EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Greg Ferro recently blogged about how attempts to define software-defined networking (SDN) are a waste of time. He wrote:

[Author’s Note: This post is sponsored by Edgeworx. The content is entirely mine.]

Most network managers are still many years away from turning on Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in their enterprise local area networks (LANs). Private non-routable IPv4 address ranges can happily exist behind a network address translation (NAT) gateway for the foreseeable future. However, things could change. At any time, someone above your pay grade might [...]

Many small and midsized IT organizations rely on a mix of freeware and open source software to manage their infrastructure. These free tools can be effective and economical choices for smaller networks. But how do you know when it’s time to upgrade to a commercial product? Scale is one of the first indicators that you [...]

You may not have noticed, but log analytics has become table stakes for network management toolsets. Last year, Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) surveyed network managers about the data sources that have become important to engineering and operations tasks. Log files consistently scored higher than anything else, including flow data, packet analysis, and SNMP metrics. Fifty-nine [...]

Champions of big data analytics extoll the virtues of massive data stores. Enterprises have so much unstructured data that could help them improve operations and generate new revenue, they say. The more bytes, the better. Some might assume that enterprises will simply push every byte they can find into a Hadoop cluster or data warehouse. [...]

As an analyst who focuses on network management research, I am particularly intrigued by software-defined networking (SDN). As SDN architectures are deployed in data centers, local area networks and WANs, network management practices will have to evolve. For instance, SDN may make it easier for cloud administrators to provision network services and connectivity for a new application, but how do you ensure that your new programmable network remains compliant with configuration controls and policies? Is your performance management tool able to model and monitor an SDN controller? If you have traditionally relied about appliance-based load balancers and firewalls in your data center, how do you monitor and manage those network functions when they become virtualized services that are as mobile and dynamic as the workloads they serve?

Docker Inc. acquired networking startup SocketPlane today, indicating that Docker wants to accelerate the development of networking APIs and software that will help network managers operationalize production Linux containers. Docker is a suite of open source software that helps developers and admins manage and scale their use of Linux containers. Containers offer the same resource [...]

Hello world. I am the new senior analyst for the network management research practice at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).  My name may be familiar to some of you. Prior to 2015, I led the news team for TechTarget’s networking and telecommunications publications for seven years. Now I’m making the transition from journalist to analyst. The [...]