Introduction of the "Relevance of Manageability & Automation Architecture" topic: http://communities.intel.com/thread/1564
Observations
- The real benefits of Manageability & Automation (M&A) in the enterprise distill down to reducing overall operational costs and providing more responsive / agile computing services. Capabilities in the Manageability space have matured (some nominally, some dramatically). Examples include: the speed and cost of deploying patches, the autonomic restarting of stopped services, out-of-band remote control, etc. Unfortunately, many Automation capabilities have been very slow to mature. An example is providing an automated capacity response to a demand signal for an application. We need to understand the overall capacity of the "data center" (server, storage, network, facility) and provision or move workloads consistent with demand of those applications / services following defined IT policies (e.g. ERP gets priority over e-mail in the last week of the quarter). We have a long way to go to make this "utility data center" happen.
- The basic automation technologies are available, but the effort/expense to deploy them is too high (or at least perceived too high). We are still trying to solve many of the same TCO and agility problems from years ago. ROI or NPV deployment justifications do not show immediate benefit.
- The basic computing models have not substantially changed. There are two basic categories of application usage models. There are local "PC" applications that create/view content and enterprise applications that help execute business processes. Technologies like "application/OS streaming", PXE network boot, etc. are creative methods for packaging and delivering the needed bits to the destination for execution.
- The industry has complicated these two usage models by introducing multiple device form factors, multiple operating systems, network enclaves, roaming connectivity, restricted permissions, secure communications, virtualization, SOA, new delivery models (like streaming), etc.. All of this must be managed.
- For enterprise applications, instrumenting the components (clients, networks, servers, services and the application) provides value, but is incomplete. Manageability needs to consider all aspects of the "user experience" to provide major benefit. The whole is truly larger than the sum of the parts.
- Manageability vendors need to sell product, which requires differentiation. There is little vendor incentive to provide "standard" products, unless they can supplement those standard offerings with their specific differentiators. Although "adapters", scripting extensions, APIs, etc. are available, it is still very complicated and expensive to implement.