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Adventures in Data Center Automation

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Dec 3 2007   11:41PM GMT

Availability Management, so what’s been going on here?



Posted by: Ryan Shopp
DataCenter, Netuitive, HP Software, IBM Tivoli, Symantec, BMC, Microsoft Windows, CA, EMC, Quest Software, Integrien

As mentioned in my November 2007 round-up, I haven’t given any love to automation products watching for outages, faults or other availability of the infrastructure oriented events.

Part of the reason for this oversight is these days most data centers are locked into a product from the “big 4″ vendors; BMC (Performance, formerly Patrol), CA (formerly Aprisma), HP (NNM, Operations), IBM (NetView, formerly Micromuse) or the “upcoming 5″ vendors EMC, Oracle, Microsoft, Quest Software and Symantec due to their overall IT infrastructure architecture and strategy.

But their are other innovative players in town to consider for replacement or complimenting these bigger guys. Self-learning technologies are being advanced by companies like Netuitive and Integrien. These technologies are focused on monitoring real-time events and then leveraging mathematical algorithms to estimate baselines and set thresholds in an attempt to accurately predict system and service level degradation.

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Nonstopper  |   Dec 9 2007   10:03PM GMT

To be complete this view needs to account for the power and cooling infrastructure upon which most apps are ultimately dependent for availability especailly since fault-tolerant computing proved too expensive for most apps outside the very most mission-critical stock exchange or ATM types, HP pushed hardware reliability to highest levels and internet apps mushroomed in number and insidieously in mission-critical importance.

**Ryan’s Update** Interesting point, this maybe should be another Data Center Infrastructure by Category…something like Physical Infrastructure. I’m not very familiar with Power (including UPS), HVAC etc being managed via IP. I guess also in that category would be the physical infrastructure like Racks, Cabling, etc). I think your referring to products from players like Avocent, APC, Powerware, etc. The problem is where do I draw the line as now were getting into more hardware then software in addition to things that can’t be managed from my experience by anything but barcodes or manual (human eyes) assessment. Please help me understand more here before I extend the model…I have to draw an automation line somewhere and I’m hoping to keep it focused on software.