The FireBlog

Fun with IP v6 and IM

If you want to have a little fun over instant messenger, try sending an IP v6 address to a friend.  We've been testing FireScope's ability to manage IP v6 environments, and one of our engineers was chatting with a developer and sent an IP v6 address over windows messenger.  Unfortunately, messenger translated the numbers and colons into smileys, not so smileys and a few finger gestures.  While not exactly transmitting the information one might expect, it does make for an interesting friday...

The Future of IT Operations : Strategy or Commodity

Paul Ingevaldson from ComputerWorld just posted a great article discussing the future of IT operations within the enterprise.  Does IT fade into obscurity as nothing more than a commodity that’s as canned and predictable as Campbell’s soup, or does it evolve into a key competitive advantage?  Personally, I see this as one of, if not the, fundamental question that dictates the direction of the industry as a whole over the next 5 years.

A look under the hood : The FireScope security model

Architecting a security model for an IT Operations portal like FireScope is perhaps among the most difficult tasks we’ve faced thus far.  Finding the right balance between flexibility for clients with unique environments and still providing robust security resulted in endless hours of ‘debate’ in our Dallas office, home office for our engineering and development teams.  Among the requirements we set out to achieve were:

The fun side of crossing the client-vendor line

Almost every member of FireScope has spent time working in IT ops.  Hard time.  We’ve all had the 3:00 AM call where the world is ending because email is down.  We’ve all had vacations interrupted by that phone call that starts with “I’ve just got a quick question…”  Some of us are hard-core linux fanatics, some feel a certain amount of comfort when clicking on the start button (we won’t talk about the brawling for now…).  Some of us worked for large multi-nationals with IT staff spread across the globe, while others just wished they had a second person.  And when we made the plunge and started FireScope, we made a commitment to ourselves to produce a solution we had all only dreamt about.

So, why offer FireScope as an appliance?

Quite often, we get asked why we chose to offer FireScope as an appliance, as opposed to traditional software.  It's an especially apt question considering almost no one in the Business Service Management space delivers their product in an appliance form factor.  However, back in the early days of FireScope, the appliance model seemed like the only way to go, both for us as a business as well as for our clients.