The Data Center Network Evolution: Three Core Network Management Tools

Businesses are pushing their infrastructures to become a standardized, self-service, pay-per-use model giving users rapid access to powerful and more flexible IT capabilities. This means that I&O teams need to coordinate infrastructure elements — servers, applications, storage, and networking — to deliver the right set of services, to the right user, at the right time, and at the right location. I&O teams reconfigure these elements on the fly and monitor the output to ensure that the newly created services are within the bounds of the business policies and rules. Each element is interconnected with the other and strives to provide a flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomic formation of services. But most I&O teams have inadequate network management teams to accomplish this. This document will highlight the trends driving data center networking and highlight the best practices and vendors for network configuration management, monitoring, and monitoring aggregation. This document helps I&O understand how to transform network management in lock step with broader business goals and data center transformation efforts.