More and more organizations are turning to cloud to transform their business. And the benefits are clear: increased productivity, faster response to users, and reduced operational costs. But for many, even with a cloud based environment, getting efficient use of precious IT resources and freeing up IT teams from repetitive manual tasks is a challenge.
Often times there are multiple administrators using different management tools to configure and deploy cloud infrastructure. And with no centralized view of those IT resources, it’s nearly impossible to keep tabs on whether they are being used efficiently. On top of that, IT administrators are performing many routine tasks manually and doing the same tasks over and over, which has a huge impact on productivity.
Today’s data centers contain a mix of technology from a variety of vendors as well as a choice of hypervisors and cloud management platforms, adding another layer of complexity to cloud deployments.
Here at Dell, we spend a lot of time thinking about these layers of complexity and what we can do to make life easier for the IT teams who have to deal with them. Our goal is to give individuals and organizations the power to do more.
There are some foundational capabilities that can dramatically simplify and increase the speed, reliability and efficiency of cloud deployments. For starters, a centralized view of your IT resources, whether physical or virtual, is a must. Along with that unified view, the ability to create and maintain shared resource pools is key to optimizing utilization and maintaining flexibility as user needs change.
Once you have a centralized view and control of pooled resources, being able to rapidly and dynamically provision (and de-provision) those resources to meet user expectations can make a world of difference in helping organizations to meet business objectives. And this is where automation comes into play.
In a recent white paper, IDC stresses the importance of automated infrastructure management in building what they call sustainable clouds. By automating the provisioning of infrastructure and workloads and other critical, time-consuming tasks like firmware updates, IT teams can devote more time to initiatives to help grow the business and less time on routine tasks and maintaining IT infrastructure.
Active System Manager (ASM) is Dell’s unified management and automation solution that gives IT teams the ability to provision infrastructure and workloads in minutes…giving them the power to do more. And when IT teams have more time, they can focus on innovating for the future.
With ASM, IT teams can increase the efficiency and reliability of cloud deployments with the ability to:
- Easily create and maintain shared resource pools of physical and virtual cloud infrastructure
- Rapidly provision cloud infrastructure and workloads
- Integrate with popular virtualization and cloud management platforms
Using ASM’s highly intuitive user interface and rapid infrastructure onboarding capabilities, IT teams can easily create and manage physical and virtual resource pools. And then they can automate the provisioning of cloud infrastructure from those shared resource pools with ASM’s powerful, template-based automation.
ASM’s comprehensive dashboard and template based automation accelerate IT service delivery for cloud
The wizard-driven template builder brings together everything needed to run a workload, saves it in a template, and lets you deploy it – whenever needed – in just a few clicks. The latest ASM 8.2 release gives IT teams a clear line of sight into the status and health of deployed infrastructure and services, helping them to be proactive and avoid downtime.
For virtualized and cloud environments, Active System Manager integrates easily with popular virtualization and cloud platforms, including VMware and Microsoft, to deliver powerful, complementary capabilities for automating the onboarding and dynamic provisioning of end-to-end cloud infrastructure.
Take a few minutes and check out this IDC paper on the importance of automated infrastructure management and how Dell Active System Manager increases the quality and reliability and efficiency of cloud deployments.
Read the ASM Cloud Solution Brief and take a look at this ASM Cloud Automation video to learn more about how ASM can help you build a flexible, efficient and future-ready foundation for your cloud.
