Data center automation (DCA) is designed to deliver value back to the business through increased levels of service and flexibility to meet business needs and demands. With increasing complexity within the data center, including but not limited to: a growing number of applications, bare metal and virtual server sprawl, security and regulatory requirements, there is an increased need for effective management in minimizing its effects.
In a recent independent study on data center automation sponsored by CA (http://www.ca.com/dca/survey), the majority (46%) of the respondents identified business compliance/ uptime as the number one challenge that they hope to address with automation. However, the survey respondents also indicated that those who have already implemented some sort of automation (an average of 48% of their data center tasks) saw that only 12% had seen these efforts as highly effective.
This brings into question where to begin an automation effort?" The right tools are essential in obtaining your automation goals, and tools that are flexible enough support your organization's unique processes and capabilities are an absolute necessity. Begin by identifying and defining your current and repeatable processes. This task could present some difficulty depending on where you are in establishing a best practices approach to IT service management (ITSM). Of course the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), takes the lead as an approach to define and map these processes as part of the overall IT services lifecycle.
In the event that you have not introduced any of these process frameworks or best practices in your environment, simply identify the existing approaches to the routine tasks currently undertaken in the data center such as patch management, maintaining consistency through gold standards, workload automation and/or server provisioning. Once your routine and repeatable processes have been successfully identified and automated, be sure to continuously measure their effectiveness and implement any changes as needed for improvement.
Next in your quest for automation, begin to identify and define more complex processes that can bring additional value from IT services to the business. At this point you may have already experienced a level of "enlightenment" in the quest for data center automation, meaning that you have already freed-up resources (both human and technology), allowing more time to focus on more strategic efforts. Examples of more complex processes include intricate workloads and policy based provisioning (based on business policy).
Data center automation has many points of entry and is only limited by your organization's ability to plan and execute where it makes sense to the business (cost vs. value). Take a careful look at what your situation has to offer and evaluate the best course of action for automation in your unique environment.