Challenges
Enterprise cloud environments require reliable IT, process, and task orchestration and automation to ensure they are effectively managed, correctly configured, highly optimized, compliant, and secure. Enterprises face a number of major challenges trying to automate these environments:
- Legacy Tools – Many legacy “list and script” tools were not designed for virtual environments and don’t support the range of automation activities necessary for these complex, highly dynamic environments. Many legacy tools are limited in functionality and very complex to implement and maintain resulting in lower productivity and higher costs.
- Lack of Automation Points - Automation needs to be invoked where and when necessary driven by changes, operator actions, trends, performance or all of the above. Additionally automation needs to be initiated by a user, admin or operator, on a schedule or through integration with other tools and processes.
- Limited Situational Awareness - Automation needs to understand the context of the environment it is executing in as well as what is being operating on. Without contextual awareness automation may be ineffective, incorrect or even counter-productive.
- Impaired Visibility and Latency - Real-time visibility into the environment is essential for automation to prevent wrong decisions being made due to incomplete, out-of-date or incorrect information. Limited visibility constrains the scope and scale of automation resulting in lower value and higher costs.
EVM Automate
EVM Automate™ provides adaptive automation and orchestration across a wide range of virtual infrastructures from department or division to very large scale, federated, and distributed enterprise environments. It leverages the patent-pending Adaptive Management Platform™ to provide model-driven, contextually aware, and highly adaptive automation. EVM Automate™ leverages the platform’s comprehensive visibility, situational awareness, and classifications and uniquely uses a dynamic, model-driven, and object-based approach providing adaptability, re-use, and encapsulation.
EVM Automate enables adaptive automation of operational and administrative activities spanning management disciplines including configuration management, resource management and optimization, security and compliance, workload management, provisioning, and lifecycle management. It integrates with systems management processes and tools including Configuration Management Databases (CMDB), Asset Management, IP Address Management, Service Catalogs, Enterprise Directories and Event Consoles, Runbook, Workflow and scripting tools in addition to virtual platforms.
With EVM Automate™, enterprise IT organizations are able to leverage their virtualized infrastructures to deliver enterprise cloud services. Using a web-based, self-management portal users can self-provision, use, manage, and retire their own IT services with strict policy control, security, and governance. Highly configurable request and approval processes, together with automated fulfilment and integration with enterprise management systems, enables self-service with fully-automated provisioning while ensuring that enterprise standards, security, and resource policies are enforced. EVM Automate™ provides users with autonomy – the ability to self-manage beyond provisioning, including operations, visibility into their performance, usage and chargeback, and support for reconfiguration, lease extension, retirement, and reporting activities. EVM enables autonomy and agility without sacrificing control ensuring continuous tracking, enforcement, and compliance with comprehensive lifecycle management.
Capabilities
- Just-In-Time, Adaptive Automation – Real-time situational awareness and complex event processing together with adaptive automation models, comprehensive visibility, and rich classifications enables highly adaptive just-in-time automation.
- Operational and Administrative Automation – Enables automation of administrative and operational activities in virtual environments driven by web-based user-interface, virtual management events, performance thresholds, state changes, discovery, time-based, web-services or on-demand.
- Self-Service Provisioning and Management – web-based portal provides secure policy-based provisioning and management activities including configurable request and approval processes. Fully automated provisioning with VM lifecycle management including tracking, reconfiguration and retirement and support for console and power operations.
- IT Service Management Integration – enables rich integration of virtual management and automation with IT service management activities including CMDB, Incident, Asset, Change and Configuration Management.
- Configurable Request and Approval Processes – Provides configurable request and approval processes with detailed tracking as well as integration to and interoperability with IT Service Catalogs.
Features
- Extensible Web-based Management Portal – allows custom automation and operator actions to be defined and presented in the EVM Management Portal. Actions are context-sensitive support role-based delegation.
- Automation Models and Methods – enable automation logic and integration to be expressed using models, objects, classes, and methods that support encapsulation, polymorphism, relationships, and state transitions. Native support for cross-platform methods in Ruby and Perl with integration to Powershell.
- Automation Development Environment – Provides interactive, web-based environment to develop, test, and deploy automation models and methods. Simulation, logging, and visualization tools are provided as well.
- Self-Service Provisioning Models – Provisioning models with integration with management processes and tools including Configuration Management Databases (CMDB), Asset Management, IP Address Management (IPAM), and Service Catalogs
- Model Import/Export Support - Automation models can be imported and exported in XML format for data interchange, documentation, change control, and version management.
- Sample Automation Models - Sample models provide useful examples of how to integrate and automate interactions with Enterprise Directories and Event Consoles, Runbooks, Workflow and scripting tools as well as virtual platforms.