Data center automation is one of the most prevalent areas today when it comes to IT spending. In fact, data center automation is included in about 50 percent of all spending plans in IT organzations in the United States. This puts data center automation firmly in the top 10 priorities for IT spending.

Why is automation becoming such a priority? To be sure, automation makes some big promises. Automation is said to not only improve service levels, but to free up resources that can be then used to invest in data center infrastructure.

In fact, data center automation is becoming a necessity. When you combine low cost servers, tends toward consolidation and the increasing demands of operations, automation is the last best hope for reigning in the chaos that comes with a data center. In addition, virtualization is one of the key components of being an adaptive and flexible enterprise. Virtualization is almost necessary if service oriented architecture and virtualization are to be fully and effeciently implemented.

Still, data center automation is a rather broad category. Originally, data center automation applications were simply provisioning tools used for server management. Today, data center management is a much broader area. It brings in server administration, maintenance of applications, management for stoage and more. It's no surprise, then, that adoption of data center automation is growing, when you look at all of the various aspects it includes.

There are data center automation products available from many well-known and respected vendors in the IT field. Computer Associates offers data center automation solutions, as does HP. While some of these solutions tend to be a bit proprietary and focused on a particular vendor's product, most have applicaitons outside of that narrow focus. Indeed, if a product can't stretch into multiple areas it becomes much less useful, at least to a heterogeneous environment.

Data center automation must be personalized and customized, if it is to be effective. Some automation efforts won't make sense in some data centers. For example, virtualization is not always a good option for every application, or even for every organization.

Rather than throwing money randomly into the data center automation bucket, an organization needs to do some real legwork. They need to know what options are available to them, but more importantly they need to be able to decide what options are most useful for their organization.

In order to realize the benefits of data center automation, the project team has to focus efforts where they'll bring the biggest payback. Data center automation efforts are only as good as the process used to implement them.

Lower Operational Costs Through Process Automation

Click here to download the IDC white paper to learn: 

• An introduction to orchestration and process automation
• Making the business case for automation and orchestration
• Process Automation and Orchestration Use Case Scenarios