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Datacenter automation is a growing opportunity for IT organizations to automate tasks that cross both within and across "IT silos." It is important that IT organizations consider the technology and business impact that automation offers. Examples include lower operations costs, improved staff productivity, reduced human errors, increased security, and streamlined, standardized processes. The opportunity to standardize on datacenter automation has never been greater; IT organizations can deliver fast, measurable results that improve IT service availability, improve change management, and align and deliver more succinctly with business objectives.
Automation should be used to accelerate the maturity of IT organizations from chaotic to proactive and from a cost to a profit center. Virtualization is an additional starting point for automation, whereby IT organizations are using both automation and virtualization to deliver results. Often, automation and virtualization are becoming part of the business strategy. Automation projects often include the provisioning, management, and retirement of virtual machines (VMs) and physical infrastructure that have historically relied on manual tasks to execute. When automation and virtualization are used together, IT organizations have the opportunity to reduce the time to market, increase business impact, and redefine their organizations. Automating Across Silos
Automation is increasingly a top investment priority, often spanning multiple "IT silos" as IT organizations look to maximize their ROI and to build on and extend initial deployments of automation technology. The following survey results address the key issues of cross-silo support of automation and the importance for IT organizations to consider the impact of automation from an IT service life-cycle perspective. As shown in Figure 3, more than three-fourths of respondents felt that datacenter automation was a top investment priority.
Figure 4 shows the domains covered by existing automation solutions. Servers domain was number 1, followed by network infrastructure and storage. Figure 5 shows the percentage of respondents who agreed (on a scale of 1ñ5, where 5 = strongly agree) with the view that comprehensive datacenter automation should include network devices, servers, clients, storage, and applications. More than 85% agreed or strongly agreed (score of 4 or 5).
Figure 6 shows the percentage of respondents who agreed (on a scale of 1ñ5, where 5 = strongly agree) with the view that automation is very important in deploying, provisioning, and managing virtualized environments. Nearly 80% agreed or strongly agreed (score of 4 or 5) with this statement.
Figure 7 shows the top challenges cited by respondents in managing virtualized environments. Integrated management of servers, networks, and storage was cited by the largest number of respondents as the top challenge, followed by automated change and configuration management.
Support for all major hypervisors (e.g., VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Solaris Zones) was chosen as the third most important management challenge. This category is likely to grow in importance in the future as multiple variants of hypervisors are increasingly deployed on x86 platforms. Interestingly, the respondents in this category were predominantly from large organizations, with just over 50% coming from companies with over 5,000 employees.
Cost Efficiency and Process Standardization
IT organizations continue to adopt process standards that enable improved security delivery and cost-effectiveness of IT services. This focus has led many IT organizations to adopt best practices for IT service management, leading to the inclusion and necessity of the automation of tasks across the datacenter. Automation has begun to deliver business process impact, driving the discussion within IT organizations of how critical business processes can operate more effectively through the use of automation solutions versus manually developed, error-prone scripts. Automation reduces the need to hire more administrators, even as infrastructure, virtualization, and the amount of change increase.
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