* New capabilities aimed at automating database and middleware management and speeding application deployment
Self-sufficiency is generally a good trait, and not just for this fall’s crop of college freshmen.
We know, for example, that autonomy in the world of IT is a good thing, a very good thing indeed if you want to reduce the opportunity for error. With this in mind, vendors for years have been working toward developing self-provisioning, self-optimizing and self-monitoring products, for example, while enterprise IT managers have been weaning themselves of the manual tasks that long defined their roles. Within the highly virtualized, dynamic data center, most everyone agrees that the more automation, the better.
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HP plays to this theme with its Business Service Automation (BSA) portfolio, new enhancements for which it announced last week.
With automation technology gained from its late August acquisition of Stratavia, HP has added deployment, configuration and management solutions for enterprise databases, middleware and packaged applications. The goal is providing a unified view that enables IT to break down silos and simplify application deployment and management in hybrid environments, says Kristin Brennan, senior product marketing manager, server automation, HP Software & Solutions.
HP Server Automation 9.0, for example, includes new functionality called Application Delivery Manager (ADM). With ADM, IT organizations can eliminate manual or scripted procedures organizations typically use today for moving code from dev to test and from test to production, she says. “The problem with these processes is that they can take a long time and are really error prone — if someone forgets to change a file or documentation, the application can work in test but fail in production.”
The ADM feature set is designed to let enterprises model multitier, multicomponent applications and set policies for how those applications should be configured in test, development and production. As they establish the model, enterprises can take configuration best practices into account, eliminate manual handoffs and, ultimately, expedite deployment, Brennan describes.
Server Automation is one piece of the multifaceted HP BSA suite, which also includes products for automating the management of network devices, client devices, storage and, now, databases and middleware. Plus, with HP Operations Orchestration, another BSA component, enterprise IT can orchestrate the whole she-bang via IT process automation.
Notably, enterprises tend not to embrace automation in one fell swoop. Rather, they standardize and automate at the element level first. “Then as they get more mature, they automate across IT domains,” Brennan says.
“Virtualization is driving a lot of that need, requiring coordination and handoff between different teams and tying that into service management,” she adds. “Once people get that nailed down, and have standards and automation in place, they can begin offering infrastructure as a server and applications in the cloud.”
