BladeLogic, Inc., a leading provider of next-generation data center automation software, has announced the findings of a data center automation survey the company conducted in early December. The survey was part of a webinar hosted by BladeLogic entitled, "Turning Your Data Center into a Profit Center.
The interactive online survey was designed to poll the audience on key issues regarding each organization's IT management strategy. As part of the survey, when the audience was asked what were the most critical elements in the data center that demand automation, over 90% of the respondents selected servers and applications. Respondents also overwhelmingly responded that configuration management, over other areas such as service monitoring and problem management, was the top management function that required automation.
"The results of the webinar survey clearly indicate that in order to make the biggest impact on addressing the cost, risk and complexity of managing the data center, automating the management of servers and applications is a priority, said Vick Viren Vaishnavi, vice president of marketing, BladeLogic, and moderator for the webinar. "With attendees representing nearly every major industry segment, the survey responses clearly demonstrate that configuration management is an important priority for most IT organizations.
In the webinar, the executives from E*Trade, General Dynamics and VeriSign discussed their best practices for automating their data center environments and the business benefits they have experienced by doing so. These leading IT executives also shared their data center automation insights, business drivers for automation, key challenges, critical risks and lessons learned. The webinar panelists identified major cost savings in areas such as:
Data center operations costs by improving server to administrator ratios;
Administration costs by consolidating tools and centralizing management of multi-vendor, multi-platform environments;
Provisioning costs by consolidating and centralizing all activities across platforms;
Compliance audits by automating the enforcement of compliance policies;
Software deployment costs through increased accuracy of distributed application rollouts across environments;
Service downtime costs by enabling fast rollback of incorrect configuration changes; and Operating costs by automating manual and error-prone procedures.
Among the many best practices cited by the webinar panelists, the ones that were credited as critical to reducing costs were:
Workload sharing that enables IT organizations to handle operational tasks using lower cost resources;
Shared services that enable a platform agnostic operations model for consistent management across platforms; and
Adopting a policy-based approach to implement and enforce continuous compliance to reduce misconfigurations that cause service downtime