By Denise Dubie
When Marvin Stone, CIO at New Century Title Insurance in San Diego, needed to improve the workflow for his company’s residential refinance-transaction process, he turned to automation software from Opalis, which enabled his staff to stop writing code and start putting their service-oriented-architecture applications to use.
At New Century Title, each real estate transaction involves multiple parties that must compile financial, credit and property information in a limited time period. Stone’s staff used Opalis Integration Server to build a“drag-and-drop” application, which the company prototyped without writing a single line of code. The new process sends incoming orders to personnel, updates the SQL Server database, alerts stakeholders and handles errors that occur -- all without human intervention.
“I don’t want to have a lot of handwritten code, so we have one platform that enables us to build applications and automate tasks. We saved between $10,000 and $15,000 prototyping that one application through Opalis,” Stone says.“Our goal is to have zero-contact response on some issues that we can remediate within Opalis.”
Stone uses Opalis in concert with VMware’s GSX Server in a Windows 2003 environment. The software installs on a dedicated server and works with third-party management tools and virtualization products via APIs. This allows IT managers to create tasks that will be carried out based on predefined triggers. Stone says with the SOA and virtualization his environment supports, automation is a must-have.“Our environment is so fluid in terms of the applications that we support that we need to automate many parts of what we do,” Stone says.
Automation isn’t new, but the way it’s being used in today’s data centers is. Software tools once responsible for running batch jobs, pinging network devices for availability and monitoring server use are now being called upon to automate multistep processes across IT domains.
Enterprise IT managers are looking to automation to keep up with the constant change in their complex data-center environments. Automation represents one of the few ways IT managers can introduce operational efficiencies. And the growing popularity of best practice such frameworks as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) have network executives realizing that with standard processes in place, manual labor can be slashed when automation is added to the mix.
“IT automation has been promised forever, and in many cases, the technology has delivered, but only with basic, task-oriented functions,” says David Williams, a research vice president at Gartner.“Today people regard automation as being more complex workflow automation based on cross-domain IT processes, something much more sophisticated than a bunch of scripts supporting a bunch of simple tasks.”
The trend toward more automated operations has deep roots in best practices, industry watchers say. Today, automation vendors fall into a new product category dubbed run-book automation (RBA) by Gartner and data-center automation by others. The technology relies less upon software to perform specific tasks and more upon executing processes across multiple systems to carry out predefined workflows.
“RBA processes cover a wider range of IT operations-process automation, including change management, server provisioning and configuration, and storage provisioning,”
Williams explains.“RBA tools have the ability to monitor how workflows are executed and provide full reporting on ITIL workflow execution and even workflow efficiencies, including when they ran, who ran them, how long they took to run, if they failed and why they failed.”
To achieve this type of automation, such vendors as Enigmatec, Network Automation, Opalis and RealOps took a generic approach, building workflow and orchestration engines which enable the products to carry out tasks across third-party tools. The software doesn’t care if HP, Microsoft or IBM owns the technology under the covers, experts say.
“These tools can be seen as a vendor-agnostic communication vehicle between IT domains and the service desk,” says Evelyn Hubbert, a senior analyst with Forrester Research.“This type of technology connects the silos of IT by enabling cross-domain processes and can take many mundane tasks out of IT managers’daily routine.”
Consider RealOps. The company’s Automation Management Platform (AMP) allows customers to integrate other systems into one operations management tool by sitting on top of existing management products and collecting data. The data is aggregated, normalized and correlated against AMP’s predefined activity library, which lets the software identify whether the data matches a predefined automated action in AMP’s library. If so, the tool kicks off the automation. If a server doesn’t respond to predefined standards, the software will generate a trouble ticket.
“RealOps does the integration of processes and workflows easily. The software does high-level scripting and builds complex workflows around ad hoc or emerging business needs,” says Bryan Doerr, CTO at Savvis in Herndon,Va. Savvis uses the technology in its data center to quickly address time-consuming tasks. For instance, when servers needed to be updated for Daylight Savings Time, RealOps software
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