Nolio – Application Service Automation

All Bets on IT Operations Automation

February 16th, 2010 by Daniel Kushner

I am excited about our upcoming webinar with 888.com’s Director of IT Operations, Ariel Pisetzky. As you might know, 888.com is one of the world’s largest online gaming networks, serving poker, bingo, and other real-time, money making applications to millions of customers every day. Ariel has kindly agreed to share with us how they moved from manual and scripting solutions to a fully automated and managed environment.

Hoping to see you on Feb 24th!

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/912658288

Posted in Application service automation, Customer Success Stories, Webinars | No Comments »

An Application – Centric Approach to Datacenter Automation

January 24th, 2010 by Daniel Kushner

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

Posted in Application service automation, Data center automation, SaaS Operations | No Comments »

Choosing the Right Tool for Application Deployment Automation

December 1st, 2009 by Daniel Kushner

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.

Automating Data Center Operations
Automation tools are often obfuscated by the use of ‘shared’ terminology that have different meanings when pertaining to distinct activities within the data center. Terms like “tasks”, “actions”, “workflows” and “processes” while common to all automation tools have different uses based on the operational challenges being addressed by each.

To differentiate between automation tools, it is important to first distinguish between the operational requirements and needs that each automation tool addresses within the data center, including:

IT Process Automation
Application Service Automation
Infrastructure Automation

What is IT Process Automation?
IT Process Automation (also known as Run Book Automation) orchestrates between independent system management tools, to create standardized procedures for consistent incident handling.

What Processes are Automated?
IT Process Automation tools synchronize between ticketing and monitoring tools. IT Process Automation makes it possible to create workflows representing the steps, requisite actions and information transfer between disparate IT system management tools to automate incident handling.

Key Operational Drivers
If you have many discrete it system management products and you need to synchronize between them to manage incidents and enforce standardized incident handling procedures.
Benefits
Incident handling standardization and orchestration.

What to Look for?
Robust integration packages with ticketing vendors and monitoring vendors.
Users
IT Process Automation tools are owned by individuals responsible for incident management within IT.

What is Application Service Automation?
Application Service Automation automates the manual operations needed to deploy applications and keep them up and running across the data center, simplifying and creating reliable, repeatable and streamlined processes for managing application change.

What Processes are Automated
Application Service Automation automates multi-tier, distributed application deployment and maintenance tasks including handover, configurations, updates and patches, among others. Application Service Automation makes it possible to create application-centric workflows, coordinating and executing application service steps across users (bridging between development, QA and staging) application tiers, application environments and data centers. By replacing complex, error prone and uncoordinated manual application change, Application Service Automation eliminates deployment errors and reduces the time and cost of deploying and servicing data center applications.

Key Operational Drivers
If your organization relies on multi-tier, distributed applications including “home grown” data center applications, web applications, online services, SaaS or cloud services. If your application deployments and changes are frequent, they are taking too long, involve too many people, you are experiencing release failures, you need to reduce your service window or want to scale operational capacity to handle higher volumes of application services, without increasing costs.

Benefits
Increased application uptime, IT cost reduction associated with data center application deployment and servicing, gain a consistent, reliable application service model and centrally manage application change.

What to Look for?

Extensive out-of-the-box application specific actions.
Multi-tier application model support (including dependencies, application logic and application environments) without the usage of scripts.
Abstracted, logical application service modeling, environment agnostic (Making it possible to design an application service workflow once and execute it across multiple environments)
Support of physical, Virtual and cloud environments.

Users
IT/Data Center Operations managers, Data Center Application Release or Deployment Teams, Application Staging and QA.

What is Infrastructure Automation?
Infrastructure Automation facilitates server provisioning and infrastructure configuration across the data center providing server lifecycle management.

What Processes are Automated?
Infrastructure Automation makes it possible to establish a baseline of operating systems, servers and local storage in addition to patching, configuration management, script execution and compliance assurance for all managed servers including both physical and virtual servers.

Key Operational Drivers
If your server provisioning time takes too long, involves too many people and you want to standardize provisioning and server builds by enabling the execution of repetitive tasks across many servers.

Benefits
IT Cost reduction associated with server management, infrastructure standardization and compliance.

What to Look for?

Rich out of the box HW/network/Storage actions and devices vendors.
Scalable automation engine to handle large number of servers.
Ability to support virtual environments.

Users
Infrastructure Managers, System Administrator teams, Network teams.

Summary
Each of the automation tools described in the previous sections address different areas of activity within the data center. The tools differ in terms of the types of tasks they coordinate along with the key operational drivers for automation. Your operational objectives will dictate what automation tool is right for you.

The fact that IT Process automation, Application Automation and Server Automation tools focus on a different set of core competencies, they are fully interoperable, making it possible to achieve full data center automation across these tools. IT process automation workflows can easily include triggers for application and server automation and vice versa, output from application automation and server automation can trigger relevant business processes including troubleshooting, roll-back or compliance for example.

If you are looking for an application automation platform, Nolio Application Service Automation is the most robust automation platform on the market. Nolio lets you automate the deployment and maintenance of web, software-as-a-service and distributed data center applications.

With Nolio operation teams can manage application service activities across users, tiers and environments, turning complex, un-coordinated, manual configurations into error-free, automated and centrally controlled processes.

The end result is that you eliminate up to 60% of application failures caused by application mis-configurations and cut the time and cost of executing and managing application operations by up to 75%.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

It’s The Application, Stupid

October 21st, 2009 by Daniel Kushner

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.

Posted in Cloud Computing, Data center automation | No Comments »

Application-Centric Data Center Automation: Webinar Invitation

October 5th, 2009 by admin

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.

Please join us on Thursday, Oct 15, 2009 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PDT for a free webinar on Nolio Application Automation, to learn how to gain control over data center application change, for heightened quality, uptime, time-to-release and operational productivity.

The session will provide an overview of Nolio’s data center automation solution and explore use cases that illustrate how you can leverage application-centric service automation to address key data center application operation challenges from packaging, to deployment, troubleshooting, maintenance, rollback and auditing.

Please click here to register.

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Thoughts on Presenting at SIIA OnDemand

September 22nd, 2009 by Eran Sher

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.

I’m also looking forward to listening to the speakers, which include industry leaders such as ars Dalgaard, Founder & CEO of SuccessFactors, the fastest growing public software company in the world; Michael Lock of Google; Zach Nelson of NetSuite; Elliot Curtis of Microsoft; and many other speakers and panelists.

I’m very excited to be a part of SIIA OnDemand 2009. The quality of the speakers is exceptional and the conference presents tremendous networking opportunities. I’ll write more about my SIIA OnDemand 2009 experience when I’m back, so please stay tuned for my next post.

Tags: SIIA OnDemand 2009
Posted in News, SaaS Operations | No Comments »

Application Automation

September 8th, 2009 by admin

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.

This is where the Nolio Application Automation solution becomes useful.

Nolio’s solution has a unique ability to design once, then execute in multiple environments, without the need to update and customize the automation for every new or slightly different lab, environment or datacenter.

This is achieved thanks to Nolio’s patent-pending technology [link to patent post], which focuses on multi-layer, complex application components, architectures, topologies and parameters.

As a result, Nolio’s customers achieve incredibly fast implementation time. Using Nolio’s application automation tools, dozens of workflows can be automated in a few days to a few weeks, and become fully operational in production environments and in Development, QA and staging environments.

Tags: application automation
Posted in Application service automation | No Comments »

Application Automation vs. Infrastructure Automation

August 17th, 2009 by admin

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.

In contrast, no platform exists today to help with application operational tasks – also known as Application Service Automation. These tasks include complex application deployment, application configuration changes, troubleshooting and recovery.

There are three main areas that make application service automation different from infrastructure service automation:

Task Complexity

Many of the infrastructure automation tasks involve repetitive tasks on many devices, usually on same-server types or devices, or according to domains. The nature of automation in this case is perform the tasks on a group of servers together, or according to domains.

In contrast, application services usually involve multiple server types/domains. The processes needed to service applications are complicated, involving numerous steps, strict procedures, and a variety of machines. Anyone who has gotten the “checklist” for an application release process knows how complicated this can be, and how unlikely it is for two people to actually do every step in exactly the same way, regardless of how well documented the process is.

Dependencies

With infrastructure service automation, the focus is on updating the device. With application service automation, teams must understand the application architecture – which servers are mapped to each other and how all servers depend on each other. In order to automate a process, they need to understand which particular application servers connect to precisely which database servers.

Order

When servicing infrastructure, it doesn’t matter if this router gets its new configuration first or which server gets its security patch first. But for application service automation, order of operations matters. To update an application, the application logic is important. You might need to take down the database server first, then the application server, and finally the Web server, before making changes. And if you do not have maintenance windows, you may need to bring down a very particular part of the application first, make your changes, and only after that part is back up and running, do the next group of servers in a rolling update.

Today’s application service teams require automated tools that understand the architecture and logic inherent in the applications they service. To learn more about how Nolio supports task complexity, grouping, dependencies and order with Nolio Automation Center, please visit www.noliosoft.com.

Tags: application automation, Application service automation, infrastructure automation
Posted in Application service automation | No Comments »

Scripts vs. Automation

August 11th, 2009 by admin

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.

Is the Nolio tool a GUI for creating my scripts?

No, it’s really not. Scripting has certain limitations – particularly around maintainability, mutltiple envinorments/ labs/ datacenter synchronization, documentation, and troubleshooting.

Most importantly, scripting does not provide you with management of the execution – reports of what was done, by whom and where in the Datacenter, so that later on you can use that information in a user friendly and timely manner.

Nolio automation completely avoids these limitations. In fact, no script is generated in Nolio. Instead, there’s a distributed workflow engine that “knows” how to run the Noio automated processes, and adjusts to any environment. This gives you the benefits of automation without the downside of scripts.

Do I need to recreate all my existing scripts?

No. In fact, I can’t think of one customer that hasn’t integrated in-house scripts into their Nolio implementation.

One of the major benefits of using Nolio is adding the following layers, which do not exist in scripts, on top of existing scripts:

1. A communication and synchronization layer. Scripts usually run on a single server, so you need to write additional code to manage scripts on multiple servers, and you need to write additional code to execute different scripts on different server types in multiple data center environments. You need to have the ability to synchronize and run scripts in stages. Using scripts, you need to write an additional layer of code to achieve this. Nolio platforms allow you to get all of the above for your current scripts without writing additional code.

2. Permissions – The Nolio permissions mechanism allows you to get now-active directory integration and provide roles and authorities to your scripts’ activations and design.

3. Notification and scheduler abilities – extend your scripts’ power, by using Nolio to provide a scheduler and advanced notification mechanism. Be alerted when your scripts are activated, stopped, failed, and completed.

4. Reports – This is the most important part. Automation is only one part, but the real management of data center activity is to KNOW what was running, when and status. Empower your scripts to have a full reporting system for your script activation, including management reports, which enable you to show your managers your achievements!

As you can see, the Nolio automation solution does not come instead of scripts, but in addition to them. It adds layers that significantly enhance your scripts’ power. Learn more at www.nolio.com

Tags: automation, scripts
Posted in Application service automation | 1 Comment »

Nolio Announces New Key Executives as Application-Centric Automation Market Accelerates

July 27th, 2009 by admin

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.

Tags: New hire news
Posted in News | No Comments »

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