WHITE PAPER Dell's OpenManage Approach to System Management: Simplification Through Standards and Partnerships

Transcription

1 Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F WHITE PAPER Dell's OpenManage Approach to System Management: Simplification Through Standards and Partnerships Sponsored by: Dell John Humphreys September 2005 INTRODUCTION Tim Grieser System management is an essential requirement for the successful deployment and productive use of server hardware, server operating systems, and applications software. Increasingly, system hardware vendors are being judged on the manageability of their platforms from a number of different perspectives, including configuration, provisioning, deployment, availability, performance, change management, and patch management. In this IDC White Paper, we examine some concerns and objectives of IT managers and CXOs revealed in recent IDC survey research. We then examine how system management capabilities can help IT to achieve key organizational goals. We focus on Dell's approach to system management; how this approach addresses IT concerns in the short term through a combination of Dell OpenManage software and partner-based management offerings; and how Dell envisions an evolving, longer-term standards-based strategy for system management capabilities in the future. KEY IT GOALS Despite significant improvements in the global economy, IT organizations remain under intense pressure to contain costs and achieve operational efficiencies while delivering higher levels of service to end users and demonstrating closer alignment with business priorities (see Figure 1).

2 FIGURE 1 IT Goals Increase IT efficiency by automation Use IT to monitor the business Speed time to integrate applications Speed applications development Improve system management Other (% of respondents) n = 204 Source: IDC, 2005 As Figure 1 shows, the top goal of IT organizations is to increase IT operational efficiency through automation. Other important objectives are to use IT to directly monitor business performance, integrate applications and data that support business processes, develop new business applications, and improve system management. Taken together, these goals indicate IT operational priorities that center around increased efficiency, stronger support of business applications and processes, and improvements in system management. System management technologies directly support the goals of increasing efficiency through automation and using IT to monitor the business. IT MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES To provide enhanced business value, IT managers are increasingly looking beyond point solutions to find better ways to manage IT resources. A current move is under way to manage IT more comprehensively. IT managers realize the essential need that exists to address issues at the business service level, including:! Application availability. Increasingly, business is done on a 24 x 7 basis, which in turn means that business services must be up and running almost constantly. Because of this requirement, applications and the underlying infrastructure that enable the business services need to be available constantly.! Application performance. Increasingly, customers are deploying applications to a broad constituency that includes employees, partners, and suppliers. The performance of these applications is critical to enabling business benefits from the IT infrastructure. 2 #IDCUS05WP IDC

3 ! Infrastructure scalability. The ability to scale the infrastructure easily to support more users and new applications is another area where companies are looking to enhance their capabilities as they begin to grow their IT infrastructures after the past few years of IT budget lockdowns. This scalability must be attainable with minimal additional costs, preferably via a solution that provides increased return on investment as more resources are deployed.! Better alignment of IT resources with businesses' priorities. Businesses are increasingly looking to harness the power of scale in order to improve the cost of ownership. Therefore, organizations must squeeze more flexibility and capacity from their infrastructures. The ability to leverage IT resources that can be used in multiple ways is critical to unlocking the value of the IT investments.! Simplified infrastructure management. To reduce costs, minimize mistakes, and streamline the infrastructure management process, companies are increasingly seeking technologies that allow for the automation of day-to-day tasks.! Reduced total cost of ownership. The reduction of the total cost of IT expenditures continues as a major focus area. Businesses are increasingly turning to solutions with lower acquisition costs to drive down the capital investment necessary up front. Opportunities for cost reduction are most promising when IT managers can contain and lower the cost of managing infrastructure; IDC estimates that an average of approximately 60 70% of server life-cycle costs are associated with infrastructure management. Focusing on the Costs The historical trend in computing has always been movement toward lower-priced platforms. Mainframe usage largely gave way to minicomputers, and RISC/Unix and RISC platforms have largely given way to x86 because of the lower cost of acquisition which has been the underlying driver of the volume market. Because of the lower prices, end users have been able to distribute many more systems across their organizations, which has helped advance the idea of scale-out computing. The aspect that consistently is overlooked in scale-out computing is the cost of operations in a distributed environment. Figure 2 shows the relationship between new server hardware spending and the cost of IT operations. Today, end users spend nearly 70% of their IT dollars on recurring operational expenses, leaving only 30% of capital available for investment in new projects and innovation. These ratios were essentially reversed just five years ago. The trend toward focusing the majority of spending on maintaining and the minority on innovating may lead users to rethink how they invest in technology and eventually lead them back to a fewer number of larger systems a situation that a scale-out vendor such as Dell will address as it attempts to feed the fire of scale-out growth IDC #IDCUS05WP

4 FIGURE 2 Cost of IT Operations Versus Server Hardware Spending, End-user server spending and cost of management and administration (US$B) Installed base units (M) End-user server spending (3% CAGR) Cost of management and administration (10% CAGR) Installed base units Source: IDC, 2005 Where IT Managers and Administrators Spend Their Time IDC has conducted a number of surveys over the course of the past three years to better understand where managers and administrators of servers spend their time and where the best opportunities lie to automate and productize some of these tasks to allow expensive personnel to be deployed elsewhere. The results of our research show that a number of high-profile day-to-day tasks are ripe for automation and can have a significant impact on an organization's operational cost budget. The largest single category is initial system and software deployment, representing 19% of the $95 billion in costs estimated in Other significant categories include system maintenance and tuning, system migration, system upgrades, and patch deployment (see Figure 3). 4 #IDCUS05WP IDC

5 FIGURE 3 Worldwide Server Management and Administration Cost Share by Category, 2004 System maintenance (7%) Other (15%) Initial system and software deployment (19%) System monitoring (8%) Upgrades, patches, and so on (11%) Planning for upgrades, expansion, and capacity (12%) Maintenance and tuning (15%) Migration (13%) Total = $95B Source: IDC, 2005 Software Tools Needed for Effective System Management To address cost challenges, many enterprise customers are investing in tools that can help their system administrators perform the tasks identified in Figure 2 more efficiently. There is a great deal of industry investment in tools that perform tasks such as remote management, automated deployment, group management, and automated patch and upgrade installation. IDC believes much of the market opportunity lies in these areas today. Effective system management is a key requirement for achieving many of IT's most important operational goals. System management software is used to manage computing infrastructure resources for systems and applications, especially server resources. System management supports a variety of organizational needs, including those of end users, workgroups, small and medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises. System management provides value to IT in many ways, such as helping to control the deployment and use of assets, monitoring operational "health," automating routine infrastructure management tasks, helping to improve performance and availability service levels, managing hardware and software patches and changes, leveraging IT staff resources, and enhancing IT's ability to control costs and demonstrate value to the business. Effective system management tools enable users to reduce the time spent on mundane and manual administrative tasks, which in turn make up the lion's share of operational costs in today's complex IT environments IDC #IDCUS05WP

6 THE DELL OPENMANAGE APPROACH Dell's focus in the system management space is not on injecting a host of new tools and products into the market but rather on making order out of chaos by taking an open, standards-based, programmatic approach to helping customers manage their infrastructures more effectively (see Figure 4). The key for Dell is to focus on integrating toolkits into third-party vendors, championing standards at all levels of the management stack, and choosing partners that help customers deliver improvements in IT service levels and in the business processes that operate on the IT foundation. FIGURE 4 Evolving System Management Requirements Reactive: Proactive: Service Level: Business Process: Element Management Reactive Change & Thresholds Proactive Application Resource Mapping & & Monitoring Service Level Resource Metering & & Real-time Real-Time Provisioning Business Process Fight fires Alert and event management Set thresholds Predict problems Automate Asset mgmt. Change mgmt. Set uptime goals Monitor and report against targets Performance mgmt. Capacity planning IT and LOB metrics linked IT improves LOB process Real-time infrastructure Source: Dell, 2005 Dell OpenManage is a Dell-supported set of technologies, tools, and partnership alliances designed to collectively provide a range of system management functions in an open, cost-efficient fashion. Some of the key attributes of the OpenManage approach are as follows:! Open approach to management. Dell's open approach means that OpenManage software is able to interoperate with a wide range of management tools and common operational environments typically found in customer sites so that customers may integrate OpenManage tools with their overall system management functions.! Support for industry standards. One of the key foundations of OpenManage is support for industry standards such as Common Information Model (CIM), Desktop Management Interface (DMI), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Wired for Management (WfM), and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). The support for standards allows the exchange and use of information from a variety of sources in order to perform system management tasks. 6 #IDCUS05WP IDC

7 One of the key benefits of this approach is the protection of OpenManage customers' existing investments in system management software. The approach also has the potential to reduce the total number of tools required to manage customers' environments. Dell OpenManage Software Dell OpenManage software, which ships with Dell PowerEdge servers, provides a number of functions that support system management. The following section summarizes the basic OpenManage software capabilities. Hardware Management Hardware management includes hardware and software tools that assist in the monitoring and management of individual devices or elements in the infrastructure. Hardware management enables IT administrators to manage the hardware and software elements of server, storage, and network devices. It includes functions such as hardware asset and inventory management, hardware monitoring and alerting, group management of hardware devices, and capacity management. Today the hardware system management space is very vendor specific (i.e., hardware platform management tools are specific to the vendor's own hardware platforms) and includes products such as Dell OpenManage. Going forward, it is clear that the hardware system management market will be based on a series of emerging standards such as IPMI and SMASH for the collection and reporting of specific bounded information. The key hardware management functions are as follows:! Monitoring. Dell OpenManage supports monitoring for single and multiple servers. Dell's monitoring agent, called Server Administrator, is deployed on servers to be monitored so that alerts and other event information can be seen directly through its Web-based GUI and/or sent to a central console used to monitor Dell hardware. Server Administrator provides views of a single system's configuration, health, and performance. It can be used to configure BIOS settings or server actions, and it provides online diagnostics to help isolate problems or shut down and restart the server. Dell's IT Assistant provides support for network monitoring and can discover servers attached to IP networks. IT Assistant's console provides views of all managed systems, including health and alert status. Working in conjunction with Server Administrator, IT Assistant provides robust discovery, inventory, and monitoring of Dell servers. It can also monitor clients and network hardware, in addition to servers.! Remote management. Dell provides remote management of servers and blades through a combination of hardware facilities, such as on-board management controllers, and supporting management software capabilities, such as server console redirection; virtual keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM); Active Directory authentication; and virtual boot media IDC #IDCUS05WP

8 ! Provisioning. Server provisioning is centered on the deployment, configuration, and management of server hardware, operating systems, and application software stack images. The four key technology areas that are included in the category of server provisioning management (SPM) software are server provisioning, configuration management, patch/software management, and change audit and reporting. Dell offers server and blade provisioning capabilities with Dell OpenManage Deployment Toolkit and industry-standard deployment solutions such as Altiris Deployment Solution and Microsoft Automated Deployment Services (ADS) that allow customers to dynamically provision blades on the fly.! Dell OpenManage Deployment Toolkit. The toolkit provides utilities for configuring and deploying PowerEdge servers. Dell deployment utilities can be used for such operations as configuring servers, checking configuration parameters, and installing drivers. Deployment includes support for bare metal provisioning, operating systems, and basic applications. Scripts can be used for deploying large numbers of servers.! Dell OpenManage Change Management. Dell OpenManage Change Management is designed to interface with industry-standard change and patch management tools, including Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) and Altiris Management Suite for Dell Servers. Dell OpenManage Change Management enables an administrator to manage both server hardware and software through a single console. Dell OpenManage supports update facilities to address both individual servers and groups of servers. Facilities are provided for group updates and for comprehensive reporting.! Virtualization. Another aspect of system management that has gained increasing attention is virtualization as implemented by commercial software packages such as VMware vmanage, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Xen. Server virtualization, which is often referred to as virtual machine technology or partitioning, is a technological approach to increasing server utilization. Server virtualization can be defined as the process by which a single larger server is partitioned into two or more physical or logical servers. The outcome is that multiple operating system instances and/or applications can run in isolation on dedicated resources in the same server frame. Virtual partitioning is becoming one of the more widely adopted technologies in the market today. Dell, along with almost all of the x86 vendors, has elected to partner in the virtualization space. Dell is working with leading virtualization vendors VMware, Microsoft, and Xen to make the integration of the virtual machine software seamless. DELL: EXTENDING SYSTEM MANAGEMENT THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS Dell's strategy is to leverage the basic capabilities provided by Dell OpenManage software and utilities by integrating with partner-supplied system management products; by interoperating with major vendor frameworks; and by supporting open management standards, protocols, and interfaces. The strategy provides Dell customers with the ability to choose the most appropriate tools for their specific environments and to incorporate Dell servers into existing system management implementations. 8 #IDCUS05WP IDC

9 Dell has extensive partnerships that support the OpenManage system management strategy. Some key partners for system management products include the following:! Microsoft. Dell has worked closely with Microsoft to provide OpenManage support for several system management products. The results of this partnership include simpler tools for the midmarket (e.g., MS Workgroup for less than $50 per server to manage hardware, operating system, and applications). Additional areas of joint development include work on the following products: # Microsoft Automated Deployment Services (ADS) for deployment # Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) for software distribution, asset management, and patch management # Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) for monitoring availability and performance and for event management! Altiris. For both Dell servers and clients, Dell OpenManage integrates with Altiris Management Suite to provide extended facilities for software distribution, provisioning, and change and patch management. The OpenManage-Altiris package unifies the tools needed to update system software, operating systems, and applications to provide a single interface. Customers using Altiris for application and operating system management can also use the patch tool for automated delivery of BIOS, ROM, and firmware updates.! VMware. Dell OpenManage supports VMware products for virtual server environments, including both VMware ESX Server and VMware Virtual Infrastructure Node, which provide base server virtualization environments for Dell hardware platforms. Dell OpenManage also includes support for VMware system management capabilities that are provided through VMware VirtualCenter management software. Dell's partnership strategy also supports software "connectors" that link to standard system management ecosystems in the industry, including the major management "frameworks" such as CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol, HP OpenView, and IBM Tivoli. The goal of the partnership strategy is to extend the management capabilities available for Dell servers based on support for third-party software tools. This strategy preserves Dell's focus on optimizing server hardware costs while delivering low-cost options for system management. CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES The technology and the vendors supporting the technology will have to overcome the following hurdles:! Proof of concept. New technologies can often suffer from a "hype cycle" in which significant attention is given to early adopters who will rapidly deploy the technology in an effort to gain short-term competitive advantage. This press often drives expectations beyond the capabilities of nascent technologies and leads to disappointment among the mainstream customer base IDC #IDCUS05WP

10 ! Features and functionality. As with other recent server technologies, such as Linux, new products are often short on management tools and functionality. The widespread adoption of Dynamic IT will require evolving products with a rich set of features that will live up to the requirements of organizations.! Reliability, availability, security. Better manageability, provisioning, and virtualization capabilities will almost certainly be deployed among companies seeking to increase the utilization of their server resources as well as reduce operational costs. Vendors must demonstrate that these technologies provide a robust platform for the most important workloads.! Lack of standards. Mainstream customers tend to "hang back" on new technology purchases and allow early adopter customers to test the waters and drive standards. Most customers are reluctant to risk their businesses (and jobs) on a technology that is not well defined and may take several years to converge on standard platforms, drivers, or interconnects.! Organizational culture. The benefits of utilization require the sharing of resources. Today, this approach is atypical in most IT environments where server resources are largely one application per server that often is "owned" by a single business unit. Virtualization and dynamic provisioning will require the creation of tools and processes, such as pay-per-use meters, payout schemes, service level agreements, and workload prioritization agreements, that enable resource sharing across traditionally siloed business units and departments. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION Dell has taken a very pragmatic approach to system management in the enterprise. By focusing on standardization at the hardware level, Dell is enabling customers to manage Dell hardware with their current toolsets in order to increase their ability to choose the management applications that are most suitable to solve their particular management needs. Whether the focus is on hardware and operating systems management or provisioning and virtualization solutions, the Dell model is to use APIs to integrate Dell's open manageability support into industry-leading management applications, thus providing customers with granular control over Dell hardware using widely available third-party management software. Copyright Notice External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2005 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden. 10 #IDCUS05WP IDC