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N-Tier Is the New Frontier of IT Operations Management (Continued)

The Top-Down Era
As the major IT market analysts have described, IT operations management will progress through a series of transitions over the next few years. The terminologies of the individual analyst firms vary. Summit Strategies calls the end goal "dynamic computing," while JNoel Associates uses the IBM-inspired "autonomic computing" term. Gartner Group offers a vision of self-regulating applications it calls "business service management," and adds a realistic view of three stages IT organizations must traverse to arrive there. Gartner points out that IT must first graduate the long phase called "element management," characterized by managing devices and processes component by component with basic automation solutions and plenty of human intervention.

The second phase, the one IT is finally entering now, is called "operations management." The third phase Gartner describes is service management, which focuses on reporting and management of services meaningful to the business customer, including service-level agreement (SLA) reporting, and interfaces to provisioning and billing.

The whole point of the major transition into the next phase of IT operations is moving from an element-by-element management approach to a more application-centric, holistic approach. Success in moving in this direction depends completely on new types of software that automate various aspects of IT operations.

This shift centers on enabling a top-down approach to application management. The traditional bottom-up approach worked fine in the mainframe era and into the client/server era. In these environments, each application tended to have its own underlying server and resources. Each server had mostly simple connections to another tier, so management efforts could concentrate on keeping particular components healthy. It made sense for network monitoring consoles to adapt their tried-and-true approaches to systems management. This element-by-element approach begins to break down once servers multiply, application processing gets distributed, and applications develop multiple dependencies across the datacenter.

As we'll discuss, the monitoring vendors (the "frameworks" sellers) have made, and are making, major efforts to add modules that address the new challenges of managing n-tier distributed applications. Those vendors, as well as most from adjacent spaces, plus startups from new software categories, are striving to create a top-down management paradigm. That is, they all want to provide, in whole or in part, methods IT operations can use to manage complex applications in a holistic, end-to-end fashion. (Click here to see details on these vendors' strategies.)

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Complexity
The move to n-tier distributed applications is rather gradual, and the problem of complexity is fairly evident, so why hasn't it been addressed before now? There's a three-fold answer. First, the issue of complexity has been attacked first by efforts to simplify IT environments. Consolidation is the best catch-all phrase to describe recent efforts by enterprises to reduce its number of core applications, datacenters, and management consoles. These efforts tend to work, at least within the metrics of the old element-by-element paradigm.

The second part of the answer focuses on improved processes, both in development and IT operations. Corporate applications teams are adopting standardized development methodologies. These methods tend to increase development efficiency and reuse, and make applications more manageable. IT operations organizations are also improving management processes. You'll hear the term "IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant" commonly used to describe methods and products. This is a clear recognition that application management processes can be standardized.

But the rest of the explanation lies in the lack, until recently, of software offering a top-down management capability. It's a case of complexity begetting more complexity, which tends to mask understanding.

Although software has been capable of implementing pre-established rules for years, until recently IT management software vendors have not been able to perfect ways of automatically finding and tracking all the elements that compose a complex application. Moreover, software creators are only now attaining the means of defining entire applications to the level required to make sense of these piece-parts and their interdependencies.



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