Month in Review - December 2007

Thanks for all your feedback and ideas during this months postings. Keep them coming.
Development of Data Center Automation Blueprint (DCAB)

• What are the Six Functional Areas of Data Center Automation - first stab at a graphic attempting to capture they key areas of management software to help automate the data center.
• Next pass on Data Center Automation “Blueprint” - based on some feedback and further brainstorming took another pass at a graphic.

Reviewing Details within some of the DCAB functional areas

• So let’s start to dig into each of these 6 functional areas: Availability and Notification - first pass at looking at monitoring the availability of data center assets.
• Digging into each of these 6 functional areas: Performance and Capacity - first pass at looking at monitoring the performance of data center assets.
• Recent activities in Configuration Management, tis’ the season on webinars - looking around a noticed lots of the CCM vendors have been busy giving webinars.
• Availability Management, so what’s been going on here? - quick mention on what is going on here.

Overall DCA Trends and Observations

• Pondering Cisco and their play in Data Center Automation… - after reading some other blogs it got me thinking about Cisco and DCA.
• Data Center Virtualization Automation/Management is becoming very, very congested - a list of virtualization management players that span all areas of the DCAB
• 2 of 10 are “disruptive” according to Gartner - CMDB’s and Process Orchestration mentioned by Gartner.
• Great IBM Tivoli ESM Recap, quick stab at mapping to DCAB - read a nice blog posting from John Willis and inspired me to take a pass at mapping it.
• BarCampESM, January 18-20th, 2008 - learned about this upcoming meeting
• Great write-up on Security Management activities this year - quick summary of M&A activities in Security Management

Out with 2007 and in with 2008, Happy New Year!