The right tools for network management

IT departments are expected to be more business-literate than ever

The demands of network management have changed radically. No longer do IT departments just face the relatively simple task of ensuring the availability of network devices and providing adequate bandwidth. Now they are expected to be more business-literate than ever, providing a better service to end users while taking advantage of opportunities for cost savings.

Fundamental business shifts mean that the workforce is becoming more mobile, more knowledgeable and more demanding of their IT. The sheer number of applications – those rolled out by the IT department and those downloaded by users – is adding to the complexity, particularly real-time IT applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), video communications and customer relationship management (CRM).

These trends make network management more complex than it has ever been. “Constant, 24/7/365 availability and uptime and performance are becoming more critical... to ensure customer [employee] satisfaction,” says Patrik Bihammar, research manager for infrastructure software at analyst IDC.

“The behaviour of users is driving the strain on the usability of the network,” adds Rob Johnson, head of solutions at Dimension Data, the systems integrator. “[Network management] may have been seen from an enterprise perspective as very network-centric, but now it is more user-centric because of developments in the applications space. Network people are having to understand more about how the applications work.”

Fortunately for the IT department, the technology to meet these complex demands has progressed rapidly and many companies are investing in the latest solutions, despite the economic recession. According to Forrester Research, global business expenditure on network management software grew nine per cent during 2009 to $3.57bn (£2.33bn).

Integration of wired and wireless
One of the most significant trends in enterprise networking in recent years is the way wireless networks have become a more integral part of the corporate LAN.

“Originally, it was about element management – it was about managing the switch. It stopped there,” says Andy Sawyer, technical consultant at HP Networking. “The business now demands that you are capable of managing the wired and wireless world seamlessly from the same interface.”

Integration is easier said than done, however. Wireless networks grew up architecturally separate to the wired LAN and vendors created their own wireless management platforms.

Though vendors such as HP with its Network Management Centre (formerly HP Openview) and Cisco with its CiscoWorks software, have since worked hard to give IT departments visibility of their equipment from a single network management interface, this does not help firms that have multiple vendors’ equipment on their network.

Johnson says that network management is itself often poorly integrated with other IT activities, largely because of the quantity of network management products available.

The problem is magnified when requirements for visibility of VoIP traffic and security are added to the equation. Martin Voelk, a self-employed network consultant, argues that the number of management systems required is causing a problem.

“There are four management areas – traditional routing and switching, wireless, voice over IP and security – and people are managing them separately,” he says. “They all run on a separate management platform. One of the biggest obstacles is there is not a platform that is vendor-independent.”

Multiple functions, one product
Another big network management trend is the move by vendors to build hardware that carries out multiple functions. Multi-functional devices can simplify network management and reduce capital costs for IT departments because there are fewer appliances to buy and manage.

One example is Cisco’s growing range of Integrated Services Routers, which now include switch modules, WAN optimisation functionality and security features such as VPN acceleration, stateful firewall and content filtering as well as the ability to run a scaled-down version of Cisco’s call manager software.

Other networking vendors, such as Aruba Networks with its Remote Access Point (RAP) products, offer an integrated router, wireless access point and WAN acceleration appliance in one device.

“What we have seen is massive consolidation. Organisations are looking to cut down on the number of products they have, and they are looking at manufacturers to consolidate their own products, instead of having myriad products. A lot of the products were overlapping,” says Stuart Parham, a consulting engineer at Cisco.

But there is a downside to having all the features in one box: if the device or its power source fails, all its functions and the services it supports fail too.

Voelk says: “They [multifunctional devices] make network management a lot easier because you receive information from the same IP address, the same box and you save on rackspace. But if there is a power supply failure, all the services go down at once.”

Voelk warns that multifunctional devices do not necessarily simplify things. “Even if everything is in one box, all the alarms are different. If a firewall is integrated into a router, it still gives firewall alarms,” he says. “Cisco is trying to integrate everything into Cisco Works [to give] a single point of administration. At the moment, we’re not there.”

New breed of convergence
Infrastructure rationalisation is also enabled by a new type of convergence. This is not the convergence of voice and data (nor fixed and mobile) that has been on the agenda of many businesses, but the convergence of storage, servers and networking in one architecture.

Those vendors that are selling or developing new converged equipment – such as HP, Cisco and Hitachi Data Systems to name three – argue that convergence can reduce enterprises’ power consumption (providing cost savings and helping drive their green agenda), reduce capital expenditure in the datacentre and decrease server footprint.

Though each vendor’s plans differ, HP’s vision is the convergence of Fibre Channel and server Ethernet I/O onto a common Ethernet-based network infrastructure running Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

“The compelling message for converged infrastructure is you can reduce the number of network ports,” says HP’s Sawyer. “I can reduce the footprint and power consumption and make a simpler environment to manage.” However, Sawyer warned that interoperability issues and unratified protocols remain. This could mean a multi-vendor converged infrastructure might continue to prove troublesome.