You’re Terminated? Hardly…Automating IT Simply Makes Life Easier
Rise of the Machines
The movie “The Terminator” paints a picture of computers and automation
Don't Panic: Machines and Automation Don't Mean Termination
as a bad thing. But nothing can be further from the truth…Unlike the bleak future portrayed in the movie, one thing is becoming perfectly clear: machines do things faster, more efficiently, and with fewer mistakes. And that’s good news - especially when you’re managing IT resources.
A Brief History
From the first time our ancestors wrapped their opposable thumbs around a stick and used it for increased leverage, reach or impact - humans have been figuring out how to build machines to make life easier. Some will claim to miss the “good old days” but there’s a reason why everyone eventually ends up adopting forms of automation that are effective. The most successful machines are the ones that introduce a fundamentally different way of doing things. This is true even when it takes a long time for people to discover those new ways of doing things.
For instance, the first cars were literally “horseless carriages.” They looked just like a normal carriage, but instead of a horse, they had a motor with a chain driving the rear wheels. Since you couldn’t steer the motor like you could a horse, the early cars adapted the tiller concept from a boat. The tiller was pretty quickly swapped for a new feature - the steering wheel. However, it took a long while for the “body-on-frame” construction technique of horse drawn carriages to give way to the more effective monocoque construction with its low weight and low center of gravity. Computer systems, and how we build them, are no different.
A New Revolution: Automating Computer Systems
When RAID storage arrays became the dominant storage approach, IT organizations pretty quickly stopped trying to manage and control the low-level formatting of the disks. However, it took a long time for those same IT organizations to stop freaking out about where exactly on the disk their LUNs were located. Honestly, it also took array manufacturers a while to figure out that striping everything to make all I/O average was not what people were looking for. Eventually, vendors figured out that it really was better to tell the array what the I/O requirements where and let the array decide where to place the data (not coincidentally, EMC’s FAST technology takes this to a whole new level).
The Next Revolution: Unified Computer Platforms
Unified platforms (those that combine network, storage and compute elements) represent another opportunity for doing things differently. There are some benefits to be gained from the hardware integration alone - just like there were benefits from replacing a horse with a motor. There are further benefits to be gained by using and automating the provisioning capabilities of the platform. For instance, you can use software to logically configure a blade with the needed resources when it’s required rather than designing and procuring a physical server.
It’s only when you rethink your overall process of managing capacity and allocation of that capacity that you can truly achieve exponential gains in efficiency and agility. To that end, EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0is introducing a service-driven automation approach to managing and provisioning capacity leveraging the VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform. It allows you to “grade” your Vblock resources according to the services you want to offer, then provisions from the infrastructure according to the requirements you specify. Not only does this execute provisioning faster and with fewer errors, it reduces the amount of time figuring out what to provision in the first place.
Wrapping it Up
As you take your journey to the next-generation of the computing infrastructure, you should embrace the revolution taking place and not be put off. The reality is not portrayed by movies like The Terminator. The fact of the matter is, this next-generation of automation is going to make your lives better.
And as you approach this next-generation, you really have to ask yourself - do you want a tiller, or a steering wheel? Do you want to trade time spent executing tasks for time spent micro-managing provision decisions? Or would you like to spend your time on more productive things like managing resource capacity.
Whatever you do, make sure you don’t try to manage your next-generation infrastructure with an outdated approach to automation.
I’d love to know what you think. Let’s keep the conversation going!!!
I’ll be back,
Phil
Change and Configuration, Cloud, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Population, Data Center Automation and Compliance, Dependency Mapping, Network Management, Private Cloud, Service Management, Service Providers, Storage Resource Management (SRM), Virtualization Management
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