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cross-domain IT processes, something much more sophisticated than a bunch of scripts supporting a bunch of simple tasks.”
tasks. For instance, when servers needed to be updated for Daylight Savings Time, RealOps software enabled Savvis to quickly update its patching process and automate it.
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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,
Net work 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
Automation and virtualization seem to go hand in hand for many IT managers.
Paul Anderson, CEO of Novacoast, an IT professional services company in Santa Barbara, Calif., used Novell Zen Works Orchestrator software to manage the company’s migration from the VMware to the Xen platform. The software not only helped the migration; it’s also helping Anderson stay on top of problems that arise in the virtual environment.
“As virtual environments grow, it becomes more of a chore to manage them. You get into a situation where you don’t even know where a virtual server is running anymore,” Anderson says.“The more you leverage virtualization, the more you realize there are management issues, and you need a way to automate some of that.”
Novacoast moved from a decentralized Microsoft Windows environment to a centralized Red Hat Linux data center, with each physical server housing between four and five virtual machines. Anderson says the change helped save the company money but required an update in management software. Zen Works Orchestrator helps his staff automate the allocation of virtual resources based on business needs by understanding the resources available and the workloads running on them.
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