Tag Archives: service assurance

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Service Outage Hits Home for Cloud Provider

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Are there blind spots in your service assurance approach?

Netflix, a provider of online streaming media, made news over the holidays when customers experienced a service outage on Christmas Eve.  Imagine taking the wrapping off of your new mobile device and deciding to try it out to stream a movie.   For those located in North America, you probably found that the Netflix movie streaming service was down. 

This outage was caused by issues within Amazon Web Services that Netflix employs to support movie streaming.  Initially, the Amazon support team pursued API errors before learning that the root cause of the outage was actually a configuration issue caused by human error.  This misstep ultimately delayed the restoration of service to Netflix customers.  Over the course of that day, the configuration error first manifested itself as performance degradation, and then cascaded to a full service outage for many customers. One way of avoiding a situation like this one could have been to take a more system-wide approach to service assurance. Continue reading →

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Service Assurance In The Cloud

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How do you provide service assurance in your virtualized data center or cloud?

Read any blog, online article, or hard copy publication about the IT industry and you will likely see much about the future of IT. But, it is the every-day challenges and victories that often determine success in the long run.

While the industry considers more logical abstractions to further loosen the ties between business processes and physical infrastructure, IT management needs to assure ongoing application availability and performance in virtual and cloud deployments with a high rate of data growth. IT needs solutions that provide a complete picture of data center health across compute, network, and storage.

The just-announced EMC Storage Resource Management Suite provides service assurance from application-to-storage by monitoring and reporting on availability, performance, and compliance. It combines EMC storage management and analysis with technologies from the recent Watch4net acquisition to ensure application consistency in dynamic data centers. Continue reading →

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Performance Management In A Cross-Domain World

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How do you ensure performance across your virtualized data center or cloud?

There is much emphasis on enterprise management tools being able to assure the availability of IT delivered services from a centralized event console.  You can search the Web and find many solutions that claim they can consolidate events into one single dashboard. However, availability is only part of the story when it comes to building an application-aware infrastructure to deliver always-on business services with better-than-expected service levels. A central management point for performance across all domains is essential in assuring delivery of business services to customers. 

Recent posts here have addressed how Web design models such as REST are setting the stage for standing up new services more quickly and providing some semblance of portability across private, public, and hybrid clouds. Standing on the brink of delivering on the promise of cloud computing, organizations need to ensure both the availability—and performance—of business-critical applications as they move to non-traditional deployments that still support demanding customers mostly disinterested in how computing gets done. Continue reading →

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EMC Extends Service Assurance With Watch4net

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What if you could ensure the availability—and performance—of your virtual data center?

With the acquisition of Montreal-based Watch4net Solutions, EMC provides another compelling option for getting your data center under better control.

EMC IT Operations Intelligence ensures the availability of the virtual data center (VDC) with a root cause or fault analysis engine second to none. And, while availability is a basic requirement for the 24×7 VDC, you also need to ensure performance, as you scale your mission-critical applications.

Watch4net Solutions APG software suite provides the performance monitoring, analysis, and reporting from vApp to LUN. While availability may be cast as black or white (available or not), performance assurance is more akin to keeping an eye on the varying shades of gray to assess the impact or potential impact of the dynamic elements of the VDC on applications and infrastructure. It all comes down to service levels and being able to deliver the throughput and response times expected by the unruly mob—er, users.

Watch4net is the performance complement to IT Operations Intelligence’s deterministic availability solution. This combo is service assurance for the VDC and the cloud.

Continue reading →

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On the Road to Delivering IT-as-a-Service

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What if you could deliver IT-as-a-Service?

Last time around, I discussed the challenge facing data center managers when it comes to responding to internal customers and standing up new services in virtual environments and cloud deployments.

The key takeaway being that IT departments need solutions that provide speed to service, service assurance, and compliance.

Address these areas and you solve the IT management challenge to delivering IT-as-a-service (ITaaS). Continue reading →