With over 27 million servers, over 50 million network devices, and over 2 million terabytes of storage installed across IT organizations worldwide, an increasing number of organizations are turning to Data Center Automation solutions to automate the management of their IT environments. Data Center Automation solutions such as Opsware's have proven to reduce the complexity of managing IT infrastructure, control labor costs and improve time to delivery and overall quality of operations.
What's even more compelling is the extent to which IT organizations are extending the Opsware Automation System to automate the unique change management processes and operational tasks that are particular to the unique nature of their own IT environments. The ability to adapt the Opsware solution to a company's own operational environment is resulting in even greater cost savings and ROI that previously anticipated. In essence, the Opsware solution and its Automation Platform architecture in particular adapts to a company's IT environment versus requiring the organization to adapt to the system.
Every IT organization is unique. Each organization has its own change management processes, its own security requirments, its own technology platforms and standards. As a result of this uniqueness, no single automation solution could possibly automate every unique process or every unique environment characteristic out-of-the-box. Instead, a Data Center Automation solution must provide an extensible automation platform that enables IT organizations to extend the system easily to accommodate the particular needs of their own IT environment.
Companies that choose a Data Center Automation solution that does not provide a rich extensible automation platform will find themselves struggling down the road to adapt the system to their specific needs, The limitations companies will run into will stand in the way of realizing the full potential from automation.
Consequently, data center automation solutions need to expose a rich, secure, and accessible programming platform that customers can build their own automation applications on. A programmable platform gives customers the opportunity to not only tailor out-of-the box capabilities but also add new capabilities based on their unique needs.
The Opsware System provides a fully programmable Automation Platform that enables a broad spectrum of programmers from shell scripters, Java programmers and Web developers to:
- Leverage the powerful security services in the Opsware Automation Platform (OAP), making it easier and safer to share best practices
- Reach the broadest set of managed devices in any location, whether that device is in a major data center, a disaster recovery facility, or a branch office.
- Extend the platform to accommodate new processes that are unique to a company's own IT environment and organizational structure.
Introduction
Today's complex IT environments span multiple data centers and remote facilities. And the number of devices in those facilities and the connections between those devices is growing in numbers and complexity, making the jobs of IT administrators highly complex.
The out-of-the-box capabilities, sophistication and reach of data center automation solutions have grown dramatically over the past few years. For example, Opsware Server Automation System automates the operations of more than 65 server OS versions, while the Opsware Network Automation System does the same across more than 1,000 network devices.
Both systems automate the entire lifecycle of IT operations, starting with discovery and moving on through provisioning, configuring, upgrading, securing, and scaling.
And with each new product release, more IT tasks can be automated. For example, Opsware Visual Application Manager (VAM) automates the discovery, dependency analysis, and visualization of complex multi-tier applications. Opsware VAM builds detailed application dependency maps that previously were created with hours and weeks of tedious work in Microsoft Visio based on input from a wide variety of specialists.
But regardless of how much it invests in software development, no single vendor can deliver a software solution which automates everything. Why? Because every IT organization is unique. Each organization has a set of unique business and operational imperatives which lead to unique business applications and processes. In turn, these unique applications and processes lead to unique IT requirements.
However, due to the uniqueness of every IT environment, no single data center automation solution can automate every operational process. Further, even if that vast majority of operational processes are ultimately automated with out-of-the-box capabilities, every IT organization will have its own specific needs and peculiarities within each process which will require the out-of-the-box capabilities to be extensible and adaptable.
