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.
