The network has turned into a mission-critical business resource where downtime can have catastrophic financial results, so ensuring that it stays available at all times has become ever more critical.

Managing a complex modern network involves monitoring and measuring the performance of a multitude of connections and links, as well as the traffic and applications running across this multifaceted infrastructure in a real-time fashion, and providing this data to the administrator in a manageable format.

In this article, Network World looks at managing this backbone resource from three different views, three facets of the complex structure. The model or, more likely, the combination of models which best suits your environment, will be determined by your business requirements.

Enterprise management

Symantec looks at management as the pillar standing alongside security that ensures the integrity of the valuable data travelling over your network infrastructure. Andreas Duerr, vice-president of Symantec enterprise management, was recently in South Africa to speak to customers about the company"s management environment.

"Information integrity is ensured through the combination of both security and availability. This environment will exist only if the infrastructure is correctly managed, which is why Symantec integrated these two areas under the banner of an enterprise management division," says Duerr.

"We offer a holistic management solution through which security, network availability, hardware and software assets and even patch deployment can be controlled through a single interface and a single location. When talking systems management, I believe that many of the tools used are already deployed, but tying these together into a single, intuitive viewer is still largely the weakest point. Our system is modular, can be implemented easily on any infrastructure, and provides this one-touch interface for administrators to maintain full control of the IT resources of the business," Duerr adds.

This solution keeps systems on the network operational through the ability to remotely re-install a system from the OS up, using original vendor set-ups rather than snapshots of original states, he continues. It is designed to log real-time, relevant data on the infrastructure itself, can deploy security patches and updates, and also support non-Windows devices like handhelds and PDAs in the managed architecture, he says.

"We believe that to gain full control of your enterprise architecture, a reliable deployment mechanism, and an accurate, real-time data analyzer, are two of the most critical concerns. Our enterprise management model provides far more than just these, so as to provide an infrastructure that your business can depend on 24 x 7," concludes Duerr.

Service assurance

Compuware, with its focus on mission-critical applications, claims to have leveraged this expertise by supporting one of the latest buzzwords in infrastructure management, service assurance.

Says Richard Hepplestone, application performance management consultant at Compuware: "We find that while all organizations test the functionality of their critical software, not many test the viability of hosting a similarly important application over an existing network infrastructure. Usually then, either the application does not bring the returns anticipated, thanks to poor performance, or the architecture is impacted negatively, so that existing critical applications slow down, thus damaging productivity."

First, Compuware aims to establish an application performance baseline, based either on a previous version of the software or the performance required in the future. This baseline is designed to incorporate data on production environment under maximum load, so that customers are able to weigh the risks of running the application on the existing architecture, or build a new one.

"The second step is to do predictive analysis exercises. During this phase we profile the application to find out where bottlenecks could be a problem, and run through the what-if scenarios, changing both infrastructure and user variables to identify problem areas, before deploying the application on the production infrastructure," Hepplestone adds.

From here Compuware moves to stress testing the application and environment, whereafter the application is finally ready for production certification. Even after going through this rigorous testing regime, Hepplestone is adamant that monitoring the performance of the application needs to continue throughout its lifecycle, to maintain the required level of performance.

BSM

Business Service Management (BSM) is an ideology along similar lines, but focused on maintaining the performance of business services in a live, complex environment. Software vendor Micromuse, with its Netcool network management suite, believes that this will be the core focus of the financial and telecommunications sectors in particular during the course of the year ahead.

Says Eric Jorgenssen, Micromuse continent director for Africa: "There is a massive drive behind understanding the impact of a business service failure and how that affects SLAs at the moment, and the convergence trend as well as the emergence of more and more advanced networks bring with them more and more service-related challenges. The general availability of VoIP, for instance, makes a 15-second delay in packet transmission unacceptable, and itself raises the ante in terms of service availability."

Micromuse experienced strong growth during the last quarter of 2004, driven mostly by interest in BSM solutions, according to Jorgensen, with numerous customers beginning to adopt this software solution. And he predicts that this will be the core focus of attention for local administrators for the next 18 to 24 months. He explains: "Most of our customers looking to install a holistic BSM solution already have many of the components in place, and the software tools really just tie it all together into a single unified view."

"Building a successful BSM platform is, however, as much about people as it is about software. The biggest advantage is that it provides a single real time view of the entire IT architecture," concludes Jorgensen.