Hello Everyone,

Mohmad Yusuf here, I work with QME Software as a Consultant for Windows Management specialising in Microsoft System Centre Suite.

I face an increasing number of IT managers who are challenged with an ever increasing set of requirements for resolving critical enterprise impacting issues in some very complicated IT infrastructures. Their Businesses and organisations have grown dependent on their IT investments to achieve profitability and meet operational goals, greatly decreasing the room for error in IT reliability.

At the same time, budgetary constraints are pressuring IT managers to provide more services with fewer resources. At the heart of the problem are complex heterogeneous IT implementations that lack consistent centralised support capacities.

The greatest challenge in establishing control over an IT infrastructure is dealing with complexity. As businesses rely more and more on advanced and disparate hardware, software and networking solutions to drive their profitability, IT managers are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a high level of reliability and performance in the IT investments by only utilising antiquated methods of manual IT administration. Recognising this critical support challenge, Microsoft introduced Operations Manager to simplify systems management in Windows-based IT implementations.

Although many systems management solutions are on the market today, few provide the breadth of support necessary to enable a truly holistic view of an entire enterprise-wide support stack. Certainly Microsoft has been hailed for providing a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (Operations Manager), but until recently it has focused its development efforts on only Windows-based platforms and its recent foray into heterogeneous support can be viewed as limited at best.

At the core of the value provided by Operations Manager is the concept of providing what Microsoft calls, “knowledge-driven IT management” – or the ability to utilise a deep understanding of a particular IT platform to ensure all aspects of its support are covered. Certainly, there can be no question that Microsoft maintains a strong, in-depth understanding of the Windows architecture and Operations Manager has been designed to leverage that knowledge to ease the tasks involved in problem identification, remediation and reporting.

In April of 2008, Microsoft announced its intention to extend Operations Manager support into non-Windows platforms. Although the long-term implications of this announcement are quite exciting, the initial scope of cross-platform support will be somewhat limited. Support will only be extended to five core operating system platforms (RedHat, SuSe, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX) and the breadth of version support available for those environments will be confined to current version minus one (at time of release – which is projected to be early in calendar year 2009). Microsoft has made it clear that they will continue to rely on its partner vendors – like Quest Software – to fill out its non-Windows coverage. Quest currently provides non-Windows support for more than 230 non-Windows systems and devices via Operations Manager.

Achieving end-to-end IT management begins with the implementation of Quest Management Xtensions (QMX). As the name implies, QMX extends Operations Manager support to over 200 UNIX and Linux platforms, SNMP devices, security systems, storage systems, mainframes, application, databases and mobile devices via native integration into Operations Manager. In addition, several Quest Management Packs (QMPs) are available to provide advanced support for specific technologies, such as Oracle and .NET. With these tools in place, an entire enterprise IT infrastructure can now be managed through the single Operations Manager infrastructure and reporting paradigm.

Best Regards,

Shaikh Mohmad Yusuf.