Automating IT processes to simplify server challenges

STORAGE NEEDS grow 53% year after year, according to the , and many companies don`t know exactly how much storage they have or how much they will need for the future.

Brandon Atkinson, director of Business Development for Business Service Automation (BSA) for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, revealed at the ITWeb HP Storage Essentials Forum in Johannesburg recently that businesses are facing increasingly complex challenges in their IT environment.

HP`s research has found that businesses are dealing with a scale and complexity in their IT infrastructure that is unprecedented. This is driving the need for automation to make storage management easier, faster and less risky.

Atkinson believes that companies need to implement comprehensive automation for their networks, servers and storage while integrating all processes together across the entire data system, which he says will allow IT to manage at the service level, as opposed to the element tool level.

Atkinson says: "Automation technology is not a big bang solution where you just plug it in and are instantly automated. Rather, we see customers gradually adopting automation over time in a strategic way. They start where they have the greatest pain, for example, heterogeneous storage management, and then move on to automate their server, network, and client infrastructures."

HP highlighted its Storage Essentials Enterprise Edition solution, which is aimed at addressing storage challenges by automating key tasks, enforcing and logging certain storage processes, implementing ITIL best practice solutions, and supporting next-generation offerings like self-service storage.

Matthias Bayer, Europe, Middle East and Africa presales technical consultant for HP Storage Essentials, explained that the solution makes storage resource management more efficient. In the past, he said, the application administrator would have to determine the root cause of a problem by consulting different IT divisions, each of which would likely refer him to another department. This alone was an extremely time-consuming process. Automated processes and easy detection of problems would save a great deal of time and reduce operational cost.

, head of HP Solutions Architecture, adds that SA`s skills shortage is another compelling reason for businesses to get automated processes in place. "Employing highly skilled resources is currently a significant challenge, locally and internationally. What you need to do is harness the knowledge of the experts within your organisation and create the automation flows that a lesser skilled resource will be able to execute. If we do not start adopting automation today, it`s only going to get more challenging to meet the demands of business in the future."



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