Published: April 23 2009, 01:43 PM | no comments
by Ben Scheerer

In lean economic times, automation can represent an opportunity for IT to reduce cost through more efficient practices and processes.  But while you can usually gain some efficiency with a lower level of automation, an automation strategy can’t achieve full business value unless it’s guided by sound business principals.  Without the proper business context organizations may end up automating processes with the least business value and devoting resources to the wrong services. 

We at CA have developed a unique approach to automation termed Business-Driven Automation (BDA).  BDA aligns to the context of the business and helps organizations achieve step gains in efficiency as they grow in their automation capabilities.  An organization’s automation maturity can easily be assessed and tracked though our BDA maturity model as detailed in a CA white paper I co-authored Enabling Business-Driven Automation for Business Advantage.  Be sure to explore the benefits and impending business value gained from Business-Driven Automation and achieve a better understanding on how a BDA strategy will benefit your business regardless of where your current automation capabilities lie.

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Published: April 23 2009, 10:59 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Stephen Elliot

In our customer discussions with IT and business executives, one thing is ringing clear in 2009;   Virtualization is becoming a strategic investment, architecture, and underpinning (across multiple IT domains)  for the delivery of IT services.  While cost savings have traditionally dominated the decision to use virtualization, CIOs are telling us that, while important, cost is becoming a secondary factor.  The decision to use virtualization as a “Strategic Managed Architecture” (SMA) has emerged.   In fact, most CIOs believe their SMA success hinges on best in class management, integrated with the physical management investments.   We believe that a trend evolution is upon IT whereby C-level aspirations can no longer be met with virtualization in stand-alone tactical deployments;   the business impact and efficiency expectations have outpaced silo deployments.  Virtualization deployments have been so successful in reducing costs, that C-level executives now expect more from it, notably from the business impact perspective.   That notion provides the need to invest in integrated, automated management, standardized processes, best practices, and talent development.     To deliver virtualization as a Strategic Managed Architecture, we advise IT and business executives to:

• Focus on Role based interfaces and reporting.   Virtualization abstracts much of the key data required for end to end IT service visibility and management; it also places more pressure on the administrators and system managers to maintain a complaint infrastructure. 
• Consider policy based management.  CIOs should recognize the compression of element management functionality from  products such as Cisco’s  1000v  are the first signs of the opportunity to drive element level, policy management across server, storage, and network infrastructure.
• Evaluate and buy management solutions that will scale.  Key technologies that enable fast scaling of virtualization include models-based management, granular performance roll-up, compliance assurance, and process automation between physical and virtual environments. 
• Encapsulate standardized processes.  Increasingly the virtualization architecture will enable ITIL and related processes to be codified and standardized in hardware platforms raising the need to execute service and policy aggregation across IT silos.   

The forces outlined above require attention from senior IT and business leaders as they offer some of the most advanced business and IT alignment opportunities over the past decade.  This emerging architecture is driving the need for new management requirements, and a new way at delivering cost savings and business outcomes via technology.   However, the discussion goes well beyond technology;  people, and processes will enable critical alignment between business processes and IT investment in real time necessitating the need for physical and virtual granular and service-oriented policy management.  The bottom line is that with the wrong management technology, the business value of virtualization can’t be fully met leading to lost opportunities and limited business outcomes.

To learn more about how to achieve Lean IT with new CA solutions visit:  www.ca.com/LeanIT

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Published: April 23 2009, 10:54 AM | no comments
by Derick Wong

How often have you been Googling to find information, or sitting on a travel website watching a spinning dial on your screen while time is wasting away and you could be updating your Facebook, getting LinkedIn or tweeting on Twitter. Man, the world has changed in just 25 years.

 When you hear the term ‘Data Center Automation’, some of you may be thinking, “That was done a long time ago, what’s new with that?” In the late 80’s there was a big push to achieve the sometimes elusive “Lights-Out Data Center”. Big budgets were spent on job scheduling software, console automation software for the mainframe (unix servers were just rolling in the door), robotic tape drives so operators did not have to find and mount tapes in order for data to be processed.  And people were willing to wait days for their boom boxes to be delivered to the store, where they could go pick them up (home delivery?, yeah right!).

The processing of data usually took place during the “off” hours, allowing the systems to be available for end users during the day. Wow, have times changed!!

While a great deal of work is still “batch” related and runs in the “off” hours, more and more workload is being driven dynamically. Loading schedules and knowing exactly what workload needs to be executed is a no longer enough to remain competitive in the world of “instant gratification” and worldwide communication and commerce.

Based on a long history of transforming the way people manage workload, resulting in tremendous cost reductions even when workload doubles or triples, CA has raised the bar again. CA Workload Automation r11.1 provides users with the ability to manage the traditional workload as well as the new workload types, by simply knowing three things.  What do you want to run, when do you want to run it, and where do you want to run it? You don’t even have to specify the WHEN, the triggering of the workload could be a message that comes from a third party, an arriving file that is unexpected, or even a value in database changing. 

Most vendors are saddled with an old job scheduling system that cannot adapt to the unexpected workload that must also be triggered. Their only option is to define everything and activate it in the system, so that when the unexpected happens, the workload can be triggered.  CA Workload Automation r11.1 is the first product to define those” unexpected” business events, even in a generic fashion, in the background (NOT part of the active workload) and trigger that workload into the active views only when the business activity dictates.

Let‘s look at an example, one customer contacted us for help managing hundreds of windows services. During our meeting we discovered that these services were built by application developers to bang on a database every 5 minutes to find out if a value had been changed. When we asked how often the value gets changed, their response was “5-6 times a day”, when a file is FTP’d in.  We showed them how our automation solution could have prevented all those services from being created in the first place, we could detect the change in the database immediately when it occurred and we wouldn’t start looking for it until the FTP file was received. When we showed this to the application developer, he was astonished that technology existed that could allow him to deliver the business functionality with less code and development effort and deliver it much faster to the end user. The Data Center folks were happy they could eliminate monitoring hundreds of services and were happy to share their automation tool with the application developers.  It was a win-win.

CA has some great history of providing advanced automation tools, from job schedulers, to console operations, and now to Workload Automation. The times have changed, but the quality of CA deliverables remains the leader in the industry.  This story gets even better when you extend the automation to virtualization, cloud, and runbook automation.  But I can’t tell you everything this week…

To learn more about how to achieve Lean IT with new CA solutions visit:  www.ca.com/LeanIT

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