Toward The Self-Driving Data Center

Like self-driving cars, the data center that runs itself, manages itself and calls for help when needed is not far away. Even complex IT infrastructure that is notoriously difficult to upgrade and maintain is being automated, converged, made into building blocks or stacks, and managed via software, not hardware.

Visionaries have suggested that the self-driving data center is as inevitable as the self-driving vehicle, as IT staffs admit that machines can do most anything better than a human, and start putting the machines to work. Doing so enables agility – that most essential IT building block – so that leaders can respond to a changing business universe. Even for those “humanists” who disagree that machines can perform IT manager tasks better, the efficiency gained from offloading repetitive functions, or making connections between often unrecognized, disparate events, frees organizations to serve customers at a higher level.

Similar to vehicles, data centers are well along their march toward full self-driving capability, and a continuum of automation and analytics-based solutions is in place to save time, hassle and costs. Using the storage industry as an example, the continuum of new devices, virtualization, alerting, and orchestration technologies enable successively greater machine direction of resources, and less overt IT staff involvement.

Six key technologies are evolving that most challenging IT domain – data storage – further along the continuum of more fully autonomous operations. They are turning IT managers into business agility agents whose work enables their organizations to achieve higher aims.

(Image: Timofeev Vladimir/Shutterstock)