Data center automation

Joanne Kossuth, CIO at 2006 Enterprise All-Star winner Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., takes a different tack on data protection. "In my experience, data leakage often occurs because of human errors in [software and hardware] configurations throughout the enterprise," she says.

These errors leave data vulnerable to hacking and theft. "When something goes wrong you have a 'he-said/she-said' scenario and it's difficult to determine who did what and the consequences those actions had," she says.

For Kossuth, whose network falls under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other compliance mandates, this is unacceptable. So she employs automated tools wherever possible to monitor and audit changes to configurations, including switches, servers and storage devices.

For instance, she uses Nortel's Enterprise Switch Manager and Optivity Telephony Manager to watch over her switch and VoIP environments, respectively. She also takes advantage of Microsoft tools such as SQL Server Configuration Manager for her Windows servers.

She's even applied automated change and configuration management tools to ensure her newly upgraded Nortel/Trapeze 802.11g wireless environment won't succumb to data leakage. "We automatically configured all access points instead of configuring each one separately," she says.

Her next project involves automating changes in configurations among the virtual servers in her data center. "It's going to be very challenging to handle change and configuration management in a highly virtualized environment," she says. From what she's seen in the testing she's done so far, "the tools out there are not yet that sophisticated and need to evolve to provide a good overview of the current state and allow for testing of new configurations and their consequences before applying them."

Kossuth is not alone in her thinking that automation is the answer to protecting data, says Andi Mann, research manager at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). In a recent EMA study, 45% of respondents said data center automation addressed their need to reduce human errors, 43% said it enabled them to have better security and reduce risk, and 35% said it allowed them to have better audit and control from compliance.

Data center automation is critical as organizations build out their infrastructures to support the creation and retention of ever-increasing amounts of data. "Each server requires several thousand configurations on it and the average data center has 300 servers," Mann says. "Being able to manage that load manually is impossible. Automation offers a lot of payback in these environments."