Today’s global economy is challenging business organizations to provide fast, reliable applications for customers and end-users who are increasingly using a variety of wireless, mobile and hand-held devices to access business services.
Typically, applications can be managed from enterprise-wide consoles or with Web-enabled interfaces to help meet ongoing business needs. To be competitive, IT organizations are being driven to achieve operational efficiencies while providing high service quality for business critical applications across diverse operational platforms that can include distributed systems, virtualized environments, public and private clouds, as well as mainframes. A key strategy for helping IT to achieve these goals is automation of key scheduling and operations functions, collectively known as workload automation.
In today’s dynamic IT environments with growing workload complexity, there are many functions and operational processes that can be made more efficient – and often more reliable – by the use of workload automation software. Workload automation has evolved over a number of years to include a variety of functions to meet diverse operational needs. These range from scheduling functions – such as assuring that a set of jobs are completed within a specified overnight time window — to making sure that a real-time, event-driven workload with complex dependencies executes successfully. Other forms of automation software that have evolved to be included in the workload automation category include automated physical and virtual server provisioning, workload and virtual machine resource allocation and reclamation, policy-based workflow execution and orchestration, run-book automation and self-service cloud provisioning portals.
Clearly, there are a wide range of IT-related functions that can benefit from workload automation. However, as workload automation evolves it becomes the basis for higher level functions such as IT process automation and business process automation. Keeping these higher level perspectives in mind, it is desirable to simplify workload automation solutions by consolidation and integration. For example, enterprise IT organizations will often have multiple solutions – such as workload schedulers – performing the same functions across a diverse infrastructure. This situation often arises when a major datacenter consolidation occurs and multiple tools are acquired.
In such environments it is appropriate to ask “How can we simplify balancing calendar-based job scheduling, application patching and event-driven workloads – without disrupting the business?” As a general approach, it is desirable to consolidate multiple automation tools and move to solutions that provide comprehensive integrated functions and consolidated controls. Things to look for include: a wide range of automation capabilities; an enterprise wide console with Web-based access; the ability to monitor, manage and control jobs; workloads and processes from a common interface; coverage of heterogeneous infrastructures including distributed; virtualized, cloud and mainframe; and support for self-service and role-based access.
Given the importance and sensitivity of automation deployments, it is essential that comprehensive migration plans and processes are in place before undertaking consolidations, migrations, or new implementations. IT staff training, conversion tools and the availability of experienced services support are key resources for successful transitions and new implementations.
By Tim Grieser