links for 2008-08-28

"Kenny Van Zant, chief product strategist at SolarWinds, a network management software maker, told me that most network outages are not caused by corrupted files...'If you look at the root causes of most network outages, north of 70 percent of them are caused by configuration errors by humans,' Van Zant told me. 'Computers fail a whole lot less often than the humans punching things into computers fail. Network engineers, as smart as they are, are not immune from that.' " >>> We've seen some evidence to support this hypothesis as well. In fact, one of our customers - an ITIL centric shop - found that 60% of outages were being caused by planned changes. Solution? CMDB360 enables them to understand the impact of change before making the change.

"Other factors are also contributing to spiraling network costs. Aberdeen Group, for example, found that companies expect to increase their bandwidth by 108%, on average, over the next 12 months. Companies also expect to increase the number of business-critical applications running on their networks by 67%."

"Challenges of a consolidation project include...Moving the right systems. It is often difficult for IT operations teams to map server resources to existing applications and IT services, ensuring that all the appropriate systems are moved in a consolidation project." >>> That's where BSM comes in: map technology...to applications...to the business

"The U.S.-led economic downturn shows no sign of causing a recession in IT spending," said Jim Tully, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, in a statement. "In subsequent years we will see reduced growth, but the fundamentals remain strong. Emerging regions, replacement of obsolete systems and some technology shifts are driving growth."