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Category: Infrastructure/Networking

NVIDIA Aims to Drive Disaggregation Following Cumulus Networks Buy

Adoption of open source networking may be about to get a boost following the forthcoming acquisition of Cumulus Network by NVIDIA.

The acquisition of the provider of a network operating system (NOS) based on Linux follows an earlier move by NVIDIA to acquire Mellanox, a provider of networking and storage systems.

Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of marketing for the NVIDIA networking business unit, said Cumulus Networks adds a programmable NOS to the provider of graphical processor units (GPUs) that should find greater adoption as more organizations disaggregate the acquisition of network software and hardware. That trend toward disaggregation is especially strong in data centers and cloud computing environments that are building artificial intelligence (AI) applications based on NVIDIA GPUs, he said.

As the worlds of DevOps and network operations (NetOps) continue to converge, NVIDIA is betting interest in a programmable NOS that is designed to scale will increase as well, added Deierling.

Cumulus Networks has been trying to drive the adoption of Cumulus Linux since 2010 with mixed success. Cumulus Linux runs on more than 100 hardware platforms, including switches from Mellanox. While cloud service providers and some high-performance computing (HPC) environments have disaggregated networking software and hardware, most enterprise IT organizations continue to buy switches from Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks that come integrated with a NOS.

Cumulus Networks CEO Josh Leslie said in time it’s apparent more enterprise IT organizations will be moving toward disaggregation of network software and hardware, especially as more application workloads move into the cloud. A NOS that is not tied to proprietary ASIC technologies embedded in a switch from Cisco or Juniper Networks makes it feasible for IT organizations to benefit from Moore’s Law as each new x86 processor generation is added, he noted.

At the same time, he added, the tools for programming a NOS based on Linux are a lot more familiar and accessible to developers than tools designed for proprietary NOS platforms.

It’s too early to say to what degree DevOps teams are going to need programmable access to shared networking resources. Ideally, developers will want more programmatic control over network resources as applications become more distributed than ever. That approach would enable them to also provision network resources to applications via application programming interfaces (APIs) without having to wait for network administrators to provision them manually.

However, network bandwidth is a shared resource inside many organizations, and the concern is that one application will consume all the available network bandwidth at the expense of every other application on the network. As such, network administrators have been embracing automation and self-service portals to make network resources more readily accessible to developers without ceding total control of the network.

Regardless of the approach, networking is becoming more agile. NetOps and DevOps teams may not necessarily converge; however, as networking becomes another class of infrastructure that can be treated as code, it’s clear the days when networking services are largely managed in isolation from the rest of the IT environment are coming to a close.

May 11, 2020
Low-Code Development: The Future of Communications Experiences

The benefits of embedding real-time communications features into business and consumer applications are well-known. When it comes to customer service, most people would much rather click-to-call from within a web experience, social media site or business application to connect with another person, than find their phone to dial a number and wait in a queue.

In today’s new digital world–where instant gratification comes when consumers can choose their communication channel of choice and get their issues resolved more quickly–businesses only stand to benefit from delivering better service with fewer intermediaries. Customer service isn’t the only beneficiary of innovation in communications platform as a service (CPaaS)–web developers can add options to get answers automatically, or from an expert, without the presence of a full contact center. Even small businesses with limited staff can interact with customers through communications channels embedded into their websites or mobile apps, automatically directing questions about specific products, orders or services to the right person through text messaging, email or voice.

This is all made possible through CPaaS–and this is where the future of customer communications experiences lies.

Breakthroughs in CPaaS Are Powering Embedded Communications

CPaaS is one of those industry acronyms that has been tossed around for a few years now, but what exactly is it? CPaaS is a cloud-based platform that enables developers to add real-time communications features to their own applications without the complexity of building infrastructure typically required when developing apps.

The ability to embed communications capabilities directly into apps or websites enables businesses of any size to engage customers more effectively across different communications channels, including mobile, web and desktop environments. The result is a much-improved customer experience leading to increased customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and recurring revenues.

Breakthroughs in CPaaS are making it increasingly easier to embed voice, video, messaging, chat, presence and collaboration into experiences than ever before. Instead of building backend infrastructure and interfaces, CPaaS-based applications are made accessible through low-code development platforms. These platforms allow developers to access the robust application logic within the CPaaS with just a few lines of code, made possible through APIs. These APIs empower developers to quite literally copy and paste code by dragging and dropping application components and connecting them together to create a mobile or web app.

As an industry, we’ve spent the better part of the last few years building out embedded real-time communications solutions. With low-code development, new communications capabilities take only minutes to create and launch, versus years, months, weeks or even days. By making it easier to add immersive communications solutions into existing applications, low-code development allows companies to introduce innovations such as communications-enabled business processes and automate any component of business processes.

The Future of Communications Experiences

There’s no doubt–the future is low-code solutions. In our digital world, with the right CPaaS technology, and a little creativity and planning, businesses can now accomplish things that would have been impossible without the support of APIs.

We are just at the beginning of even more exciting and valuable applications. By accessing the massive compute and software application capabilities of CPaaS through just a few APIs, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and natural language processing is possible. Applications including voice recording, transcription and analytics for greater insights will be made a reality. Bots that sound like humans and can speak in multiple languages, with multiple choices for voices, will leave old breakthroughs like interactive voice response in the dust.

We’re still early in the cycle, but the benefits and applications of low-code development continue to grow. Jump in–you may be surprised how easy it is to roll out new services that customers will love, and your business will thank you for.

May 11, 2020
Citrix Makes Case for VPN Alternative

Citrix this week announced it will make its remote access tool that enables users to efficiently access their desktop PCs more widely available via the cloud.

Gabe Carrejo, senior program manager for Citrix, said Remote PC Access provides a more efficient alternative to the virtual private networks (VPNs) that most organizations currently rely on to enable employees to remotely access their desktops.

To use Remote PC Access, an IT administrator installs a small client on the remote systems. The client provides access to a range of networking services that Citrix makes available on top of its Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) remoting protocol to create a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) tunnel, which Citrix markets collectively as High-Definition Experience (HDX) Technology.

To make it easier to access a desktop PC remotely, Remote PC Access installs agent software that IT teams can now push out to an endpoint as long as they have licensed any one of several Citrix services, said Carrejo. In most cases, IT teams will employ a platform such as Microsoft System Center to deploy agent software on an endpoint.

In the rush to provide employees with remote access almost overnight to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations turned to VPN offerings they were using to provide a small number of employees with remote access. However, with almost every employee trying to access the same VPN, many of those IT teams have encountered network bandwidth issues. What’s more, many of the desktop applications installed in the office are not especially tolerant of the latency a VPN adds to the equation.

Citrix has long been making the case for ICA as a more efficient protocol for providing remote access to desktops. Now, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is making it easier for IT teams to distribute HDX agent software across as many remote endpoints an IT organization needs to support. End users can then access applications on their office desktops remotely via any HTML5-compatible browser or virtual desktop software provided by Citrix.

Carrejo said more organizations are re-evaluating their reliance on VPNs as it becomes clear that what once viewed as business disruption has become the “new normal.” Many organizations are looking closely at how many employees they need to come into an office when their job role may not require it. Remote computing is now a core element of a larger business continuity strategy. As such, Carrejo said many organizations are looking to find a way to provide more efficient remote access to office-based desktop systems while contemplating a possible transition to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform deployed in a local data canter or in the cloud.

It’s too early to say to what degree Windows desktops will be moving to VDI platforms. In the meantime, however, the remote access protocols that IT teams rely on suddenly matter a lot more.

May 8, 2020
IBM Looks to Drive Edge Computing

IBM today at its Think Digital conference launched an edge computing initiative anchored around an IBM Edge Application Manager, through which a single administrator can manage up to 10,000 nodes.

Hillery Hunter, vice president and CTO for IBM Cloud, said IBM Edge Application Manager is based on the Open Horizon open source software originally developed by IBM that is now under the auspices of LF Edge, an arm of The Linux Foundation focused on networking and edge computing platforms. Open Horizon makes uses of machine learning algorithms to automate the management of fleets of edge computing platforms.

IBM also launched IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager to orchestrate both virtual and container network functions. IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager is built on top of an instance of Red Hat OpenShift, which is based on Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Finally, IBM is making available a range of edge-enabled applications, including IBM Visual Insights, IBM Production Optimization, IBM Connected Manufacturing, IBM Asset Optimization, IBM Maximo Worker Insights and IBM Visual Inspector.

Like most IT vendors IBM sees the rise of application workloads on the edge as an opportunity to drive adoption of hybrid cloud computing. In the case of IBM, all of these offerings run on the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

IBM also announced the IBM Edge Ecosystem, which brings together independent software vendors (ISVs) and IBM partners to craft edge computing solutions. Additionally, IBM launched the IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem, which is more narrowly focused on edge computing platforms deployed for telco-focused environments such as a wireless 5G network.

IT vendors participating in those initiatives with IBM include Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Juniper, Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung, Packet & Equinix, Hazelcast, Sysdig, Turbonomics, Portworx, Humio, Indra Minsait, EuroTech, Arrow, ADLINK, Acromove, Geniatech, SmartCone, CloudHedge, Altiostar, Metaswitch, F5 Networks and ADVA.

Edge computing will undoubtedly force organizations to embrace DevOps more aggressively. Managing thousands of edge computing platforms will require not just higher levels of IT automation infused with machine learning algorithms, but IT teams will also need to be able to deploy, secure, update and manage applications distributed across thousands of endpoints.

IBM, of course, is not the only IT vendor eyeing the edge computing opportunity. The challenge IT organizations will face first is building new classes of latency-sensitive applications running in near real-time that will be built mainly using microservices. Once those applications are built, organizations will then need to update them continuously within the context of a highly scalable IT management framework.

Naturally, some organizations will prefer to rely on external IT service providers to rise to that challenge while others will continue to build and manage their own applications and infrastructure. Regardless of the approach, the level of scale and complexity at which IT is being applied is about to reach a level that once would have been unimaginable. Not only will more applications run in near real-time, those applications will be integrated and share data with batch-oriented applications running in the cloud and local data centers. The challenge is finding a way to automate the management of IT at scale without requiring organizations to rely on manual processes, for which there are simply not enough IT professionals available to manage.

May 5, 2020
Dell Advances Convergence of Compute and Storage

Dell Technologies today launched a revamped midrange storage platform that takes advantage of NVMe interfaces and solid-state drives (SSDs) to deliver 7x the performance of previous Dell EMC PowerStore platforms, in addition to allowing applications to run locally on an instance of a VMware virtual machine.

Ben Jastrab, senior manager for storage product marketing at Dell Technologies, said the inclusion of a virtual machine in form of an AppsON capability means that rather than having to deploy applications on a server, for example, a data analytics application could be deployed directly on top of the data it needs to access on a storage system. In addition, the latest version of Dell EMC PowerStore adds support for instances of Kubernetes from VMware running on top of a virtual machine. Dell storage systems already provide support for the Container Storage Interface (CSI) needed to provide Kubernetes clusters access to external storage systems.

Dell has also added support for Ansible and VMware vRealize Orchestrator frameworks to automate the deployment and ongoing maintenance of Dell EMC PowerStore systems. As part of that effort to automate the management of storage systems, Dell added built-in machine learning algorithms to automate labor-intensive tasks such as initial volume placement, migrations, load balancing and issue resolution. Dell EMC CloudIQ storage monitoring and analytics software makes it possible to combine machine learning and human intelligence for real-time and historical performance and capacity analysis.

Jastrab noted that many of these innovations are made possible because the storage operating system employed within Dell EMC PowerStore has been completely revamped using microservices based on containers. That approach not only makes the operating system more flexible and resilient, but it also will afford Dell the opportunity to experiment with how it might present storage services in the future, he said.

Automation coupled with technologies such as deduplication and compression will play a critical role in driving the total cost of storage lower in the months ahead, Jastrab said. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, IT organizations will be under increased pressure to reduce costs at a time when both the amount and types of data that need to be analyzed and stored continue to increase, he noted, adding the Dell PowerStore system can provide access to 2.8PB of data when configured in a scale-up architecture and more than 11PB when configured using a scale-out architecture.

IT teams will need to determine to what degree they want to rely on proprietary frameworks such as VMware vRealize to automate IT infrastructure versus an open source Ansible framework that can be applied more broadly to multiple platforms. Dell owns VMware, but Jastrab said the company is committed to providing support for multiple IT automation frameworks.

It’s not clear to what degree applications will shift from being deployed on traditional servers to a storage system. Many next-generation applications are clearly more latency-sensitive than their predecessors, so providing more direct access to data over an NVMe interface may present IT teams with a compelling alternative. Regardless of the approach taken, the line between compute and storage continues to blur.

May 5, 2020
HPE Extends Reach of GreenLake Central

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has made available HPE GreenLake Central, a self-service portal through which IT teams can collaboratively manage and monitor instances of servers deployed in IT environments that are managed by HPE on their behalf.

At its core, HPE GreenLake is a managed service that allows IT organizations to pay for IT infrastructure on a consumption basis. HPE meters usage and HPE ProLiant servers and bills customers accordingly. HPE GreenLake Central provides a portal through which IT teams can track usage themselves and provision applications both from HPE and third-party software vendors.

Data management and file management software from Cohesity and Qumulo can be provisioned via the self-service portal. In addition, HPE GreenLake systems can now be co-located in data centers managed by CyrusOne.

Keith White, vice president for HPE GreenLake, said HPE also provides via HPE GreenLake Central integration with Microsoft Azure Access Manager and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Access Manager services to make it easier for IT organizations to compare the cost of deploying workloads on-premises versus in the cloud, in addition to identifying potential compliance issues. IT teams still will need to access a separate portal provided by either AWS or Microsoft to spin up a virtual machine in the cloud.

HPE claims to now have more than 800 enterprise customers consuming HPE GreenLake services. With many organizations opting to focus their efforts on building and deploying software, HPE is now making the case for a service through which it manages ProLiant servers and associated HPE storage on their behalf. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, White said HPE expects to see increased demand for consumption-based pricing for IT infrastructure.

Of course, IT teams have been consuming cloud infrastructure using various consumption-based pricing models for years. However, there are many workloads that for a wide variety of compliance, security and performance issues that still do not lend themselves to being deployed on a public cloud. HPE GreenLake provides the flexibility of a cloud service while still employing IT infrastructure deployed in a local data center.

It’s unclear in the wake of the downturn how many additional application workloads might be moving into the cloud. The general expectation is that because many local data centers have been inaccessible during the pandemic, more organizations naturally will shift workloads to the cloud. However, a managed service from HPE also serves to eliminate the need to manage servers in an on-premises IT environment that are managed remotely by HPE. IT teams can remotely log into the HPE GreenLake portal from wherever they are located.

Undoubtedly, the relationship between IT teams and vendors such as HPE is evolving. Many rote infrastructure tasks increasingly are becoming automated not just by the IT team, but also by the vendor that built the server or storage system. Of course, the automation being provided by the IT vendor only applies to their latest generation of infrastructure.

May 5, 2020
Latest Version of Open Source IPFS Improves Performance

The team behind the open source InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) announced this week that a significantly faster version of the peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol is now generally available.

IPFS is a distributed file system that makes use of a global namespace to connect all computing devices. The fundamental difference between IPFS and other distributed file systems is a decentralized system of operators who hold a portion of the overall data, which serves to create a highly resilient system for storing and sharing files. Any operator on the network can serve a file by its content address, and IT teams can find and request content from any node using a distributed hash table (DHT).

Molly Mackinlay, project lead for IPFS and a senior product manager for Protocol Labs, which provides protocols, systems and tools to improve how the internet works, said the latest 0.5 update to IPFS significantly improves the content routing performance in addition to adding support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.

IPFS can now also add files to the IPFS network twice as fast, in addition to performance improvements that have been made to the core file transfer mechanism.

Finally, the mechanism for looking up mutable links is also faster and there is an experimental pubsub transport to speed up record distribution.

Mackinlay said organizations such as Microsoft and Netflix are adopting IPFS to drive a number of distributed computing use cases. Netflix, for example, has been experimenting with IPFS as a way to distribute container images that is more efficient than employing repositories.

IPFS won’t replace the need for traditional file systems as much as it does create an opportunity to employ a file system that makes distributed computing on a global scale more feasible. Microsoft, for example, uses IPFS as the content address storage layer to power its take on a decentralized identity system. In fact, Mackinlay noted IPFS has now been deployed on more than 100,000 nodes around the globe.

It’s too early to say how broadly IPFS might be employed. Mackinlay said the community is still growing as IT organizations discover IPFS makes tasks ranging from fetching data to watching a video more efficient. As is the case with most open source projects, the adoption of IPFS is more likely to be driven by developers from the bottom up rather than IT managers from the top down. Developers trying to find a way to more efficiently distribute container images could, in theory, employ IPFS without anyone in the organization even knowing.

Regardless of how IPFS finds its way into the enterprise, the need for more efficient ways to distribute files and content has become apparent. While data may be more distributed than ever, the laws of physics have not been suspended. As such, IT teams need to find a way to leverage IT infrastructure resources that are physically located as close as possible to the point where content is consumed. On one level, of course, that’s the role of a traditional content delivery network (CDN). However, given the cost of employing CDNs to distribute massive amounts of data, it might not come as a surprise that the open source community is exploring a much less expensive alternative.

April 30, 2020
NetApp Grabs CloudJumper to Manage Windows Desktops in the Cloud

NetApp today announced it has acquired CloudJumper, a provider of management tools for virtual desktops at a time when the rate at which Windows desktops are moving into the cloud is accelerating.

Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit, said NetApp will primarily employ CloudJumper as a software-as-a-service application that complements the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service provided by Microsoft on the Azure cloud. However, CloudJumper is also available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform.

CloudJumper has also been rebranded as NetApp Virtual Desktop Service (VDS) on NetApp Cloud Central, a control plane for managing NetApp cloud services, and integrated with Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes.

Lye said that as NetApp extended the reach of its data management platforms into the cloud it became apparent even before the COVID-19 pandemic that large numbers of desktops were moving into the cloud, thanks to the general availability of WVD and end of life for support for Windows 7. The COVID-19 pandemic is serving as a catalyst to further accelerate that shift as organizations look to make their IT environments both more flexible and resilient, said Lye.

As more desktops shift to the cloud, it then only becomes a matter of time before those virtual desktops create the need for additional NetApp data management services that already reside natively on cloud platforms such as Azure, he added.

While there is general agreement that more desktops will be moving into the cloud, the rate at which that transition will occur is debatable, since many organizations have limited resources to invest in IT projects. However, Lye said there are also many organizations that will take this moment to accelerate their transition to the cloud.

The one thing that is for certain is the number of desktops deployed locally will decline steadily in on-premises IT environments. End users may still have a local device, but the amount of compute power required to access Windows desktops in the cloud should be substantially less. That’s critical as more organizations also are abandoning traditional desktops in favor of mobile computing devices that enable end users to work from anywhere. In fact, it’s not even clear to what degree the IT professionals supporting virtual desktops will need to be in an office when the management tools being employed all reside in the cloud.

Clearly, in terms of Windows deployments, the next year may be the most transformational in recent memory. The impact on IT professionals will be especially profound as the need to physically service individual endpoints becomes less required. Of course, the transition to virtual desktops has been a long time coming. More than a few organizations have embraced virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with mixed success. However, now that virtual desktops have gone mainstream in the cloud, many IT organizations will soon be wondering why it took so long to actually make that happen.

April 30, 2020
Chef Updates Tool for Managing IT Infrastructure as Code

Chef today updated its tool for automating the management of IT infrastructure as part of an effort to further eliminate the need to rely on manual processes that generally fail to scale.

John Wyss, vice president of product for Chef, said Chef Infra 16 adds a Unified Mode that provides a more streamlined means of executing policies and adds support for YAML, which means IT teams can now employ Chef to automate the management of infrastructure without having to write code.

In addition, Chef has made it easier to update legacy instances of cookbooks built using Chef and added support for Arm processors.

Interest in automating the management of IT infrastructure is expected to accelerate considerably in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many IT teams are likely to be considerably reduced in size. The remaining IT staff will need to automate the management of IT at much greater degrees than ever before. Much of that infrastructure soon may also be residing in a public cloud rather than in an on-premises IT environment.

Of course, Chef is not the only way to automate the management of IT infrastructure. However, IT professionals who master Chef typically are able to create workflows that automate a wider range of tasks.

As an early pioneer of using code to manage infrastructure, Chef has been making a case for employing the Ruby programming language to make it easier to manage IT infrastructure at scale. While adoption of Chef largely has been limited to IT professionals who could master Ruby, Wyss noted those individuals who have mastered Chef will be in much higher demand as organizations look for IT professionals who have the skills required to manage tasks that otherwise would have required a much larger staff.

It remains to be seen to what degree IT professionals might embrace IT automation frameworks further. Many have developed their own scripts to automate a task. The challenge IT organizations have encountered is that those scripts are usually poorly documented and generally fail to scale. Automation frameworks provide a means to consistently manage IT infrastructure at scale in a way that is easily repeatable.

In the meantime, the debate of who inside the IT organization will automate the management of infrastructure continues to rage. Some IT organizations want developers to be responsible for the entire stack as part of an effort to reduce headcount, while other organizations prefer to have developers for a variety of reasons focus all their energies on writing application code. Regardless of who automates the management of infrastructure, the one thing that just about everyone agrees on is that legacy processes for managing IT infrastructure that typically involve many rote mundane tasks are no longer the way to work.

In fact, increased reliance on IT automation might accelerate the adoption of best DevOps practices because the frameworks required to automate the management of the underlying infrastructure might have been put in place already by the IT operations team, noted Wyss. Otherwise, the DevOps team itself has to put those IT automation frameworks in place with or without the help of the rest of the IT operations staff, which is a current state of affairs that many DevOps teams would just assume live without.

April 28, 2020
Commvault Deepens Ties With NetApp to Automate Data Protection

Commvault has extended its alliance with NetApp to make it possible to recover files nearly instantaneously from an all-flash memory array.

Ranga Rajagopalan, vice president of product management for Commvault, said NetApp Scale-out Data Protection (SDP) from Commvault builds on its backup and recovery software to make it possible to use to NetApp hyperconverged infrastructure in combination with all-flash arrays running StorageGRID object storage software to now recover data stored on-premises or in the cloud.

The on-premises capability is critical because it eliminates potential downtime in the event of a ransomware attack, Rajagopalan said, noting data can be recovered from an all-flash array residing on-premises using a scale-out architecture in a matter of seconds.

At the same time, IT organizations can take advantage of an object storage system from NetApp that is compatible with the S3 application programming interface (API) to store data in the cloud, he added.

Most IT organizations are by now aware the only way to combat ransomware is to be able to access a pristine copy of their data. The challenge they face, however, is finding a way to make that data accessible as fast as possible. It not only takes a significant amount of time to extract data from a cloud service, but it is also expensive. By keeping an organization’s most recent data available in an all-flash array locally, the time to restore data is sharply reduced, said Rajagopalan.

Of course, organizations have been keeping copies of data on magnetic storage systems for years. However, as the cost of all-flash arrays continues to decline it’s now more affordable for organizations to consider employing much faster all-flash arrays to back up and recover their most mission-critical data, he added.

Commvault also makes available application programming interfaces (APIs) through which the whole data protection process can be automated, he said.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are two issues that many organizations are now struggling to manage. The first is the need to automate more processes at a time when many organizations will have smaller IT staffs. The number of IT personnel that can be dedicated to manually managing data protection tasks will be fewer during the economic downturn.

At the same time, however, the number of ransomware attacks being launched continues to increase. All it takes is one mistake for an organization to find all its data encrypted. As a result, the relationship between data management and cybersecurity has become much tighter as organizations strive to ensure they always have a pristine copy of their data available.

In the months ahead there is no doubt there will be a lot more focus on the total cost of IT operations. The challenge is, finding a way to reduce those costs must be balanced against the existing commitment to service level agreements (SLAs). The only way to meet those often-conflicting goals is to rely more on IT automation frameworks to make data always available, in a way that requires much less human intervention.

April 27, 2020