The rapidly evolving, modern business environment places a significant change-management burden on IT teams. These teams are tasked with delivering infrastructure and applications at a dramatically accelerated pace.

Virtualization and automation can be a fundamental response to these business challenges. However, building meaningful automation can be complex and time consuming. The initial development cost can be significant, and the cost of maintenance fueled by the challenge of responding to an evolving infrastructure landscape can quickly erode the initial value of internal automation programs.

Some of the maintenance challenge can be addressed through careful analysis to determine what tasks should be automated. Some tasks are insufficiently frequent or time consuming to warrant the development and maintenance effort.

However, after completing such analysis, IT organizations often conclude that while automation would be beneficial and potentially transformational, the ongoing sustaining effort is too significant to ignore. The final automation might be more complicated than the task that it was created to address.

The challenge, therefore, is to determine how to benefit from the power of automation while simultaneously addressing the maintenance issue.

Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 is a leader in converged infrastructure (CI), providing enterprises worldwide the simplicity of a turnkey engineered system experience that allows them to focus on innovating rather than spending time on maintenance.

For VxBlock System 1000 administrators, VxBlock Central has made the promise of automating and managing the infrastructure a reality. VxBlock Central provides a single unified interface and access point for CI operations. It dramatically simplifies daily administration by providing enhanced system-level awareness, automation, and analytics. VxBlock Central includes launch points to VMware vRealize Orchestrator with workflows for automating daily operational tasks and to vRealize Operations for deep VxBlock analytics and simplified capacity management. These advanced automation and management capabilities are available at no cost to current and future VxBlock customers.

This paper reviews the challenges and opportunities of automation and describes a set of automation tools and capabilities that allows IT administrators to accelerate IT infrastructure deployment and optimize system utilization.