Networked Enterprise Featured Article

The coalescing trends of cloud computing, Big Data and IT consumerization have transformed the data center into the central hub for everything. To make sure that applications hosted in those data centers are adequately supported, and that the operational infrastructure is as efficient as it can be, enterprise IT should consider implementing savvy automation and dynamic resource allocation strategies.

Effective automation and allocation is carried out via orchestration—a management strategy to tie everything together. This is a platform that ensures that information is flowing between systems efficiently and that the right compute resources are spun up as appropriate to support a given application, just when they’re needed.

And most importantly, these processes need to be customized to an organization’s unique environment.

“When creating any sort of data center automation or orchestration architecture, remember to design around your use case and your business,” said Bill Kleyman, vice president of strategy and innovation at consulting firm MTM Technologies, in a column. “The whole idea here is to simplify business process and create new levels of efficiency. New solutions spanning the entire data center allow you to proactively manage very dynamic workloads and a diverse set of users. You’ll create better visibility into the distributed data center and be able to truly utilize the capacity of the cloud. Through it all, you’ll allow your content to flow more efficiently and allow the user to be much more productive.”

Automation and orchestration are becoming more and more necessary with the advent of high-density computing and greater levels of multi-tenancy; servers are hosting more users and more workloads.

“Data center administrators don’t have the time to configure individual blades,” Kleyman explained. “Now, hardware and server profiles are built in seconds. Admins only need to insert a new blade and allow the server layer automation to take over. New technologies allow administrators to create powerful follow-the-sun data center models where hardware automatically re-provisions itself for the appropriate set of new users.”

When coupled with a load-balancing solution, the platform can dynamically port users to a data site that is most efficient for the workload and has the available resources. All of this is done through orchestration and automation policy.

Implementing orchestration should be seen as a layered process. It’s not enough to perform simple application server mapping.

For instance, on the software layer, new technologies are able to look at applications running within the data center or within the cloud and help automate and control them.

“Physical and virtual load balancers, for example, can see that a certain type of application is receiving too many connections,” Kleyman explained. “From there, an automated process will allow the administrator to provision another instance of the application or a new server which will host the app.”

Platforms like CloudPlatfom, OpenStack and Eucalyptus help automate and create true cloud orchestration. From there organizations are able to granularly control hosts, clusters, various zones and even core virtual machine resources.

Then there’s the virtualization and hypervisor layer, which bridges the data center and the cloud. Automation and orchestration tools aim to directly integrate with the virtual layer to better control resources, virtual services delivery and the virtual workloads themselves. And, automation solutions like Puppet help create a unified management and automation approach to heterogeneous environments – cloud, virtual, and physical – to automate the management of compute, storage and network resources across all of them.

“For example, [using automation], you can send VMs from one data center to another,” Kleyman said. “Or, you can push entire repositories from an on-premise data center to a cloud facility all from the virtual layer. You can even integrate security policy, user control and application automation into your hypervisor.”

When it comes to the cloud automation and extension layers, many tools place governance and advanced policy control directly into the hands of cloud admins to control security aspects of their cloud.

And finally, some services bridge the gap between IT and control engineers for connecting, managing, and automating industrial networks and control systems. As networks converge, the physical infrastructure becomes even more critical to support the demands of real-time control, data collection and device configuration.

It should be remembered that automation networks are susceptible to interruptions which often result in downtime, and lost production. Industrial automation infrastructure systems like those from Panduit can bridge the gap between IT and controls engineers by providing optimized building-block architectures for connecting enterprises, industrial networks and control systems.

“Many large data center providers are looking at ways to align data center power, cooling, environmental and overall management all together to create one intelligent control layer,” Kleyman said. “The future may very well aim to directly unify cloud automation with data center resources control and delivery.”