Data Center Network Managed Services is 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 have potential hazards.
It’s important that businesses understand what automation really means before setting off down this path. Data Center Network Managed Services 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.
Data Center Network Managed Services Challenges
With Data Center Network Managed Services 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. Data Center Network 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
With Data Center Network Managed Services 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 where automation will add 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.
Data Center Network Managed Services
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