What is Data Center Automation?
In a nutshell, Data Center Automation is a process by which day to day and routine tasks and processes of a data center, namely, scheduling, maintenance, application, etc. are carried out without the need of human intervention.
The benefits of this are manifold. Obviously, human hands are slow, while machines are exponentially faster. Hence, the agility and overall efficiency of a data center increases by leaps and bounds with the advent of automation.
Time is of paramount importance, and automation saves time. It reduces the time required by the IT Department to undergo routine tasks and thus helps an organization deliver on deadlines far easily.
Automation generally induces images of complicated machines and devices working in a world without any human touch. The ground reality is not so. Human interaction and oversight is crucial for many aspects of an automation system.
Automation merely enables a faster and more accurate system capable of dealing with situations much faster using fewer resources. The IT team will still receive important alerts and they can take action if necessary, but the automated system handles everything otherwise.
Automation = Speed
Data has gone through a huge boom in recent years. There's an ocean of data to be sifted through and thus the bygone manual methods of troubleshooting problems as they arise and traditional remediation methods are way too slow for the current landscape.
A Data Center is a cornerstone for business. The faster it works, the more competitive your business will be as this world values speed more than anything. To execute fast, your data center needs to be agile. And this agility is brought about by automation.
Now, how you define agility is completely contingent on your role, goals and the processes automate, like:
End users want to order applications through self-service and expect delivery in minutes
Application developers require automated delivery of standard resources to develop, deploy applications.
IT needs to deliver application workloads on-demand in an automated and repeatable manner, eliminating the scope of manual inefficiencies.
Now, with the advent of automation, the data center provider has API access to the entire infrastructure, so it can operate between shared public clouds enabling customers to transfer data or workloads among clouds.
The way this is done is, software solutions are granted central access to almost all of the resources of the data center. And this access facilitates the automation of servers, network, troubleshooting, etc.
What should a good DCA strategy look like?
If you are a progressive company, you should be looking to utilize the benefits of Data Center Automation to improve your overall efficiency and also to reduce the burden of workload on an already overworked workforce. Features that you should be on the lookout for are Centralized Management and Support for Heterogeneous Systems.
Also a truly holistic DCA strategy should keep in mind that the data center landscape is ever changing, and it's normal that the associated infrastructure changes drastically too to keep up with the times. Therefore, a good DCA strategy should be flexible, allowing space to work through these changes and troubleshoot problems proactively.
The only concern of a DCA strategy should not be making life easy for managers now, but also preventing future issues that may arise from the automation of tasks that were running non-automated for all these years.
A good DCA strategy also enables planning for the future metrics and making accurate estimations of the cost of changes to hardware and software.
Automate your Data Centers, to increase productivity of your organization and also to reduce the burden of routine tasks on your employees.
What do we have to offer?
Vigyanlabs IPM+ has developed a patented PowerMind AI technology that manages all the requirements of your Data Center and troubleshoots in real-time. It has the following features:
Detects anomalies in the system
Does Predictive Analytics for the Server
Efficient Energy Management
VM Sprawl, Zombie Detection
Rack Space Optimization
Consolidation Advisor
UPS and Phase load balancing
Optimized Thermal Mapping
Smart Server Allocator
In Conclusion
As the demand for data center support continues to grow, and providers continuously scale up their operations to meet such demands, automation will play a key role in keeping everything running smoothly.
The data center automation market is expected to reach a value of $16.10 billion by 2023.
There's no stopping it.