The modern data center is much more than storing a large amount of data. It is the backbone where operations and the entire IT infrastructure are centralized, and must be capitalized on in terms of flexibility, scalability, security and performance. This is an area that has evolved a lot and is being transformed through virtualization and the cloud. Optimizing data center processes is crucial to eliminating silos, enabling business continuity, streamlining and simplifying the work of IT professionals, accelerating access to data and systems by users, and ensuring that everything works securely, without problems, maximum availability and minimum costs. Furthermore, it should allow IT professionals to focus on processes/tasks that can bring added value to their organization’s business.
Solutions such as Cisco UCS Director, Red Hat Ansible or VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) were specifically designed to simplify all of this, making it possible to manage, automate and orchestrate physical and virtual resources, networks and storage from a single location.
Discover 4 ways to optimize data center processes in your organization:
- Creation of workflows for automatic execution of tasks and processes. Creating workflows brings you several types of benefits: the guarantee that all processes are followed “by the letter” in your data center; obtaining accurate and up-to-date information on the status of the data center; and, ultimately, optimizing operations and processes in the data center. It must not be forgotten that data centers are complex and constantly evolving structures, suffering daily interventions that add, remove, exchange, modify and even deactivate components. Workflows should therefore be created to automatically carry out tasks and processes that are critical to daily operations and which are essential to keep the data center secure and highly available, eliminating time-consuming, ineffective and error-prone manual work.
- Provision of service catalog for users. A unified and consistent catalog of services allows users to request and provision infrastructure and application resources correctly and without waste. The service catalog must be on top of the automation layer, translating into logical and measurable services that are simple to request and manage. Important: this catalog can include a wide range of IT and non-IT services, allowing end users to use them easily. The provision of these resources and/or applications may also be subject to an approval cycle, in order to ensure that users do not make requests that exceed the capacity of the infrastructure or that this resource and/or application should not be provisioned at a given time. Another aspect to consider in service catalogs is the modular resources offered as an orchestration layer. In fact, what reality shows us is that resources are limited and therefore it is necessary to avoid that the company is trapped in a solution that cannot be scaled according to the needs at each moment, growing or decreasing in accordance with the dynamic requirements dictated by IT and the market. Just remember that the back-office itself is in a constant state of change, so the lack of control can result in performance problems for front-office applications. In extreme cases, this can lead to costly service outages and, consequently, frustrated users – which could be both your company’s employees and end customers.
- Provision of multi-tenant infrastructures. This is a good strategy if your company needs to make a logical separation of the infrastructure by several departments, managing to maintain total cost control. Through a data center with a multi-tenant infrastructure, you can simply distribute different types of resources among the different tenants, whether they are a server or a certain logical amount of resources, or, at the limit, just carry out a separation in terms of security.
- Infrastructure scalability. Currently, companies are often faced with the need to increase their infrastructure, whether for a seasonal peak in workflows (for example, the end of the year) or to ensure recovery from a disaster. The dilemma always involves acquiring more resources for your infrastructure, or adopting a different strategy and evolving towards an “as a Service” model. Through the orchestration and automation tools, it is possible to guarantee, in a fully automated way, that your organization’s service continues to operate within normal limits and in a totally transparent manner, regardless of whether it is a peak need or a recovery from a disaster. Thanks to these tools, these “extensions” of resources can either operate in another data center of your organization or a partner, or in the public cloud, allowing total cost control and changing to an Opex-based financial model.
Workflow, Orchestration and Automation: the recipe for success
Using workflows, orchestration and automation are the keys to optimizing data center processes, making them more agile, robust and consistent – and adapting them step by step to your organization’s business needs for simplified operation, increased performance , security and high availability. However, the way to get there involves several fronts that must be analyzed in order to find the perfect balance that leads to the best solution for each case.
To move forward, you must have a trusted partner that will allow you to obtain the necessary help and guidance tailored to your needs. This is a passionate subject about which there is much to say and talk about – and at Warpcom we will be delighted to exchange some ideas with you. Our experienced and certified Data Center & Multi Cloud team works with the main references in this field, including names such as Red Hat, Cisco and VMware.
Get in touch with us and find out how to implement the best strategy to optimize your company’s data center processes.
