One Company's Journey Out of Darkness, Part VI: Looking Forward

I've had the opportunity over the past couple of years to work with a large customer of mine on a refresh of their entire infrastructure. Network management tools were one of the last pieces to be addressed as emphasis had been on legacy hardware first and the direction for management tools had not been established. This mini-series will highlight this company's journey and the problems solved, insights gained, as well as unresolved issues that still need addressing in the future. Hopefully this help other companies or individuals going through the process. Topics will include discovery around types of tools, how they are being used, who uses them and for what purpose, their fit within the organization, and lastly what more they leave to be desired.

Blog Series

One Company's Journey Out of Darkness, Part I: What Tools Do We Have?

One Company's Journey Out of Darkness, Part II: What Tools Should We Have?

One Company's Journey Out of Darkness, Part III: Justification of the Tools

One Company's Journey Out of Darkness, Part IV: Who Should Use the Tools?

One Company's Journey Out of Darkness, Part V: Seeing the Light

One Company's Journey Out of Darkness, Part VI: Looking Forward

If you'e followed the series this far, you've seen a progression through a series of tools being rolled out. My hope is that this last post in the series spawns some discussion around tools that are needed in the market and features or functionality that is needed. these are the top three things that we are looking at next.

Event Correlation

The organization acquired Splunk to correlate events happening at machine level throughout the organization, but this is far from fully implemented and will likely be the next big focus. The goal is to integrate everything from clients to manufacturing equipment to networking to find information that will help the business run better and experience fewer outages and/or issues as well as increase security. Machine data is being collected to learn about errors in the manufacturing process as early as possible. This error detection allows for on the fly identification of faulty machinery and enables quicker response time. This decreases the amount of bad product and waste as a result, improving overall profitability. I still believe there is much more to be gained here in terms of user experience, proactive notifications, etc.

Software Defined X

Looking to continue move into the software defined world for networking, compute, storage, etc. These offerings vary greatly and the decision to go down a specific path shouldn't be taken lightly by an organization. In our case here we are looking to simplify network management across a very large organization and do so in such a way that we are enabling not only IT work flows, but for other business units as well. This will likely be OpenFlow based and start with the R&D use cases. Organizationally IT has now set standards in place that all future equipment must support OpenFlow as part of the SDN readiness initiative.

Software defined storage is another area of interest as it reduces the dependency on any one particular hardware type and allows for ease of provisioning anywhere. The ideal use case again is for R&D teams as they develop new product. Products that will likely lead here are those that are pure software and open, evaluation has not really begun in this area yet.

DevOps on Demand

IT getting a handle on the infrastructure needed to support R&D teams was only the beginning of the desired end state. One of the loftiest goals is to create an on-demand lab environment that provides compute, store and network on demand in a secure fashion as well as provide intelligent request monitoring and departmental bill back. We've been looking into Puppet Labs, Chef, and others but do not have a firm answer here yet. This is a relatively new space for me personally and I would be very interested in further discussion around how people have been successful in this space.

Thank you all for your participation throughout this blog series.  Your input is what makes this valuable to me and increases learning opportunities for anyone reading.