Why Datacenter Automation is the need of the hour?

Data, also known as the digital currency, is the most valuable asset of all businesses. Insights drawn from these chunks of data help predict the trends and track customer behaviors. Almost all enterprises maintain one or more data centers to compute and store applications.

The pandemic hit a large part of the global economy and brought down revenues. It accelerated digitization across the industries, bringing AI and automation into the limelight.

In October 2020, IDC jointly released a survey report with Huawei. The report presents an Autonomous Driving Datacenter Network Index, which breaks down the steps towards achieving a fully autonomous datacenter network. The digital empowerment of datacenters can create an easier ecosystem to ensure efficient business outcomes.

Data Center Automation: Why and How?

According to the IDC report, 45% of the respondents identified business continuity and application and resilience as the driving force towards datacenter automation. The COVID-19 crisis created a need for agility and flexibility to hold a place in the competition. Technological developments help achieve this. Thus, automation is a necessary milestone in the world of business.

• Datacenter automation reduces the gap between identifying and troubleshooting problems. This helps in faster recovery and solutions sans any human intervention.
• Although partially automated, many functions of a datacenter require monitoring by humans. Imagine otherwise, when machines can detect a crackdown and perform accordingly without impacting business outcomes. For example, if a machine needs to switch off to prevent overheating, set configurations can take up the task.
• Automation will reduce system outages that can lead to reduced reliability of your customers.
• Softwares can perform repetitive tasks and reduce overload.
• Datacenter automation enables consistent and rapid delivery of services with lesser human errors.

The IDC report lists a step-wise method to develop an automated datacenter. From being a manually operated system to adopting Command Line Interface to analyze. Then it shifts to partial automation and conditional automation. In the end, extensive network automation is achieved, thus craving a self-driven system able to function in every scenario.

There are various cost-effective configuration management tools like Puppet and Ansible. They ensure consistent and agile delivery of products.

Dell introduced an automative IT operations tool called the Dell EMC Powerone. It is built around asymmetrical scaling principles and provides fully automated business outcomes.

Conclusion

AI-driven network intelligence helps integrate applications and ensure maximum agility. Automation provides real-time visibility into the storage and computing systems to evaluate the performance. Predictive analytics will play an essential role in delivering a user-friendly experience.

Automation of datacenters will optimize ITops to increase productivity and decrease downtimes.