Data center automation is the process by which routine workflows and processes of a data center—scheduling, monitoring, maintenance, application delivery, and so on—are managed and executed without human administration. Data center automation and orchestration increases agility and operational efficiency. It reduces the time IT needs to perform routine tasks and enables them to deliver services on demand in a repeatable, automated manner. These services can then be rapidly consumed by end users.

Data center automation is primarily delivered through a composite data center automation software that provides centralized access to all or most data center resources. Typically, data center automation market solutions enable automating the servers, network and other data center management tasks.

The massive growth in data and the speed at which businesses operate today mean that manual monitoring, troubleshooting, and remediation is too slow to be effective and can put businesses at risk. Automation can make day-two operations almost autonomous. Ideally, the data center provider would have API access to the infrastructure, enabling it to inter-operate with public clouds so that customers could migrate data or workloads from cloud to cloud.

Typical high availability architecture includes application servers with apps replicated multiple times. The applications in this scenario are virtualized in every application delivery controller. This architecture supports high availability and performance necessities. However, high efficiency may not be supported in this model, as the resources provisioned for each app is not efficiently reallocated to the other apps.

An automation architecture based on server virtualization requires images to be created and software to be installed in each physical server in order to support automated provisioning of applications through VM images. Additional storage in case of server virtualization or OS virtualization incurs additional costs. While server virtualization deploys applications across all usable resources, OS virtualization stores them locally. In case of OS virtualization, however, not only is the application stored, but the application server and the virtual image are also stored.

In order to reduce the impact on either of these methodologies, virtualization for data center automation in cloud computing can be used. Storage virtualization is the concept of amalgamating multiple storage networks into a single storage unit. Usually, the storage unit is managed and utilized with the help of software, making the storage software-defined. Virtualization obfuscates the storage systems used, making any kind of storage network be part of the virtualized environment. Virtualization of data center automation makes such tasks as backup, archiving, and recovery easier and faster.

Data center automation is immensely valuable because it frees up human computational time and:

• Delivers insight into server nodes and configurations
• Automates routine procedures like patching, updating, and reporting
• Produces and programs all data center scheduling and monitoring tasks
• Enforces data center processes and controls in agreement with standards and policies