Information for Business from Lenovo
Contributor: Darren Baguley
Four tips for simplifying systems management

With business moving faster than ever, it is critical that software management tools centralise and automate hardware resource management.

Below are four tips for simplifying systems management that will enable fast cloud and traditional infrastructure deployments, while providing visibility and control of physical resources.

1. Automated systems management

Modern systems management tools such as Lenovo’s XClarity can make life a lot easier for IT staff in organisations ranging from SMB to enterprise. The latest-generation tools are also designed to be hardware agnostic with clean, easy-to-read, dashboard-driven graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that can be accessed on a PC, via a browser or on a tablet or smartphone. And many of them also include automation capabilities designed to reduce the workload on busy administrators while minimising errors by handling routine management tasks across large numbers of systems.

2 .Device level hardware queries

Whatever the endpoint, effective systems management tools need to ensure that administrators are able to easily see the most important information and drill down quickly to uncover the underlying data, whether it’s an alarm, an alert or just a particular detail of a piece of hardware. IT staff should be able to see temperature, fan speed and a variety of other metrics for every server, storage appliance, network device and endpoint throughout the data centre.

3. Automatic for the administrator

And it’s not just hardware. Modern systems management tools should also be able to inventory the software installed, identify versions and use that information to automate basic infrastructure tasks. Firmware updates, pattern-based software configuration management, and deployment of operating systems and hypervisors to multiple systems can all be handled by systems management tools, taking a workload off the administrator’s shoulders.

4. Dynamic workload allocation

Another feature offered by modern systems management tools is centralised management of virtualised server networks. These tools can be used to streamline server maintenance in cluster environments by dynamically moving workloads from machine to machine through rolling reboots and firmware updates. Similarly, unplanned downtime can be reduced by dynamically shifting workloads from affected hosts during predicted hardware failures.

Systems management tools can also help move data centres towards the holy grail of the software defined data centre. By using open representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate with a variety of cloud and IT service management software tools, it’s possible to obtain deep visibility and control over hardware resources through the use of higher-level cloud and service management software tools.

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