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General Information
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September 11, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 23
Page(s) 24 in print issue
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Automation Advancements
Implementing Automation Lets You Put Some Of Your Tedious Tasks On Autopilot
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| Key Points
• IT automation can help data centers to remain competitive in an era of being tasked with doing more and having fewer resources.
• There are many areas in which data centers can benefit from automation, including virtualized environments, applications, and management.
• More automation solutions are being developed for commercial enterprise systems, making it easier for data centers to implement them. | Although computer systems have driven business into the 21st century, there are still plenty of monotonous, repetitive tasks in the data center that can make an IT administrator feel as if she is sitting at a 19th century manufacturing machine pumping out widgets.
According to Joe Kosco, marketing manager of Network Automation (www.networkautomation.com), the issue data centers are confronting, especially in this tough economy, is that they now have fewer resources but still have to support just as many machines and users and an expanding array of applications. Additionally, the demands are greater in terms of having real-time data with virtually no downtime. “The demands on the IT department are increasing in terms of time and expectations, while the resources they have available to deploy against increasing demands are shrinking. IT is in a real bind and must do things much more efficiently,” says Kosco.
Given the financial restrictions on the data center budget, hiring more staff to address the mounting workload is no longer an option. IT departments can no longer afford to bring new staff up to speed or hire developers to write customized scripts. Increasingly, Kosco sees more organizations turning to commercial IT automation software in order to increase the efficiency of their data center operations.
Although customized scripting and coding will continue to fill many needs in the data center, automation software delivers the convenience of easy-to-use solutions with familiar capabilities such as drop-down menus, radio buttons, drag-and-drop, directory trees, and fill-in-the-blanks without the arduous tasks of learning new and complex programming languages. So where does automation fit into your enterprise?
 What Can You Automate?
Various organizations—health care, finance, manufacturing, and supply chain, for example—have different kinds of data spread across multiple systems and platforms that must be integrated, monitored and disseminated, and stored and secured, often in real-time. The two most prevalent areas of IT automation today are monitoring and data movement.
“Data centers are automating everything that is automatable—things that are repetitive in nature and that are predictable. They are thinking about processes where people are doing repetitive things that are chewing up a lot of time,” says Kosco.
Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere (www.automationanywhere.com), sees three distinct areas of IT automation emerging: virtualized environments, the front end of applications, and event-driven deployments.
As data centers integrate virtualization to reduce the cost of hardware acquisition, cooling, and space constraints, the intricacy of the IT environment drastically increases. “The complexity of management and security has increased, and we see automation software specifically designed for virtualized environments being rapidly adopted,” says Shukla.
Shukla also points to the application layer as being ripe for automation. “If you look at a typical application, it has three tiers—database, user interface, and business logic. Typically, automation has occurred at the back end, particularly the database, but increasingly the front end is also being automated, such as mimicking the user behavior,” Shukla explains.
The Transition
In order for an IT organization to effectively implement automation into their data center, Kosco advises, “It’s more of a mindset of knowing there are inefficiencies. They need to identify the inefficiencies and streamline processes that are costly and error-prone.”
He sees two distinct types of automation deployments within organizations: generalized and specialized.
“There are companies that say, ‘We have a general problem and we need to do more with less, so where can IT automation software have the biggest bang for our buck?’ and they start looking in those areas,” says Kosco. However, the majority of organizations turn to IT automation to address specific problems.
“It will start shifting in the next few years to organizations who have IT departments who are pulling out their hair because they have so much work to do and not enough time or resources. In order to get out of the IT firefighting mode, many IT departments are going to be turning to automation software,” says Kosco. Currently, he sees too many IT departments so busy being reactionary that they don’t even have time to implement automation measures. “That’s a situation that due to competitive issues will have to change.”
Looking Ahead
From Kosco’s point of view, he has been seeing more adoption of IT automation in the midmarket compared to what has happened in the high-end market. “More and more of these midmarket companies are wanting solutions that can assist them with their specific problems. They don’t have the resources but still have similar issues that need to be tackled.”
He predicts that over the next few years, more midlevel companies will be turning to IT automation solutions because of the development of direct connectors allowing them to automate their specific applications, such as Active Directory, SAP, and Oracle applications. “They need to be able to automate their business processes without writing specific code,” says Kosco.
Shukla expects to see much more IT automation over the next few years, including automating IT management. “Numbers can speak for themselves. IT automation can sufficiently impact the bottom line,” he says. 
by Sandra Kay Miller
Most Promising Technology: Self-Healing Systems
One area in which data centers can greatly benefit is event-driven automation, also referred to as “self-healing” systems. Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere (www.automationanywhere.com), believes many of the problems that regularly occur in the data center can be prevented in the first place. “We are seeing automation being placed in the environment and watching for certain events to occur in the system. It’s not just preventing the problem but taking corrective action, as well. Event-driven automation on a self-healing system is the beginning of a large market as a whole, and we are seeing a significant demand for it,” says Shukla.
Automation experts are finding that many problems that regularly occur in the data center can often be prevented by event-driven automated solutions. For example, servers that reach a predefined threshold for CPU can be instantly offloaded onto available systems. Similarly, when drive space reaches a maximum, files can be either automatically archived or redirected elsewhere. |
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