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Special Issue: IT Automation: Server Configuration Management

Posted by Bill Driscoll on June 9, 2007

ANALYSIS: IT AUTOMATION OUR LOGIC IS UNDENIABLE: SELF-HEALING, SELF- PROVISIONING NETWORKS THAT EASE PROCESS AND CHANGE CONTROL ARE OUR FUTURE. WANT A TASTE NOW? READ ON... Easy Does IT FLEX TIME Best Practices PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR DATA CENTER IS

Change is a fact of life in the data center. From provisioning new servers to deploying patches and updating configurations, the only certainty is that your servers are different today than yesterday--and tomorrow they'll change again.

Vendors are pushing automated SCM (server configuration management) to help get a handle on all this change. The more tasks that can be automated, the more time and money IT can save. Automation systems enforce processes that ensure unplanned changes don't disrupt critical business services, and even help meet compliance goals by tracking and reporting on all modifications.

Sounds great, but these benefits don't come cheap. Assuming an overall IT budget of $150 million, we would expect to invest about 2 percent of the IT budget to get this software project off the ground, or about 10 percent of the total value of the company's server hardware. Although we figure there are more costly software projects, these tend to provide fundamentally new capabilities. To arrive at this figure we enlisted the Windward Consulting Group, which helps major corporate and government clients design and implement IT operations management systems. Together with Windward, we created a fictional online bank to cost out two leading SCM products--from BladeLogic and Opsware--for 1,200 servers deployed across three geographically diverse data centers (see "InterBank Goes Automatic").

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Dollars & Sense

SCM has several goals: Reduce operating costs by automating common tasks that IT would otherwise perform manually, minimize ad hoc changes that affect business services, provide a centralized management environment, and help IT meet audit and compliance requirements.