Beyond System Center: Addressing Systems Management Needs Across the Entire IT Infrastructure

For many organizations, Microsoft’s System Center suite provides a powerful automated systems management platform to address a significant portion of the needs inherent in today’s dynamic IT environments. However, if that functionality can be expanded to even further simplify and improve support for a greater portion of today’s complex IT infrastructures, enterprises can more effectively improve the value of their IT investments and better achieve IT goals and requirements. Although Microsoft has recently announced its intent to support heterogeneous IT architectures, the breadth of support is not innately extended to all platforms, systems and/or devices found in today’s dynamic IT infrastructures. Add to this the need for more advanced functionality in areas including network management, disaster recovery and virtualization and the need for expanding the scope of System Center’s abilities becomes clear. Businesses need solutions that leverage System Center’s core functionality and build on its extensible architecture to support a broader IT infrastructure. Fortunately, solutions do exist today to provide this expanded support and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recommends organizations looking to expand IT support to encompass the whole IT support stack implement an automated solution that can improve IT productivity, increase return on IT investments, and help drive business profitability.

IT Management in a Complex World

Dealing with complexity in today’s dynamic IT infrastructures is the single greatest challenge faced by IT managers and support personnel. Increased reliance on IT solutions to drive profitability and achieve business goals has broadened the scope of IT support issues while expanding the need for more reliable IT infrastructures. This has led to the deployment of a myriad of products to address those business needs including messaging and e-mail services, Web commerce, SharePoint portals, security, accessibility, virtualization, disaster recovery, and a variety of other specialized applications and services each with its own unique set of requirements and on-going management. Add these services to the already challenging systems and network management issues and it becomes clear that it is no longer practical to manage an IT infrastructure through purely manual processes, nor a myriad of disparate tools.

In order to achieve success in meeting business IT goals, automated solutions must be employed to simplify the process of collecting data, evaluating status and reporting conditions on the entire IT infrastructure. By simplifying the IT management process, businesses see a significant reduction in environment failures and occurrences of downtime are both shortened in length and diminished in frequency. This allows IT support personnel to focus less time on reactionary problem "firefighting" and dedicate more time to proactive problem prevention and improving overall IT performance. Automated systems management tools empower IT support organizations to meet SLAs, satisfy regulatory compliance, and achieve business IT objectives. Operational costs are also reduced as greater support can be performed by smaller staff sizes and IT assets are optimized to ensure they provide the greatest value.

Improving Windows Management with Microsoft System Center

For Windows based IT environments, few solutions can provide depth of support at the systems level as Microsoft's System Center suite. Utilizing its in-depth familiarity with the Windows operating system, Microsoft has built its System Center set of automated, integrated and centralized solutions to capture and aggregate knowledge about infrastructure, policies, processes, and best practices so IT organizations can be more productive and deliver the level of services needed to support the business. This philosophy is referred to as "Knowledge-Driven IT Management" - that is, by automating the collection and reporting of detailed configuration and log data, administrators are empowered to quickly resolve issues, rather than waste significant time investigating the cause, and they are able to make informed decisions on how the environment should be configured, rather than just guess about what might or might not be relevant.

A core element in the System Center suite is System Center Operations Manager 2007 (", formerly Microsoft Operations Manager or MOM). Operations Manager provides the centralized monitoring for servers, applications and clients to establish a comprehensive view of the health of an entire IT service infrastructure. A graphical interface provides a simplified method for defining the components that make up the IT support stack. Data is collected for Operations Manager by deploying agents to the client systems that monitor for events and performance statistics based on the parameters set for the service model. These agents can monitor Windows operating systems, applications and database servers, providing insight into the current and historical state of health for the underlying infrastructure. Further enhancing the viability of this solution, in April 2008, Microsoft announced it was extending System Center Operations Manger 2007 support to include agent coverage for the mainstream Unix and Linux platforms.

System Center covers a broad range of other system management functionality to perform a wide range of Window support requirements. For instance, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 ("formerly Systems Management Server or SMS) automates hardware and software inventory and metering, the deployment of applications, patches and configuration change, as well as asset management. Configuration Manager enables Desired Configuration Management (DCM) by providing the tools necessary to monitor for, report on and remediate policy violations so as to achieve standardization and regulatory compliance goals.

Additionally, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 enables the back-up and recovery of an organization's Windows infrastructure; IT implementations that utilize virtualization solutions are supported by System Center Virtual Machine Manager; Capacity planning is facilitated with System Center Capacity Planner; and comprehensive reporting with fully configurable queries and IT operations status forecasts is delivered through System Center Reporting Manager. As an integrated collection, Microsoft's System Center family of products provide broad systems management capabilities, incorporating service monitoring, problem diagnosis, root-cause analysis and problem tracing to reduce the time and effort of operating Windows based IT environments of varying sizes.

System Center Limitations

Although Microsoft System Center provides an expanding platform for managing those IT components for which it was designed, today's dynamic IT infrastructure requires a very broad range of functionality and support to ensure complete end-to-end IT management. While Microsoft has made significant inroads into achieving a complete solution with its commitment to providing heterogeneous support inside of Operations Manager, the increased support is limited to only a few non-Windows platforms. In fact, Microsoft has announced that they are relying on their partnerships with other vendors to fill in the gaps for providing a solution that encompasses the entirety of a commonly deployed IT support stack. This is a compelling model in which Microsoft aides its customers in achieving holistic IT management through platform extension and partner enablement.

Organizations that have implemented System Center to manage their Windows operations are often forced to deploy additional solutions to support non-Windows systems - Mac OSX, IBM AIX, many Linux distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, etc., as well as mainframes or mid-range platforms. IT professionals must then utilize multiple consoles to interact with the disparate environments. This "swivel chair" administration is not only inefficient, but actually impedes progress in identifying systemic, cross-platform problems as personnel must manually correlate data from the independent support tools. The cost of training support personnel is also increased in order to ensure they have sufficient knowledge of the different consoles to be effective in their rolls.

Naturally, operational support does not end at system level management. For instance, although System Center provides rudimentary network monitoring and operating system level administration, it does not manage remote, non-windows applications or databases, nor network and storage devices - such as routers, gateways, firewalls, SANs or NAS - that are commonplace in today's complex network topologies. Also, even though Microsoft's System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 performs basic file system backups, it does not include deeper support for more granular components of Active Directory and Exchange infrastructures. Ultimately, it is in an enterprise's best interest to utilize solutions beyond those provided in System Center to ensure maximum return on investment from IT components across the entire organization.

Expanding the Scope of System Center

To effectively manage the complexities inherent in today's dynamic IT infrastructure, businesses need to invest in a centralized, automated systems management platform that provides end-to-end support for the entire IT infrastructure. Included should be support for all IT components, including: Linux, UNIX, and Mainframe coverage as well as application, network, storage, and mobile devices. This integrated solution provides a "single pane of glass" management view of all "entities" in the environment simplifying IT management, increasing overall business productivity, diminishing environment failures and improving the value in business IT investments.

To be complete, an enterprise IT management solution needs to address critical support needs on all implemented platforms. Key areas to be addressed include:

• Monitoring and Diagnostics - In addition to heterogeneous OS support, IT support personnel require visibility into critical hardware, network, and application deployments and the collective health of this infrastructure working together to meet the needs of the business. Detailed reports need to be available to provide prompt problem identification and enable organizations to achieve compliance goals and meet SLAs/OLAs.
• Change and Configuration Management - Not only must the solution be comprehensive in scope to support multiple operating system platforms and versions, it must also be scalable and simple to use to ensure its viability.
• Provisioning and Virtualization - Automating the process of deploying desktops and applications in both real and virtual environments significantly eases the IT management burden, shortens implementation times and drives efficiency leading to reduced operational costs.
• Backup and Recovery - Disaster recovery plans typically requires the scope of backup solutions to include all components in the IT infrastructure. Traditional file-system backups often overlook the importance of including support for non-standard file types, like messaging systems and SharePoint portals.

Implementing Tools for Success

Clearly, to address all the critical requirements of an enterprise IT infrastructure, Microsoft System Center needs to be enhanced with the additional management tools to broaden both its breadth of coverage and its depth of support. These tools should be fully integrated with System Center to leverage the full value inherent in the existing solution, creating a comprehensive, end-to-end systems management solution.

As an example, Quest Software offers a suite of solutions designed specifically to address those areas of an IT infrastructure not supported by Microsoft System Center. Essentially, Quest has provided a solution that takes the already significant support Microsoft has provided for the Windows platforms and extended it to many unsupported platforms commonly found in today's IT infrastructure. This includes Linux, UNIX, and Mainframe coverage as well as application, network, storage, and mobile devices. With Quest, a plethora of non-Windows systems and devices can be managed from within the System Center infrastructure, providing a complete management picture of the entire business IT environment. Quest has developed a close working relationship with Microsoft to ensure their development paths are complementary. This committed partnership establishes reliability in the continued viability of the combined solution. Together, the Quest family of System Center offerings increase the relevance of the System Center suite to ensure end-to-end systems management support across complex, heterogeneous IT infrastructure.

Download the full EMA white paper:

Beyond System Center: Addressing Systems Management Needs Across the Entire IT Infrastructure , and learn more about Quest System Center solutions at info.quest.com/system-center.