Automated Datacentre Deployment – It’s Time to Let Go of Your Physical Devices

I work in the process automation arena, and have mainly spent the last 6 months automating server build processes. You might think "Why have you been doing that? There are plenty of tools out there for it", well, you might be right…

In fact you are right. The problem that I came up against is that server build automation tools assume that there is a physical server with drives and network already setup that it can build or there is a virtual environment/"cloud" that it can start orchestrating. Can you see where the problem is yet?

Best of breed datacentre environments use dedicated physical devices delivering what they're designed for. Devices such as network switches and routers, firewalls and IPS/IDS devices, SAN and NAS technology, fabric networks, the list goes on.

All of these devices are made by the industry leaders, such as Cisco, HP, Broccade, Netapp etc, all who have their own configuration interfaces and run their own software/firmware, many don't even have an API…

So, when it comes to deploying an enterprise environment which will consist of a physical and virtual hybrid, you're not going to just be putting operating systems and applications on servers, you're going to be:

- Configuring access ports on network switches
- Configuring core network routing
- Configuring SAN or NAS storage and presenting it
- Configuring fabric networks
- Configuring physical server hardware via ILO or DRAC

All of the above are generally done by subject matter experts via SSH or a web interface or (if you’re lucky) via a vendor specific orchestration tool which will keep track of all the different command sets required by different firmware/software versions of their relevant devices.

The issue now comes in the fact that everyone is thinking "Cloud" with services such as "Auto Scaling" and "On-Demand", so they want virtual datacentre environments delivering performance and security of the old school environments but spun up quickly, very quickly, we're talking minutes here, not days or weeks.

This provides a big challenge in orchestrating the configuration of all of these physical devices. This is not to say it can't be done, it CAN be done, I've done it, but should we be doing it?

If you look at products like VCloud Director, CA (Previously 3Tera) Applogic and AWS you'll start to see what I'm talking about. These physical datacentre elements are now virtualised. For instance, you can drop a virtual F5 firewall, load balancer or some S3 storage into your AWS environment, and you're done. Just "Drag and Drop" not "Rack and Stack".

All of these devices are now software, but delivered by industry leading vendors. This is not to say they're better than their physical predecessors, but they're a lot easier to deploy in a virtual datacentre environment, and more importantly, you can automate their configuration.

So, it really feels like we're on the cusp of a datacentre revolution, and it's one that a lot of enterprises and MSP's aren't ready for. If you're going to compete in this growing, agile, scalable and transient world of "The Cloud", it's time to lose the shackles of physical devices and embrace an even more virtual world.