The IT Factory: A Vision of Standardization and Automation

Abstract

Together, standardization and automation are the key to greater efficiency in data center operations. The trend is clearly moving away from manual systems with custom parameters to standard systems whose parts, from infrastructure via operating system to finished services, are produced automatically as a joint product of multiple (virtual) servers (e.g. SAP systems). The characteristics of this type of IT production include self-service capacities, agility, and scalability. Service providers use economies of scale to provide services quickly and cheaply, often billed in a pay-per-use system. The degree of automation increases at the same rate as the data centers can be managed by software resources. The software-defined data center virtualizes the entire infrastructure and provides it as abstract server capacities. On top of the many other advantages, the new transparency that overcomes the limitations of traditional data centers (e.g. the hybrid cloud) is an important factor in managing workloads more dynamically and with an improved awareness of actual needs in the future.