Automation: Better but not yet automatic

Automation has come a long way since the days of running batch jobs on mainframes, but given the complexity of today's distributed networks, the technology still has plenty of growing up to do, experts say.

Network managers today can use automation in innovative ways to reduce costs and labor, and to speed problem resolution when performance degrades or failures occur. Systems management heavyweights IBM and HP have been adding automation to their product suites in an effort to entice customers into supporting their utility computing product road maps.

For example, IBM this week is scheduled to introduce several products within its Tivoli software division designed to lessen the need for manual intervention when monitoring cross-platform systems, applications and service-oriented architectures. The company also plans to ship later this month the second generation of a virtualization package that includes software to automatically provision systems and manage workloads across pools of network, server and storage resources. Separately, HP is set to release software that automatically collects, correlates and delivers data from multiple systems into one Web-based dashboard for analysis and reporting (see related story ).

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Automation has come a long way since the days of running batch jobs on mainframes, but given the complexity of today's distributed networks, the technology still has plenty of growing up to do, experts say.

Network managers today can use automation in innovative ways to reduce costs and labor, and to speed problem resolution when performance degrades or failures occur. Systems management heavyweights IBM and HP have been adding automation to their product suites in an effort to entice customers into supporting their utility computing product road maps.

For example, IBM this week is scheduled to introduce several products within its Tivoli software division designed to lessen the need for manual intervention when monitoring cross-platform systems, applications and service-oriented architectures. The company also plans to ship later this month the second generation of a virtualization package that includes software to automatically provision systems and manage workloads across pools of network, server and storage resources. Separately, HP is set to release software that automatically collects, correlates and delivers data from multiple systems into one Web-based dashboard for analysis and reporting (see related story ).

The automation push isn't limited to big management vendors. Companies such as Enigmatec, Opsware and Opalis, which recently landed another $8.5 million in venture funding, promise to bring more intelligence to automation with cross-platform software designed to take the work out of such tasks as provisioning resources and collecting asset information.

Start-ups such as Corente, iConclude, RealOps and Optinuity emerged in the past two years with tools to help customers automate operational workflows, roll out applications to servers and fix known performance errors - freeing IT staff from redundant daily tasks.

"IT has done a terrific job of automating processes around developing software, but the opposite is true when it comes to automation in operations and production environments," says Jean-Pierre Garbani, a vice president with Forrester Research. "Companies can start to automate with daily tasks, and vendors are starting to deliver some tools to help in that area."

Bill Homa, senior vice president and CIO for Hannaford supermarkets in Scarborough, Maine, uses automation to balance workloads among virtualized server pools and allocate bandwidth to higher-priority traffic on the company's corporate WAN. Homa, who uses products from IBM, Cisco and other vendors, says the process of automating data center operations started some five years ago and significantly eased the more-recent initiative to virtualize servers in two corporate data centers.

"You can't decide you are going to be automated and virtualized tomorrow and have it happen just like that," Homa says. "You need to have a foundation in place, such as an enterprise scheduler, a way to coordinate jobs and a way to move data between systems."

For others, automation is focused on a specific area of data center operations. Lenny Monsour says SunGard's project to automate asset and change management about two years ago enabled the company to become ISO 9001 compliant. SunGard, a provider of software and processing solutions in Durham, N.C., had already been working to document and then align its asset- and change-management processes with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), but by being able to automate the processes with Opsware software, the company also achieved ISO compliance.