AUTOMATED SWIM (SINGLE WINDOW INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT) FOR CLOUD

Data centers manage complex server environments, including physical and virtual machines, across a wide variety of platforms, and often in geographically dispersed locations. Information Technology managers are responsible for ensuring that servers in these increasingly complex environments are properly configured and monitored throughout the IT life cycle. They also face challenges managing the physical and virtual environments and the fact that we must centralize, optimize and maintain both. If the variation and complexity can be taken out of a process to make it more consistent, it can be automated. Through the use of virtual provisioning software, provisioning and re-purposing of infrastructure will become increasingly automatic. Staff will physically rack once, cable once, and thereafter (remotely) reconfigure repeatedly, effortlessly, as needed. An automatic infrastructure will rapidly change which servers are running what software and how those servers are connected to network and storage. It will re-purpose machines according to the real-time demands of the business. It will enable capacity to be "dialed up" or "dialed down". And it will bring up a failed server on new hardware, with the same network and storage access and addressing, within minutes. All without needing to make physical machine, cable, LAN connection or SAN access changes.