EMC Smarts: Watch4Net APG Data Purging

A short note about default behavior within EMC Smarts Watch4Net APG

How to delete a device in Watch4Net. 

With default settings, APG will delete a device (or one of its component) and its history if it’s not updated for 1 full year. However, for some reason, you may want to manually override this behavior without changing the automated configuration. APG provides a tool that allows you to delete data from the database. It’s only available to administrative users, in the “Administration” pane and it’s called “Management of APG Metrics”. To use this tool, you have to:
• Set a filter to select the data to delete
• Type in the maximum number of results
• Check whether or not the last timestamp is displayed
• Select the properties to show
• Then, click the “Query” button
• Results will appear in the box below
• Last, just click the “Delete” button to delete all these data from APG 

There is no out-of-the-box way to de-provision from the command line.

Conclusions:

If a site runs out of licenses, the GUI may crash and refuse to remain running... a very poorly written application result - but hey, EMC is not supporting high-end platforms like Solaris any longer, so what can you expect? Make sure you have spare licenses within Watch4Net to handle customer on boarding and off boarding - otherwise you may have some unexpected results!

EMC: Shakeup and Network Managment Implications

[image courtesy: blog of Chuck Hollis, EMC VP --Global Marketing CTO]

Changes at EMC

EMC has been going through a great deal of changes over the years.

2003-12 - [html] - EMC Purchases VMWare for Hypervisor

2004-12 - [html] - EMC Purchases SMARTS for Network Fault Management

2007-11 - [html] - EMC Purchases Voyence for VoyenceControl

2009-11 - [html] - VMWare, EMC, Cisco Announce VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) VBlock Architecture

2012-05 - [html] - EMC Purchases Watch4Net for APG

2012-06 - [html] - Cisco, NetApp Announce FlexPod Architecture

2012-06 - [html] - EMC Produces Own Blade Servers

Some of internal changes are more political rather than product infrastructural.

2012-09 - [html] - EMC CEO Succession Politics

During EMC world, Oracle was made to look like the red-headed bastard step child, while SPARC hardware probably drives more EMC storage than either company cares to acknowledge.

Implications to Network Management

EMC had normally played well in the multi-vendor environment, because they were a software and storage company - they would sell disks and software to anyone who used any vendor's equipment. This started to change in 2003.

With the acquisition of VMWare in 2003, there was an internal drive to virtualize more software in the proprietary Intel space, rather than play in the Open Systems space. With the VCE announcement, using Cisco to push into the carrier space further pressed the Open Systems vendors.  In 2012, with the announcement from Cisco to partner with NetApp and EMC producing their own blades, the internal political pressure to abandon Open Systems will continue.

Ironically, historical analysis of performance, configuration, and event data from Network and Systems Management platforms drove the need for robust disk storage systems... Telecommunications Market -was one of the original Big Data platforms. Big-data using off-the-shelf network management software requires Open Systems (with massive vertical [socket-count] and horizontal [blade-count] scalability.) No robust system implemented under traditional Open Systems platforms would be done, without external EMC storage. The push away from Open Systems platforms (to lower-end Linux & Windows platforms) ironically drives EMC storage out of the solutions... yet this [increasingly] is the direction from EMC.

Will the investment of Open Systems management tools from SMARTS, Voyence, and Watch4Net continue to be made by EMC - with the transition from EMC CEO Joe Tucci? EMC recently killed cross-vendor object storage. With VMWare CEO Paul Maritz assuming a higher profile, will the traditional EMC suffer greater loss in their EMC Network Management and EMC storage customer bases? Pat Gelsinger, president and COO of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products, became CEO of VMware, which may offer greater influence for Open Systems management in VMWare's proprietary Intel sphere.

[Graph courtesy: seekingalpha.com article]

Traditional Network, Systems, Storage, and Security Management may be losing the last viable multi-vendor player, as the industry consolidates into vertical, proprietary stove-piped systems. It is really EMC's choice as to whether their political structure decides to carry the Open Systems banner and say "we are different - we manage everything on everything" (and are worth the premium we charge) or whether they choose to lose the moral high ground offered by Open Systems and suffer the lower profit margins of a solely proprietary Intel platform [which offers no marketing differentiation.]

[Tombstone of Elizabeth in Yangzhou courtesy: wikimedia.org]

If EMC's SMARTS, VoyenceControl, and APG will not "manage everything on anything" in the near future: EMC will lose their main competitive position against dominate industry players like HP & IBM. Without "everything on anything" - EMC will not be worth the money they currently charge. Any two-bit open source network & systems management framework supports "management of everything on anything"... so if EMC continues to choose vertical isolation [with the abandonment of Open Systems such as Itanium, POWER, and SPARC] - EMC's may soon no longer be "the only game in-town" and there will no longer be the need to even consider EMC as a competitor to Tivoli and OpenView. Ignoring a great marketing feature and poor management decisions will result in the death of EMC NSM.

Network Management at EMC World 2012

 

[EMC World 2012 Man - courtesy: computerworld]

Network Management at EMC World 2012

Abstract:
EMC purchase network management vendor SMARTS with their InCharge suite, a number of years ago, rebranding the suite as Ionix. EMC purchased Voyence, rebranding it as NCM (Network Configuration Manager). After EMC World 2012, they completed the acquisition of Watch4Net APG (Advanced Performance Grapher.) The suite of these platforms is now being rolled into a single new brand called EMC IT Operations Intelligence. EMC World 2012 was poised to advertize the new branding in a significant way.

Result:
EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada was unfortunately pretty uneventful for service providers. Why was it uneventful?

The labs for EMC IT Operations Intelligence did not function. There were a lot of other labs, which functioned, but not the Network Management labs. EMC World 2012 was a sure "shot-in-the-head" for demonstrating, to service providers, the benefits of running EMC Network Management tools in a VM.

After 7 days, EMC could not get their IT Operations Intelligence Network Management Suite running in a VMWare VM.

Background:
Small customers may host their network management tools in a VMWare VM. Enterprises will occasionally implement their network management systems on smaller systems, where they know they will get deterministic behavior from the underlying platform.

Service Providers traditionally run their mission critical network management systems on larger UNIX Systems, so as to provide instant scalability (swap in CPU boards) and 99.999 availability (reboot once-a-year, whether they need to or not.)

The platform of choice in the Service Provider market for scalable Network Management platforms has been SPARC Solaris, for decades... clearly, for a reason. This was demonstrated well at EMC World 2012.

The Problem:
Why not host a network management platform in a VMWare infrastructure? Besides, the fact that EMC could not make it happen, after 1 year of preparation, and 7 days of struggling... there are basic logistics.

Network Management is dependent upon ICMP and SNMP.  Both of these protocols are "connectionless protocols" - sometimes referred to as "unreliable protocols". Why would a network management platform use "unreliable protocols"?

The IETF understands that network management should always be light (each poll is a single packet, while a TCP protocol requires a 3-way handshake to start the transaction, poll the single packet, then break down with another 3-way handshake. Imagine doing this for thousands of devices every x seconds - not very light-weight, not very smart. A "connection based protocol" will also hide the nature of an unreliable underlying network, which is what a network management platform is supposed to expose - so it can be fixed.

Now stick a network management platform in a VM, where the network connection from the VM (holding an operating system, with a TCP/IP stack), going down through the hypervisor (which is another operating system, with another TCP/IP stack, which is also sharing the resources of that VM with other VM's.) If there is the slightest glitch in the VM or the hypervisor, which may cause the the packets to be queued or dropped - the actual VMWare infrastructure will signal to the Network Management Centers that there is a network problem, in their customer's network!

Politics:
Clearly, someone at EMC does not understand Network Management, nor do they understand Managed Service Providers.

The Network Management Platform MUST BE ROCK SOLID, so the Network Operations Center personnel will NEVER mistake a alerts in their console from a customer's managed device as a local performance issue in their VM.

With EMC using Solaris to reach into the Telco Data Centers,  EMC later using Cisco to reach into the Telco Data Centers - EMC is done using their partners. VMWare was the platform of choice, to [not] demonstrate their Network Management tools on. Cisco was the [soon to be replaced] platform of choice, since EMC announced they will start building their own servers.

Either someone at EMC is sleeping-at-the-wheel or they need to get a spine to support their customers. Either way, this does not bode well for EMC as a provider of software solutions for service providers.

 

Business Requirements:
In order for a real service provider to reliably run a real network management system in a virtualized environment:

• The virtualized platform must not insert any overhead.
• All resources provided must be deterministic.
• Patches are installed while the system is live.
• Engagement of patches must be deterministic.
• Patch engagement must be fast.
• Rollback of patches must be deterministic.
• Patch rollback must be fast.
• Availability must be 99.999.  

Solutions:
There are many platforms which fulfill these basic business requirements, but none of them are VMWare. Ironically, only SPARC Solaris platform is currently supported by EMC for IT Operations Intelligence, EMC does not support SPARC Solaris under VMWare, and EMC chose not to demonstrate their Network Management suite under a platform which meets service provider requirements.

Today, Zones is about the only virtualized technology which offers 0%-overhead virtualizataion. (Actually, on SMP systems, virtualizing via Zones can increase application throughput, if Zones are partitioned by CPU board.) Zones, to work in this environment, seem to work best with external storage providers, like EMC.

Any platform which offers 0% virtualization penalty with ZFS support can easily meet service providers technical platform business requirements. Of these, the top 3 are probably the best supported by commercial interests

• Oracle SPARC Solaris
• Oracle Intel Solaris
• Joyent SMART OS
• OpenIndiana
• Illumian
• BeleniX
• SchilliX
• StormOS

Conclusion:
Today's market is becoming more proprietary each passing day. The movement towards supporting applications only under proprietary solutions (such as VMWare) has demonstrated it's risk during EMC World 2012. A network management provider would not be well advised to use any network management tool which is bound to a single proprietary platform element and does not support POSIX platforms.