Increasing business demands is adding more complexity to the data centers. Ever changing technology landscape including hardware upgrades, adoption of new technologies like virtualization, cloud, etc. along with the need of staff training on the new technologies adds much more to it. Businesses build high dependency on human resource which becomes the pain area during staff attrition. Apart from this, compliance enforcement has always been a challenge for most of the organizations.

72% of IT staff perform maintenance and support tasks and only 28% are assigned to participate in the strategic initiatives. Systems are required to be configured, more the systems, more is the work configuring them. To provide 24X7 IT support, ownership of a single IT resource is distributed amongst multiple technicians. Temporary changes are made during troubleshooting which become permanent after a while, leaving the change management completely uncontrolled. Similarly, users are created in a system, deleted and recreated. Carrying a consistent configuration across the data center stays a difficult task for any technician. Technician needs to logon to the system one-by-one and configure it. Procedure appears to be simple for few systems but is a tedious job when it comes to high number of systems. Recovering a fully configured system from a crash will leave the technician into sleepless night and high loss to the business.

Our data center automation framework is based on open source configuration management system, Puppet. Puppet is already been used by big giants including Google, Mozilla, Redhat, Fedora, Harward Law School, Sun Microsystems, Directi, Steria, etc. to name a few. Framework is capable of automating software installation, patch management, configuration of different components like web server, database server, custom applications, etc. Framework can also enforce policies and compliance across the data center with the template based approach. Framework preserves the copy of configuration files into its repository and is highly helpful for quick system recovery.

It provides complete control over the changes happening across the data center. Any unauthorized changes are rolled back to the master configuration stored in framework which leaves no scope for human errors. Dashboard provides complete overview of the changes happened in the data center. With the deployment of the framework, business can achieve policy compliance like SOX, SAS70, ISO 27001, etc. It also reduces dependencies on the human resources and leads to more servers per administrator to help the IT staff focus more on strategic initiatives than routine maintenance and troubleshooting tasks.

Framework currently supports following operating systems which can be fully automated:

Linux

CentOS
Debian 3.1 and later
Fedora Core 2-6
Fedora 7 and later
Gentoo Linux
Mandriva Corporate Server 4
RHEL 3 and later
Oracle Linux
SuSE Linux 8 and later
Ubuntu 7.04 and later

BSD

FreeBSD 4.7 and later
OpenBSD 4.1 and later

Other Unix

Macintosh OS X
Sun Solaris 2.6
Sun Solaris 7 and later

Download detailed presentation on how our data center automation framework can help your business.