"The most significant aspect of the announcement is the management, says Phil Hochmuth, an analyst with the Yankee Group. 'Enterprises are really consolidating their management roles,' he says. 'More and more enterprise IT and enterprise security teams are sharing the same hat, the teams are extremely integrated. The more they are looking at the same screens, the better.'"This is something I've been discussing and writing about for many years. Too many different management consoles leads to confusion, error and frequently extreme segregation of operational functionality limiting the ability of administrators to manage increasingly complex systems. Systems that are comprised a mixture of servers, storage, networks, security systems and more and all being virtualized as well.
This need is becoming more and more critical as even the largest organizations are relying on teams of technologists responsible for managing these virtualized, integrated, multi-vendor environments. These teams may be made up of men and women who've specialized in storage or server or application management, but are now being asked to address issues outside their comfort zones as the issues they're facing are not necessarily linked to any single component of the IT environment. Problems may be coming from any device, program or function in the system and waiting for another specialist to solve a problem is untenable.
A "Single-pane-of-Glass" console helps the administrative team identify the multifaceted issues they're facing and a uniform interface, tool set and command syntax empowers team members. They are empowered because they can resolve all but the most complex issues by using what they already know about the system and are comfortable enough with the tools at hand to attempt what may have not been comfortable for them before.
It's good to see 3Com attempt to address these issues, as is Cisco and the other vendors. It will be interesting to observe how this plays out.
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