CA Data Center Automation Blog

March 2008 - Posts

• Data Center Complexity-Fact or Fiction?

  The day-to-day challenges of managing the IT data center include management of its diverse and complex makeup of key systems to meet the needs of its users, but more importantly the overall business.  As IT becomes more aligned with the business, IT begins to lose its longstanding identity as a "cost center" as it is required to provide more tangible value back to the business.  One of the largest hurdles in this quest is to turn the tables on data center management as a "lights-on" cost center to a provider of business value.  We've heard the statistic that 70% of IT's budget is spent on running day-to-day operations - simply keeping the light's on - leaving only 30% of the budget for deploying innovation along with new applications to fuel business growth.  This statistic leads to an interesting question, where in the datacenter do these costs exist? Expensive staffing, high cost of hardware / software, Inefficient processes?  The answer is yes to all the above. And a combination of all the above is easily attributed to overall data center complexity.  So how can we reduce those complexities so that we direct more resources towards providing business value? Let's begin to dissect data center complexity in order to better understand where the problems lie.  In the perfect world, data centers would have consistency across platforms (hardware, software, OS), staff skills sets and operating environments to support a stable business environment.  But in the real world complexity exists and rears its ugly head, especially in attempts to break these barriers to support a dynamic and constantly changing business requirements.  One step towards datacenter flexibility is the ability to de-compartmentalize and remove the silos of applications, data and operating systems environments yielding positive results in manageability leading to reduction of complexity.  In addition, a consistent and centralized view across these "IT Services" enables IT to invoke higher levels manageability and automation. I am often asked "is automation realistic for our company? Where do we start?"  Yes it's realistic and one place to start is to phase in Data Center Automation to simply allow IT to free up existing resources from error-prone, tedious and time-consuming tasks for new projects aligned with business strategy. Another may be to enable automation to dynamically provision capacity to meet increased demands for a more stable and flexible environment. These examples show clear benefits in automating processes that normally could take days, if not weeks, to as little as minutes while drastically reducing errors and increasing productivity.  Multiple entry points for Data Center Automation allow organizations to take advantage of the benefits of automation no matter where they are in their process maturity, as well as benefiting from increased process efficiencies as a natural automation byproduct! Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted Mar 24 2008, 10:46 PM by Ben Scheerer with no comments Tags: automation, data center complexity, data center automation, ca dca