Tom Hayes: If something goes wrong, it’s critical to identify the
issue and resolve the problem quickly 
                     
There’s a problem in the network — but what is it and what is its impact? Too often when something goes wrong the staff of a network operations centre are flooded with alerts — thousands of them — and it’s hard to find out what is the root cause, still less what is the impact on the business.
This has all become much harder because operators are facing new challenges in their business, as they deliver more and more sophisticated services to their customers.
Typically operators — wireless, cable and wireline — deliver new services that involve the company’s entire infrastructure, including network, its computing power and its storage components and applications, says Tom Hayes, senior product marketing manager at EMC’s infrastructure management business unit.
The key challenge, and the opportunity for EMC, is “that often now they are virtualized — that means, they are running on virtual machines, and that poses new management challenges to the environment, tying those virtualized applications to the physical infrastructure”.
For a start, virtual machines move, he says. In other words, applications are not always directly associated with the same physical hardware running on the same physical server with the same back-end support.
“In the past there was a one-to-one relationship with applications,” he says. “Today an application may move from one cluster to another or one server to another.” It is important to be able to balance the computing environment so the applications can move, he notes. “If something goes awry, it’s critical to understand how the virtualized environment relates to the physical environment to get to the root cause of any problem that may happen. You have to identify the issue and resolve the problem quickly.”
Many of the services that operators are providing to their customers are tied now to virtualized environments — and this affects the tasks that they are used to performing. “It’s something as simple as customers’ ability to go to a website to manage the services they have procured from the operator,” he says. “Often that self-service portal is running in a virtualized environment.”
The whole issue of virtualization is creating a new management challenge — and that’s at the same time as the usual challenges, such as continuing to be able to scale. Hayes summarizes the four things that are critical to the support that EMC gives service providers: virtualization, scale, new technologies and new devices.
“But there is another challenge: service providers have to deliver new IP-based services — and they need to use servers, storage and network to be able to do that. They need to be able to manage all three in a comprehensive way.” He describes it as “a single pane of glass” that allows service provider to know what is going on “and quickly identify what is going on, and identify the root cause of that problem”.
EMC “does that better than anyone else in the industry with our root-cause analysis engine, or RCA engine”.
EMC service assurance tightly links the virtual environment to the physical environment “and is continually updating the model of the environment” as things change, as virtual machines move, for example. “We call that VDC — virtual data centre — vision, so we are always viewing the virtual and physical environment tightly linked together.”
It happens automatically. “We continually rediscover the environment as things change. If a virtual machine changes, we see that happening and we update the model, so the service provider knows exactly what’s going on.”
With patented Codebook Correlation Technology (CCT), EMC “is able to resolve problems faster and more easily than others in the market today”, says Hayes. “It is the leading root cause analysis engine today. The operations team sees what’s happening on the ‘big board’ in the network operations centre or the global operations centre.”
If there is a problem they want to know not just the root cause of it, but also the impact. “They want to know the critical services that are impacted.” This enables them to put the right people on the task. “Too often companies get too many alerts — thousands of them — and it’s difficult to sort between the root cause and the symptom. We separate out the root cause from the symptoms.”
Then EMC combines all that into a business barometer — a way of displaying the business impact to the service provider. “When they do have an issue, they also know the impact on the business, right down to the customer level, right down to a detailed level.”
Tied to all this is “our configuration compliance capability”, he adds. “Usually when there is a problem, someone has changed a configuration. We detect that and send an alert. We tie that into the overall service assurance model, so you get a completely comprehensive view.” GTB