How to Remotely Manage your IT Infrastructure

As your IT setup becomes more complex, traditional methods of managing it prove insufficient. Here we take you through the latest ways of handling it remotely

Sunday, July 16, 2006

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Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) is not a new concept, but its adoption in recent years has increased rapidly. This trend is mainly derived by two key factors. One is a rise in Outsourcing IT infrastructure management to a competent authority, and second is the availability of tools and the bandwidth to be able to deploy a remote infrastructure management solution on your own. In both cases, the objective can be to reduce cost of management as well as the downtime. In 2003, Gartner had also predicted that remote infrastructure management was going to be a mega trend and forecasted that most of its customers were likely to adopt this model in the next two years. Today, most of the large companies around the world have adopted RIM in some form or the other. Have you done it?

In this story, we will look at the key benefits of a RIM setup, and what are the different scenarios and options available for you to have a Remote Infrastructure Management System (RIMS) for your organization's IT infrastructure. We will also get our hands dirty on some well known and not so well known but effective products and devices and will see how you can build your own RIMS with those products.

Before going further, let's talk about why you should go for RIMS. Let's assume that your company has its head office in Gurgaon with more than five hundred desktops and a datacenter, which has hundreds of servers. Then you have around 200 different branch offices across the country, each having anywhere between 20 to 100 machines. You obviously want that your datacenter should have at least 99.999 percent uptime and your other nodes should at least have 99.99 percent of uptime. To make sure that this happens, traditionally, either you have your own IT team in each and every location or you outsource the maintenance task to the local vendors who have provided you the machines. In the first scenario, the cost you have to invest will be pretty high, because you have to deploy skilled professionals in each location. In the second scenario, you'll have too many interaction troubles with the local vendors, with delays in communication causing downtime. In other words, first a problem would happen at a branch office, this would get noticed by the local staff, who in turn would first try to fix it on their own. If this doesn't work, then they would contact the local vendor, who would then come and fix the problem. The HO would come to know about it much later, and would then perhaps send some experts from the center to fix the problem.

Key benefits

By deploying a RIMS in-house, in a central and connected location, or by outsourcing the maintenance to a company who does Remote Infrastructure Management, you can save a lot of cost as well as ensure uptime. Let's have a detailed look at some of the reasons why you should go for RIM and where would it fit in your enterprise.

Uptime
The biggest challenge for a CIO or an IT decision maker today is to ensure that the core business functions without any hitches caused by the IT infrastructure. To make sure that happens, you have to have proper monitoring in place. To maintain your uptime, RIMS can help you by providing better and centralized monitoring. There are quite a few independent network device and monitoring applications in both the commercial and Open Source world that are available for the job. In the commercial space, three names come to the forefront. These include HP's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli, and CA's Unicenter. We've written about how to deploy OpenView for RIM later on in this story. All of these have remote infrastructure management capabilities. In the Open Source world, there's Nagios (Read the box item on how to install and use it), OpenNMS, and even some good log polling applications such as Lire or xlog, which can fetch all the logs to a centralized location for you to analyze.

Response time
Another key benefit you get from RIM is faster response time. This will happen If you have a centralized setup, something like a NOC, for your RIMS from where your IT team can access all nodes and servers from across the country. This can immediately help spot problems remotely and do something about it immediately. This cuts down the response time drastically and ensures higher uptime for your servers and nodes. There are multiple ways to achieve this. Most network devices and applications today provide a web-based management interface, meaning they can be
accessed from anywhere. All you need is to access the network where these devices are located. You can either go for a VPN setup to access the network and then manage (test, configure, and even reboot if needed), or do one-to-one NATing with the local IP address of the device to a public IP from your vendor and then access it over the Internet directly. The latter idea is only suitable if you have very few devices to manage. In this case you must also make sure that you at least use the web interface over an SSL connection.

If you are trying to configure some servers or nodes remotely, then the option will be Remote Desktop, which is available in all Windows OSs, since NT4, and for other platforms, like Linux UNIX, and Mac, you can go for VNC, which is available for most platforms. 

One problem you will face here is the BIOS level access, because the remote connection is running over the OS. So if you have a machine that has a corrupted BIOS, and you want to fix it, or you want to do a remote OS installation, then the option for you is something like a KVM over IP switch. Read the last part of this story to know about some such devices.

Scenarios

Here, remote offices are managed and monitored from a NOC setup over a secure public network. The NOC IT team is keeping an eye on the status of the entire IT infrastructure

Typically this setup is used by an Outsourcing company that is managing its clients' IT infrastructure. All client side alerts are first fetched by a centralized RIM core and then forwarded to the NOC

Cutting costs
Setting up a RIM is usually a one time cost. After that, around 95% of your monitoring and management is done from one single place. So you immediately save the cost of hiring more people in all your branch locations. Then, if you do proactive monitoring of your infrastructure (logically and physically), which also includes remote asset management, you can keep track of your resources and do better resource allocations. This again saves costs in a big way.

If you still don't want to go for implementing an RIM system for your own organization, you can outsource it to a competent agency, which does it day in and day out. This can again save some of your deployment cost according to the type of plan you choose for your organization. There are quite a few companies (Indian and MNCs) who do this. We will talk about them in detail in the following sections of the story.

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