Automation is a hot topic today. We read about autonomous cars and trucks that drive themselves over long distances, eliminating the consequences of human error and maximizing productivity as drivers can now focus on tasks that add far more value to their lives. We read about automated cooking robots that prepare the perfect burger or cappuccino every time for a steady stream of customers. Many of today’s network managers would appreciate more automation when it comes to managing their network. In fact:
- Rather than relying on the manual efforts of IT personnel to manage devices and workloads within the network environment, wouldn’t a fully automated process be superior?
- Rather than submit IT admins to mindless maintenance tasks that lack scalability and sustainability, why not incorporate a system that is driven by software instead?
- Why continue the reduced support role of IT that merely “keeps the lights on” and instead cultivate an IT department of transformation and leadership that fosters strategic innovation and delivers value to the company?
There is an automated way of managing the data center today, one that is centered around software automation and is template driven so that IT can provide continuous service delivery. One that allows processes and tasks to be initiated directly from other software, as needed, based on patterns and policies.
Fortunately, there is such a solution available today called Composable Infrastructure. In fact, it is sometimes referred to as “infrastructure as code,” due to its automated efficiency in provisioning services and workloads at just the right time and just the right size. Composable infrastructure by its very design is positioned around the facets that the modern data center must have in order to compete in the ‘Idea Economy.’ These traits such as agility, flexibility and scalability allow companies to respond quickly to changing market opportunities and disruptions. With composable infrastructure, management no longer has to worry about infrastructure being underutilized, which contributes to reduced capital and operational expenditures.
Some of the primary benefits of this new automated provisioning architype were recently summarized in an executive brief by Frost & Sullivan that was sponsored by HPE. The composable infrastructure benefits they outlined were:
- Speed to Market – Development and operations teams can quickly place new and enhanced Applications into production.
- Consistency, repeatability – Patterns and templates ensure that applications are repeatable and provisioned the right way, every time, so if something goes wrong or the operation fails to execute as expected, the development team can quickly roll back to a previous point in the cycle, and continue production.
- Scaling – You can be confident that workloads will scale correctly, improving application performance and user satisfaction.
- Less trial-and-error – Replicable templates mean fewer wasted cycles in moving applications to production.
- Streamlined processes – Composable infrastructure with automation fits into DevOps and Agile processes for continuous development, test, integration, and delivery of applications.
- Security and compliance assurance – Your company’s assets can be protected by embedding company policies into templates required for software deployment.
- IT innovation enablement – Your developers, architects, and operations teams are able to focus on solving business problems, since they are free from performing endless test-and-deployment cycles.
Rather than a hardware centric platform, composable infrastructure is software-defined that is driven by a sophisticated intelligence platform. Market demands are shaped today by apps that reside on the smartphones of customers across the world. If demand for products and services is app driven, then supply must be software driven in order to meet that demand. If your data center is plagued by traditional hardware servers that support legacy or resource demanding applications, composable infrastructure can manage them as well. Even the most complicated of hybrid environments can be managed in simple, automated style. Composable infrastructure is about simplifying the complex.
So who has this solution? The same leading corporate IT innovator that provides the OneView management and orchestration platform that so many companies of all sizes throughout the world use to deploy, configure and manage their fleet of servers in simple, automated fashion. In other words, composable infrastructure isn’t just an architype whose time has come, it is available today, integrating the much needed automation you need to manage your network infrastructure. What’s more, you don’t have to build Rome in a day. Composable infrastructure can be integrated into your data center at the pace that is comfortable for you. With all of the many benefits of composable infrastructure, it is an automatic decision for many IT leaders today.
NEXT STEPS: Learn more about composable infrastructure in our white paper, Orchestrating Composable Infrastructure -- 6 Ways to Ensure Operational Financial Harmony.
