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Hitachi IT Operations Suite Monitors and Manages IT Infrastructure to Help Companies Address IT Complexity

The combination of two easy-to-use products, Hitachi IT Operations Director and Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer, provides mid-to-large-sized companies with a powerful set of IT lifecycle management tools and infrastructure monitoring tools
HITACHI IT OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, INTRODUCED worldwide in April by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), combines three sets of functionalitysecurity management, asset management, and software distribution. Server virtualization has been the No. 1 IT initiative for the past two years, according to research from IT analyst and business strategy firm, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). To take advantage of advanced mobility functions, a networked storage environment is required, says senior analyst Bob Laliberte of ESG. This creates much stronger interdependencies between these domains, and makes integrated visibility across layers of abstraction created by virtualization vitally important. ESG views the priorities as first to get visibility, then to effectively manage, and lastly, to automate. As environments grow more complex and abstract, automated solutions like Hitachi IT Operations Director will be required to minimize time-consuming manual processes and enable future growth. IDC Views Challenge of Medium-Sized Data Centers The medium-sized data center is typically managed by a lean IT staff challenged to administer and troubleshoot a complex and interdependent set of IT resources. The tools they use are typically written to address specific vendor implementations and operating domains, such as networks, servers, and storage devices. These tools can detect events and issue alerts related to their own span of control, but according to IDC analyst Mary Johnston Turner, they provide little insight into how the performance of a specific device impacts the end-to-end service levels experienced by an end user. To get a comprehensive view of the overall health of the data center and find the root cause of application performance problems in systems that are interconnected, is difficult. The medium-sized data centers are experiencing the same challenges of operating complexity as large-scale data centers, especially challenges related to the expanding use of virtual servers, network storage, and Web 2.0 applications. At the same time, business user service-level requirements are becoming more demanding. When respondents in medium-sized organizations were asked to identify the top challenges resulting from implementation of a virtual infrastructure, they selected management issues, followed by concerns about business/IT alignments, IT organization structure, and unanticipated management requirements for IT staff. (See Fig. 1.) Although enterprise data centers have a wide range of software tools in place and specialists available to focus on new technologies, the medium-sized data centers need to rely on already overtaxed generalists to take on more responsibilities, IDCs Turner states. These generalists tend to share roles and responsibilities and coordinate verbally and via ad hoc processes to make up for the lack of sophisticated tools. While this often works adequately, trends are converging to stress this structure. These trends include: IT teams feeling economic pressure to do more with less and spread IT resources even thinner; increasing deployment of technology such as virtualization, with the goal of reducing costs; and rising awareness of the business costs associated with application performance problems, IDC states. The IT professionals in medium-sized data centers need tools with the following attributes, according to IDC: broad visibility across a range of server, storage, and network resources; easy installation and discovery; an intuitive user interface; automated root cause analysis; and cost-effectiveness. IT Operations DirectorIT Lifecycle Management Directors focus on three areas of IT lifecycle management asset management, software distribution, and security managementis the result of feedback from customers on what was needed, says Brett Hesterberg, technical product manager for the Hitachi Global IT Software Business Unit. The asset management functionality discovers information about hardware and software installed on laptops and PCs. It enables administrators to compare purchased software licenses to actual software installs, Hesterberg says. Information can be entered into the tool so that administrators can see the associated costs of all deployed assets.

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Software distribution is assisted by Number 1 Challenge Created by Use of Virtualization an installation wizard. Director has the ability to guide installations, which can lower security risk by ensuring critical software is consistently installed in the environment, says Hesterberg. Security management is enabled by customizable policies that can automatically correct problems on managed computers. For example, Director can be set to block unregistered USB devices from connecting to a computing device, or set to uninstall prohibited software automatically. Alerts can be triggered by specific events set by administrators, and file-level audits can be conducted when needed, Hesterberg says. These three areas of function are delivered within Director by a single software license, which HDS sees as a differentiator Figure 1 Source: IDCs Virtual Infrastructure Management Survey, 2008 for the product. HDS positions IT Operations Director in the small to medium business (SMB) market, and network, storage area network, and storage devices on a network. Director has the ability to scale for large businesses as well. Root cause analysis enables the reduction of the mean time to IT Operations Director is integrated with the previously rediagnose IT environment outages by up to 90 percent. Analyzer leased IT Operations Analyzer so that the entire asset discovery can integrate with ISV applications and third-party devices via performed by Analyzer can be pulled into Director. plug-ins, providing unified monitoring of the entire infrastructure. ESG analyst Laliberte sees the challenge for HDS being to AnalyzerMonitoring the Heterogeneous Infrastructure raise awareness of its expertise in data center software. ComHitachi IT Operations Analyzer, an all-in-one availability and petition will come from existing storage vendors with solutions, performance monitoring software application, provides essential independent software vendors, and even virtualization vendors, capabilities to efficiently and cost-effectively monitor heterogehe says. While the presence of HDS and its channel partners as neous servers, switches, and network and storage devices. Anastrategic advisors in many SMB IT shops will help the company lyzer features automated root cause analysis, simplified network reach the market, their challenge is to get organizations to unpath view, agentless architecture, an award-winning unified, derstand they are a serious player in the infrastructure software intuitive Web-based interface, proactive alerting, multivendor solutions space, Laliberte adds. platform support, and an open platform. HDS plans call for Analyzer and Director to extend Analyzer 2.5 is enhanced with IPMI (Intelligent Platform functionality to address a wider range of computing devices, Management Interface) framework support, allowing servers to including mobile devices. We are watching because in the end, be monitored via plug-ins even when the OS is not running. IT IT is likely to be responsible for asset and security management departments need to know the health of the devices in their IT around a wider array of devices, says Hesterberg. infrastructures. Analyzer gives IT organizations integrated insight Hitachi IT Operations Director is priced competitively and into the performance and availability of their infrastructures. is available for a free 30-day trial. Director is licensed in 100-deA chief differentiator for Analyzer is root cause analysis. vice packs to serve laptops, PCs, servers, or any other connected We use a proprietary method to correlate events in the data device for a price of $4,000, or $40 per device. Director scales to center to let users know the root cause of a problem, such as a 3,000 devices. Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer sells in 25-device switch going down, so that management does not have to conpacks and is priced at $4,300 for each pack. duct an extensive diagnosis, says Hesterberg. Expect HDS to be a player to contend with in IT lifecycle Through a single interface, Analyzer shows the availabilmanagement. n ity and performance of the heterogeneous servers, local area For more information, go to: www.itoperations.com