Chris Boos on Automation

After blogging some months about automation, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about the definition of automation. Nearly everyone seems to have an “Automation solution” in place. So what is that Automation-hype all about?

The word Automation is derived from the ancient Greek language and means that something is operating or moving self dictated, which gives quite a good idea about what we are looking at.

Automation might have started with the invention of the wheel decades ago, is omnipresent in many branches and industries and a substancial factor for producing any kind of goods and services today.  Robots and Automated Manufacturing systems and During my journey through the world of IT Service Management, I encountered various kinds of Automation. From my point of view most vendors will agree to the following categorization:

Automated IT-Service Management / ITSM Process Automation

This is a umbrella term for solutions focused on supporting Service Management workflow, usually based on best practices and standards like ITIL or Cobit. Subordinated terms are Support Automation or Run-Book-Automation.

Support Automation

Support Automation refers to software packages are focused on supporting the routine work of help desk personnel. Think of it as a kind of script integration in existing Service desk, CRM application or even in Knowledge Base Applications for Automated Self Service. Examples for this category are products like CA SupportBridge or mValent Integrity, which is focused on Change Management Automation.

Run-Book-Automation

Products belonging to this category are very popular nowadays. They allow to define a set of ITSM-Workflows through a Graphical user interface. Good products offer a multitude of connectors and interfaces to existing ITSM suites like OpenView, Tivoli or Unicenter. Examples for this kind of products are Opalis Integration Server, BMC Realops or HP/Opsware/IConclude Opsforce.

IT-Workload Automation

These concepts stem from early (mainframe) days of computing, where batch processing or job Scheduling were a big improvement, allowing operator to “automate” recurring tasks. Though modern products are highly evolutionized through offering multi platform compatibility, event-triggering, policy-based execution and configured to smart coloured visual GUIs. These products are gaining ground in modern service oriented environments and are represented through products from big vendors like CA/Cybermation and IBM Tivoli or smaller competitors like ASG and UC4

Data Center Automation

This is the hottest topic today, as companies have started to deploy myriad of servers into an extremely fast growing number of data centers all over the world, bringing high demand for automated tools to provision, change and manage vast numbers of components. Any of the large vendor offers such a tool or suite and - you guessed it - here is place, where the bucks go. HP know that story. Products in this category are former Opsware Server Automation System, BMC BladeLogic, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and to bring in some cloudy haze modern and cool products/players like Elastra or 3Tera/Applogic which allow to mix data center and cloud offerings.

Roland

Turns out, supporting Mozilla’s firefox project wasn’t good enough for Google: they’ve got their own shiny new browser called Chrome now. It was all over the newspaper headlines today. Most commentaries featured it as “The return of the browser wars”. Funny as it seems that Web 2.0 finally brought us browser war 2.0, my prediction is that we will look at it from a different angle in retrospect: It’s another important step to kill our old fashioned notion of an operating system. The interesting thing about Chrome is the new virtual machine included. It’s called V8 and has been developed by guys who already created the the Java virtual machine for SUN.

So don’t compare Chrome to Internet Explorer – compare it to Midori.

Midori is a rumoured strategic project at Microsoft –a serious operating system beyond Windows. It seems to be more than a research study, though there is little official information. SD Times claimed that “Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors.” An operating platform rather than operating system, allowing us to make use of all those multicore-processors, multiprocessor-machines and multi-machine computing clouds.

In the old days, there was a single hardware, a single CPU, and a single operating system. On top of that, many applications could be executed. Things started to change with the Java virtual machine (JVM). Now the Java software effectively ran on the JVM, ignoring the underlying OS. Then there was virtualization: today, you can easily run several OS on a single computer using vmware. Sometimes, virtual machines are already used to eliminate unexpected interactions between applications: We got enough computing power to deploy less trusted applications into their own virtual machines – so we do it and eliminate hard to locate side effects. Who knows – we might just as well end up with each application running within its own VM. Now Google gives us V8 – the new operating platform included in their browser. Applications like Google Apps will use it as their operating platform and ignore the underlying OS. Others will continue to develop Flex application running on Adobe’s Flash-plug-in. Different platform, same thing.

And parallel computing on the desktop has just begun. It will add to the trend. In the future, a single hardware will have multiple CPUs with even more cores, and any number of operating platforms layered on top of it. It’s going to solve some compatibility issues and create a number of new ones: keeping all those layers of operating platforms up to date, for example.

Chrome’s V8 will be one of those operating platforms. Thus, Google moves from controlling the entrance to cyberspace to controlling the entrance to the V8 operating platform. It’s the next step beyond cyberspace.

“Burning Chrome” is a collection of short stories by Sci-Fi author William Gibson. It was published following his novel “Neuromancer” in which he coined the term “cyberspace”. So yes, Chrome is the logical next step after cyberspace.

Everyone knows the big four auditors (Deloitte, Ernst&Young, KPMG, PWC) for a long time. In recent times, while our favourite topic becomes more important from week to week, there are the IT Service management big four aka BMC, CA, HP and IBM (alphabetical order!).

As Erin Joyce on enterprisestorageforum.com describes <here> EMC is integrating two solutions they acquired in recent years (Smarts in 2005 and Voyence 2007). Voyence Control is a solution for Automated Configuration and Change Management, while EMC Smarts is a solution for fault isolation and root cause analysis. In combination with the in 2006 acquired nLayers solution for Application Discovery, which is now labelled as EMCs ADM (Application Discovery Manager), it looks like they added ITSM and BSM (Business Service Management) to their interesting product portfolio.

So if I were Cisco and had 45bn$ to spend, I definitly would take a deep look into EMC. I guess together with Cisco, we would see the Big Five.

Roland

Not just for all of us who have to deal with day-to-day operation of IT the topic of automation seems to be of great interest. Naturally the interest of people maintaining systems and services becomes the interest of vendors. I had the pleasure of attending the HP BTO Talk in Frankfurt and was glad to find out, that automation itself is the main focus of HP´s system management efforts.

For the first time since HP acquired OpsWare in 2007 I was actually able to see the platform in a customer environment. Swisscom attended the event and demonstrated their efforts in network automation. More impressive was the presentation of Mr. Rossa from Wien IT, who was able to show how standard changes and standard procedures in provisioning were captured into the automation suite.

I have seen more complex provisioning environments but in the HP presentation on the OpsWare platform I could get a glimpse at the visualization and reporting offered behind the scene. Coming up from the network layer they really found a very intuitive way to show what is actually available and going on in an IT infrastructure.

The strategic presentation offered by Mr. Winkler from HP put forward automation as the key to the HP software strategy. I consider this corporate understanding to be a major advantage in market development – much more than all the thousand features us techies like to talk about every day. So in my opinion HP´s view of the future is absolutely correct:

Good IT operation is, when you see nothing of it

I was a little amazed to see that the actual automation of operational tasks as well as tasks dealing with incidents and problems are still in a fairly basic state. All the cute things we have been talking about in this blog are still in the vision only. Simple rules and actions can be applied but that is all. Compared to the field of automated deployment, standard changes and predefined tasks the automated reaction to upcoming problems is not in an advanced stage. Even though there obviously is a really fancy interface for cross platform command execution. This interface could actually be hooked up to an automation engine like aAE and voila, commands would go out to the world. I actually think we will give this a try.

All in all I have to say that the visualization is impressive and the strategic alignment of the softwarestack is convincing. I will keep a close eye on the things happening around there – even though integration all the new acquisitions may still take some time.