EMC Bridges Virtual, Physical Networks to Spot Problems

EMC Corp. announced Tuesday it is rolling out a new version of its network management system designed to fix one of the features that make virtual servers easy to use but difficult to maintain.

EMC's Smarts Server Manager is an update of the company's existing line of Smarts network and systems-management applications, which it acquired when it bought the privately held Systems Management ARTs, Inc. in 2004.

The new edition comes with the ability to bridge the gap between physical and virtual networks to help identify the root cause of an error that might otherwise be difficult to identify.

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EMC Corp. announced Tuesday it is rolling out a new version of its network management system designed to fix one of the features that make virtual servers easy to use but difficult to maintain.

EMC's Smarts Server Manager is an update of the company's existing line of Smarts network and systems-management applications, which it acquired when it bought the privately held Systems Management ARTs, Inc. in 2004.

The new edition comes with the ability to bridge the gap between physical and virtual networks to help identify the root cause of an error that might otherwise be difficult to identify.

Virtual server infrastructures do more than eliminate the need for an application to know much about the hardware on which it's running and make it possible for more than one application to share a server, according to Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

They also sever the one-to-one connection between application and server-which traditionally helped data-center managers identify the machine that was experiencing the problem when an application reported having problems.

"Now you've got four or five applications running on a single physical server and they can move," Laliberte says. "They could be on this physical server today and that one tomorrow."

Add in virtual storage technology that eliminates direct physical connections between servers and storage devices, and maybe cloud-computing services or interfaces, and identifying the root cause of a problem becomes a disaster in itself.

"It's hard to manage an environment when your applications are playing hide and seek and your storage is lying to you," Laliberte says.

Minor hardware problems such as the failure of the only interface card between one server and the network don't appear in network-management application consoles as clear indications of a specific problem, according to Jim Frey, analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.

They appear as an "alarm storm" made up of failure notices from applications trying to access that server, help-desk complaints from users who can't get to their data or applications, and network alarms identifying bottlenecks and congestion in the network around the failed part, he says.

"When you've got a virtualized infrastructure it's much harder to know what's causing this," Frey says. "Each of these servers is a mini ecosystem, with multiple VMs running on the same server with a virtual switch running between them, and if the virtual switch fails it can cause the same problems as a physical switch.

"In that kind of environment, it goes beyond valuable to be able to apply root-cause analysis to identify a problem," Frey says. "It's necessary."

Smarts Server Manager-a set of applications EMC bought along with Smarts in 2004 and extended to cover its own storage product line as well as the networking products the systems then covered-is designed to identify both physical and virtual servers and identify all the connections and hardware or software dependencies of each, according to EMC.