Enterprise Management Solution
MPE documents | |
 Complete PDF | |
| Table of Contents | |
| Index |
Commercial Systems Division
The Current Need
As data centers become larger, the complexity of managing them increases multifold. Today's challenge is to manage distributed, heterogeneous IT environment that comprises various systems. The level of sophisticated management has to be extended towards business critical applications and service management, where scalability, reliability, robustness, and optimized down time are the key factors. At the same time, we have to keep the Data Center Management simple enough such that the customer spends a minimal amount of effort on developing the skill set to use them. Today there is a whole range of Enterprise Management solutions available in the market. When we look at the entire collection of the solutions, we realize that we have some opportunities to fill some gaps in terms of offerings that are available on the HP 3000 platform. The HP 3000 needs to get integrated seamlessly in today's EM setup to enable the users to manage it with little or no extra overheads. Keeping this need in mind, we formed an Enterprise Management Solutions' group, who can focus on fulfilling the user communities' needs in this area. We would like to let you know the roadmap for the same, that is, the direction we intend to move.
Recent Offering
Among our recent offerings, we are pleased to provide the Legato Backup Solution and free availability of EasyTime on the Fundamental Operating System (FOS). The Legato Backup solution enables the HP 3000 to be backed up in a heterogeneous machine environment. Today we have many customers whose data centers are spread across great distances. Not only that, customers have a plethora of machines from different vendors for different tasks in their data centers. Legato Backup solution becomes an ideal solution for such an environment. EasyTime allows users to work on the HP 3000 effectively without needing to know much about the Command Interpreter of the MPE/iX OS. It allows the data center manager to make group of commands that are easy to use and tailored to his need. Added to this, we have made an effort to make the MPE/iX programming documentation better and easily available - for example, we have made some of the documentation available on web for easy accessibility.
Short Term Plans
In the next 1-2 years, we plan to strengthen our basic set of offerings. A very near future inclusion is providing support for the HP Secure Web Console (SWC). The inclusion of HP SWC in the list of devices supported by the HP 3000 means that the users have 'Location Independence' for accessing the HP 3000 system console. This is, of course, coupled with a high level of security to provide a secure access to the system's console. Please see the separate article on the SWC for more information. The data center manager needs to manage all his machines efficiently. It has become a challenge to manage a heterogeneous geographically dispersed data center cost effectively and efficiently. We already have the IT/Operations Agent available on MPE/iX. We have enriched the default environment for the agent very recently. Now the ITO's default settings are tuned better with the MPE/iX environment. We believe this should result in operational convenience for the users. Please see the separate article on the New Default Templates on the IT/O on MPE/iX for more information. We are planning to make the Omniback Agent available on MPE/iX shortly. With the availability of the Omniback 3.1 Agent, we essentially provide the HP 3000 user community a powerful set of back-up solutions to choose from. We think this adds a great degree of flexibility for the users to select their choice of backup solution. To integrate the HP 3000 in a data center for performance measurement purposes, we are considering providing a powerful performance solution like the Measureware Agent available on the HP 3000. We may first provide an interim work-around to allow the existing Scope Collector to smoothly send the measurement data to the central PerfView console.
Long Term Plans
In the long term, we plan to extend the strength with new and additional capabilities.With the constantly increasing demand to process more and more data, users are going to need a solution that allows increased availability of data, increased backup performance, simplified management of growth, etc. We think our users would eventually move to a SAN environment. As mentioned earlier, in the long term, we intend to enable the HP 3000 to integrate seamlessly in the SAN environment. We plan to start putting various building blocks for SAN support into the base platform. The list of such 'building blocks' includes solutions like - system level integration of key user applications, simplified/automatic device configuration, simplified database maintenance, web-based centralized system management, improved (and faster) back-up for backing up terra bytes of data efficiently, and even tools for simplified and quick resource planning.
Summary
We know that the data center management needs are going to grow. The need to handle large amounts of data, the need to have highly available data, the need for increased performance of backup, the need to have a better fault tolerant storage system, the need to have a scalable storage system etc. are some of the future needs. We plan to continue making the data center management an easy and complete job for HP 3000 customers such that the skill set needed to manage the HP 3000 in a data center is going to be very small. Our goal is to create a Virtually Operator-less environment. As we get more clarity on the market and our customers' needs, we will proactively change/tweak our plans to better reflect the needs of the customers. With this strategy, we will ensure that we are putting our resources on the right solutions, i.e. the solutions that our customers want most.
|
Chapter 4 Data Center Management |
Support Tools Manager (STM) |