Network Management: Trends and the future

As businesses move into a 24x7 mode and uptime becomes crucial, Network Management comes into the limelight. C V Venkata Subramanian explains what Network Management is all about, current trends in the space and future projections

In a perfect world, networks would not need management – they would just run themselves. However, in the real world, parts tend to break, changes are made, somebody has to pay, performance is often below expectations and abuse of resources is a reality.

Given these operational challenges, organisations deploying various network and communication technologies are often forced to look at the following key management functions, often referred to as FCAPS, to effectively administer and manage their networks. FCAPS, indeed, is the ISO model for Network management.

FCAPS stands for:

• Fault: Network problems or faults are found and fixed.
• Configuration: The network is monitored and controlled. This includes keeping track of hardware and software on the network and any modifications to them.
• Accounting: Network resources are distributed and used equitably; end users and departments are charged for their network use.
• Performance: Network congestion and bottlenecks are minimised.
• Current trends and capacity planning for future needs are taken care of.
• Security: Only the people who really need access to specific network resources are allowed to use them. This applies equally to outside hackers and internal users.

In addition to the above operational challenges, it is important to consider that:

• Business is getting more and more customer-centric and as operations switch to a 24x7 mode, it becomes imperative to have a network with 99 percent-plus uptime.
• It makes little difference where you are or how big you are.

Thus, in order to succeed, an organisation must manage its network—every node, every server and every connection. It should be managed not just from a technology perspective, but from a business perspective as well.

Current challenges

In order to make sure that organisations, business processes and infrastructure are working in harmony together, instead of against each other, network managers need to take a close look at both sides of the situation.

CEOs and CFOs are increasingly demanding information on the nature of network traffic from network managers and CIOs. The latter are asked to give reports specifically on the break-up of traffic directly related to business. This has often put network managers in a difficult position because, in the first place, it is difficult to distinguish what is business traffic and then monitor and report what percent of the infrastructure is being used for business.

During the tech boom a few years ago, everyone was buying—no one was actually pricing. Now that the economy has tripped, organisations have started to re-look at the existing infrastructure investments and are focusing on maximising the existing IT infrastructure.

Most CEOs and COOs argue: “Organisations are paying 100 percent of the cost for providing and managing IT infrastructure, whether ones uses 80 percent or 15 percent of capacity. The cost of infrastructure doesn’t change based on utilisation, so it is better to utilise as much as one can.” Organisations are looking at capacity expansion of networking infrastructure as a last option only if they know for sure that the current capacity can no longer manage the new requirements.

Network Management—Indian scenario

Network Management today is maturer as compared to the late 90s. In the early 90s, Network Management was looked more from the device management perspective, wherein the tools provided by the network device vendor were used to primarily configure and administer the network. These tools also had some in-built monitoring mechanism, which was fairly adequate.

However, with the growing challenges in managing networks, organisations have started realising the need for complete network management. They have also understood that device management is only a subset of network management. Most organisations have made budget provisioning for either purchasing and implementing, or outsourcing network management. In particular, most government organisations and institutions are calling separate tenders for network management.

Technology in use

Some of the commonly deployed technologies that needs to be managed in an IT infrastructure include:

• Local Area Networks—Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Giga Ethernet, fibre backbone
• Wide Area Networks—Terrestrial lines, radio links, VSATs
• Storage Area Networks
• Wireless networks
• Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
• Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs)
• Internet, intranet, extranet
• Mobile users
• Firewalls

Physical connectivity and related technologies are getting more and more mature and standardised. A classic example is the number of options that existed in the late 80s and early 90s (close to five different technologies co-existed—thin Ethernet, thick Ethernet, token ring, FDDI, Arc net). Today we have close to 98 percent dominated by Ethernet. The remaining 2 percent legacy systems are also in the process of migration to Ethernet.

Each of these technologies comes with configuration tools that have to be individually used. On the other hand, organisations do not want to get into details of these tools, instead they are more interested in:

• Service Level Agreements
• Uptime of networks
• Seamless integration with the existing business process.
• Ability to manage from business perspective

Network managers are always looking forward to have some kind of tools that will enable them to administer devices using native tools while managing and monitoring network infrastructure in totality in the context mentioned above.

Trends

In the past, particularly around the late 90s, customers mostly shied away from integrated, unified and complete systems. They opted instead for point solutions to solve specific problems, While there is great demand for specific management functions, a number of market surveys conducted across the globe have found that more than 50 percent of customers want these functions to be tightly integrated. That point solutions continue to sell so well is largely attributable to user scepticism towards the claims of vendors who promise tight integration between functions.

However, in the last few years, there are clearly two trends that are emerging in the market. Firstly, Network Management is clearly heading towards highly integrated management solution sets, with an emphasis on pre-emption rather than reaction. Organisations are increasingly looking at Network Management as a sub-set of enterprise management systems. This would enable customers to deploy and manage networks based on policies and also move towards ‘on-demand computing’.

Secondly, organisations are considering remote management, through the Internet or though an external managed service provider, to manage complex network infrastructure. These service providers are measured against the service levels committed to and the service fee payable towards the service providers is directly linked to the uptime maintained by the respective service providers.

Future

If top management wants to focus more on service alignment and revenue generation, a Network Management solution is definitely a way to quickly implement and automate services.

To meet growing organisational demands, policy-based management is the only solution that will allow organisations to prioritise networking resources such as bandwidth, application access and security clearance based on individual users. These policy-based management tools will have to be self deploying, self configuring and self healing, automatically discovering any changes taking place in the network infrastructure and dynamically building and altering policies for accessing resources based on needs.

Eventually, in one form or another, organisations have to adopt some form of policy-based management tools that will dynamically manage resources based on demand. These are often referred in the industry as ‘managing on demand’ or ‘on-demand computing’. The whole concept will revolve around understanding current demand by various self-learning techniques and re-prioritising existing activities in such a way that the business does not suffer due to poor infrastructure, while at the same time taking care of immediate needs.

Therefore, Network Management is going to be an essential foundation on which practically all future business automation efforts are likely to rest. New technologies are likely to accelerate this dynamic trend, as IT is increasingly run as an integral part of the business rather than as a cost centre operating as a separate entity.

The author is currently working as a project manager with Computer Associates