The Challenges Facing Data Centers

Businesses of all kinds depend increasingly on software applications for their core operations. Managing these applications is a mission-critical task. Yet, until now, IT operators in data centers have had only rudimentary tools for deploying, configuring, and analyzing applications. Most data centers find themselves relying on custom scripts to perform essential functions. IT operators recognize the risk involved with these scripts:

• Scripts are usually hastily written and are prone to error.

• Scripts tend to operate using a long lists of files and lack the ability to manage applications as discrete units.

• Scripts are written with an imperfect knowledge of application requirements, component dependencies, host environments, and other factors that can affect the success or failure of a deployment.

• Scripts lack the benefits of a complete management platform; for example, they typically can not rollback operations systematically, dynamically adjust configuration values, and so on.