Data Center Orchestration

The need for automation and orchestration to optimize data center operations is gaining momentum in today's competitive data center environment. According to a study conducted by IDC, in 2000, 38% of a data center's budget went towards IT management staff.

Data Center Orchestration is a process-driven workflow that helps make data centers more efficient. Repetitive, slow and error-prone manual tasks are replaced by the automation of tasks and the orchestration of processes. 

The software uses the automation of tasks to implement processes such as servers load balancing, applications and servers configurations, system and hardware auto-scaling or implementing security policies.

Although these functions are done by separate specific programs, the orchestration software outlines how individual tasks can come together for a larger purpose. It organizes all the tasks of various services and creates a highly functioning and responsive data center enviroment.

Orchestration tools work using the following functions:

• Scheduling and coordination of data services.
• Leveraging of distributed data repository for large data sets.
• Tracking and publishing APIs for automatic updates of metadata management.
• Updating policy enforcement and providing alerts for corrupted data.
• Integrating data services with cloud services.

Due to their importance, we can find several solutions from big companies in the market for orchestration software such as Azure Automation, IBM Cloud Orchestrator or Cisco Process Orchestrator among others.

Albert Ribas