurately plan for growth.

Meanwhile, managing the system environment in large enterprises and providers is becoming more complex and is often separated from network management. Adding to these challenges are changing business conditions and the proliferation of mergers and acquisitions, which have created the need to manage servers and desktops across heterogeneous systems and applications environments in broad geographies. These needs have, in turn, generated a requirement for tools to automate and simplify the systems and applications management process.

The growing range of services offered to end users means that traffic levels are always increasing. Deploying more bandwidth can offset rising traffic levels but, unfortunately, the nature of this traffic is also changing as the associated applications become more resource-intensive and mission-critical.

Some important aspects of network management are:

• Availability of network elements, interfaces, links, and services.
• Discovery and inventory management.
• Monitoring the status of network elements, interfaces, links, virtual circuits, VLANs, and so on.
• Measuring traffic levels and checking for network congestion.
• Configuration—VLAN set-up, SAN volume set-up, storage allocation, remote-control software (Microsoft Systems Management Server), and database redundancy (e.g., Informix).
• Service level agreement (SLA) reporting, SLA verification between an enterprise and service provider.
• Security control—resistance to attacks from both sides of the firewall.
• Scalability—handling increased numbers of users, traffic, network elements, and so on.
• Disaster recovery.

Additionally, assuring reliable application performance is becoming increasingly critical to user productivity and business effectiveness. Even momentary performance degradations in enterprise resource planning, customer relations management, and other critical business applications can significantly impact revenue and customer satisfaction. The same is true with time-sensitive applications, such as order entry and securities trading. Likewise, spikes in response time for popular applications, such as e-mail or Internet access, can have a substantial effect on user productivity. What is needed is a way to measure, monitor, and track application response times to assure both application availability and performance.

Service providers use a combination of commercial and home-grown network management tools to help operate their networks. With the growing complexity of operating large networks and an increasing focus on profitability, traditional network management systems fall short in the areas of capacity, peering, and routing management.

Network management software greatly improves service providers’ ability to manage these critical aspects of the business, thereby limiting risk and improving profitability.

It is clear that enterprises can no longer afford an unreliable network infrastructure. Rapid restoration and recovery from any network outage is a mandate for all network operations organisations. To accomplish these objectives, operations groups have invested in fault and performance management software platforms. Software performance management systems work to analyse and report network and application performance metrics in order to address issues before they turn into problems.

One of the best ways to address these network management challenges, and improve network reliability, is to implement network management software processes and automated solutions.

NMS as a discipline

The introduction of management software as a discipline in an enterprise should be a phased approach that results from an investment in people, processes and systems within the framework of an adaptive methodology. Network availability is arguably the most essential and measurable objective of any IT organisation. Network outages incur immediate and long-term costs that can often be staggering, thus creating additional pressure to keep networks running.

Industry analysts estimate that over 50 percent of all network outages are caused by errors introduced during the networking process. Accurate, reliable, and secure network management software is the cornerstone to a network’s reliability and availability. However, optimally setting up a network is a very complex process, and the environment is only getting worse. For example, during the past several years, the global economic climate has forced enterprises to seek ways to cut costs and improve operational efficiencies. This environment has driven a proliferation of mergers and acquisitions, and the associated integration of network infrastructures. Effective management software is one that ensures network availability, reliability and stability.

The place to start in the development of network discipline is with software that can centrally and securely create, deliver, audit and archive the configurations and operating systems of network devices in heterogeneous networks. Since network downtime is so costly, managing network information and processes reliably, securely and centrally is critical. Centralised control creates the network uptime required to retain profits needed to stay competitive. By using software to document networks and to automate device configuration and change management, network operators can gather a baseline of current configurations, audit changes, and most importantly, rollback to previous working states when network devices fail.

Future

Systems management should become seamless throughout the IT infrastructure as integration between disparate management tools will boost system reliability and availability. Organisations will increasingly tie network management, storage management and security management together. IT managers will head off potential problems before they occur by using an automated single management console that reaches across the entire organisation and predicts system errors or failures.

IT infrastructure will be completely integrated across the entire organisation, helping to tie IT to business goals. As companies move toward an on-demand environment, the complexity associated with those networks will need to be managed by a flexible and configurable systems management solution.

Network management software automates and verifies the more complicated tasks, therefore making it significantly simpler to do any thing, including regularly updating passwords and SNMP community strings, and maintaining higher levels of security.

It is designed to meet the needs of today’s complicated network environments and will easily evolve to meet tomorrow’s requirements as well. Today’s network management software requires an open, scalable, cross-platform approach that is also truly integrated. Enterprise and service providers are realising the strategic importance of network management in today’s computing environment.

The author is country manager, Tivoli, IBM India