Faced with a range of automation tools, many it departments are struggling to understand the difference between IT Process Automation, Application Service Automation and Infrastructure Automation. While all automation tools provide the benefits of streamlining operational processes to deliver manageability, cost savings and productivity gains, the purpose of each automation tool is different. This post will clarify the distinction between the different automation tools – focusing on what problem each solves, for whom and where each fits within the data center.
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I spend a significant portion of my day reading blogs and playing catch-up with the latest technology offerings, trends, and fads. It’s become somewhat of a challenge to discover the “useful” pieces of information as the number of blog posts that Google Reader and Google Alert deliver to my door step are growing at an unbearable rate. Last night I stumbled upon a link to this post that talks about CohesiveFT and how they easily provision virtual servers with a specific user defined stack to the cloud, whether it be Amazon’s EC2 or any other cloud that their customers would like.
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The shifting of application production to the data center is introducing formidable operational challenges.
With a continuous cycle of changes, operation teams are struggling to manage the complexity of tasks needed to release and service customer-facing multi-tier web and ‘home grown’ applications.
As a result, application mis-configurations and service errors are routinely responsible for up to 60% of data center downtime.
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On October 29 I will be presenting at SIIA OnDemand 2009, the industry’s top conference for SaaS and Cloud Computing.
SIIA OnDemand is dedicated to understanding the business drivers around SaaS and cloud computing. SIIA OnDemand 2009 is especially interesting, because it will be focused on identifying new ways for SaaS companies to drive revenue. Panelist and presenters such as myself will be sharing actual real-world successes that you can learn from and apply to your own business.
Nolio’s presentation will be one of just a few early-stage, innovative companies that provide Software as a Service and Cloud solutions. Being a selected Previews Presenting Company at SIIA OnDemand will enable me to present our application automation solution to an audience of leading vendors, executives, and industry influencers. I am excited to be there and see it as a great opportunity to highlight the ways in which Nolio’s application automation solution streamlines application service tasks in the cloud.
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A huge pain point of trying to manipulate traditional infrastructure automation tools to work on the application layer and produce application automation, is that companies find themselves writing pieces of code, scripts, or huge numbers of nasty workflows.
These scripts then need to be continually maintained and tweaked for each lab or environment. This results in very high maintenance costs and very low efficiency. Companies simply can’t afford operating this way when it comes to data center applications uptime.
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Infrastructure automation is far from being simple. It involves integration of many types of actions, on many types of devices such as routers, servers, storage, switches, load balancers, laptops, and desktops.
However, there are several tools and methodologies available today to service infrastructure, including software distribution, server provisioning, network management automation, virtualization, virtualization management software, and storage configuration and management.
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For many companies, their first attempt at automation is to develop in-house scripts in whatever language (Python, Perl, Tcl, etc.)
In fact, scripting is almost always a stepping stone to automation. Which brings up several questions about scripting and about Nolio Automation Center that I’d like to address here.
Is scripting bad?
Of course not. Most customers get their toes into the waters of automation with some level of scripting. Our best customers are the ones that have gotten some benefits from scripts but have really reached the limits of what they can do with scripting and need something that is more effective and less prone to human errors.
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Nolio, the leading innovator of Application Service Automation solutions, today announced key management additions as the application-centric automation market accelerates.
Doron Gerstel, co-founder and former President and CEO of Zend Technologies, joins Nolio as Chief Executive Officer. Nolio also today announced the appointment of Yuval Scarlat, formerly Senior Vice President of Products for Mercury Interactive, acquired by HP (NASDAQ: HPQ), to Chairman of the Board.
For more details, click here.
What happens when you get a service unavailable alert but all your server monitors show normal state? How can you respond to such an alert?
When discussing this with one of Nolio’s customers, a large online bank operation, they told me that in the past, in cases of a ’service unreachable’ alert with green servers, they didn’t really know what the source of the problem was. The first thing they would do when troubleshooting this type of problems is look into their monitoring system and check if there are problematic servers, but in most cases the issue is in the application layer, where some services or processes are stalled.
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In a recent article titled “Ready to automate data center management?” James Urquhart points out that “few organizations had made the decision to systematically automate” data center management, and adds,”If you don’t have an automation pilot in your budget for this fiscal year, I would seriously recommend planning one for the next cycle. I would also strongly recommend that system administrators begin to think about how they would automate their jobs.”
I couldn’t agree more and would like to stress the importance of application service automation.
Modern data centers are very different from traditional data centers. The main challenge of modern data centers is not primarily the number of servers, it is the complexity of the multi-tier applications that run on those servers.
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