Blade Watch

TechWorld

IT professionals don’t have the right tools in place to manage their data centres effectively and many fail to monitor all their equipment, according to research from the (ARI) Aperture Research Institute.

The institute, which is funded by data centre specialist Aperture, found that under a third of all data centre professionals monitored more than 90 percent of their equipment while, rather alarmingly, 12 percent of those surveyed had no sort of monitoring system at all.

Tom Waun, Aperture’s president said that managers who were failing to look at all the equipment were leaving themselves open to vulnerability. “The problem is that any item of equipment could fail; it could be a UPS or an aircon unit as well as a server.”

It’s a mixture of things. There are many individual systems which carry out different functions, the hardware monitoring tools (like Insight Manager or IBM Director), the software monitoring tools (like HP OpenView or CA NSM). We have the information, we know therefore the servers we have, we know that Server97 is a DL380, but getting an overview, linking all the individual databases and knowledge bases is the problem. Just ask any large enterprise for the following:

• A list of all servers – ok that’s not too bade
• A list of all servers with Internet explorer 6 including customer facing ones
• A list of servers which are Compaq DL380’s, which have Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000 SP4

The ability to do on demand reports for business specific, IT and licensing specific reasons is the thing that we need to be able to do. With an understanding of what we have, who owns it and what it’s doing, we can then decide where we want to go, what we need to achieve to do so and which systems and business lines are impacted. Anything the vendors can do to achieve this has to be a good thing.

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