• Management and Automation
  • Orchestration and Automation
  • Provisioning
  • Laboratory Management
  • Release Management

Orchestration and Automation

The control of automated datacentre tasks through workflow solutions

Orchestration plays an important role in helping IT attain the usually mutually exclusive goals of responsiveness and control. Automation enables frequently repeated processes to be performed without manual intervention and orchestration then manages these multiple automated processes across heterogeneous systems. Orchestration can help your organisation:

• Shorten time to deployment for virtual servers, desktops and resources.
• Reduce the number of manual tasks in daily operations.
• Reduce the amount of time spent in manually reacting to unplanned changes in your virtual environment.
• Provide more clarity in IT processes by centralizing automated scripts.

Orchestration allows IT to deliver a flexible and integrated infrastructure with improved processes that execute automatically in a scheduled or event driven manner. There are 4 main areas where orchestration can play a major role:

• Provisioning
  Managing the lifecycle of the hypervisor, physical hosts, VMs, storage and network devices underlying the entire virtual infrastructure.
• Backup
  Managing compliance, archives, backups, and snapshots of VMs.
• Maintenance
  Creating or moving VMs during maintenance and pre-provisioning of VMs.
• Administration
  Self-service web interface for business users or administrators to manage the virtual environment

Orchestration tools can be fully integrated with external 3rd party systems including:

• Help desk
• Asset tracking
• SNMP
• Email
• Chargeback

Virtual Age is currently writing several orchestration plugins to integrate the major storage manufacturers directly into the virtualisation layer and will be announcing these to the marketplace through industry press over the coming weeks.