IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH, INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Using Converged Infrastructure
Management to Optimize the Planning
and Operations of Cisco Environments
An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper
Prepared for CA Technologies January 2013
Table of Contents
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Executive Summary ... 1
Introduction ... 1
Essentials of Converged Management ... 2
CA Technologies and Converged Management – A Brief Introduction ... 2
Convergence Transitions in Cisco Environments ... 3
Datacenter Convergence ... 4
WAN Convergence ... 5
Voice/Video/Data Convergence ... 6
Converged Infrastructure Management – The Rest of the Story ... 7
CA Technologies Solutions for Converged Infrastructure Management ... 8
EMA Analysis ... 11
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Executive Summary
The steady convergence within IT infrastructure and IT operations organizations is fueling a drive for tightly integrated, converged infrastructure management options. But even as infrastructure convergence takes place, the pace of technology evolution and introduction has not slowed. As such, management approaches must keep up with significant rates of innovation and change. This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) whitepaper focuses on the intersection of
these two forces and how two IT industry leaders, Cisco and CA Technologies, are working together to optimize converged management in key areas of technology change and convergence, such as Voice/ Video/Data, the Wide Area Network (WAN), and the datacenter.
Introduction
Convergence is everywhere within IT. There is convergence in communication technologies, where IP-based voice and video are now sharing the same delivery infrastructure as traditional data applications. There is convergence within networking technologies, where “flatter” network architectures are collapsing traditional approaches and new standards such as Data Center Ethernet (DCE) and others offer an opportunity to bring together traditionally separate storage and data transport technologies. There is convergence in aggregate datacenter infrastructure as well, where converged infrastructure solutions are unifying storage, compute and networking into pre-configured, optimized “datacenter in a box” offerings. Cisco is a global technology provider, supplying solutions that either directly implement or otherwise enable many of these convergence directions to be realized.
Beyond technology convergence, there is also convergence occurring in organizations. EMA research has revealed a twofold increase over the past three to four years in the number of organizations that have assembled cross-domain operations teams. These “converged” teams are centered upon application performance and/or service quality goals, with a focus on tracking, understanding and assuring good IT experiences among customers and end users. These teams are common among organizations making the transition from traditional IT cost-center to internal private cloud operating models.
Voice, Video, & Data Applications & Services Wide-Area Networks Datacenter Systems, Networks & Storage Operations Teams
Management
Tools
Figure 1. Convergence in ITUsing Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
With all of this convergence going on, it should be natural to seek convergence within the management tools and technologies being used to plan and operate today’s growing, dynamic, interdependent and increasingly converged infrastructures. Management convergence makes sense from a cost and efficiency standpoint, but is also an imperative for those moving towards service-centric or application-centric operations. CA Technologies is a global supplier of management solutions that has recently introduced newly integrated and broadly capable products to comprise a converged management solution.
Essentials of Converged Management
So what is really meant by converged management? There is no industry-standard definition; however, the basics are pretty straightforward. First off, converged management brings together multiple features/functions into a single seamless solution. This means having access to planning, configuration/ provisioning, monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities all within an integrated or unified management system. The primary values of such an approach are lowered deployment and integration costs for the management system, as well as more efficient workflows when tasks require traversing more than one functional area or domain.
Next, a converged management solution must support the many connected technologies that comprise an IT infrastructure and applications environment. This means addressing network, compute, storage and, ideally, endpoint and application management – all within the same integrated or unified solution. Bringing together even two or three of these “domains” into a single system can pay substantial dividends, such as allowing for the correlation of events and alarms across the interconnected and interdependent IT architectures that are typical today.
Finally, converged management must also recognize that IT exists to serve its host organization, by creating or sourcing applications and then making it possible for employees, customers, and partners to consume those applications in a predictable, measurable, high-quality manner. This means providing the capability for understanding services as a representation of how IT resources are consumed, including service expectations and service quality as experienced. Further, these solutions must adapt to and align with organizational constructs, so that each IT customer/user constituency can be understood and management actions prioritized accordingly. In this way, converged management can improve IT’s alignment with the business and its understanding of the role that it plays in the success of the organization it serves.
CA Technologies and Converged Management – A Brief Introduction
With a long history of meeting the management needs of enterprises and service providers, coupled with a broad set of product offerings, CA Technologies is in a prime position to build and deliver converged management solutions. In particular, with the company’s September 2012 announcement of a major revision within its Infrastructure Management (IM) integrated solution, CA technologies has taken definitive steps in precisely this direction. CA IM 2.0 marked a major milestone in bringing multi-vendor, multi-function infrastructure monitoring and management capabilities together across multiple technology domains. Figure 2 illustrates the basic scope of the solution’s components and capabilities.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Figure 2. CA Technologies Converged Management Solutions – functional map.
While CA IM 2.0 clearly meets the basic test of converged infrastructure management, the complementary nature of CA Technologies’ full product portfolio delivers additional value via broader management convergence. For example, CA Technologies’ application performance management, service management, voice/video management, and service dashboard solutions are pre-integrated with CA IM 2.0 to achieve management convergence on a large scale.
Convergence Transitions in Cisco Environments
Often the best opportunities for adopting converged management are when a new technology transition dictates a re-evaluation of existing management practices. As mentioned above, many such transitions are currently taking place within IT infrastructure, and many of those transitions are being led by or enabled by Cisco. Following are three examples of such transitions: datacenter, voice/video/data and WAN, including the product technologies involved, the direct impact on management tools and practices, and the way in which CA Technologies is addressing the challenge.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Datacenter Convergence
The Change Cisco’s Role Impact on Management
Virtual server technology and cloud computing have altered both the scale and complexity of datacenters. The number of connected servers has leaped and the rate at which new servers are deployed has grown equally. New virtual network elements have arisen as part of virtual server architectures, creating new connectivity/path elements to be recognized and understood. Building on these enabling pieces, technology providers are offering “converged infrastructure” solutions that combine server, network and storage products into a pre-configured “datacenter in a box.”
Cisco offers many products that aid in datacenter transformation, such as the Nexus switching products, including the Nexus 1000V virtual switch (built for connecting many virtual systems) and Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), which combines high density server blades and innovative memory design with networking technology for high–volume virtualized computing. For VCE, Cisco integrated virtualization and storage with UCS to provide a converged infrastructure solution. Finally, Cisco works with partners like Citrix on solutions that span infrastructure and application software, such as virtual experience infrastructure (VXI) for the optimized delivery of converged services to any device or endpoint.
Data center convergence introduces new barriers to visibility, but also new opportunities for fault isolation automation. It creates specific needs for extending discovery and monitoring functions to span both physical and virtual elements and recognizes the topological and service dependencies between them. With the tight integration of converged infrastructure solutions, there is an opportunity to better recognize physical and virtual relationships across multiple technology domains. Finally, analysis of network traffic flows to and from converged datacenters as well as within them can and should be integrated into planning and operations management workflows.
CA Technologies Answer: The CA IM 2.0 solution has been adapted specifically to support the converging datacenter in many ways, including:
• Direct support for discovering and monitoring mixed physical/virtual infrastructures such as traditional Nexus switches as well as the virtual Nexus 1000V.
• Direct support for sophisticated products such as Cisco UCS, including both cross-domain discovery and modeling of relationships between physical and virtual sub-elements, provides essential converged device availability, performance and capacity management capabilities.
• Automated analysis leverages both monitoring and relationship discovery to determine root cause and suppress symptomatic alarms.
• Tracking and correlation of traffic flows from/to and throughout the datacenter using technologies such as NetFlow and Cisco NAM for application-aware visibility throughout.
CA IM 2.0 does double duty by providing a single management solution for all elements of the converged Cisco UCS as well as the broader IT environment (network, systems, and storage devices) beyond. The CA IM 2.0 solution has been optimized for very high scalability (monitoring millions of elements at thousands of metrics per second) and for visualizing high-volume key performance indicators. Thus, a common user interface allows operators to troubleshoot both UCS and its environment via efficient, continuous workflows.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
WAN Convergence
The Change Cisco’s Role Impact on Management
Beyond the data center, the next major layer of infrastructure is the distribution network. In most organizations, this includes a Wide Area Network (WAN). The WAN has always converged delivery for multiple applications, but the relatively recent introduction of latency and loss-sensitive flows such as VoIP, interactive videoconferencing, and remote-hosted desktop (such as VDI) has increased the demand for optimization. That demand includes improving reliability and predictability of service and application performance, with the end goal of improving user experience.
The broad solution area under which Cisco addresses WAN convergence is known as Borderless Networks. Key elements here include a common set of security and performance policies that span core, distribution and access layers of the network across both routing and switching. Important components include Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) technologies, which perform WAN optimization. Also directly relevant are advanced management instrumentation within Cisco products, such as NetFlow and WAAS Flow Agent.
Visibility is a major need within the WAN, particularly as optimization policies are applied. WAN optimization techniques can obscure details of the original non-optimized traffic, making it difficult (if not impossible) to recognize the impact of changing optimization policies and troubleshoot issues with manipulated flows. What is required is a clear recognition of the impact and effectiveness of WAN optimization across the lifecycle, including pre-optimization planning, tuning during pilot, and sustained tracking/trending of response times/volumes by application/ site during full-scale production. CA Technologies Answer: With CA IM 2.0, IT teams can address the full lifecycle of WAN optimization planning, testing and production, while also bringing continuous visibility of WAN-specific performance and health measures directly into the broader infrastructure monitoring picture.
• CA IM 2.0 can directly monitor WAN-edge routers and WAAS optimization components for device activity/health while collecting/integrating NetFlow into the same monitoring and reporting solution. This informs pre-optimization planning via details on current traffic mix and volumes to identify best targets for optimization and vet them quickly, as well as end-to-end quality metrics for assessing results of applied optimizations.
• Trending, event identification and prediction features within CA IM 2.0 provide a means to recognize WAN congestion or performance issues early enough to invoke proactive measures.
• CA Technologies Application Delivery Analysis (ADA) ― one of many add-on components to the core CA IM 2.0 solution ― directly supports Cisco’s WAAS Flow Agent for unlocking visibility into optimized traffic. CA ADA integrates with IM 2.0, so each application and activity flow can be recognized end-to-end for monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting.
• CA IM 2.0 dashboards combine diverse data (in this case, network device performance and capacity, flow for bandwidth usage and application response) into a best-practice “guided” workflow that improves operator efficiency to triage and remediate problems.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Voice/Video/Data Convergence
The Change Cisco’s Role Impact on Management
Voice over IP (VoIP) is in itself a relatively mature technology and represents one of the first areas of IT convergence, whereby formerly separate voice and data networks were combined. The basic concepts of IP-based communications have grown broadly to include a full suite of collaboration products such as live chat, social media, webcasting and interactive videoconferencing. All of these now traverse the same networks, raising the need for defining, deploying, and monitoring network QoS (quality of service) traffic policies.
Cisco offers VoIP-specific products plus VoIP–ready networking infrastructure solutions, from telephone handsets, to videoconferencing, and telepresence systems. Key voice infrastructure components include Cisco Unified Communications Gateways and Servers and Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM). UCM generates management metrics for each call via call detail records, and Cisco networking equipment provides voice and video quality measurements via Cisco MediaNet. Further, Cisco equipment supports IP SLA for proactive synthetic sampling of VoIP delivery quality and CBQoS features for proactive monitoring of QoS policy compliance. Finally, Cisco VoIP end devices (such as desk sets) support Cisco Voice Web Services, a virtual remote probe function for end-to-end troubleshooting.
From a management
perspective, most organizations face a significant challenge in bringing VoIP planning, monitoring and troubleshooting under the same umbrella of operations tools and practices as those for applications and data. Needs for unique, VoIP-specific monitoring techniques and quality measures, as well as technology-specific troubleshooting methods, has proven a difficult barrier to overcome for those seeking converged management. Such integration is needed across the lifecycle for planning, pilot and production phases if the holy grail of VoIP – reliable and predicable high quality voice communications – is to be achieved at scale and on an ongoing basis.
CA Technologies Answer: CA IM 2.0 is a central platform for monitoring and managing the infrastructure entrusted with providing and delivering the full range VoIP services (voice, streaming video/Webcasting, interactive video, etc.). Used in conjunction with CA Technologies Unified Communications Monitor (UCM), all phases of the VoIP lifecycle can be supported.
• Planning: CA IM 2.0 support for NetFlow and IP SLA helps reveal network readiness to support latency/ loss-sensitive VoIP traffic, particularly in the WAN.
• Pilot: VoIP traffic volumes and session quality (such as MOS, or Mean Opinion Score) can be monitored via CA UCM, with essential metrics folded back into CA IM 2.0 alongside NetFlow, IP SLA, and CBQoS data for sustained dashboard visibility and reporting.
• Production: CA UCM facilitates detailed VoIP troubleshooting by leveraging the Cisco Voice Web Services features to directly analyze call process and experience from the end user’s perspective. CA IM 2.0 is designed to manage the many diverse elements that comprise the converged voice/video/data environment in a single interface, thus promoting operator efficiency and proactive actions.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Converged Infrastructure Management –
The Rest of the Story
While the ideal converged management solution would be all encompassing, history informs us that such solutions are difficult to find and difficult to deploy, keep current and administer. Many of the same potential values offered by fully converged management architectures can be realized by converging portions of the broader management stack. One area that offers the most immediate such opportunity is converged management for IT infrastructure. As virtualization of applications and services continues to increase, the underlying infrastructure that is expected to host and deliver them must itself be increasingly available, reliable and high performing. By converging management functions across compute, networking, and storage, IT operations teams are in an advantaged position to recognize whether IT infrastructure is performing as expected, whether current resources are sufficient for current and future activity, and where to look first when performance problems occur.
Converged infrastructure management requires new, broader thinking, because such systems must span the needs of historically independent technology groups and management products. In order to accommodate multi-function, multi–domain and service-oriented objectives, the following system requirements must be addressed to achieve converged management:
• Broad and deep span of feature-functions: Solutions must have the ability to look across the broad, diverse, distributed infrastructure and provide multiple management functions, but must also provide a depth of features to analyze, manipulate and display data available from the IT environment to enable planning and operations tasks. In other words, a “mile-wide, inch-deep” approach is insufficient, as is an in-depth, narrow approach. Optimally, breadth should include availability, performance, capacity, and configuration management functional areas; depth should include flexible, granular treatment of a rich set of key indicators across all functional areas.
• Cross-domain discovery: Discovery capabilities must include traditional techniques for recognizing infrastructure elements and their components, but must also be able to recognize the connectivity and dependencies between them, empowering root cause and impact analysis. This would ideally include all network–attached and supporting infrastructure elements, such as power/ environmental and security systems. In the broadest case, this could also include endpoint devices such as printers, PCs and even mobile clients.
• Hybrid-savvy: With the advent of server virtualization and cloud services, new virtual elements came into existence and require management. Systems must be able to recognize both physical and virtual components as well as those portions of IT infrastructure that are hosted internally versus those hosted in the cloud.
• Bottoms-up and top-down viewpoints: Solutions must be able to support workflows that begin with a detailed understanding of individual elements within the infrastructure (bottoms-up) as well as those that begin with investigating service or application behaviors from the top down.
• Facilitated, task-oriented workflows: Management operations typically revolve around specific task objectives. Management tools must support these workflows effectively and efficiently by organizing and presenting data in a way that accelerates task steps and facilitates completion. • Full lifecycle support: A strong set of features for monitoring infrastructure must be complemented
by capabilities to support both initial and incremental planning, as well as pilot projects and test activities during rollout of new or upgraded infrastructure technologies.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
• Efficient reactivity and empowered proactivity: Effectiveness for quick identification and resolution of problems is essential within such systems, but so are viewpoints and intelligence allowing preventive and proactive steps to be taken to protect the integrity and performance of applications and services.
• Connected to other management systems: When converging management specifically for infrastructure, other management systems will still be required. Particular attention must be paid to connecting converged infrastructure management with service desk, service operations dashboards and application-centric performance monitoring and management.
In aggregate, these requirements areas represent a broad framework for understanding just how far a converged infrastructure management solution can go in pulling together and meeting multiple, diverse needs. The more that can be met, the greater the value for managing across multi-technology converged infrastructures.
CA Technologies Solutions for Converged Infrastructure
Management
CA Technologies Infrastructure Management (IM) 2.0 represents a substantial step in the direction of truly converged management, integrally supporting Cisco technologies to result in a comprehensive platform for deploying next-generation business services. By bringing together broad and deep fault/ availability, performance, capacity, and configuration management spanning physical/virtual networks and servers, as well as capabilities to support storage and even endpoints, CA IM 2.0 meets the core test for management convergence. Products that are complementary to and integrated with CA IM 2.0, such as CA Application Delivery Analysis, CA Application Performance Management and CA Unified Communications Monitor, extend the capabilities and troubleshooting features required for specific infrastructure technologies and application types. Further, when used in conjunction with service management solutions, such as CA Service Operations Insight (SOI), CA IM 2.0 provides the integrated infrastructure–side view needed for empowering cross-domain, service-oriented operations. Functional and architectural capabilities that have long existed within CA IM pave the way for converged management. Autodiscovery spanning physical and virtual network and server environments lays the groundwork for bringing converged infrastructures under management. A model-based approach to recognizing and tracking inter- and intra-component relationships powers automated root cause analysis and impact recognition. Further, dedicated CA development commitments to fully support Cisco infrastructure management technologies such as IP SLA, CBQoS, MediaNet, and NetFlow (including the latest v9/Flexible NetFlow extensions) keeps the solution current and in position to allow practitioners to fully leverage the latest advanced features within Cisco-based converged infrastructures. New features added as a part of the 2.0 release of CA IM further optimize impact and effectiveness of the solution in meeting the needs for full lifecycle support, efficient reactivity/proactivity, empowered productivity and seamless integration with surrounding management systems. For instance, intuitive patent-pending graphical dashboard components, such as the calendar heat chart, trend/events widget,
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Figure 3. Innovative graph/table and trend/event console widgets in CA IM 2.0
Further, these components display metrics according to “Top n” value and are placed in pre-defined, customizable dashboards for a wide range of technology domains. Together, these features provide fast entry points to triage and logically guide investigative workflow (see Figure 4). This allows operators to construct and share management views for collaborative analysis, business-aligned production monitoring and proactive/predictive performance and capacity watches. It also brings together data into aligned views that would historically require the use of many separate tools, or at best several consoles/dashboards.
Finally, architectural advancements in massively parallel processing, linear polling, centralized data storage and multi-tenancy made as part of the CA IM 2.0 release are also highly relevant to the objectives of converged management. In particular, scalability increases more than 5X within the collection tier combined with significant expansion of managed device capacity at the server level translates into far fewer management components to deploy and maintain when monitoring large converged infrastructures.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize
the Planning and Operations of Cisco Environments
EMA Analysis
Convergence is upon us, and is taking many forms. Most is driven by technology innovation, but some is also being driven by the sheer necessity of keeping pace with truly stunning rates of change. IT infrastructure is witnessing consolidation and convergence along many axes, most all of which are either directly delivered by or significantly aided by Cisco infrastructure solutions. CA Technologies has taken up the challenge of converging management products, tools, and technologies so that IT planning, engineering, and operations teams can realize converged management practices and benefits. The latest release of CA’s Infrastructure Management solution represents a strong foundation for converged management, and CA Technologies continues to focus on optimizing management, especially for organizations that rely on Cisco for their own converging infrastructures.
About CA Technologies
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is a management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments – from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies solutions enable enterprises, government agencies and service providers to manage and secure technology environments and deliver more flexible business services to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 as well as government agencies and service providers worldwide rely on CA Technologies to manage evolving their technology ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at www.ca.com, and our Cisco partner page at www.ca.com/cisco
About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or
blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter or Facebook.
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