It's kind of surprising in this day and age how rudimentary server management can be. Far too many IT organizations are still using pen and paper trying to keep track of which servers are attached to what applications. In short, they are using the most basic of manual processes to keep track of the equipment we use to automate every other aspect of the business environment.
The good news is that the discipline of IT service management is maturing quickly. A lot of internal IT departments are taking a page from professional IT services organizations by starting to manage their own operations like a service company. We have all kinds of IT automation tools available today to help accomplish that, but the first step along that journey is to start figuring out what server equipment is actually in place.
Turns out that may be a seemingly obvious thing to do but you might be surprised that there are not that many tools focused on the physical management of servers. In fact, Hewlett-Packard just expanded its portfolio of systems management tools to include Vista server management and monitoring tools from Aperture, which makes a set of tools that company officials say address the often overlooked "Layer Zero" aspect of server support services management.
The other side of this equation is that in this economy IT organizations are likely to find they are going to be short-handed when it comes to data center personnel. That means they need more tools to proactively monitor data center environments that are becoming more complex in the wake of virtualization and data center consolidation projects.
With the advent of blade servers and multicore processors, the challenges associated with managing servers are only going to get more difficult. But you can't really manage what you don't really know you have. And when you're dealing with hundreds of servers.
Source: blogs.eweek.com
The good news is that the discipline of IT service management is maturing quickly. A lot of internal IT departments are taking a page from professional IT services organizations by starting to manage their own operations like a service company. We have all kinds of IT automation tools available today to help accomplish that, but the first step along that journey is to start figuring out what server equipment is actually in place.
Turns out that may be a seemingly obvious thing to do but you might be surprised that there are not that many tools focused on the physical management of servers. In fact, Hewlett-Packard just expanded its portfolio of systems management tools to include Vista server management and monitoring tools from Aperture, which makes a set of tools that company officials say address the often overlooked "Layer Zero" aspect of server support services management.
The other side of this equation is that in this economy IT organizations are likely to find they are going to be short-handed when it comes to data center personnel. That means they need more tools to proactively monitor data center environments that are becoming more complex in the wake of virtualization and data center consolidation projects.
With the advent of blade servers and multicore processors, the challenges associated with managing servers are only going to get more difficult. But you can't really manage what you don't really know you have. And when you're dealing with hundreds of servers.
Source: blogs.eweek.com
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