WHITE PAPER Introduction... 2 How Zenoss Helps Service Providers... 3 Why Leading Service Providers Use Zenoss... 4 Summary... 7 Zenoss for Service Providers This white paper explains how service providers can use Zenoss to manage their infrastructure and their client s infrastructure more efficiently and cost-effectively. This white paper also explains how service providers can also expand their business opportunities by using Zenoss to offer a broad portfolio of value-added services to their clients. Copyright 2010 Zenoss, Inc., 275 West Street, Suite 204, Annapolis, MD 21401, U.S.A. All rights reserved. The Zenoss logo, Zenoss, Open Enterprise Management, Business-to-Blade management, and Dynamic Model Maps are trademarks of Zenoss, Inc. 1
Introduction Enterprise IT organizations are in the midst of a journey a journey that began with relatively static, physical infrastructure and is transitioning to increasing levels of abstraction and dynamism. This journey has accelerated in recent years as a result of softening global economic conditions, which have hastened the adoption of disruptive datacenter technologies. Now the pressure to consolidate, optimize, differentiate--all while reducing operating overhead is leading to explorations of once unheard-of service delivery models. Enterprises are looking to new technologies such as unified communications, server, network and storage virtualization, SaaS and most recently Cloud/utility computing to increase agility and improve efficiencies. Now more than ever, enterprises are looking for external partners that can help provide an accelerated migration path. This has resulted in increased competition as a spectrum of IT service providers, from traditional telcos to managed hosting providers expand their offerings. Market segments that were entirely distinct a few years ago now overlap, often significantly, yielding ever increasing competition for IT service providers. Unthinkable 10 years ago, an online book seller is now viewed as a direct competitor and potential threat by some of the world s largest IT Outsourcers and hosting companies. IT Outsourcers (ITOs) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) are finding it necessary to develop and market increasingly productized service offerings while telcos and hosting companies feel pressure to deliver a wider spectrum of value-added services to meet unique organization requirements. IT service providers in today s hyper competitive and constantly evolving IT marketplace are presented with exciting opportunities as well as daunting challenges. As the focus of the journey turns from cost reductions to provisioning speed, capacity management expertise, reliability and management automation, tomorrow s service providers must lead the way. These new operating procedures and platforms will drive change but will add complexity and break existing processes. Standard operating procedures will not scale to meet the demands of this new high-performance business model. Tomorrow s market leaders in IT Services will be those firms that: Deliver enhanced value while responding to cost pressures. Increasingly clients will expect service providers to deliver the customized services they deliver in-house, while reducing, if not eliminating time to market. They will also demand that service providers achieve enhanced service levels while at the same time dramatically reducing operational overhead. Provide strategic expertise and services using the latest technologies. Enterprises want to know that their IT partners can leverage advances in technologies as well as new business models to help them work more efficiently and effectively. Agility and response to change is the new normal. Focus on visibility and end-to-end IT service assurance. As Enterprises migrate to virtualized datacenters, monitoring discrete infrastructure elements will no longer suffice. In the next generation datacenter where infrastructure dependencies change by the minute, enabling dynamic, end-to-end visibility will be a necessity to manage the gap between component and service availability. Seamless IT service assurance across traditional, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructure. Cloud computing signals the commencement of a fundamental change in the IT industry flexible capacity, instant availability, and economies of scale. However, practicalities will impose a phased migration to cloud computing for almost every large-scale enterprise. For years to come, service provider clients will be faced with the daunting challenge of simultaneously managing traditional client-server based IT services as well as services deployed on private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures. 2
How Zenoss Helps Service Providers In the middle of the last century when aircraft were unable to break through the sound barrier without disintegrating, it took a quantum leap in aviation technology applied to well-understood principles of flight to achieve supersonic speeds. The aviation engineers involved didn t invent flying; they reinvented it, disposing along the way the legacy myth that supersonic travel was impossible. Zenoss didn t invent IT operations management software. Zenoss reinvented it; making it simpler, faster and cheaper to allow service providers to meet the seemingly impossible expectations being set for virtualization and Cloud computing. Zenoss Enterprise is a purpose-built Dynamic Service Assurance platform that unifies and assures IT service delivery to applications, business services and real-time hybrid cloud infrastructures. From the ground-up, Zenoss has been engineered to meet the needs of the following types of large-scale service providers and their clients: IT Outsourcers Managed hosting companies Managed Service Providers (MSPs) Telco-based hosting and Cloud services providers Next generation dynamic datacenters need next generation service assurance. Zenoss is the solution to meet the visibility, efficiency, and cost requirements of Enterprise clients. With Zenoss, service providers can offer a broader portfolio of value-added management services allowing acquisition of new clients and expansion within existing accounts. From a single platform, Zenoss enables the following types of pre-packaged service offerings: 3
Different levels of IT infrastructure monitoring and management services: o o Availability, Performance, Event Management End-to-end Server, Database, Application, and Storage Management Network management from traditional routers/switches through VoIP and Unified Communications platforms Different levels of monitoring for physical, virtual, hybrid, and cloud infrastructure components Different levels of end-to-end application as well as transaction response time monitoring IT infrastructure inventory and capacity planning services Seamless management of hosted, as well as client- premises infrastructure. Additional value-added services can be enabled based on consistent, cohesive Zenoss reports, including: Capacity Planning reports Performance and availability reports Global inventory reports Event time to resolution reports Network utilization reports Configuration Change history reports Device detail reports Why Leading Service Providers Use Zenoss Rapid Client Deployment Zenoss dramatically improves the efficiency of on-boarding new clients and maintaining existing ones. Zenoss uses standard APIs to discover IT infrastructure devices and automatically maps the dependencies between critical elements such as servers and even applications to the underlying data network supporting them. Zenoss continuously finds new devices as they are added to the network and notes changes in configuration. Zenoss provides 360-degree visibility into the health of your infrastructure--and never becomes out of date. Through the use of its agentless technology and auto-discovery capabilities, Zenoss delivers the following benefits: Streamlined implementation and configuration Simplified and dramatically more efficient service delivery Automatic event/alarm suppression without the cumbersome maintenance of custom rules End-to-end IT service assurance that never becomes out of date Avoidance of agent-induced overhead, conflict and performance issues Licensing Model Aligned to Service Provider Business Model The Zenoss licensing model closely aligns to service provider business models. Zenoss uses a flexible, subscriptionbased licensing model with volume-based pricing that will reduce the cost of service delivery. This offers Service Providers the ability to align subscription growth with client growth - a significant advantage over traditional software licensing. With Zenoss, you pay as you go, and you pay for only what you need. 4
Freedom from Legacy Tools Legacy management tools require large upfront investments, expensive maintenance agreements, protracted deployments, and significant effort to extend and customize. Zenoss is NOT an integrated suite of management tools from a single vendor. Zenoss is a single product that provides a unified view across physical and virtual, network, server, and storage infrastructure. As such, Zenoss significantly streamlines the time and effort required to monitor and manage sophisticated IT infrastructures. A myriad of point monitoring and management solutions are not sustainable for managing the dynamic datacenter. Incident management in the next generation datacenter can no longer mean conference calls with tech leads for various elements of IT infrastructure. The Zenoss commercial open-source model and architecture delivers the benefits of open source technology flexibility, low cost, and lack of vendor lock-in. The Zenoss open-source model and architecture make it easy to extend and customize to precisely meet the needs of unique market niches and/or individual enterprises. And unlike 1 st generation open source tools, Zenoss unique business/licensing model allows sophisticated service providers to potentially monetize some of the intellectual property they develop on top of Zenoss Enterprise. The Zenoss model delivers other unique benefits above and beyond traditional open source technology. Because Zenoss is commercial open source technology delivered by a well-funded company, Zenoss provides a predictable product road map, a controlled development/testing/release process that eliminates IP related risks and full-time, professional, enterprise-caliber technical support. Dynamic Modeling for Dynamic Datacenters Zenoss was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of next-generation, highly virtualized datacenters. Zenoss provides a single, unified view to monitor servers, storage, and network devices, including devices in physical, virtual, hybrid, and cloud environments. Traditional CMDBs are far too static for the dynamic datacenter. Zenoss gathers data from physical and virtual environments simultaneously allowing IT operations to manage and view both physical and virtual resources together. Zenoss automatically discovers and categorizes virtual infrastructure components, including virtual machines and guests, ESX hosts, clusters, and data stores creating a dynamic model of the environment. Zenoss dynamic model allows for real-time and historical reporting of events and changes to the infrastructure, such as when VMs move from one host computer to another. With Zenoss, locating where a particular application is running and what the impact is if a server needs to shut down is not a challenge. Zenoss automatically correlates performance and availability information for the virtual and physical infrastructure, providing a single-pane-of-glass which helps IT operations understand end-to-end application availability and performance at every layer. Zenoss also continuously measures dynamic workloads and resource allocations to establish performance requirements and inform the capacity planning process. Zenoss continues to innovate and add integrated support for technologies at the forefront of the dynamic datacenter such as the recent upgrades for Cisco UCS, vsphere 4 and NetApp. 5
Comprehensive, Unified View Today, most service providers are forced to use a wide variety of disparate vendor and homegrown tools to manage their infrastructure. Deploying, supporting, and using these tools to manage a dynamic environment not only prevents true end-to-end visibility, it increases support costs. System View showing physical and virtual dependencies for a CRM business service Zenoss is a single tool that provides a unified view of all of the IT infrastructure components used to deliver services. Zenoss provides automated visual dependency mapping enabling real-time service visibility into the linkage between virtual and physical infrastructure. This allows for the visual identification of shared resources, such as ESX hosts or network attached storage, which may be a source of service impacting contention. Zenoss is especially valuable in service provider environments where IT services are being delivered and managed across a combination of legacy physical and virtual/cloud infrastructures. Zenoss provides a comprehensive view, even if the IT infrastructure is wildly heterogeneous. This unique capability allows service providers to simultaneously consolidate previous generation IT management tools while avoiding deployment of a point solution for managing next generation infrastructure. Proven Enterprise Scalability Zenoss provides proven enterprise-class scalability. Zenoss scalability has been extensively validated through its use in some of the largest enterprise datacenter and service provider environments in the world. One of the largest hosting companies in the world uses Zenoss to monitor every element in their network approximately 25,000 different systems. 6
Zenoss can scale from monitoring a few hundred devices to tens of thousands of devices. This enables service providers flexibility whether they re managing SMB infrastructures or entire enterprise organizations. Multi-tenancy/Segmentation Capabilities Zenoss supports multi-tenancy, which means one instance of Zenoss can support multiple clients (tenants). This includes configuring access controls using LDAP or Active Directory authentication all the way down to the individual device, as well as managing overlapping customer IP address spaces. Service providers who support part or all of their customers IT environments can configure a read-only, portal that displays Zenoss information as needed. Clients can use their portal to view their IT environment on-demand at any time allowing for a greater sense of security and control. Zenoss currently manages networks as large as 32,000 devices. Components in the four-tier Zenoss architecture can be deployed in multiple ways to meet different environment requirements. The most common needs are managing large numbers of devices, managing devices in remote locations, and respecting security boundaries. With larger networks, or networks requiring higher data collection rates, it is common to install collectors onto multiple servers. Cloud Capabilities Zenoss monitors physical and virtual devices and services hosted in Amazon EC3 and other public Clouds. Zenoss manages private/public Cloud integration scenarios, such as when a private cloud temporarily needs extra resources and uses the public Cloud to obtain them. Zenoss monitors service performance and availability for Cloud-based applications using synthetic transaction monitoring. Zenoss synthetic transaction monitoring capabilities enable monitoring and reporting on simulated service requests that accurately mirror how real users access applications a critical requirement as component uptime and availability take a back seat to real world performance. Fully Customizable Zenoss is fully customizable. Personalized dashboards and views can be created to help support element and device management along with logical groupings of resources based upon discrete clients, business units, geographies and even abstract concepts like business services. Zenoss also easily integrates into external portals or dashboards. Some monitoring and management solutions don t provide an interface that provides clients with real-time visibility into their environment that is managed by a service provider. At best, clients only see items such as service desk tickets generated by the monitoring environment. However, with Zenoss, all of the data in the system can easily be 7
accessed via a simple yet powerful web-based user interface or called by external web portals using simple, intuitive web services calls such as representational state transfer (REST). Clients can access the Zenoss portal from a standard browser to view the monitoring and management activities occurring in their environment in near real-time. These customizable views provide security and assurance of the services being delivered by the service provider. In addition to feeding custom portals, Zenoss delivers user-customizable reporting. Reports such as performance and availability, global inventory, and event time to resolution can be generated to provide informative and compliance updates. Finally, Zenoss can be configured for self-service activities such as generating reports on demand. Self-service capabilities reduce bottlenecks and client support costs and increase client satisfaction. Summary In today's competitive environment, service providers are looking for ways to differentiate their offerings while improving their profitability through operating efficiency. Zenoss can lower the cost of managing traditional physical infrastructures, enable the management of IT services deployed in real or virtual environments and uniquely provide a single view of IT infrastructure spanning traditional, virtual and Cloud. With Zenoss, service providers can offer monitoring and management solutions for physical, virtual, hybrid, and cloud infrastructure components, prepackaged services for application performance and availability monitoring, and IT infrastructure inventory and capacity planning services. Zenoss helps service providers deliver sophisticated IT monitoring and management for any infrastructure, for any business application, and for any client. 8