MiBURA: Server Management

Keeping things running smoothly and planning for the future.

As the data center has evolved from the client/server to the web computing paradigm, solutions for provisioning, change, and configuration management have not kept pace. Management processes are mired in a craftsmanship era, where highly-skilled personnel use a collection of scripts and point tools to effect change manually. The result – data center infrastructure is essentially hard-wired because it is so complicated and costly to change. Consequently, server utilization rates are exceedingly low, IT resources cannot be quickly re-purposed to respond to changing business requirements, and management and support costs account for up to 80% of data center budgets.

Given today's rapidly evolving and highly competitive business environment, IT organizations are faced with an ever increasing rate of configuration changes to data center assets – especially to servers and applications – to properly service the business. Paradoxically, there has been increasing emphasis in assuring the configuration integrity of IT assets to both internal (e.g., security, operational processes, etc.) and external (e.g., SOX, GLBA, HIPAA, etc.) policies by controlling how changes are made, when and by whom.