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Technology is meant to be the great enabler of our age, a means by which companies can do more with less and with which we can stay connected to the world around us. But for those charged with managing the current generation of corporate technology, things are not always so easy.

Virtualisation, cloud computing, software-as-a-service and truly powerful mobile devices have all made a significant impact on the way the IT function supports the business’ goals and in particular, it’s become possible for smaller companies to seriously up their game by making use of enterprise-level systems.

But with enterprise-level technology come enterprise-level headaches. When people can easily create virtual machines on the network, guess what? They do just that and then forget about them, leave them to soak up system resources and cause virtual machine sprawl.

And when a company has moved to a virtualised machine model, as well achieving lots of savings they also encounter a new problem-09:00 burst demand, the digital equivalent of a run on a bank when everyone comes in to work and tries to power up their virtual machines at the same time, draining resources.

Hybrid operating systems, security issues, people losing mobile devices-all these and more are symptoms of the modern network environment and are the day to day problems encountered by those charged with systems management.

Monitored needs
"The IT department can no longer just monitor systems and report on that to the business because the business really couldn’t care less about system availability. What the business cares about is service availability and the IT department must now report to it in a language it understands," said Paul Turley, regional manager for HP Software.

"That means reporting on service availability. Underpinning that, the business still needs to know what IT infrastructure its services depend upon because if there is an incident or an issue at a business service level, it needs to be able to get to the root cause rapidly."

According to Turley, this is the key issue that cloud and virtualised technology presents-it’s no longer always absolutely clear where the IT infrastructure upon which business services depends actually resides.

"It’s become really important to have, for want of a better description, an up to date map of what the infrastructure upon which the business services depends is, and where it is. This allows you to identify the root cause of any incidents far faster."

"That’s where all the innovation is going, at least for HP. Ultimately predictive incident analysis is going to become more important-figuring out how to better predict incidents before they happen based on how previous issues have arisen. Systems monitoring is now old hat-things have moved on, driven by technologies like virtualisation, the cloud and also mobile computing."

"We offer our software products both on premises and in the cloud, and quite a large percentage of our customers are consuming our software in the cloud-that has a fundamental impact on how their systems need to be managed. The key message we try to communicate is that being heterogeneous is going to become more not less important," he said.

"There will be growing choice out there in the market and we think it’s really important that people aren’t locked into one virtualisation stack, one OS, one application service stack-we support everything. Microsoft, Oracle, VMware-they’re very good at monitoring their own stack but once you go outside that, or go into cloud or mobile, then we think we can offer more."

Consumer demands
Meanwhile the consumerisation of IT, the introduction of more consumer orientated tech to the workplace, has also had an impact on the workload of those charged with systems management. With a growing number of people used to having well designed tools at their fingertips in their private lives, why would they expect anything different at work?

"Expectation management in this area has become a bigger issue than at any time in the past," said Robert Lanigan, software consultant with IBM Ireland.

"The rate of change of technological innovation and evolution isn’t slowing down and in particular people are becoming more and more used to using responsive and flexible technology, and that’s particularly true in the business community. It’s true with their smart phones, their laptops, their tablets and even on their media servers and their kid’s Xbox consoles at home."

"They see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to access similar performance levels in the workplace, and it’s easy to see why that’s the case. On top of this, there is growing demand for full mobile accessibility and pressure on the IT function to be able to securely and dependably deploy and support this."

"That can cause panic in the IT department when it first happens, because of the challenges integrating a smartphone or tablet into the corporate network presents but it there’s no need for that to be the case. This is a trend which is unlikely to go away-as a society we are becoming increasing plugged in and the line between private and business technology continues to blur."

Good processes
According to Lanigan, dealing with staff introducing their own technology to a corporate environment is best done using firmly established and enforced systems management processes.

"Organisations that implemented good processes in the past for systems and services management can usually adapt to new technology without too much difficulty. On the other hand, organisations that didn’t usually can’t. They’re in a difficult position and are likely to find the situation will get worse not better."

"When we talk about service management in IBM, we talk about people, processes and only then do we talk about technology. Technology is important, but unless the key processes are in place you’re really building on sand. The technology to adapt and integrate things like virtualisation, the proliferation of mobile devices and the cloud has been around for quite a while now."

Adoption rates
While the technology is not particularly new, a lot of organisations are finding themselves having to deal with new systems management challenges as adoption rates for technology change, according to Tom Schroeder, senior product marketing specialist with Symantec.

"The arrival of virtual infrastructure has made the job of systems management more challenging because it has brought with it higher expectations of service and monitoring. Virtualised operating systems are almost a commodity and require the same management as physical devices-OS deployment, software, configuration and patch management, packaging, policy management and remote control."

"In an ideal case, the systems management vendor shouldn’t care whether the OS sits on a hypervisor or on a physical platform such as a laptop or desktop."

However, Schroeder suggests that traditional systems management primarily addresses stationary devices such as desktops, servers and laptops in docking stations-all of which are usually continuously connected to the corporate network. With the proliferation of mobile devices currently in the marketplace, this isn’t something that can be taken for granted anymore.

"With mobile devices employees are not expected to continually connect back to their network so many companies are looking for alternate and more flexible delivery models, especially software-as-a-service type models."

"This requires vendors to adjust products to make them cloud ready-such as systems management over WAN and highly scalable management platforms for service providers. Companies are also looking for more simplified, user friendly ways to manage diversity such as appliances which are easy to install and run."

More infrastructure
This is the challenge facing systems management specialists at the moment-how to reduce the level of complexity that comes with managing the many disparate technologies that typically make up the IT landscape of the average Irish company. According to Peter Trevaskis, enterprise marketing manager for the UK and Ireland, this is the single biggest issue facing those looking to streamline the way they manage their systems.

"It’s the search for the so called ‘single pane of glass,’ the single point from which you can see and manage everything. Every time you buy a new system you typically end up with an additional management console and it can quickly become ridiculous. Companies selling these systems tend to only give a passing nod to how their technology will sit alongside the customer’s existing infrastructure from a management point of view."

"A second issue we’re encountering in this area is the management of technology at the lowest level. Let’s say a server fails and you want to take your existing host bus adapters (HBA) that were in the failed server and put them into a new one-you’ll hit all sorts of difficulties with firmware updates. Trying to figure out what firmware update those HBAs were on, what BIOS the motherboard was on, and so on. It can be enough to make you tear your hair out," he said.

As hardware and the various solutions out there become more complex, it is becoming much harder to successfully keep track of all this.

"What everybody is trying to do at this point is to simplify the management that goes into these systems. Once you do that, they start to look very attractive," said Trevaskis.

"There aren’t that many companies which are 100% virtualised. The vast majority of people using virtualisation are 40% or so virtualised but that’s going to change dramatically in coming years. But until that happens, it’s important to bear in mind that everything you can achieve by going to the cloud or virtualising, all the savings you can make are immaterial if you don’t get rid of your existing infrastructure. Otherwise you can end up managing more infrastructures, not less," he said.

Organic growth
For some of the vendors offering systems management suits, there has been a degree of organic growth in the evolution of their products. Microsoft Ireland’s server and tools business manager Ronan Geraghty says that the company has channelled a lot of the experience it gained through its public cloud products into its private cloud offerings.

"This is one of the things that informed our thinking and the design for both System Centre 2012 and Windows Server 2012," he said. "We learned a lot from managing public cloud services such as Azure, Bing, Hotmail and so on, and we’ve made that experience available to people building their own private cloud systems."

A reality, according to Geraghty, for those engaged in using virtualisation to consolidate the number of servers they manage is that once their finished, they usually end up with more rather than less servers than they started with. This is something that needs to be factored into systems management policies because of the changing nature of the demands being placed on IT staff to deliver dependable services to the business.

"The industry has moved towards a service level agreement (SLA) driven approach to systems architecture because the focus has shifted to the services being delivered. We’re moving away from managing things at a component level, at an individual server level and towards making sure that the service the business needs is separated from the underlying hardware that supports it," he said.

"This means that if something happens to that underlying technology, a disk failure or whatever, the management tools should step in and make sure that service is maintained seamlessly to the level the business needs."

Business apps
"The applications are what power the business-they are the be all and end all of the system whether they’re customer relationship management (CRM) systems or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or whatever," he said.

Ultimately systems management is about making it easier for the IT function to meet its commitments back to the business, to deliver value by making sure that these applications are always available.

"If you can do that in a simpler way, then you free up IT to be able to focus on other projects that can continue to deliver additional value to the business. That’s it in a nutshell," said Geraghty.

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