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Full Stack Automation- Critical For BSM
By Robert Gardos | May 27, 2009
Business Service Management (BSM) is a nice buzzword being thrown around by datacenter/systems management players as they attempt to bridge the perceived gap between business benefit and technology investment. Clearly business priorities driving IT, as opposed to eccentric engineers, will drive value for the enterprise. Automation is a critical component of BSM as it not only promises efficiency and repeatability, but empowers business owners to rapidly obtain necessary services (especially if you add the self-service and on-demand buzzwords into the mix). Of course the underlying delivery of those services could involve the deployment of server, Network, and storage resources. While automation players appear to be filling out their portfolios in these areas, and virtualization is helping simplify this dramatically, no one seems to be paying any attention to the least commoditized component, the application stack.
Applications can be made up of several tiers including application, Web and database servers. Unless you have a solution that can truly handle the automation and ongoing administration of the full stack the allure of BSM will never be achieved. The reality is that no systems management player can handle full stack automation whether it be deploying new systems or handling the inevitable application upgrade. While this hasn’t prevented these vendors from selling the dream it has prevented the end user from actually realizing it.
Why is it so hard? Don’t these systems management players have extensible solutions? Didn’t they show us, within the confines of a proof of concept (or worse yet a demo), how their solution deploys Linux, Oracle, Websphere and Apache, all at the same time? Why can’t I use these building blocks to achieve BSM nirvana?
The quick answer is that applications tend to be complex and far more dynamic than any other component within the datacenter. Systems management players rely on predictability of process. This may work just fine for patching Solaris since it is a process that hasn’t materially changed in ten years. When it comes to managing Oracle or some J2EE application, processes tend to be far more dynamic. Imagine an end customer looking to automate the entire application change management lifecycle. If we assume Oracle as a component of this application, the end customer would have needed to update the simple patching process four times in the last 18 months just to make it work. And forget the handling of newer technologies like Oracle RAC which increase the complexity an order of magnitude. In the end, until there is a true automation solution that can handle the full application stack, there is no way that business priorities will drive IT. The end result is maintaining a blind dependence on technology administrators that can over-complicate even the simplest of tasks.
While I agree with the fundamental tenets of BSM (how can you argue with it) without support for the full stack you’ll struggle with a solution that doesn’t live up to the hype.
Topics: Data Center Automation