You probably know by now I'm a big fan of Smarts -- not simply because it's another EMC product -- but because it embodies game-changing thinking.
A few obscure press releases slipped out in the last few days, but there's a wealth of thinking behind it, and I'd like to take a moment and share some of it with you.
The Case For Model-Based Management
I've written about this before. Simply put, EMC believes that new form of management technology (model-based management) is poised to make an order-of-magnitude improvement in how IT gets monitored and managed.
Most legacy management framework technology was architected for a very different world than the one we live in now.
We used to live in a world of one server, one application. Users logged in, did their work, and left. Other than the network, very little was shared between application stacks.
We now live in a world of shared infrastructure: servers, databases, storage and networks. Applications are composite entities with many moving and interrelated parts. IT is getting abstracted and virtualized as never before.
And the older approaches are showing their age.
Model-based management is fundamentally different. It focused on the relationships between things, rather than the things themselves.
Yes, there's a database there, but here are the seven applications that use it, and the twelve business processes that depend on it. And it runs on this operating system, that server there, using these resources.
In this complex IT world, relationships matter. That's what modelling is all about.
EMC has jumped in with both feet; acquiring the core Smarts technology, and then going about the business of complementing and extending it in different areas.
It's usually sold as a complement to existing monitoring and management tools. Every IT discipline has its favorite tools (servers, databases, storage, networks, apps, security, etc.). Smarts adds the missing coordination and correlation that's so often missing.
If you've never seen a Smarts ADM demo, you should. Here's a nifty tool that'll crack packets, discover application relationships, and crawl your entire IT infrastructure to give to a near-realtime configuration of what you have, how it's connected, what version, etc. And do it all without agents.
If you've ever struggled to know what's on the floor right now, it's pretty amazing.
So, What Did EMC Announce?
A bunch of stuff, all built on the Smarts modelling approach. Every so often, EMC will release a new batch of functionality based on the model approach.
Take the EMC IT Compliance Analyzer
Not obvious what it does?
Many environments (especially secure ones) have very strict policies about how things are configured and used. Even if the policy is well-defined, and everybody's trying hard, you need to be able to prove that you're following the policy.
Someone plugs something in. Or forgets to configure something. Happens every day.
At a high level, this product will automatically discover what you've got configured (at a suprisingly sophisticated level), and compare it with what it should look like according to policy. The result is a punch list of out-of-spec configurations that someone should go take a look at sooner than later.
As more and more organization are getting audited around informations security, it also has a role in audit support, along with EMC enVision.
Now, without agent-less modelling technology, this would be a very hard problem to solve. But, using Smart's model approach, it's a relatively straightforward application of the technology.
I don't want to forget to point out, the model it uses is the exact same model used for other disciplines, like real-time fault correlation, or ... performance.
Which brings us to the EMC IT Performance Reporter - Network Edition
If you know the history of Smarts, you know it came out of the Big Network world. Models were demanded to simply describe and capture the behavior of these very complex entities.
Sure, it's easy to monitor the performance, do trending, forecasting, etc. of any single piece of the network puzzle -- but what if you have a big, hairy network with lots of moving pieces?
To solve the problem, you need an accurate description of not only the elements themselves, but how they relate and behave as a system. You need a model.
Doing performance analysis, reporting, trending, forecasting, etc. is hard enough when considering the pieces in isolation. Plug everything together in a complex, nasty, interconnected mess, and you'll most likely need a model to make sense of it all.
I'd guess you'll be seeing more from EMC in this regard -- in addition to network performance -- in the future. It's only logical.
There were a few more pieces in the announcement, but I think of them as variations on a theme.
The Big Question
So, what will be the tipping point for people when they realize their tools won't keep up with their new world?
Will it be driven by SOA or Web 2.0 adoption? Or will it be driven by adoption of VMware? Or perhaps a crisis in IT when they realize that they just can't keep up with their new, interconnected world, keep users happy and still find time to do useful work?
I don't know -- but I do know that when I talk to customers about their management environment, there's a general awareness that what worked before probably won't work going forward.
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