IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » Cisco's Network Management Push Raises More Questions than Answers

August 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Cisco's Network Management Push Raises More Questions than Answers

TAGS: Networking

In Q4, another InfoWorld blogger noted Cisco's 'rolling thunder' in systems management. According to Greg Nawrocki:

"I think it's really interesting to consider the consolidation that will likely take place in the systems management realm in the next year. Over the last couple of years, there's been an explosion of vendors with dynamic server provisioning capabilities -- Opsware, Cassatt, Platform, Data Synapse, Levanta, Egenera, Qlusters, BladeLogic, etc., etc. -- the environment is ripe for acquisitions, and Cisco is one of the looming giants that's up to the task. To me, the question is not 'if' Cisco will continue to beef up its systems management capabilities -- but 'when' they will officially acknowledge that they intend to compete head to head with the Tivolis, Openviews, etc. of the world. As highly distributed applications become normalized in enterprise -- the value of 'intelligence in the network' keeps getting more compelling for enterprise customers."

That speculation that Cisco was to compete with the "Big 4" continued in a Network World article by Lynn Haber, which pointed out that Cisco's acquisition of Sheer improved the interoperability between Cisco gear and system management vendors.

In that same article, Jim Hull, VP of engineering at MasterCard, said, "If Cisco does focus its strategy on open standards that will let users pick the best management tools."

But when I read Denise Dubie's Q&A ("Cisco Exec Touts Network Management Push") with Cliff Meltzer, Sr. VP of the Network Management Technology Group, today on Network World, I felt like her questions were all the right track, but some of the answers seemed a bit opaque. For example, on the question about how Cisco's new management technology will "allow you to manage other vendor gear."

I would like to hear more specifically how Cisco intends to handle the practical technical issues that are common to environments with a large diversity of different network hardware. For example, how will they make it easier to poll different MIB values across Foundry, Juniper and other competitors' equipment?

How will Cisco's management product deal with competitors' network security? For example, firewalls blocking the monitoring protocols. A customer might have a router built in '99, and it will respond to SNMP and ICMP -- but it may not have a web interface or HTTP. Whereas a modern router will have an HTTP interface, may have other configuration interfaces -- where you can send to it with usual versioning questions.

Those are the types of common issues that a network admin runs into in environments with heterogeneous equipment. It would be helpful to hear Cisco explain its management product roadmap a bit more specifically to that degree of granularity.

Cisco talks about handling multiple vendor gear, but their Network Analyst Modules page -- the sort of engines, if you will, for their monitoring solutions -- also seems to say that it monitors traffic exclusively for Cisco Catalyst Switches and Routers.

I am intrigued by Cisco's forays into network management. But until there's a little more direct evidence, it seems like the story their telling about managing heterogeneous environments is a bit more spin than substance.

I think there is room for improvement in the Network and Systems Management arena, but I wonder about gargantuan companies' interests in general solutions. It's too easy to sow in small technical problems where all the parts work much better from the one vendor and maddeningly almost (but not quite) work for everybody else.

This is one of the advantages of Open Source. Because of the way it's structured, it's to everyone's advantage to work with as many other systems as possible. That incentive just doesn't exist for commercial products, particularly as the behemoths take over more and more of any one domain and start to spill over into new domains.

Posted by Harper Mann on August 1, 2006 12:17 PM

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