Data Centre Automation First published: July 2007

  Data Centre Automation (DCA) is becoming a necessity
The increasing complexity of the data centre and dependent systems means that tooling is now required to keep track of, and maintain the environment in a manner which involves as little human intervention as possible

 

  Freeing up expensive human resource is becoming all important
With upwards of 70% of an organisation’s IT expenditure being spent on maintenance and fire fighting, tooling is required to drive down costs.  The availability and cost of adequately skilled human resources is becoming prohibitive – and utilising these skills for maintenance is not cost-effective.  Freeing up these resources for value-add strategic IT implementation work is a necessity

 

  Discovery, Dependency mapping, Maintenance and Dynamic Provisioning are all key areas
Many organisations have no real knowledge of how many servers and other hardware resources they have in their environment – never mind to what level of version and patch each layer of the stack may be at.  DCA tooling can automate each of these tasks, and ensure that systems are maintained at necessary critical patch levels and optimum operating levels

 

  Utility computing will drive the need for greater flexibility in the data centre
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and other utility concepts such as grid computing will increase the need for a fully dynamically managed infrastructure. Manually managing and maintaining such environments should not be considered – DCA provides the best way to create a managed system.

 

CONCLUSIONS:

The opposing forces of greater demands from the business for increased flexibility and speed of response compared with the drive for lower infrastructure costs while complexity increases means that IT departments have to look to solutions to replace the costly and generally inefficient human aspect of managing the data centre and its dependent systems.  DCA provides the way to create a highly dynamic and responsive capability that provides increased support for the business.