When industry’s most demanding companies need to increase the power of their data center investments and sustain the growing demand of IT services, they look for automation tools to better control the performance, security, compliance and availability of applications, machines and servers. IT management requires a platform that can integrate with their existing infrastructure, driving greater value throughout the organization. IT managers struggle to find the right tools to automate business system administration. The solution is a technology architecture that provides organizations the ability to sustain applications, infrastructure requirements and IT processes.

Medium to large enterprises must be setup to adequately monitor and measure the performance of the data center environment. Managing tasks from troubleshooting, performing analysis and conducting basic metrics is an ongoing battle. In the typical data center landscape, application management can be quite an undertaking. Large enterprises may have thousands of servers, sustaining numerous applications.

In order to effectively manage the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements, data center automation is a necessity. Supporting, running and serving the potentially thousands of applications, processes and services can be costly, in terms of time, money and valuable IT resources. Standardization of the provisioning process lays the groundwork for successful data center automation. By automating the server provisioning best practices of an organization, servers are provisioned identically, providing consistent quality and higher levels of predictability.

Confirmation of the customization capabilities will help determine if the solution can work with even the most complex of environments. It is also wise to look at the various change management tools designed to improve servers, storage and networking, all of which are critical to an organization’s data center automation requirements. Lastly, by ensuring that the configuration management capability is sufficient for the organizations data center needs is imperative.

Standardizing business rules and procedures is conducive for transparent managed resources. Data center automation can reduce labor and hardware costs, and improve IT availability and responsiveness. The result is more productive administrators and a higher level of quality IT service. Automation for pre-determined conditions can alleviate the headaches normally associated with manually implementing these required operations. By scheduling and automating IT tasks such as system maintenance, server provisioning, deployments, migrations, ITIL service management and database backups, IT resources are better aligned with the operational needs.

Whether you are looking for a stand alone application management solution where simple process management tasks such as starting, stopping or monitoring applications; or a complete IT automation solution, for multi-tier management of one or more application servers, Web servers and various applications, data center automation is essential. Deploying cutting-edge technology, can improve the availability and performance of applications and services both internally and externally.

By: Sam A. Brown

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