Automated Server Provisioning:
IT Organizations are increasingly looking to standardize on automation platforms to improve the delivery of business services across the enterprise, while reducing costs. Automated server provisioning can be implemented in many ways; however, organizations that take IT automation seriously demand a higher level of sophistication than simple scripts. They require a automated platform that can be integrated within their existing infrastructure to drive greater value and leverage throughout the enterprise.
A prime example of the benefits of automation is being driven by the proliferation of distributed servers and enterprise applications. This has created an immediate need for the automation of server provisioning. Automated server provisioning and management can provide many benefits:
- The ability to accelerate initial deployment of new infrastructure and also redeploy servers from a standardized, preconfigured, "corporate standard" image, ensuring that consistent images are replicated across the servers.
- The ability to quickly create and deploy images of a complete software environment (OS, middleware, applications) to large numbers of servers, reducing the time it takes to provision a server with fewer administrator errors.
- The ability to manage, control and troubleshoot provisioning from a single location, with minimal manual intervention at the individual server.
The promise of automated server provisioning is that a single system administrator can remotely manage the deployment of software for large numbers of servers. This will provide support for more services and more distributed servers with less cost, and achieve a greater degree of flexibility and responsiveness in operations.
This whitepaper will discuss the benefits of including server provisioning as part of an overall IT Automation Platform strategy, specifically leveraging Stratavia's Data Palette IT Automation Platform. Data Palette automates complex, error-prone, manually intensive yet repetitive IT administration tasks, while providing the industry's first predictive analytics solution designed to detect and resolve issues before they can impact operations. For organizations in search of data center or database automation, Data Palette provides the industry's most robust platform for streamlining IT operations.
Automated Server Provisioning – Tangible Benefits
Leveraging the power of automation, IT organizations can capture the expertise of their staff and harness this expertise across their networkattached hardware platforms. The following sections walk you through the tangible benefits of automation in server provisioning operations.
Driving Consistency, Quality, and Predictability in Automated Server Provisioning
IT Administrators are independent by nature, and most often have their own methodologies for provisioning and configuring a server. These methods come from tribal knowledge, script libraries (often referred to as 'toolkits'), personal preferences and lessons learned in the past. While these traits are certainly valuable to have, the various methodologies breeds inconsistency between servers which results in low predictability that one server will operate identically to the next.
Standardization of the provisioning process lays the groundwork for successful automation. IT Administrators each incorporate their individual knowledge and preferences into a standard operating procedure (SOP). This SOP then becomes the organizations best practice. By automating the server provisioning best practice, servers are provisioned identically, with a consistent level of quality independent of who performs the work; which breeds a higher level of predictability that each server will operate as expected.
Process Automation of Business Policies
Controls are commonly in place for even the smallest IT organizations. Controls add an additional layer of complexity onto server provisioning processes, as an IT Administrator must comply with company policies and process to perform changes within the infrastructure. These controls are most often identified through Change Management, Ticketing and Configuration Management.
Process Automation ensures that each step of the company policy is adhered to, and reduces the manual overhead and logistics which these policies introduce. Standard controls such as checking for change approval and updating Ticketing and Configuration Management systems is incorporated into the SOP as well as the automation.
Decision Automation based on Server Type
Automated Provisioning sounds great on paper, but the truth is that servers are provisioned for various purposes (or 'server types') and each type has very unique characteristics. For example, a Web Server is provisioned very differently from a Database Server or a File Server.
Decision Automation provides the flexibility to automate a single Provisioning SOP which makes different decisions on how to configure a server based on server type.
