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

Despite the fact that the new Google competitor Cuil is considered to be more energy efficient (because the black page background seems to be a big energy saver - if they get as big as Google of course <LINK>), Google is cutting edge when talking about the energy revolution. Sites like http://www.blackle.com or http://www.ecofree.org/ which claim to provide a more energy efficient Google search interface (at least on CRTs), by having had the black background idea ahead of cuil, are a minor issue to this revolution.

Google committet to be carbon-neutral by end of 2007 <READ HERE>, a goal, which they just missed, but as you might guess, they are working on that issue. Google needs to do somethink, as long as some of us believe that one Google search consumes as much as a 11-watt light bulb <READ HERE>.

There are rumours/news that Google buys large chunks of land (800 acres in Oklahoma <LINK> and 1000 acres in Iowa <LINK>). So what to build on a site being 4 kilometer long and 4 kilometer wide? A fancy new datacenter with some Hi-Tech, sophisticated cooling facility? Housings and facilities for an army of human taggers to annotate the whole earth? A theme park?

Nope, my I guess is the big Google has other plans for using these site. A hint could be found on a page Googles homepage titles “Powering a clean energy revolution“, where Google describes their effort toward reaching the goal of beeing carbon neutral. I like especially the part, where the author name some companies Google and Google.org are cooperating with. Do you see the point? It’s obvious.

So in the near future Google will not only provide grid-like computing services with GAE, but they will provide carbon-free computing services and this might be putting some pressure on some people investing billions of dollars at the moment in build hi-tech datacenters. Sounds like Google not only wants to index, map and annotate the earth, but they want to save it.

Good luck.

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

Hi folks,

we survived the 4th Frankfurt International Dragon boat Race, that was held from 30.5. to 1.6. in Frankfurt Germany, where our head office is located. Beside some sunburns and aching arms and legs, the whole team and our supporters, families and friends had a lot of fun. As being an IT projectmanager, the first thing that comes to my mind on monday morning is: What are the ‘lessons learned’? Beside the fact that water sport is wet sport.

If you look at the photos you’ll see why this sport is booming all around the world: Dragon boat racing is all about teamwork. 20 people are working together and the most important point is not sheer ‘power’, but much more to stay in sync and to follow the stroke. And this is really not that easy with 6 boats starting at the same time, 18 paddlers plus drummer and steerer in each boat, counting the strokes or screaming ‘GO-GO-GO’.

OK, the distance is just 250 meter or about 120 strokes, but I promise, you learn how to manage and use your power because you are part of a team and anyone is trying to be a part of the success in the end - really great team building and also great fun for all of us. In the end nobody cared about our position 42 of 67 Teams participating the ‘Corporate Cup’. That was more than expected, because we only had one training session to prepare. Maybe there’s also a higher meaning in our final position 42, but I don’t dare to ask “Deep Thought” about that.

Next year, we hopefully will take this event more seriously and to advance from the middle to the first third of the starter field.

Roland