William Vambenepe's blog

Apparently Coté’s upstairs neighbors were having a party last night and he could not sleep. That’s good for us because as a result he bookmarked a long list IT systems management stories. Several of those picked my interest:

• Is User Monitoring The Next Wave In Enterprise App Management?
  Nice overview. Forgets to mention Moniforce (now Oracle UXInsight). Also, when they say that “it doesn’t get any easier than installing a bunch of appliances in your network”, I’d like to see them install an appliance that decrypts HTTPS traffic in a bank. Tell me how easy that was.
• Network and IT management platforms : 2007: Products of the Year: SearchNetworking.com
  How about this as a PR challenge for HP. A silver award is not shabby but how do you spin the fact that the gold went to a free product?
• Mapping HP Software to the Data Center Automation Blueprint
  Nice overview. Quite a few changes (at least at this high level) since I left, mostly from Opsware integration. WRT the security question at the end, don’t hold your breath. But you never know. How many Ping could you buy for the price of one EDS?
• Microsoft targets CA, HP with new management attack - Network World
  Already commented on this here. I doubt anybody at HP is surprised.
• Jeff’s Professional Side » Blog Archive » Vendors, Open Source, and Hypocrisy
  As I already commented at the bottom of this post (look for the “UPDATED 2008/5/15″ section), “if a given SNMP agent works with HP, IBM, BMC and CA you will probably save yourself time in the long run by finding a way to support it (even if it is not spec-compliant) rather than getting the vendor to change”.

I missed this good review of Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) by eWeek’s Cameron Sturdevant that came out almost two months ago. It is “good” in the sense that it is well researched and well written but it is also “good” in the sense that it is a very positive review. The only drawback listed is the price of some of the features. But you have to evaluate these numbers in comparison to productivity gains of your IT management staff. Or, even more compellingly, in comparison to the cost of business disruption that can result from insufficient management insight into the applications.

I got to this review through this very nice blog post in which my colleague Chung Wu (a director of product management for OEM) describes step by step the key role that OEM plays in effectively managing Oracle technologies and in allowing a smooth and controlled evolution of the deployed portfolio.

Dave Chappell and David Berry have recently published an article in SOA Magazine titled “The Next-Generation, Grid-Enabled Service-Oriented Architecture”. I had unexpectedly gotten a quick overview of this work a few weeks ago, when I ran into Dave Chappell at the Oracle gym (since I was coming out of an early morning swim it took Dave a couple of seconds to recognize me, as I walked through the weight room leaving a trail of water behind me). Even if you are more interested in systems management than middleware, this article is worth your reading time because it describes a class of problems (or rather, opportunities) that cut across middleware and IT management. Namely, providing the best environment for scalable, reliable and flexible SOA applications. In other words, making the theoretical promises of SOA practically achievable in real scenarios. The article mentions “self-healing management and SLA enforcement” and it implies lots of capabilities to automatically provision, configure and manage the underlying elements of the Grid as well the SOA applications that make use of it. Those are the capabilities that I am now working on as part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager team. And the beauty of doing this at Oracle, is that we can work on this hand in hand with people like Dave to make sure that we don’t create artificial barriers between middleware and systems management.

Network World recently published a “technology update” column I wrote for them on WS-ResouceTransfer. It was supposed to come out soon after the release of WS-ResourceTransfer (in August 2006) but got postponed a few times. In the process, the editors requested that I made some improvements but also made some changes to the article that I hadn’t seen until it was published. The title is from them for example, as is this statement which I don’t actually agree with: “Models can be easily translated from one modeling language to another, so the invoker of the model and the service providers don’t need to use the same modeling language. Service Modeling Language, for example, was designed for that purpose.” SML was not designed for the purpose of doing model translation (even though you can of course transform to and from SML) and unfortunately model translation is not always easy. I guess the lesson is that if I had written the article more clearly to start with they wouldn’t have felt the need to make such modifications.

I think the article is still helpful in describing the potential role of WS-ResourceTransfer at the intersection of SOA and model-based management.

I wrote a short article on SML for Network World that was just published on-line and in the paper edition.

Some of the authors of the HP/IBM/CA management roadmap (namely Heather from IBM, Kirk from CA and me) are hosting a Webcast to present the roadmap and answer questions. The Webcast starts at 9:00AM Pacific on Tuesday August 30th. More info about the Webcast and registration (it’s free) information at http://www.presentationselect.com/hpinvent/detailsl.asp#977. Talk to you on Tuesday…

HP, IBM and CA recently released a white paper describing how we see the different efforts in the area of management for the adaptive enterprise coming together and, more importantly, what else is needed to fulfill the vision. Being a co-author I am arguably more than a little biased, but I recommend the read as an explanatory map of the standards/specifications landscape, from the low levels of the Web services stack all the way up to model transformations and policy-based automated management: http://devresource.hp.com/drc/resources/muwsarch/index.jsp

Call it “laziness” or “smart reuse”, here is a pointer to a Web services journal opinion piece I wrote a few months back in an attempt to explain how the different efforts going on in the industry around Web services, grid, SOA management, virtualization, utility computing, <insert your favorite buzword>, fit together to provide organizations with the flexibility and efficiency they need from their IT in order to thrive. This is how it starts:

Enterprise services are created by combining infrastructure services, applications, and business processes. To be able to adapt quickly to business changes, enterprise IT must evolve from management of individual resources to management of interrelated services. [more...]