Over the past decade, the data center has been steadily evolving. It’s transforming from a mega facility, filled with disparate infrastructure that’s difficult to integrate, maintain, and manage, into a more agile business response center. Businesses looking to refocus their IT efforts on delivering greater value are exploring ways to leverage automation to optimize utilization and reduce waste. While vendors promise automation ‘in the box’, many organizations struggle with the complexities of achieving a fully functional, automated data center environment. How do you plan for automation in terms of skills, policy, and processes? The data center continues its steady evolution from a mega facility, filled with disparate technologies that are difficult to integrate, keep up, and manage, into a more agile business response center. While these present exciting opportunities for IT leaders, we need to be mindful that the journey to a next—generation data center doesn’t happen overnight—and that it may be littered with potential hazards.

It’s important that businesses understand what ‘automation’ really means before setting off down this path. The definition of automation has changed over the last decade. Ten years ago, automation was almost exclusively about provisioning. It wasn’t unusual for businesses to have upwards of 70% of their resources focused solely on provisioning new storage and configuring logical unit numbers. Cloud has fundamentally changed our expectations of automation, and now it’s as much about deprovisioning. Yes, cloud services are automated, but you still need to make sure that services are turned off, or you’ll waste resources and fail to realize the savings you anticipated. While a steady stream of innovative and transformative technologies continues to enter the market, taking advantage of them isn’t always that easy. Many IT leaders are unable to leverage new data center technologies due to the process changes and other investments needed to support them. Often, vendors will introduce new technologies that supposedly come “in the box, yet many organizations lack the skills to unlock their true value.

Data Center Challenges

Process requirements change significantly when you’re looking to take advantage of transformational technologies. In today’s age of technology, we still find that many businesses haven’t defined processes or documented standard operating procedures for their existing infrastructure. The desire to invest less time and money in IT processes—and more on core business applications—is a common pain point among IT leaders. Managed services can provide a remedy. Typically, managed services providers have; invested significantly in their facilities, over a long period, and implemented industry best practices and standards, resulting in high levels of automation—so you don’t need to invest in developing your own. Owning and operating your own data center can be costly. If you’re on a tight budget, you may find that once you’ve made the necessary investments in the infrastructure that’s running your applications inside the data center, there’s little left over to spend on the maintenance of the facility itself. Some businesses outsource the facilities management responsibility to a third—party, but often the results are less than satisfactory.

Define Network Policy

Defining a policy about ‘what’ and ‘when’ to automate is a critical step. Increasingly, businesses need to turn data into a strategic tool. To do so, they need to gather it from various sources, analyze it, and move it both geographically and between different types of storage, depending on its criticality and usefulness at specific points in time. Do you want to use automation to burst into the cloud and manage peak workloads, or to coincide with specific business events? Do you want to configure a testing and development environment when your developers arrive at work? Is your goal to spin up resources to troubleshoot problems? Under what circumstances should you do so? To answer these questions, you need to make sure you understand exactly where automation will add the most value. You can’t automate everything. You need to ask yourself, ‘What’s the value in automating this?’ It doesn’t make sense to automate workloads that remain relatively static throughout the year, and for which you’re already achieving 90% server utilization levels. However, a workload that has three change windows a day is an ideal candidate for automation.

Features And Benefits

Existing IT processes pose a significant stumbling block for many businesses looking to take advantage of transformational technologies. Businesses looking to automate their data center environments often struggle to understand or expect the effects of multi tenancy. How much extra capacity do you need to provision to manage spiked traffic, at different times of the day? This is where bringing in a seasoned cloud services provider can add value. During many years of providing cloud services to clients, they’ve developed consistent policies, and begin by implementing best practice. That’s not to say that a best practice approach is always right for every organization—each has unique workloads and requirements—but it gives you a good starting point. Analytic tools that allow businesses to perform predictive troubleshooting, gain visibility about how much capacity they have, decide when to automatically add capacity, or even pinpoint when traffic levels are going to change, can add significant value. Adding analytics means you don’t have to rely on particular people to deliver these insights. It also allows you to monitor your internal usage patterns and continually update your automation policy, based on this information.