Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody were to take away all the grunt work of data centre management – the discovery, the provisioning and patching, the best practice enforcement and remediation – leaving you and your people lots of time to think of new and better ways to help your partners in the various lines of business?
At some point, every data centre manager worth his salt will start to dream of automating things like change and configuration management. However, fewer than ten percent actually do today, according to some industry estimates.
While many believe that automation as a concept has been around for a long time, basically since the days of mainframes and simple batch computing, automation experts like Shay Mowlem, Vice President at HP’s Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) division, beg to disagree. “Yes, there are tools and scripts that people use to perform certain tasks and then repeat them, and one might argue that that’s automation, but it isn’t, it’s still an uncoordinated and inconsistent execution process,” he believes.
The key, he insists, is repeatability of all the common, manual, and error-prone tasks that administrators spend all their time on – everything from provisioning to patching to reconfiguring and enforcing best practices. Opsware, which pioneered data centre automation in the mid-90s and was acquired by HP in 2007, services big customers like British Telecom or EDS, who may be running tens of thousands of servers day and night.
Every time a human being is called on to intervene, Mowlem insists, costs go up and less time can be spent on business-critical activities. “The companies, the time it takes them to provision a new server – meaning taking the server, installing the operating system, loading the application, performing any required updates and configuration changes, and ensuring that the security requirements are in place, doing everything, in other words, to make the system operational – could take four to six weeks.” Reduce that time to a couple of hours, and you are talking big-time savings in resources and budget.
In some cases, according to Mowlem, automation can cut operational tasks across servers, network devices or storage systems by over 99 percent. “We have customers that operate 40,000 or 50,000 routers, switches and other network devices spanning a multitude of different manufacturers. Making consistent changes across a heterogeneous environment is not something you can just run a batch process to handle. There is a lot of manual work involved in addressing the unique nuances of each device type, even if you use scripts. Opsware allows you to automate all that centrally and provides a very clean common view of your global heterogeneous infrastructure.”
In fact, it sometimes calls for vision to see the possibilities automation can open up – the kind of vision that a guy like Marc Andreessen, who founded Opsware (formerly known as Loudcloud) in 1999, has shown more than once in his career. In 1992, as a graduate student, he invented the very first web browser, named Mosaic, and went on to found Netscape, which he later sold to America Online.
On 1 September 2007, HP announced that it was buying Opsware for $1.6 billion (€1.1 b) and integrating it into its Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) software business in order to offer its customers a comprehensive value chain across all aspects of IT and data centre automation.
A very important part of this value proposition, Shay Mowlem maintains, is providing best of breed solutions not only for automating servers, networks and storage, but for making sure that they are totally integrated to provide a single management platform for all aspects of automation across the entire data centre infrastructure.
With the addition of Opsware and its range of products, HP stands to become the market leader in all the core segments of IT automation, with Opsware’s systems falling into the category of data centre automation, and HP’s software product for managing client systems and personal computers, which, Mowlem stresses, has its own inherent challenges and requirements. This ties in neatly with the BTO Centres which provide an “operational window” to allow data centre managers to oversee what’s happening.
So in the end, the vision of end-to-end data centre automation is starting to become reality. And managers can start to look forward to a lot less grunt work and more time for getting their “real” jobs done.
For further information, please go to: www.opsware.com
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