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Singlestep Technologies, with the help of partner IBM, is out to prove that autonomic computing is within reach of ISVs and small and midsize businesses.
The companies are teaming on a new autonomic computing offering for midmarket service providers that allows faster root-cause analysis in remote monitoring and management.
The new Singlestep Unity/AME offering automates the manual steps a network engineer takes to perform root-cause analysis of problems and can take appropriate action to update, notify and possibly fix the problem.
For one early user, the amount of “actionable events the staff had to deal with [fell] by 20 to 40 percent,” according to Victor Kellan, president of LAN Solutions Inc., in McLean, Va.
“We verify all our clients backup solutions. Before this we manually went to every client site, looked at their sys logs and made sure everything was complete,” Kellan said. With Unity/AME “we automated that in the NOC [Network Operations Center].”
Seattle-based Singlestep, one of the earliest participants in IBMs autonomic computing partner program, integrated its Unity network management tool with IBMs CBE (Common Base Event) format technology and its AME (Autonomic Management Engine). Unity gathers events from different management systems and, with CBE, converts them into a common format to provide a single view of whats happening in the network. IBM expects the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS, standards body to publish CBE as a standard by April.
“Unity collects management information, converts events to CBE and, with the AME involved, can look at these events in this common format and automate actions depending on what events are collected,” said Dave Bartlett, director of autonomic computing at IBM, in Somers, N.Y.
The automation allows LAN Solutions to reduce its operational costs by making its network engineers more productive, Kellan said. “We can use the IBM engine on the back end to correlate multiple events, and Unity can interface with any system and provide an automated response diagnosed by the IBM piece. It lets us stretch our NOC engineers further and lets us be completely flexible with our clients.”