A rchive Date
[ 04-10-2001 ]
Category
[ Information Technologies ]
sub-Categoy
[ Networking ]
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[http://www.visualnetworks.com/products/info/white_papers/ip_ipnetworks.html
Service Management For IP Networks
Executive Summary
Enterprise IT organizations are planning for and implementing three key business initiatives today - e-commerce, supply chain management, and globalization. These projects are dependent on network services, and the quality of these network services actually impacts a corporation's competitive position in the marketplace. If the network fails, it is no longer merely an inconvenience - it impacts the bottom line. Never before has the quality and renaissance.htmrenaissance.htmavailability of network services been so important to a corporation's success.
Emerging business models and new network-aware business initiatives require that the enterprise network manager and service provider partner for success, particularly in an outsourced environment. However, there are few tools on the market today that can monitor network service delivery quality for both intra-enterprise and inter-enterprise service flows. Given that effective service management and service level guarantees are becoming higher priorities for both the enterprise and service provider communities, it is clear that an increase in the number of Service Management products is imperative.
There are many requirements to consider when implementing effective Service Management. These include the ability to scale; the ability to monitor both end-to-end and what is called "edge-to-edge" service delivery (regardless of the physical location of the communicating parties) and the ability to customize service delivery and service quality metrics to meet an individual customer's needs.
"The deployment of Service Management is essential in order for businesses to realize the full potential of e-commerce."
Service Management implementation is becoming a question of when rather than if for an increasing number of users. Renaissance believes that the deployment of Service Management is essential in order for businesses to realize the full potential of e-commerce, globalization, and supply chain management. Organizations anticipate improved performance and efficiency from their existing operations and so in order to meet these expectations; network access quality expectations will increase accordingly. Without some form of formalized Service Management system in place that is complemented by formal service quality guarantees, peak business performance will be difficult to achieve.
Introduction
Enterprise IT organizations are planning for and implementing three key business initiatives today - e-commerce, supply chain management, and globalization. Unlike initiatives of the past, these are critically dependent upon network service quality. The absence of this quality would likely have an adverse impact on the corporation's competitive position. If the network fails, it is no longer just an inconvenience - it directly impacts the bottom line. Today, it is an absolute necessity.
In order to ensure this service quality, IT organizations have two choices. They can build the network themselves or they can outsource the network to a trusted service provider. Building private networks is expensive in terms of both capital and facilities costs. In addition, experienced network professionals, if you can find them, are very expensive to attract, train, and retain. The benefits of building a private network is that the organization retains full control of network but at a very high price.
When IT partners with one or more service providers, operational support becomes more of a service provider responsibility. The benefit of this approach is that IT staff can then be re-deployed to work on other initiatives. However, the drawback to this approach is that the IT organization surrenders management control of some or all of the network. Given the role of the network in facilitating the success of the business, this can be a risky proposition. Enterprises have been able to gain a very limited view into service quality, primarily concentrated on Frame Relay services. While useful, these tools do little to support the new generation of Internet-based services.
The good news for users is that this situation is changing. Progressive vendors are now beginning to offer enterprise network managers service monitoring products similar to those used by service providers to monitor their own network availability and performance. As a result, enterprise network managers now have a far better chance of ensuring that the quality of service that they are receiving is the quality of service that they purchased.
The Evolution of IP Service Management
The movement to service management for IP networks can be viewed as a logical progression of internetwork management technology first implemented in the late 1980s. What started with basic SNMP element management at a physical level has evolved into a multi-dimensional management structure.
"A product is regarded as very scaleable when the rate of increase of the product cost is small in proportion to the increase in the number of supported end stations."
In the early days of internetwork management, the focus was on single product or "black box" management. Individual element management platforms would manage the physical equipment and the various sub-entities that supported the operation of that equipment. Over time, network managers needed to manage individual network elements as part of a larger enterprise network. This was the impetus for the introduction of network management systems.
As desktops became networked into the overall corporate infrastructure, network managers were faced with managing service demands from users at specific networked desktops. As a result, a new dimension to the existing network management infrastructure was required - customer management.
Simultaneously, as networks grew and became more complex, enterprises looked to external sources, such as service providers and large integrators, to manage their networks. However, not only were base management services required, but more complex management services that spanned the traditional boundaries of system and network management were also required. This drove the requirements for customer management systems to be both highly scaleable and highly functional. This led to the higher level requirement for end-to-end service management.
"Whether we talk about VPNs, Extranets, Intranets, e-commerce or any other type of network-aware application, network performance and availability are the primary building blocks for success."
Each customer, whether they are internal to the organization such as a business unit or being serviced by a service provider, requires different types and levels of service. For example, in a highly geographically distributed organization whose core business is not e-commerce, email traffic may receive a higher priority over Intranet access whereas in an organization such as Amazon.com, priority would be given to e-commerce traffic. These committed service levels need to be monitored so that each customer receives what they need and what they have paid for.
Frame Relay is an example of an existing service that supports guaranteed service quality by means of the Committed Information Rate (CIR). New emerging IP Services require the same level of service quality that the Frame Relay CIR offers today in addition to the longer term benefits of application and service integration.
Whether we talk about VPNs, Extranets, Intranets, e-commerce or any other type of network-aware application, network performance and availability are the primary building blocks for success. For example, online business-to-business transactions were once considered a luxury. However, because of the explosive use of the Internet for business-to-business transactions, high-quality network performance and availability are rapidly becoming must-haves. For example, Forrester Research estimates the total annual business volume of company to company e-commerce transactions will exceed $3 trillion during the next four years - a figure that is equal to approximately 35% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States.
Current examples of successful use of on-line e-commerce services also illustrate this trend. Dell Computers, the leader in direct sales of personal computers, generates more than $1 million per day using their e-commerce site.
Charles Schwab has more than 1.52 million active online accounts valued at more than $12 billion. Schwab expects to process up to 4 million transactions per hour online by the year 2000. For many companies, such as Amazon.com, their e-commerce site is the primary source of interaction between the customer and the company. Not only does it handle transactions, but it is the primary vehicle for developing brand awareness and customer loyalty. Because of the magnitude of these business volumes, there is never a good time for an e-commerce site to be down. Unexpected downtime often translates into lost revenue, lost customers and lost reputation.
In order to meet the growing need to manage private and public network service quality, service providers are now offering two things. First, an increasing number of providers are committing to service level guarantees that provide a measurable amount of network availability and performance. Second, in addition to offering the service quality guarantees, some progressive providers are also offering the necessary tools that are required to gain real-time access to the state and health of the enterprise customer's portion of the service provider's overall network. As this trend becomes more mainstream, the result will be a stronger sense of partnership between enterprises and service providers as the perceived "black box syndrome" starts to become a thing of the past.
Requirements For IP Service Management
Figure 1: The Evolution of Service Management
Click on image to enlarge |
There are many requirements to consider when implementing IP Service Management such as the ability to scale; the ability to monitor end-to-end service regardless of the physical location of the networked entities; and the ability to customize services, and therefore service metrics, to meet an individual customer's needs.
Figure 1 illustrates the evolution of Service Management as a core competency to meet customer requirements.
Scalability
Organizations vary in size and scope. Therefore, it is important to point out that every network should be dealt with independently. What exists in a given networked environment today, such as the number of networked desktops or the number of remote offices, may actually change in either the short or long-term.
As organizations go through mergers, takeovers and acquisitions, the total number of end stations may increase dramatically. This is where the scalability of a management product becomes critical. A service management solution should be able to scale from a networked environment as small as 10 end stations to millions as the networked environment changes.
A product is regarded as very scalable when the rate of increase of the product cost is small in proportion to the increase in the number of supported end stations. When this occurs, a product or set of products can be considered truly scalable.
Given the increasing scope of traditional enterprise networks to connect business partners, customers and suppliers over the public network for the purposes of transacting business-to-business e-commerce, management product scalability becomes an extremely important attribute.
By allowing the service management tool to scale to a large number of applications and services, it will continue serving the same purpose that it did on the day that it was originally implemented. Not only will it be easier to expand the scope of the enterprise business, but both the enterprise manager and service provider will reap the benefits from reduced product cost and implementation complexity as the enterprise environment expands in size and scope.
End-to-End Service Management
Another important requirement for implementing IP Service Management is the ability to deploy it end-to-end. What is meant by "end-to-end" is that management services can be consistently delivered, irrespective of network ownership or where the source and destination end systems are located. This becomes particularly important when managing e-commerce services as it is highly likely that source and destination will reside in different networks at different companies (and perhaps in different countries) with little more than Internet to connect them.
"A service management solution should be able to scale from a networked environment as small as 10 end stations to millions as the networked environment changes."
In this example, the ability to have a shared management of the service quality of session flows becomes an essential pre-requisite to the success and growth of e-commerce services.
There is also an "edge-to-edge" connection for service management. Edge-to-edge is the connection between edge devices from one side of the WAN cloud to the other edge device that resides on the other side of the cloud. This flow through connection is also one way to provide service quality to the network devices that require it.
Customized Services
Figure 2: The Network Architecture
for IP Service Management
Click image to enlarge |
Figure 2 illustrates IP Service Management across the entire network architecture, identifying both end-to-end and edge-to-edge service management paths.
In general, service management tools must support a fundamental premise of service delivery - specifically, that no two customers are exactly alike. In the same way that an enterprise network manager must support the service quality objectives of individual departments and business units within an enterprise, so too must an external service provider be capable of providing custom service delivery and service quality measurement to meet the needs of individual enterprises.
Just as services themselves need to be customizable from both a delivery and measurement standpoint, the software products and utilities that support the delivery as well as service quality measurement must also be tailorable. This is necessary in order to meet the needs of both the service provider and the enterprise customer.
This turns out to be particularly true in the case of service quality reporting. Quite often, enterprise clients have different internal constituencies that, on the one hand, are dependent upon the services delivered by the provider yet, on the other, have service reporting needs that are quite different from each other. In one case, detailed application availability and performance statistics need to be provided while in another case it may be sufficient to simply report availability and response time averages across all applications.
Additional Considerations
In addition to the three primary Service Management attributes already discussed, there are other key attributes that are also critical when delivering high quality Service Management. These attributes include:
1. An end-user accessible view of the delivery quality of network and application services;
2. Views of the enterprise and provider networks that are available to both the service provider and enterprise network manager;
3. Non-disruptive service quality testing that can be initiated by either the provider or the enterprise network manager;
4. Dynamic service quality thresholds that result in timely alert generation leading to prompt problem resolution; and
5. A standards-compliant database that serves as a reliable repository for all service(s)-related data.
These attributes are important criteria that should be used by the enterprise manager when assessing Service Management capabilities of individual service providers. The result of a successful investigation and implementation will likely be high-quality service delivery that is a major win for both the enterprise network manager and the service provider.
Technological InSight By Renaissance
Recent research performed by Renaissance Worldwide and McConnell Consulting shows that 1999 will be a year in which the importance of delivering Service Management will become extremely important to many enterprise network managers. These findings include the following.
First, Service Management implementation is becoming a question of when rather than if for an increasing number of users. A recent survey performed by CIO Magazine on the Top 5 Issues for CIO's identified "Implementing IT Strategy and Setting Business Expectations" as the second most important issue. The only issue cited as being more important was "Re-deploying and Retraining Y2K Staff." This issue positioning by itself underscores the importance of defining and implementing an effective service management strategy and getting it done as quickly as possible.
More often than not, the impetus for the implementation of service management is indeed coming from business units within the enterprise rather than from IT itself. As these business units offer more products and services through Internet and e-commerce services, proportional demand will rise for production quality service management for the distributed network, system and application infrastructure due to the substantial business impact of poor operations or performance in any or all of these areas.
Second, the state of service management implementation over the next six to 12 months will be characterized by a strong emphasis on four key quality metrics. These metrics include Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), Network Availability, System Availability and Service Availability. Of these, support for service availability, a metric whose effective measurement requires a more complete network, system and application management integration than is currently available today, represents the most significant challenge for many network managers over the coming year.
"Service Level Management will be the means by which shared responsibility is executed and shared success is realized."
Third, despite the fact that most service management initiatives are generated by individual business units, most users still struggle with the formulation of a compelling business case for service management implementation, particularly for the implementation of Service Management that is directly implemented and managed by the IT organization.
The lack of a compelling business case can often lead to frustrated business units who are unable to obtain the level of service guarantees that they require, leading to an increasing likelihood on their part to consider outsourcing or other third party service delivery alternatives. And it is exactly this frustration that has created the Service Management opportunity for both traditional telcos as well as an increasing number of Internet service providers (ISPs).
Renaissance believes that the deployment of Service Management is essential in order for businesses to realize the full potential of e-commerce. Organizations anticipate improved performance and efficiency from their existing employees and so in order to meet these expectations, network access quality expectations will increase accordingly.
Summary & Conclusions
Without some form of formalized Service Management system in place that is complemented by formal service quality guarantees, peak business performance will be difficult to achieve.
By outsourcing the network services to a service provider, cost savings, reduction in support and network performance are a few attributes obtained. Not only will the service provider deliver service level agreements, but so too can the enterprise manager have the ability to view and control the same services.
There are products on the market today that deliver a "win-win" solution to both the enterprise manager and the service provider. The enterprise manager has service quality visibility at any point and the service provider is free to dynamically manage its physical and logical resources in any way necessary in order to continue to successfully deliver on its service level commitments.
Increasingly, many enterprises are relying on the delivery of managed services in order to support their core businesses. Many of today's fast moving companies such as Amazon.com, Dell and Schwab would be unable to achieve the business growth that they have without the availability of such services. And much of the record economic growth that occurred in the latter part of this decade would simply have not occurred.
"Service Level Management is becoming a question of when rather than if for an increasing number of users."
An industry shift toward Service Management is expected to provide the increase in network service quality that is required in order to grow and expand the business. Yet it is a service delivery model that has not been the traditional norm for many enterprise network managers who have become accustomed to having sole responsibility for the success of their network operations.
The mandate, however, is clear.
IP-centric networks are the future. Managing IP-centric networks will often be a shared responsibility between service providers and enterprise network managers. And Service Management will be the means by which shared responsibility is executed and shared success is realized.
© 2001 Visual Networks Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Visual Networks and Visual UpTime are registered trademarks and Visual IP Insight and Visual eWatcher are trademarks of Visual Networks Technologies, Inc. Other slogans or names of actual companies, products or services may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
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