Infrastructure Management Revolutionized
The trends that made the difference - Posted by Yesudas Jayson Kurisinkal
The past decade has sparked several noteworthy developments in Infrastructure Management Services (IMS), like the acceptance of ITIL , Remote Management of Datacenters and Off-shoring of Services, and new models in computing. Let’s examine some of these key trends.
Infrastructure Management tools have progressed from times where a Sysadmin relied on custom scripts or open-source tools. There was an MRTG box in every Datacenter; MRTG being open-source, functional and with less computing overhead. The late 90’s saw the emergence of Enterprise Management Software (EMS) combining server, network, database, application and desktop management. While implementing it was a nightmare then - due to the tool immaturity and improper planning – today, we have success stories of EMS deployments.
Right from the early days, Sysadmins would sit outside the datacenter and work remotely, primarily for two reasons – it’s extremely cold there, and you can’t take coffee inside! So they would connect from their desktop to the devices via tools like telnet or VNC . Whenever a cold-restart or a tape change was needed, they’d walk across into the datacenter, get the job done and get back.
During early 2000, with Global Delivery Model becoming the industry buzz word, IMS also adopted Remote Administration of Infrastructure. In one of the projects I was involved in, the datacenter was a 30-minute drive from my residence. Any failure requiring physical presence necessitated me driving all the way to the datacenter and doing a cold restart of the machine or boot from the BIOS. Except for this and changing tapes, we essentially did everything from the remote office and even from a remote country! Two technological advances that significantly aided Remote Administration were KVM-over-IP devices (which enabled remote access to the consoles even at BIOS level) and Robotic Tape libraries.
Ask any IT Manager to list the most significant happenings in IMS in the past decade, and you will surely find ITIL right on top. Disregarded by many initially, we nonetheless saw the emergence of ITIL and the numbers celebrating its benefits. Consequently, several other concepts also emerged, like CMDB, BSM and BSA. It made sense to view IT from a business perspective, especially in times of cost-cutting. These concepts are not new, but analyzing them from a business/service angle gave them a better structure, helped in prioritizing and getting the buy-in from management.
What’s next? The new wave, as in any other industry, is to paint it green! It has been noticed that aside from being beneficial for the planet, energy-efficient IT Infrastructure also saves costs. Many analyst and service firms have already started creating service offerings in this line. IBM released Tivoli Monitoring for Energy management recently, and many other vendors are to follow suit.
Let’s therefore look forward to a more business-friendly and environment-friendly Infrastructure Management!
