How much automation is enough?

Two of the chief reasons for hiring an outsourcing provider are management and automation. Recently, there has been a movement to bring those two functions together, and we’d like to know what you think about it.

For the next two weeks, Enterprise Management Associates is conducting a survey of IT and outsourcing professionals to find out their attitudes toward the automation of specific IT management tasks. The survey (see below for link) seeks your insight on how much automation is needed – and how much is too much.

The impetus for the survey is the growing movement toward IT management automation. Several major hardware and software vendors – including IBM/Tivoli, HP, Sun and Microsoft – are currently promoting automation initiatives designed to make IT management more efficient and less resource-consuming. Several of the major outsourcing providers have expressed interest in implementing these initiatives under their own families of services. Some have already begun.

Historically, however, many IT organizations have resisted attempts at management automation. Although there have been policy- and rules-based management systems on the market for years, some IT administrators were philosophically opposed to the idea of enabling their systems to make service-critical “decisions” without operator intervention. Others simply didn’t trust the tools to work properly, or felt they didn’t have time to build the policies or rules that would make the systems run.

With improved “intelligent” technology emerging on the market – and in a struggling economy that begs for more efficient use of resources – has the time for management automation now arrived? Do the old attitudes of IT and outsourcing managers still hold true in the face of better tools and smaller IT staffs? Let’s take a brief look at some of these automation initiatives and what they have to offer.

* IBM Autonomic Computing

This initiative is designed to add a level of self-diagnostic, self-healing and management awareness to computer systems. The idea is to enable computers, networks and storage devices to work together to automatically identify problems such as low capacity or poor performance, and then initiate change to rectify them. The initiative takes its name from the human autonomic nervous system, which monitors the body and makes automatic adjustments and repairs as needed.

* HP Adaptive Infrastructure

 HP’s management initiative has some of the same automation goals as the IBM initiative, but its focus is on mapping business goals to IT infrastructure performance. Essentially, the HP initiative is designed to help networked systems make automated changes and adjustments based on business priorities, ensuring reliability and performance on the most critical systems and applications.

* Sun N1

Sun’s N1 architecture is the company’s vision for the next generation of computing. The architecture adds capabilities such as automated provisioning, virtualization, policy management and monitoring to the networked computing environment. Like the HP initiative, a key goal of N1 is to optimize the resources that serve the most business-critical services via an intelligent data center infrastructure.

* Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative

Microsoft’s initiative is an effort to create a common management architecture that could be embraced by hardware, software and service vendors. The basic idea is to enable these disparate systems, applications and services to become “aware” of each other, so that they can work together to automatically resolve problems without human intervention.

While these initiatives are very different, their end goal is very similar – to create an IT environment that manages itself, automating actions to prevent problems and ensuring that capacity, bandwidth and other resources are always available to mission-critical services. Yet, IT administrators have been handling these functions themselves for decades. The question is: how badly do IT organizations want this sort of automation, and how extensive do they want it to be?

You can weigh in on these questions by clicking on the link https://www.enterprisemanagement.com/survey/automation-enterprise/ and answering our brief survey. We’ll share some of the survey results with you in a future column.