Data Center Automation: Key Benefits and Proven Best Practices

Every year, data center automation technology helps businesses save billions of dollars worldwide. As the volume of data produced increases and data center speeds up, the manual operation becomes less efficient. Data center automation has become a new trend to break through the situation. What is data center automation and why is it important? This article will give guidance.

What Is Data Center Automation?

Data center automation, as the name implies, is the process of managing and automating the data center workflows without human interaction or administration. Data center automation is not about a single task or process in one single stage. It can be carried out in many different directions.

Servers, storage, networking, and other management tasks can be automated in data center automation. If there is a need to handle the entire data center operation with automation, different operational frameworks based on various tasks will be required.

According to Forrester, 67% of companies are using business process automation to improve end-to-end visibility across systems. A survey from FlowForma found that 74% of business leaders have accelerated their work process automation efforts. It indicates that a substantial number of IT companies have integrated automation into their operations.

Why Is Data Center Automation Important?

Obviously, data center automation has become a trend in the coming years. Enterprises had been expected to invest in data center automation several years ago. Why is data center automation so promising? Will enterprise businesses and staff both benefit from it?

• The exponential expansion of data volume is one of the drivers that transform human administration into automation. With large amounts of data that businesses need to access and process, manual administration is no longer efficient. Thus, data center automation plays its role in accessing workflows and driving the efficiency of the whole data center. Meanwhile, influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more businesses were on the step of moving online and remote working became more common among employees. Traditional manual operation is no longer able to support the needs of rapidly shifting workload requirements.

• The main beneficiary of data center automation is enterprise businesses. For businesses, data center automation is not only a great way to eliminate time to handle those tasks that cost lots of labor and time. It also helps to reduce human errors, making the administration more concise and work more smoothly.

• What does data center automation mean for data center managers? Without time consumed in human interactions, data center automation frees these managers from mundane tasks. Hence, it creates more spare time, therefore, to better leverage time in those business-level problems.

  

5 Best Practices for Data Center Automation

1. Use APIs to Connect Disparate Applications Quickly

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are essential for quickly and efficiently connecting different applications and systems. They facilitate communication between software systems, allowing them to work together seamlessly. By leveraging APIs, you can streamline the integration of your automation tools with existing systems, reducing complexity and costs. This enables faster implementation and quicker realization of automation benefits.

2. Centrally Monitor and Manage Processes

Implementing automation across multiple systems is possible, but managing data center operations from a centralized control panel offers significant advantages. A centralized view simplifies issue identification, process management, and decision-making. By centralizing control, you reduce the complexity and effort needed for data center management, freeing up valuable time and resources for more strategic tasks. This streamlined approach enhances efficiency and effectiveness in managing data center operations.

3. Manage Workloads with Event-Based Automation

Event-based automation is a powerful strategy for managing workloads in data centers. It sets up automation rules triggered by specific events or conditions, enabling swift and efficient responses to environmental changes. This approach significantly enhances the responsiveness and efficiency of data center operations, ensuring optimal performance even under rapidly changing conditions. By leveraging event-based automation, you can maintain seamless and effective data center management, adapting quickly to meet operational demands.

4. Automated Compliance Management

Automating compliance management is essential for data center operations. It streamlines the process by establishing automated checks for adherence to regulations and standards, and generating compliance reports. This approach reduces the time and effort needed for manual checks, enhances the accuracy of compliance monitoring, and lowers the risk of breaches. By automating these processes, data centers can ensure they consistently meet the latest regulatory requirements and standards, maintaining optimal operational integrity.

5. Choose the Right Automation Tool

Automation tools for configuration management and deployment can greatly enhance productivity by reducing manual effort and minimizing errors. These tools can programmatically apply changes across all cloud platforms, streamlining hybrid cloud management. By improving efficiency and reliability, automation tools reduce operation and maintenance costs, ensure system consistency and security, and support large-scale scaling. Each tool has unique features and application scenarios, so choosing the right one depends on your specific needs and environment. With the right tools, data centers can achieve significant overall benefits.

Data Center Automation Tools

There are tens of thousands of data center automation tools on the market and they can be classified into several types according to their applications. Some of them are tailored for single tasks in data center operation and some make full automation of data center possible. Here we will introduce some network automation tools that are seen most often.

• OpenStack controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, managed through a dashboard or through the OpenStack API. OpenStack is an operating system that helps build a cloud infrastructure or manage local resources as though they were a cloud. This means automating the building, teardown, and management of virtual servers and other virtualized infrastructure.

• Ansible is an open source tool for software provisioning and configuration management. Many organizations are using Ansible to drive complexity out of their environments and accelerate DevSecOps initiatives. Also, different from other automation platforms. Ansible is built on a powerful agentless framework, thus it is convenient to use the tool in almost any network environment.

• AmpCon™ is a management platform that automates Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP), deployment, configuration and lifecycle management for PicOS® Software Switches. It provides a Web UI and is deployed as a software appliance that runs in a virtual machine (VM) running in the data center or cloud. AmpCon™ supports remote deployment and scalability for 1000s of PicOS® Software Switches.

• Puppet is a framework and language that systems operations professionals use to define operations like software deployment so that they can be automated. The Puppet language creates the definitions and workflow that are implemented by the Puppet framework. Puppet brings a common language and compatibility across a broad range of devices. IT departments use Puppet to automate intricate processes involving many pieces of hardware and software.

FS: Expert in Data Center Automation Solutions

Before you're ready to implement automation into your workflow, or if you're having trouble using it, you need a partner who can help you with these and other issues.

As a professional communications equipment and solutions provider, FS is committed to providing high-performance data center switches and a dedicated team of modern solutions. FS PicOS® switches leverage AmpCon™ to help you improve network visibility and make network management more intuitive and efficient while enabling network automation to reduce labor costs, improve operational efficiency, accelerate service delivery, secure the future of your business, and unlock new ways to interact with customers.

Ready to redefine your data center automation? With cutting-edge R&D and global warehouses, we deliver tailored solutions. Take action now - click here to learn more about AmpCon™ Management Platform. Take your data center to a new level of excellence with FS.