The challenge with virtualization and cloud: management
I’ve been helping Network World line up speakers to present end user case studies at its IT Roadmap events for more than four years now. IT Roadmap is a one-day event held in 10 U.S. cities that covers multiple technologies in separate breakout sessions and workshops. (Learn more here.)
In the course of finding folks who can present on the various topics covered at the events, I talk to lots and lots of practicing IT professionals. I mean lots. I talk to them about what projects they’ve implemented lately and how the projects went, to get a sense for the topics they’d be able to talk about at an IT Roadmap event.
Consistently, the topic I have the most trouble finding folks to speak about is network management. This is a topic that I’ve followed to varying extents for about 20 years, dating back to when it was part of my beat as a Network World reporter in the late 1980’s and early ‘90s. Back then, the big topic was being able to remotely monitor and control various pieces of network and computing equipment from a central console – a la HP OpenView or CA NSM.
It strikes me that things haven’t changed all that much. The products are out there, to be sure, but an awful lot of folks haven’t implemented them. The reasons they cite most often are purely budgetary – they just don’t have the money. As a result, many favor open source products that they acknowledge are somewhat less functional – but it’s hard to beat the price.
I suspect many of these folks are going to run into trouble as they look to take advantage of technologies including virtualization and cloud computing. Every time a new technology comes down the pike, it brings with it its own set of management challenges.
Virtualization and cloud are no different. Just consider the challenges inherent in managing applications that may be running on multiple servers at the same time, of multiple operating environments on the same piece of hardware and of virtual servers that may move from one physical environment to another.
If you’re in an IT shop that isn’t quite up to snuff on the network and systems management front in the first place, then you want to implement virtualization and/or cloud computing, you’re going to be that much more behind.
Of course from a marketer’s perspective, that should be a great opportunity – virtualization is all the rage and there’s a strong case to be made that IT shops can only get the most out of it if they have proper management tools.
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