By Bob Violino

As the data center evolves, so too must the automation of IT processes. Today’s business processes require an unprecedented level of agility, and IT must support these new demands by building and maintaining data centers that are not just automated, but also dynamic and flexible. The challenge is great: IT must support these new business demands while also balancing increasingly complex technology and working with constrained budgets. Ultimately, data center automation must enable the truly dynamic data center. To move in this direction, CIOs and their IT organizations will need to consider server provisioning, change and configuration management, compliance controls and policy-based automation.

With this evolution, organizations will be able to reap the full benefits of automation, which include lower costs and more efficient allocation of resources. At the same time, they’ll ensure adherence to all business and IT policies. “We call the future of the dynamic data center the real-time infrastructure,” says Donna Scott, a Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst. “With a real-time infrastructure, you’re Dynamically managing resources and IT services to meet Service Level Agreements and business objectives. There’s a higher quality of service and greater level of agility and flexibility in this environment.”

In fact, in a Gartner survey of IT executives, nearly 65 percent said a real-time infrastructure was an imperative for their organization (see sidebar, “Getting Real About Real Time,” below). Increased agility was cited as the main driver for this new environment, followed by increased quality of service and reduced cost.

Business Drivers
Driving the need for automation of the data center and other IT operations is competitive pressure, which is greater than ever. As a result, businesses need to respond more quickly than ever before to market changes and customer demands. The systems that support key business processes need to change on a dime, too. In another Gartner survey, which queried 600 attendees at the firm’s 2006 Data Center Conference, respondents were asked to identify the single biggest pressure they face in IT operations and infrastructure management. Their No. 1 response: “The increasing rate of change and the pressure to move faster.”

CA is working on a solution for data center automation. Scott of Gartner says the CA solution will combine elements of systems monitoring and analysis with automation, provisioning, and change and configuration management. The server provisioning and configuration management market the solution will serve is a precursor to the real-time IT environment many organizations strive for, Scott adds.

That should prove useful, since IT is being asked to be more agile, and CIOs and their departments are under what Ajei Gopal, CA’s Executive VP of the EITM Group, calls “unprecedented pressure” to lower their costs, improve service and drive strategic innovation—all at the same time. “IT must be managed in a new way to respond to these business demands,” Gopal says. That means spending less on day-to-day tactical changes and, instead, freeing up resources for the strategic initiatives required to compete more effectively.

The processes that consume a huge portion of the typical IT budget today include provisioning, incident and problem management, change, configuration and compliance. To free up resources for strategic moves, Gopal adds, it’s critical to include these integrated processes in an automation solution.

Indeed, CIOs who operate an automated, dynamic data center can easily and quickly adjust to shifts in capacity demand. For example, a company might automatically provision additional Web servers to support a new sales campaign. Then, if response to the campaign exceeds expectations, the CIO could add even more capacity on the fly. Later, when demand has subsided, the company could dynamically decommission servers to save energy and operational costs. “You’d need to have a level of business intelligence that lets you know you need more resources, and you must have the instrumentation necessary to dynamically respond to changing conditions,” says Paula Daley, VP of Product Marketing for Distributed Network and Systems Management at CA. “Humans can’t respond quickly enough to these changes. You need to have a wealth of data about what’s happening on the servers and in the business to support this kind of agility.”

Unfortunately, many IT organizations today simply overprovision systems as a way to meet this demand, Daley says. “Even though their highest demand might happen very infrequently, they dramatically overprovision just to be ready,” she adds. “If you do this over a number of applications and business services, you’ll find yourself spending a lot of money on servers that are just sitting around.”

Tools of Automation
Solution providers are offering ways for CIOs to evolve their data centers to better deal with constant change. For example, Change & Configuration Management software solutions help organizations to set priorities for change, then preview the impact of those changes before they’re made.

CIOs can use this application to reduce the risks of uncontrolled change, improve IT service quality and achieve compliance for critical controls such as approvals and segregation of duties. Organizations get a single view of changes and interdependencies across each department’s systems, networks and applications, so they can make informed change decisions—then demonstrate accountability and traceability.

Systems management vendors are introducing solutions that manage virtual environments and can dynamically provision servers. For example, the CA Dynamic & Virtual Systems Management solution (DVSM) centralizes the monitoring, management and automation of heterogeneous system environments, including mainframes and virtual and clustered systems. CA DVSM provides visibility into resources and assets, their configurations, and the business services they support, enabling organizations to better prioritize service and use resources.

As vendors develop technology to make data centers more dynamic, organizations continue efforts to add efficiencies and automate processes. Equifax Inc., an Atlanta-based consumer and business credit firm, is simultaneously consolidating data centers worldwide and automating processes.

Equifax, which has databases containing information on 300 million consumers and 100 million commercial entities, currently has 20 data centers and expects to reduce that number to just six over the next three years, according to Rob Webb, the company’s CIO.

The move is part of an effort to consolidate servers, storage systems and networks throughout the organization to improve services and drive growth, Webb says. “Rather than having standalone servers and storage systems, we’re moving toward larger-class blade servers that are configured in a utility computing model,” he explains. “That way, we enable increased optimization across the company.”

A big part of the Equifax initiative involves adding software-driven automation of processes wherever possible. “Automation goes hand-in-hand with our migration toward more of a utility-based computing infrastructure,” Webb explains.

Another key for Equifax to improve IT’s ability to respond to change is ITIL®, a customizable framework of best practices for the delivery of IT services within an organization. ITIL provides a systematic approach to the provisioning and management of IT services, from inception through design, implementation, operation and continual improvement. “We’re moving toward ITIL as a common processing standard for our infrastructure,” Webb says.

Equifax will use standardized software tools for functions such as network and systems monitoring, and configuration management. “Today we have a disparate collection of nonstandard tools across the environment,” Webb adds. “Part of this transformation is to move toward a common tool set and common set of processes. The business goal is to drive the more rapid provisioning of IT resources, which enables us to increase productivity and therefore revenue growth. We’re also creating an infrastructure that lets us continue rapid innovation.”

The IT transformation at Equifax is being driven by several factors. First, the company’s customers have extremely demanding service-level requirements; they expect a high level of uptime and performance for all transactions. “We process billions of transactions every year, and it’s not sustainable over the long term to manage that type of performance level with nonstandard processes and nonstandard tools,” Webb says.

A second driver is the need for Equifax to more rapidly provision IT resources to meet customer needs. Optimization of the IT infrastructure and application development environment will allow this, Webb says. Yet another driver is Equifax’s need for increased automation and more efficient use of technology to drive continued growth and innovation.

Another organization, New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is building a new data center and plans to use virtualization and automation to make its IT environment as dynamic as possible. “The availability of virtualization, SOA [service-oriented architecture], middleware and BPM [business process management] yields an ability to automate data center environments,” says Kamal Bherwani, the city agency’s CIO and Associate Commissioner. “However, you are only as good as your weakest link. Only the most mature IT organizations will be able to reap the returns of automated provisioning and overall business agility.”

The New York City department is adopting applications and underlying technologies — including virtualization and storage-area networks—that will facilitate the proper adoption of automation in its data center environment, Bherwani adds. “If you aren’t up to speed on the utilization of certain base technologies,” he says, “then data center automation is not likely to pay.”

Bherwani expects data center automation to enable the department to create and monitor what he calls “real-time, dynamic Service Level Agreements” for users in the organization. It should also help him prioritize IT processes based on unpredicted demand and emergency response, and reduce the time needed for mundane tasks such as provisioning.

As organizations continue to look for ways to improve the delivery of IT services and respond to change, there will be growing demand for technology that delivers the real-time infrastructure. The benefits will include reduced costs through more efficient use of resources, increased agility, higher revenue made possible by increased flexibility, and improved quality of service.

Bob Violino is a freelance writer in Massapequa Park, N.Y., who covers a variety of business and technology topics.

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