Managing Enterprise Networks How do we reduce IT

Managing Enterprise Networks: How do we reduce IT costs? June 2, 2005 Self-Managing Networks Summit 1

Participants • • Hari Balakrishnan Rebecca Isaacs Lee Gates Venkat Padmanabhan Sunjeev Pandey Jennifer Rexford Dave Thaler Alec Wolman Self-Managing Networks Summit 2

What IS an enterprise network anyway? • Network is a cost center, business is something else • Same company owns infrastructure and end systems • Security is important • Apps are often more constrained • Heterogeneity is common – Data center? Extranet? VPN? External face? – Many different types of devices and systems • There is no such thing as a “typical enterprise network”! Self-Managing Networks Summit 3

Top sources of cost (1/2) • Configuration – Software deployment/installation – Hardware deployment/installation – Testing and certification of new hardware and software • Troubleshooting – – – Intermittent failures Serialization and disjoint sources of troubleshooting data Lack of logging standards Noise in data (too much) Help desk, telephone support Attacks and viruses Self-Managing Networks Summit 4

Top sources of cost (2/2) • In-house apps/tools – – – Alpha code for in-house business apps Developing in-house management apps Lack of sufficient tools motivates in-house apps/tools Own unique set of problems Web site and wiki maintenance • Training • Heterogeneous versions across devices/hosts • Extranets, remote access Self-Managing Networks Summit 5

Ways to reduce cost • • • Increase resiliency - redundancy and self-adaptation Homogenize Better ways to test and sandbox Better models to understand complexities and dependencies Data consolidation and mining in real-time Proactive monitoring before help desk calls More self-help tools/systems Sharing of problem/workarounds - knowledge base Have a backup system 1 version behind Self-Managing Networks Summit 6

Barriers to adoption • Pace of change - new technologies, apps, hard for automation to keep up • Value proposition for investment – Can savings be quantified? – Short-term (switching cost) vs long-term cost tradeoffs & budgets (Cap. Ex vs Op. Ex approval) • Awareness of tools & best practices, job security Self-Managing Networks Summit 7

Next steps for research • Study of enterprise attributes for various types of enterprises • Highly reliable systems out of homogeneous components at low cost • Standard evolvable logging schema to help correlation and aggregation problems • What is a “normal” model based on captured data • Performance debugging • Network aware apps, what is good behavior • What-if modeling and sandboxing of complex systems • Methodology for interactions between protocols • Scalable network emulation Self-Managing Networks Summit 8