Open Standards Is for Systems Management Too
Dec. 2, 2006

As we talk about industry standards and how they enable scaling out an IT environment, it’s easy to think in terms of hardware. After all, scaling out an open-standards IT environment involves deploying servers and other devices, usually from several vendors and frequently across multiple locations.

Sometimes, this use of diverse technologies creates a challenging management problem. Almost every vendor includes or sells tools to manage its hardware. After a while, data centers find themselves desperately trying to keep current on updates and revisions to all their hardware… not to mention the challenge of keeping their operating systems and applications up to date.

So it’s interesting to consider that a solution to all this clutter and confusion might lie with industry-standard software. Taking advantage of new standards in instrumentation, standards-based management tools can deliver a simplified way for IT staff to get a single view of their environment.

These tools open the door to more proactive systems management, enabling IT shops to capacity plan and allocate resources as needed. They will also eliminate the need to depend on dozens of standalone tools to manage hardware. And these tools can integrate with the popular management applications that businesses are already using to monitor networks, operating systems and applications.

The ability to inject new functionality into common systems management applications by vendors like Microsoft, Altiris and Novell, makes it easier for customers to automate many time- and labor-intensive processes. Plus, they don’t need to buy and learn new applications to manage their streamlined environments.

Our featured story, The Open Standards Approach to Systems Management, explores this topic, demonstrating the simplicity and functionality of today’s integrated standards-based management tools. If you’re interested in scaling out efficiently, it’s worth a look.

Posted by Andy Mazer 12.02.06

Previous Blog Posts
11.22.06 - Virtually Ready for Primetime
11.14.06 - Technology No Substitute for Communication
10.16.06 - Running a Data Center? What's Your Problem?