Guarantee application and system performance for data centers - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, June, 2001 by Frank Moreno

Web-based management solution imbues customers with opportunities.

Whether you are the director of IT in a Fortune 1000 enterprise or the CTO of a management service provider, the issue of maintaining the highest levels of performance and availability are the core of your responsibility. While traditional management frameworks have long served as the tools of choice for monitoring network and system performance, the new breed of management solutions designed specifically for the demands of Internet infrastructures are providing enhanced features that ultimately change the way MIS and IT managers work on a daily basis. These new products actually predict and prevent downtime with proactive, automated actions that address issues down to the application layer.

Now, with the growth and acceptance of service providers, guaranteeing service-level agreements (SLAs) requires tools that cannot only ensure end-user availability and performance on demand, but provide a level of trust that a business is in good hands through a service provider. Service providers are now turning to solutions that take advantage of the Internet to guarantee their SLAs and differentiate their services to prospective end-users. Features such as real-time monitoring, customer portals, simulated transactions and a browser-based interface position these new products as solutions that improve performance and improve revenue opportunities.

The management team at Cambridge, MA-based InterNoded, a managed services provider (MSP) specializing in developing and hosting Web-based business solutions, recently set out to improve the performance of its hosted applications and to centralize the management of its three data centers. By early 2001, InterNoded was managing more than 100 servers for customers worldwide, running a variety of custom and off-the-shelf applications, including Lotus Domino, IBM Websphere, Allaire Cold Fusion, and both Oracle and MS-SQL databases.

According to Julie Palen, InterNoded's chief executive officer, the company utilizes co-location facilities from two Boston-area companies, Exodus and Genuity, and houses the third data center at its corporate office. In addition to managing the company's internal LAN and multiple ISPs for connectivity, InterNoded maintains responsibility for the servers and applications at all three facilities, with customers ranging from independent software vendors (ISVs) offering hosted applications, corporate websites and e-business solutions, and complete e-businesses or dot-coms.

"We were working in reactive mode many times," Palen says. "A problem would occur and our IT staff would have to stop what they were doing and immediately diagnose and address the problem." Recently, InterNoded implemented system and application management software from Dirig Software, with the goals of maximizing the productivity of its IT staff and giving its members complete control of the entire hosting business from a single location--the corporate office.

CENTRALIZED, PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT

One of the biggest challenges for any organization is managing a distributed environment, where mission-critical servers and applications are running in multiple locations. IT managers end up inundated with alarms and pages, while constantly analyzing a variety of historical reports to correlate Performance issues for their networks, servers and applications.

In the past, when a problem occurred, an administrator would have been required to be at the physical location to address it. This yields the classic image of the 2 a.m. page or phone call to the IT manager because a critical customer server has crashed.

"If a server crashes, it's already too late," says InterNoded Chief Technology Officer Custie Crampton. "Our customers lose accessibility, and we lose money. We need the ability to monitor all of our servers and applications at all times, from anywhere, and ensure that we comply with our service-level agreements."

With the implementation of new management software, InterNoded is able to view every server, in all three data centers, from any Web browser. Real-time monitoring provides constant views into system health, and automated corrective actions address problems before failures occur.

"A browser-based management tool provides us with access to any system from anywhere," offers Crampton. "Our team now has a central view of everything going on. We can proactively monitor our hosting services, and we can address problems from anywhere, even from our home PCs on the weekend, if needed."

A NEW BREED OF MANAGEMENT

The wide array of management technologies available for Internet infrastructure covers every component of the network used to deliver content over the Web. The products of choice today are not the traditional frameworks that attempt to cover every aspect of the environment, but rather, specific tools and solutions for each device, service or system, designed today to work together to get the job done. Network management, performance monitoring, load testing, and system and application management and reporting tools are designed to integrate as best-of-breed components, based on the needs of the environment and the service delivered.