Archive for the ‘Data center automation’ Category

An Automation Odyssey – A Forrester Paper

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

A combination of forces, including skyrocketing complexity and severe economic pressure, are radically and irreversibly altering the IT landscape. New methods, new functional sourcing, and new organizational structures are needed to address this onslaught, but one theme is obvious throughout all of these approaches — a need to automate more of what you do in IT. The typical IT organization wastes a significant portion of its budget on inefficiencies that only get worse as complexity grows. Automate many of these tasks and you become leaner and more responsive to business changes. Evidence indicates an automation “tipping point” is already under way this year. All IT shops need to consider their plans for automation, including the many derivative outcomes for process refinement, staffing, tools, and the organization itself.

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/it_operations_2009_automation_odyssey/q/id/54531/t/2

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An Application – Centric Approach to Datacenter Automation

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Driven by increased adoption of services-based computing, virtualization technologies, and mixed private and public cloud computing, enterprise datacenter applications are evolving from static and monolithic to dynamic, distributed, and multitiered. With this new application model come new operating challenges.

As organizations become increasingly reliant on integrated data center applications, deploying these applications is becoming a key business priority and a formidable operational challenge for IT teams. Responsibility for these applications – from managing release cycles to servicing lifecycles – is shifting to datacenter operations.

Traditionally, application release and deployment tasks have been performed manually, or semi-manually based on scripting. However, due to the complexity of multi-tier applications, the growing number of application environments and dependencies, and the sheer volume of operational tasks, manual approaches have become increasingly error-prone. As a result, application release and deployment tasks are resulting in delays, configuration errors, and release failures that undermine application reliability. Furthermore, this tedious manual work may result in increased operating and maintenance costs.

To address these challenges, a new application service model is needed to automate and orchestrate routine and emergency application tasks. These solutions should help IT operation teams execute and manage application service tasks and build reliable processes across application silos and the entire datacenter application lifecycle.

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Read the rest of this IDC White Paper on www.noliosoft.com

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It’s The Application, Stupid

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

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.

Lets take a step back, and think how the cloud and easy server provisioning is effecting the computing world? To put it in a nut shell, Joe Smith from Gibraltar can almost instantly deploy more computing power than Hewlett Packard. This is definitely revolutionary and deserves a big round of applause, but what we must realize is that the moment that Joe deployed his army of virtual servers, he has adopted a problem. An enterprise problem. Due to the fact that cloud computing, and server and stack provisioning, have become so easy, the time consuming and error-prone operations have moved higher up the scale; they’ve moved to the application. Joe is now faced with the challenge of providing services to his online and in cloud applications; updates, patches, hot fixes, log gathering, database manipulations, and the like. Pushing configuration changes to a couple of servers is no problem, but when these changes are on hundreds of servers, multiple tiers, and across clouds or data centers (don’t forget to add dependencies into the equation), we can quickly see how the celebration of easy cloud server provisioning is very much short-lived.

Application Service Automation is the natural evolution of the migration to cloud computing, and as the servers have become commodities, followed by the operating systems and stacks, businesses will now need to enforce scalable and manageable application services as part of their daily operations.

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Application Management Automation for Modern Data Centers

Monday, July 6th, 2009

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.

Deployment, changes and configurations, troubleshooting, recovery, expansion and other repeated processes on complex applications with multiple tiers, large numbers of servers, and specific dependencies between application components is challenging. Add to that the complexity of running applications on virtual or cloud environments.

Let me repeat: Modern data center applications are complex. Relying on error-prone manual and scripted processes to service and maintain data center applications often results in costly application downtime caused by human errors.

This is where new automation and management tools, such as Nolio’s, become useful.

In the high-stakes world of application availability, this is something your business cannot afford. Data center application service automation is the answer.

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Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the management of application change.

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