Trouble in paradise?

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For Martin Webb, upgrading the network to support new IP-based applications and then adequately managing them can be like taking one step forward and two steps back. As technologies such as VoIP emerge to advance his network, the tools to manage them are falling behind, says Webb, who is manager of data network operations for the province of British Columbia, in Victoria.

"Network management technologies are fairly well positioned to tell you if the device is available, and report on traffic in and out, utilization and errors," Webb says. "The problem is, they only give you visibility into how you believe your traffic is flowing. Management products now need to understand how the network routing functions and to see changes to the routing in real time."

The traditional model of centralized server software depending on distributed agents and intermittent SNMP polling of the network simply can't keep up with the rate of real-time change that today's applications sustain. Nevermind looking ahead to a time when data, voice and video applications will share on-demand bandwidth and computing resources. Then Web services-based service-oriented architectures (SOA ) will enable applications to disassociate from the hardware, requiring management from within the application. And the management of today really will lose its bearings.

"The mainframe-oriented and agent-based technologies are going to evolve in the next five to 10 years to support real-time requirements, and that's going to call for a lot of integration and standards support among vendors," says Stephen Elliot, a senior analyst with IDC. "Even now, large vendors are looking to improve their management capabilities through standards and more management knowledge of various IT domains, such as applications, storage, servers and networks."

As management vendors change their perspectives, corporate IT executives need to shift their view of the advanced IP infrastructure from one of network availability to a more dynamic picture of application performance on - and user experience with - the network. In British Columbia, as Webb rolls out VoIP to some 450 sites, he finds himself talking with developers to better understand how applications need to traverse his network. Since implementing a partially meshed network, it's anyone's guess which way application traffic will choose to travel, Webb says.

"We can look at bandwidth consumption and see no errors, trying to understand why the user experience is becoming a problem," he explains. "We're realizing more and more there are traffic flow issues, but with centralized monitoring tools, it gets very difficult to bring all the pieces together."

Management heavyweights, such as BMC Software, Computer Associates, HP and IBM, are tweaking their products to better share data among them, as well as adding ease-of-install and use features to management suites that once required considerable upfront work to get results. The vendors also are partnering with start-ups, such as Collation, nLayers and Relicore, to build and update application topologies and collect configuration data across network devices, and application and server software. As a result, IT should be able to visualize how applications use network resources and get an accurate picture of application performance and IT service delivery.