Data Center Automation
Register Now:
Next Meeting of Federal Server Automation User Group Meeting
Learn how to automate the creation and provisioning of virtual machines
at the next meeting on September 23rd. Topics NOW posted at the
website.
Business units demand that you shift from managing discrete devices to delivering enterprise business
services. These complex services usually include hundreds of infrastructure elements, distributed across
several data centers, and managed by different teams and systems. To be able to respond quickly to market
and organizational needs, business units also demand greater flexibility, agility, and accountability,
which means you need to manage change more effectively and meet compliance regulations for your IT
infrastructure.
HP Server Automation software goes beyond managing servers independently. It provides server lifecycle
management for enterprise servers and applications, from establishing a baseline of applications, servers
and local storage to provisioning, patching to configuration management, script execution to compliance
assurance. HP Server Automation also automates operations and processes across disparate IT teams and systems.
HP Server Automation provides a comprehensive view of the applications, server and storage dependencies
and relationships. It is integrated with other HP Data Center Automation software for a single view of your
enterprise application environment.
With HP Server Automation, you get automated, physical and virtual server management, helping you follow
best practices and perform work quickly and correctly, giving you more time to develop the new applications
required by your business. HP Server Automation delivers what you need to manage your server and application
environment under today's business demands.
August Schell implements the latest technologies to streamline systems administration and eliminate
time-consuming non-synchronized activities, producing measurable efficiencies across the organization.
Our Data Center Automation capabilities include the support of internal Cloud Computing infrastructures using
Hewlett Packard's suite of products (previously Opsware) and VMware virtualization as building blocks. These
solutions allow you to take control over how your physical and virtual servers are configured, deployed and
managed.
Benefits of Data Center Automation
Visibility and Control
Data Center Automation lets you manage your entire server
environment, physical and virtual, to gain unprecedented visibility into servers, storage, and operations.
The automated agent deployment features let you quickly establish a baseline of all server, local storage,
operating system, installed packages, and configuration data in the data model. This visibility and control
helps you make sure you have the right amount of storage for your business service, manage the overall
compliance of your business service, and accelerate incident resolution since you now have a dynamic map
of all of the relationships and dependencies impacting your business service.
The server explorer facilitates easy browsing of individual servers, server groups, storage, operating
systems, patches, and applications. The global shell and Windows PowerShellª interfaces let you run automation
scripts easily and with enhanced security features across multiple servers at once. All administrator actions
are stored and digitally signed in a central data repository for performing compliance and IT reporting. With
a record of all changes and real-time server, local storage, and business application views, HP Server
Automation provides deep visibility and increased control for your business service.
Powerful Process Workflows and ITIL Support
To implement process-based initiatives such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or to
facilitate cross-tier activities, you need to integrate server operation tasks across multiple teams and systems.
HP Server Automation lets you create and customize workflows that integrate IT processes across various teams
and tools. The workflow sequences coordinate every task within the process while creating an audit trail. You
also get several out-of-the-box workflows, including end-to-end provisioning, ITIL-change and incident-management
workflows, and application promotion to production workflows. Integration adapters are available for integration
to several IT systems and applications for fast process workflow creation. HP Server Automation provides several
out-of-the-box workflows to implement standard ITIL processes, such as Change Management, Incident Management,
Problem Management, and Release Management.
Using the process automation framework from HP Server Automation, you can enforce, document, and log your
processes and subtasks, decreasing process hand-off errors and latency.
Best Practices
By automating server and operating system provisioning and server and local storage configuration management
using industry best practices, you can simplify the management of large IT environments. HP Server Automation
also enables multiple groups to collaboratively manage and share best practices to promote infrastructure
consistency and compliance. For example, domain expert teams can create baseline infrastructure configuration
standards and policies and then share them with IT administrators across your organization, regardless of
location and domain skills. In this way, your IT infrastructure follows a defined standard.
Fewer People-Points of Failure
Because of their traditional role in keeping technical systems up and running, System Administrators can
become a single point of failure as well as an almost irreplaceable critical asset. Multiplying this fact by
the thousands of machines in large organizations and it becomes easy to recognize how critically important
the organization's institutional knowledge, often contained solely in the minds of the System Administrators,
has become.
Data Center Automation allows you to methodically harness the knowledge possessed by your System
Administrators and take control of all of your machines from a central location in a methodical fashion
using remote provisioning software. You can perform multiple tasks remotely including assessing local
profiles, confirming IP addresses and performing updates overnight en masse rather than relying on disparate
individual efforts.
Comprehensive and Customizable Application Compliance Management
HP Server Automation provides comprehensive compliance capabilities for helping you meet compliance
requirements for your servers, storage, and applications. At the core of the compliance engine is a powerful
framework for defining operating system, patch, application, and configuration policies. You can create,
share, and enforce policies across distributed environments. You can create the policy framework based on
your existing policies and supplement it with industry best practices to create strong policies that meet
your specific needs. The Security and Compliance service from HP BSA Essentials provides real-time feeds of
vulnerability and compliance audit rules, giving you the latest vendor and best-practice processes.
Additionally, HP Server Automation provides out-of-the-box regulatory compliance reports, including Payment
Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other regulations. You can customize the compliance framework to proactively
set policies and automatically audit your infrastructure for custom compliance requirements. With policies in
place, you can run regularly scheduled audits to enforce them. For example, the Server Administrator could audit
the storage configurations to make sure that dual paths to storage resources have been established, thus
eliminating the risk of a single point of failure. To provide an up-to-date view of how servers comply with
pre-defined policies, the Compliance Dashboard displays status and provides actionable links, helping you
remediate out-of-compliance servers.
Scalable for Large Server Environments
HP Server Automation has a robust architecture with enhanced security features that can scale from managing
hundreds of servers in one data center to thousands of servers distributed across multiple data centers and
remote locations. Each core server can support thousands of servers, and multiple core servers can be meshed
to manage your entire enterprise. HP Server Automation also supports satellite servers for automating the
operations for small clusters of servers in remote offices. The Multimaster feature facilitates real-time,
event-based synchronization among geographically distributed data centers. With Multimaster, you get a
unified view of your IT environment, and authorized users can safely access any server at any location.
Multimaster also replicates the latest state of a server for disaster recovery.
Key Features and Benefits
Automate configuration and compliance management: Proactively set and enforce policies across servers,
applications, and local storage to meet compliance requirements.
Reduce time to deploy new infrastructures, letting you respond more quickly to changing business needs.
Accelerate time-to-repair: Reduce server and application downtime by decreasing the inconsistencies and
misconfigurations at the root of most problems. Increased visibility into the relationships and dependencies
between server, storage, and network resources helps quickly isolate the source of your issue.
Improve efficiency: Achieve server-to-administrator ratios as great as 200:1 by automating daily,
time-consuming tasks.
Accelerate implementation of process-based initiatives: Quickly create and customize workflows that
integrate and automate operational process across IT teams and systems.
Follow the links below to learn more about our comprehensive Data Center Automation solutions.
Contact us to learn more about how our Data Center
Automation solutions can enhance your business.
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