Automated Server Provisioning: What Every CIO Needs to Know

W H I T E P A P E R
What Every CIO Needs to Know
About Automated Server ProvisioningWhat Every CIO Needs to Know About Automated Server Provisioning
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1 Stratavia | Whitepaper What Every CIO Needs to Know About Automated Server Provisioning
Introduction IT Organizations are increasingly looking to standardize on automation platforms to improve the delivery of business services across the enterprise, while reducing costs. Automation 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 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 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.

2 Stratavia | Whitepaper What Every CIO Needs to Know About Automated Server Provisioning
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 network-attached hardware platforms. The following sections walk you through the tangible benefits of automation in server provisioning operations.
Driving Consistency, Quality, and Predictability 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 le... [download for more]