The commoditization of large-scale computing is upon us. About seven or eight years ago a new maxim was born, thanks to the rise of Web 2.0 companies that restored energy to Silicon Valley investing: $1 million is the new $10 million.

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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.

Read the full article on Forrester blog

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! (more…)

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.

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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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