Automation the key to improving efficiency and checking
rampant IT growth.
“Scream now, while there’s still room to breathe.”
That’s one of the advertising taglines from “The Blob,” an
old sci-fi movie about an alien ball of gelatinous goo that consumes
everything in its path as it grows uncontrollably larger and larger.
Unfortunately, that catchphrase might ring true for many of today’s
IT directors and managers. Explosive growth in the data center
has created blob-like IT infrastructures that have become so large
and complex as to be nearly unmanageable.
More storage capacity. More processing power. More bandwidth.
The insatiable demand for “more” has led organizations
to add servers, storage devices and network gear at an astounding
rate. The result often is a bloated computing environment that
devours IT resources and makes it difficult for IT managers to
meet business demands.
Gobs of Problems
Bringing the data center back in line has become a primary focus
for IT. The cost of management and maintenance has spiraled far
beyond the traditional half of total budget. What’s more,
IT is supposed to spin what’s left of the budget into IT
gold: new business processes that generate profits, and new avenues
to which applied technology develops solid revenue streams. To
do it, they must revisit how they manage and administer their networks
and build efficiencies into their processes that translate into
greater productivity.
“Data centers have become more complex, difficult to manage
and challenging to control. Yet service level expectations continue
to rise even as IT budgets remain relatively flat,” said
Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. “Clearly,
next-generation data centers require management tools that reduce
complexity, ensure availability, and improve efficiency and productivity
without adding significant cost.”
That’s a tall order, but data center automation might be
the perfect solution for bringing IT back under control and achieving
much higher levels of operational efficiency. Data center
automation solutions seek to streamline many of the manual processes
that can bog down IT operations.
Sticky Situation
Virtualization, regulatory compliance, off-shoring, new application
deployments, ITIL standardization, disaster recovery, technology
upgrades and configuration, data center consolidation, patching
and security — all of today’s major initiatives involve
multiple groups, process steps, technology components and interdependencies.
Lacking a single integrated view of the environment, IT often must
manually address these independently with blinders on.
Consider server patching. Multiple servers may be patched quickly
with a point tool, but that tool doesn’t understand the entire
software stack, configuration state or the state of surrounding
components. A seemingly small change to a given part of current
applications or infrastructure can cause cascading problems throughout
the extended IT infrastructure. It has been estimated that misconfigurations
account for 80 percent of all downtime.
In fact, Forrester Research reported recently that organizations
often choose not to apply server patches simply because they fear
the process might bring down production systems, and because they
lack the tools to validate the avalanche of patches from system
vendors. Forrester says non-compliance with security patching has
cost CIOs billions of dollars in system damages.
In addition, the manual processes involved in patching — opening
a ticket, initiating a change, executing the change, closing the
ticket — can be tedious to follow, often leading staff to
circumvent them. There have been many instances of companies failing
Sarbanes-Oxley audits simply because staff failed to fill out all
the fields in close-ticket forms.
To the Rescue
Automation platforms streamline many such processes, working across
geographically disparate locations and heterogeneous data center
environments consisting of UNIX, Linux and Windows servers and
a wide range of software infrastructure and applications. Generally,
users access and interact with the automation platform through
a secure, Web-based console.
Automation platforms typically include a large selection of drag-and-drop,
fill-in-the-blanks workflow modules that automate particular IT
processes without scripting or custom coding. These modules might
include server, operating system and software provisioning, configuration
tracking, script execution and more.
Sitting on top of all these modules is a management layer typically
consisting of several distinct components. One piece records information
for installed operating systems and software applications, and
maps relationships between these products and systems to facilitate
key operations such as installation, patch deployment and updates.
Another captures characteristics about the data center environment,
including hardware types in use, physical location of servers,
network infrastructure, application names, business units and assigned
service levels. Another common component enables users to first
model and preview desired changes before actually committing them
to production servers and applications.
Gartner estimates that about 35 percent of IT managers will start
to invest in such automation technologies in 2007, and that number
should grow as organizations experience incremental successes.
With the ability to enable faster, more accurate and less expensive
IT support in many organizations, automation platforms have demonstrated
an ability to give their data center horror stories a happy ending.
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