– Ben Rosenberg, president and founder of Advanced Systems Concepts (www.advsyscon.com), says:
In today’s economic climate, IT organizations are being forced to balance rising resource demands with constraints on data center space and budgets. They’re turning to virtualization, consolidation and new hardware to address the growing resource demand within the data center.
Consolidation boosts the need to automate manual processes, which has become a key initiative for IT organizations. The result is that job scheduling and workload automation technologies are moving to the center of integrating IT and business application processes with the integration of newer virtualized systems, all the while conserving resources, reducing costs and streamlining IT operations.
The flexibility of virtual environments, whether confined within a physical server or developed as a private or public cloud, presents complexity challenges in which simple run book automation is no longer the solution. Bringing virtualization and the cloud into the automation equation is the most effective way to automatically allocate resources to workload processing where and when it’s needed.
Workload automation solutions have become perfectly situated to assist companies in the transition from legacy technologies to virtualized environments. They serve as the automation engine to integrate applications and IT functions and allow IT operations staff to define and run sets of business processes between widely varied applications and technologies. Workload automation solutions provide behavioral insight like performance, availability and capacity factors that govern the execution of processes by analyzing service behaviors and triggering the appropriate actions.
Workload automation vendors are taking things a step further by marrying both predictive and reactive forms of resource management, provisioning and scheduling to transform the way virtual and cloud environments are managed and governed. This allows enterprises to leverage historical processing information to proactively configure their public or private clouds minute – by – minute, an ever-changing, completely tailored environment.
By ensuring that systems will be rapidly and accurately provisioned and virtualized enterprises can leverage the cloud to rapidly provision its internal infrastructure for upcoming load increases, whenever needed. Cloud-based systems will positively affect their hosts in terms of utilization and power consumption. Since the customer pays only for what it uses, there is an even greater incentive to obtain incremental resources in real time – and to disengage when they are no longer needed.
Today’s data centers and IT environments are at a tipping point, as the move towards virtualized and cloud computing environments will parallel the growth and importance that automation solutions will play in this distributed IT world. The ability to integrate existing infrastructure with newer technologies, all the while proactively provisioning virtualized and cloud systems on the fly via job scheduling and workload automation solutions will provide IT departments with the opportunity to reduce costs, streamline IT operations and increase productivity.
