From humble roots in basic provisioning, data center automation has grown in response to years of unbridled server proliferation, and is now transforming the enterprise data center.
July 2007 BUSINESS INSIGHTS Contacts: Data Centre Automation Clive Longbottom Enabling the Agile Enterprise Quocirca Ltd Tel +44 118 948 3360 Executive Summary Clive.longbottom@quocirca.com From humble roots in basic provisioning, data centre automation has grown in response to years of unbridled server proliferation, and is now Dennis Szubert transforming the enterprise data centre Quocirca Ltd Tel +44 845 397 3660 Dennis.szubert@quocirca.com Main Findings 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. Conclusion 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. An independent report by Quocirca Ltd. www.quocirca.com Commissioned by Symantec www.quocirca.com 1 Background Organisational computing and data needs have moved in a cyclical basis - in the age of the mainframe, everything to do with the computing environment was held within one environment, the data centre. Then there was the move to distributed computing, with departmental computers and data being held more locally to the users. However, as data volumes grew and the organisation became more dependent on the IT infrastructure, issues caused by lack of easy access to disparate data sources meant that the capability to deal with data or infrastructure loss was impaired. This led to a move back to monolithic data centres, with massive data warehouses holding aggregated data alongside racks of servers dedicated to specific tasks. However, different enterprise applications required different data stores, and silos of data began to appear within these data centres, and the speed of response when interrogating and reporting against these data stores became such an issue that departments started to again look to localised computing as a means of supporting their own needs. Now, the move is towards a service oriented architecture (SOA), complete with data federation (the capacity to bring multiple different data sources together for reporting and business intelligence purposes) and master data models (the capacity to have a single view of the truth for common data through a single database for information such as customer records). The increase in interoperability due to g... [download for more]
