Posts Tagged ‘Application service automation’

Application Automation vs. Infrastructure Automation

Monday, August 17th, 2009

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.

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Future Of Data Hosting Is In Cloud Computing

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has recently made some interesting predictions on the future of cloud computing.

Ozzie said that the future for companies’ data hosting will be in a combination of cloud computing and on-premise data centers. In his words, “at some point in time, every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud…”

We couldn’t agree more. Our vision is that in the future, every company will have some kind of environment in the cloud. As Daniel Lyons of Newsweek recently said, “People are going to be putting their information not into some device but into some service that lives in the sky.” Lyon added, “Pretty much everyone in the tech industry agrees it’s the future.” For companies, cloud computing makes a lot of sense because it’s cheaper: in some cases, it cuts a company’s costs in half.

Of course, organizations that move to the cloud will need tools to help them deploy and manage their cloud applications.

The layer IT will need to handle in the future is the Application layer: deploying, managing, maintaining and troubleshooting applications in the cloud. Existing automation tools are old and fit traditional data centers. They are system- and infrastructure- centric solutions, while there should be a shift to application-centric solutions that will enable effective and efficient automation.

Nolio is a vendor leading the charge on doing just that. As an innovator of Application Service Automation solutions for physical, virtual and cloud data centers, Nolio’s 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 deployment of applications in the cloud and for the management of application change.

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Nolio Customer Success Story: SuperDerivatives

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

SuperDerivatives is the world’s leading derivatives solution provider, affording real-time accurate pricing for options through its unique pricing model that had become the global benchmark.

To deliver real-time option pricing, SuperDerivatives delivers 15 applications, operating across 100 servers, distributed over 8 global data centers. Each application requires weekly updates: content changes, new features and bug fixes.

Prior to adopting Nolio’s solution, these weekly changes involved R&D, QA and Operations and were done by executing a large number of error-prone manual service tasks. This obviously consumed a large chunk of SuperDerivatives’ web operation team’s time.

SuperDerivatives desperately needed to streamline application changes and eliminate misconfiguration errors.

Nolio’s Application Service Automation enabled SuperDerivatives to eliminate the use of scripts, affording a highly streamlined, error-free process for deploying application changes.

Matty Rosen, SuperDerivatives’ Head of Data Center Operations says, “Our customers depend on our hosted financial tools. Managing application consistency across our 8 global data centers, and our ability to reliably execute application changes in a timely manner, is therefor essential for our business.”

Rosen adds, “In addition to Nolio’s measurable productivity benefits, translating into labor cost savings, the ability to establish and enforce best practices across operations and all departments involved in application production, including R&D and QA, is Nolio’s intangible value of heightened application quality and manageability.”

SuperDerivatives experienced dramatic productivity gains once it adopted the Nolio solution for application change automation:

• Eliminating scripting reduced labor overhead from 2 days to just 30 minutes.
• Labor overhead for weekly updates has been reduced from 3 days involving 3 employees to JUST 1 HOUR.
• Labor for troubleshooting tasks has been reduced from 10 hours to 15 minutes.
• Application service auditing, not possible prior to Nolio, is now provided on demand.

Visit us at www.noliosoft.com to see how Nolio can dramatically improve your data center application operations.

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Automating the Application Service Process: Nolio’s Patent-Pending Technology

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

The idea for Nolio’s patent-pending technology was sparked by an unmet need for a system that would enable process automation of multi-tier applications in a computer network with a plurality of computers, in which one or more of the application components are interdependent or hierarchical in terms of their operation.

Nolio’s patent-pending technology enables application process automation in a distributed environment by providing a distributed architecture in which each application component can communicate with the other application components, regardless of their physical location.

As complex as this sounds (and it is), we also wanted to make sure that a person who is not specialized in the application would be able to invoke this automated process on a plurality of environments. This is achieved by having two design phases. In the first phase the user, who is specialized in the application, designs the possible processes. In the second phase, a non-specialized operator maps these processes into the actual environment, such as a data center computer network.

The application process automation is preferably controlled at a management server, which enables the software to be managed, verified, monitored and tracked from a single location. The system provides management reports for the user (software professional) and to the company’s management level.

Among the many benefits of this invention:

It provides the automated deployment and life cycle maintenance of multi-tier applications.

It automates maintenance, control and support activities on the deployed software.

It verifies application functionality after deployment.

It automates disaster recovery activities on the deployed software.

It replaces manual operations.

It bridges the gap between application teams and operation teams.

It reduces Data Center deployment errors and costs.

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Application Service Automation, Explained

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Application Service Automation is the automation of the tasks and services required for operating applications.

Data center applications are complex. They are made up of many components, they are distributed across large volumes of servers, and they undergo constant change. Relying on error-prone manual and scripted processes to service and maintain data center applications often translates into costly application downtime caused by configuration errors.

In the high-stakes world of application availability, your business simply cannot afford failures and downtime. Operations must gain control over application services, minimize downtime and eliminate service errors. Fully automating data center processes is the answer.

Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform that automates application deployment, maintenance and auditing. IT process automation simplifies the process of managing the application op-cycle across your data center, heightening application quality, improving time-to-market, and dramatically reducing operational overhead and costs, delivering immediate productivity gains.

By automating application service tasks and eliminating all human intervention, the time and resources needed to manage application change are dramatically reduced, and application downtime is minimized, ensuring business continuity of mission-critical applications across the data center.

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Welcome to the Official Blog of Nolio

Monday, February 9th, 2009

We are here to save you time and money. We are here to cut your costs and reduce your workload. We are here to streamline your data center processes by fully automating them.

As you probably know by now, relying on scripts to deploy, manage and make changes to your data center applications is highly ineffective. Scripts are prone to human errors. They place a heavy burden on operations staff to maintain them. They are costly in terms of time and significantly reduce productivity.

The only way to truly streamline data center processes is to fully automate them, and this is exactly what Nolio does. By automating data center processes, Nolio eliminates the use of scripts and provides customers with tremendous gains in efficiency and productivity.

We established this blog because we wanted a space where we could share our views on application service automation; tell you more about our exciting software; share customer success stories and more. Comments are on: please feel free to comment, to ask questions and to add your own input to anything we discuss here.

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