As information and systems increasingly move into virtualized environments — whether they are cloud data centers run by managed service providers, internal private clouds, the wider Internet, or a combination of all three — the problem of being able to guarantee high availability and service levels becomes ever more tricky.

Effective network management and monitoring tools that give adequate visibility and control of these increasingly complex environments are therefore vital.

A single point of failure, or bottleneck, could affect the performance of any number of applications and services, degrading users’ experience and — critically in the case of cloud service providers, which are contractually committed to delivering certain levels of availability — denting a business’s bottom line.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that big vendors are at pains to persuade organizations that they have the tools for the job. Fujitsu’s Proactnes II SM V01 software, announced last year and available in Japan since January this year, is described as “an industry first.” The technology can detect system failures before they happen (see Data Feed, below), and the software offers a notably improved ability to “analyze cloud system data and gather information, thus narrowing down the causes of failures and resolving them successfully.”

Fujitsu is now using the software at its Tatebayashi System Center, which offers customers cloud services, and says as a result it is possible to ensure service levels of 99.99%.

As CIOs weigh up the decision to move their IT into the cloud, such assurances from potential providers will be ever more key to their confidence in migrating mission-critical systems and services. But, as analysts point out, monitoring data supplied by cloud vendors is probably not enough. If CIOs truly want to know whether their SLAs are being met, they also need to maintain their own logs of what users are experiencing to ensure their provider is achieving what it claims.

Data feed

• By analyzing the response of communications across a network, the Fujitsu software locates where a failure has occurred, on both the data center’s internal network and external networks connecting users to the cloud.

• By correlating the volume of a data packet traveling across a network and the CPU usage of each virtual machine, the system identifies unusual behavior at an early stage.

• Processes are simplified by using network device settings and other details to make the configuration of users’ virtual systems visible.