Addressing the Complexities of Data Center Environments

May 30
08:23

2008

Sam A. Brown

Sam A. Brown

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Finding an automated IT Service that addresses complex, error-prone, manually intensive tasks can be a challenge in of itself. For data center environments the need for repetitive tasks and processes is as important as the ability to provide predictive analytics to detect and resolve issues before they create problems leading to costly impacts on operations.

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As a CIO,Addressing the Complexities of Data Center Environments Articles wouldn't you love to have the flexibility and ability to allow your operations teams to have the freedom of automated repair and maintenance tasks?  By implementing automated solutions into the data center, you can direct your resources to handle the more business critical applications.  Regardless of platform, version or vendor, managing a data center environment can be one of the more challenging roles within an organization.  From virtualization, to server consolidations, migrations and expansions simply ensuring the day to day operations are conducted can be overwhelming.  There are many resources available, but data center automation is one that provides increased value as well as reducing IT service costs. 

Another advantage of automated environments is the ability to leverage existing ‘tribal knowledge’ and best practices.  Too often, we recruit the best of the best to join a department, but literally handicap their skills and knowledge because the operations is chock full of individuals who know a lot, but march to the beat of their own drum.  Automation solutions can provide centralization of knowledgebase articles, scripts and run books, allowing for documented and consistent implementation of standard operating procedures (SOPs). 

While some solutions address one area of the data center environment, true IT service market leaders have the ability to consolidate the tasks and policies into one, seamless and integrated system.  Through a platform of such, organizations are able to leverage automation to increase efficiencies of tasks and processes.  Routine operations such as server provisioning, database administration, maintenance and service requests, etc can all be implemented into an automation platform. 

For organizations who have already maximized efficiency, and demonstrated the benefits of data center automation, there is always an evolution of features.  If you're looking to reduce operational costs and expenditures, data center automation can effectively meet this goal.  An additional benefit of enabling a predictive analytics system, one that can monitor and predict resource behavior, is the ability to avoid costly downtime or unnecessary IT service responses.  Being able to automate incident resolution for recurring alerts and performance is also key. 

IT Service environments can minimize timely lifecycle tasks and procedures and experience productivity and efficiency as well as reduce operational expenditures associated with data center automation.  If you are in the market to minimize costs within your IT infrastructure and improve production outputs leading to better profit margins, consider data center automation to help manage your operations and budget.