Simple Tips To Automate Your Data Center

By Author: Alice Coope
Total Articles: 213
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Operational efficiency and overall cost reduction are important factors in today's data center. Today’s data center has to contend with more technology, more different applications and more physical servers than ever before. Managing your data center inventory can be a involves higher levels of service at a lower cost. Data center automation is a great way to cut costs while increasing service levels. Automation takes a variety of repetitive, manual tasks and turns them into automated processes.

Automating your data center involves automating all labor intensive tasks, which consequently reduces the costs. It also increases consistency, reliability, availability and reduce risk exposure and resulting outages and breaches. Here are a few simple steps to help automate your data center

• Assign Responsibility
Data center compliance needs to be kept in mind when automating your data center. It makes good sense to make someone accountable and ensure that the given task is completed. This will ...
... assure that the project gets done and you’ll have a point person for each step in the process.

• Track the processes
Although there may be some processes that look like they can’t be automated, look at the overall picture. Track the time that people are spending for running processes manually or re-running because of errors. This will help ascertain where you can save the most time and also find out who is doing what.

• Keep it Simple
Look at the schedule for a month and break it into smaller pieces. Daily, weekly, monthly and stand-alone vs. resource dependencies are good places to start. Do the easy things first. Schedule all of those daily reports and then check them off your list.

• Record the Important Stuff
This will include your month end processes. Find someone who knows these dependencies and get them documented. Although there is plenty of knowledge in the data center, in most cases, this knowledge is not shared. While the schedule knowledge is all inside people’s heads, it is important for the same to be recorded.

Data center automation is an on-going process as there are always improvements to make. The main objective is to automate the data center operations less downtime because of errors.

With a widely accepted data center automation standard, progress in this area often comes in the form of vendor agreements. IT organizations need to pay attention when selecting an IT automation technology, and make sure the environment is open to change.

Also read on - data center infrastructure management, virtualization software