At last weeks Gartner’s Data Center conference in Las Vegas, Ronni Colville and Donna Scott presented their view on the DCA – Data Center Automation. While they advocate that DCA is mostly marketing jargon, there are however a few referenceable implementations. Vendors have been slow to deliver the tools needed for DCA, and Ronni and Donna explain what organizations can do to gain benefits and move forward towards the promised vision.
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.
We had an interesting discussion the other day with one of our customers, a very large SaaS organization. They presented to us the automation process they have created using Nolio for the recovery process of their main application.
Their situation was that in case of a communication problem or an application problem in their main Data Center, they needed to switch to their Disaster Recovery site so that the customers will keep working while they fix the problem in the main Data Center.
Without automation, they had about 50 minutes downtime to sync their Disaster Recovery site, make the application functioning as well as the main Data Center, and make the transfer transparent to their customers.
