The amount of data being created is soaring, putting pressure on data centers to keep pace with growth and application support demands. At the same time, IT is expected to become more agile and responsive to the needs of the business. Storage infrastructure is a foundational component that allows the IT professional to keep up with these growth elements and meet organizational expectations.
The goal of storage automation should be to perform the provisioning of storage and the adjustment of storage performance in a predictable, repeatable manner that can be done at scale, often outside of the storage system’s graphical user interface (GUI). “Outside” could mean that storage management tasks are performed from within VMware vCenter/vRealize, OpenStack’s Horizon, any other management GUI, or the command line. For example, automatically provisioning a virtual machine (VM) should allow for setting the storage characteristics at the time of creation. A script or VMware's vRealize interface accesses the storage system's API to enable the setting of these characteristics. These adjustable features cover the spectrum from capacity and performance to data protection and security. The result of storage automation should be a significant reduction in administrative time as well as a reduction in errors.
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