One of the key trends within IT is the need to automate management of technology infrastructure. Increasing and accelerating automation projects is needed to not just reduce costs but deliver new value to the business. The reason automation is so important is because technology is moving at a superfast pace. Keeping up with all this new “technology goodness” and making it consumable to users and the business is a challenge for IT organizations.

Equally challenging is the need to keep up with new skill sets necessary to harness the value of automation. Let’s look at some of the cool things Dell Technologies is doing to help you add these new skills to successfully automate and modernize your storage environment. 

The Evolution of the Role IT infrastructure Administrator

The role of an IT infrastructure administrator has evolved significantly over the years. Back in the day, it was typical to see teams of admins managing dozens of apps across dedicated silos of infrastructure. Today, admins face the challenge of managing thousands of apps deployed across virtualized clouds, managed as pools of resources. In this new world, the need to automate administration is no longer a “nice to have”, it’s a “must have”.

As an example, storage provisioning tasks used to take dozens of steps and 10’s of minutes to complete. Over time, improvements in these workflows have reduced provisioning to a few simple clicks that take seconds to complete making admins more effective, efficient, and less prone to making a mistake.

Today, improvements in management automation and orchestration tools now help reduce the number of individual device managers. The requirement changed from making devices simple to manage to developing a “single pane of glass.”  The challenges, and required IT skills, associated with achieving this automation are exponentially greater than reducing the number of admin clicks to complete a task.

New skills are required because making things simple through automation, can be hard. Infrastructure elements can use different APIs and programming languages. Management frameworks are often vendor specific, sometimes inconsistent, and can be fragmented across technologies. Deployments can be risky due to the expenses, complexity, and time, sometimes taking years to go from pilot to production. Without the right skills to do this, getting to a “single pane of glass” can easily become more of a “pain of glass”.

What’s Next for the Role of Infrastructure Administrators

Going forward, we are seeing yet another shift in skill sets on the horizon. Infrastructure management “Nirvana” has moved from getting to a single “pane of glass” to no panes of glass. From fewer clicks to no clicks. From automating administration of infrastructure to making administration of infrastructure invisible.

IT modernization will mean infrastructure will be deployed and managed as code versus a stack of individual devices and elements. Developing these environments will again require new types of IT skill sets because the automation prioritizes the outcome and not the steps to achieve the result. It’s more about the “why” than the “how”.

In the past, skilled admins were the backbone of IT operations who made everything run seamlessly. Finding more admins to keep up with today’s level of scale and rate of growth is not just impractical, it’s impossible. New levels of simplicity and automation are required to allow organizations to keep pace. And the skill sets to use these tools to modernize your storage environment are also changing.

Instructor Sessions – Automation with PowerMax

Instructor Sessions are a series of 4-hour, interactive, digital experiences led by technology experts. The Automation with PowerMax session is a great opportunity to learn more from experts with practical hands-on experience. This session will allow  you to leverage PowerMax REST APIs that enable interactive, scripted, and programmatic management control of the PowerMax platform.

During the session you will:

• Learn about PowerMax automation capabilities and elevate performance by leveraging automation tools.
• Explore advanced automation technologies such as Ansible for PowerMax VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and Ansible modules for PowerMax.
• Hear the latest automation use cases that enable you to become familiar with repetitive tasks and automation case studies.
• Receive bonus material and lab demonstrations to support you in your automation journey.

How to Get Started Today

Dell Technologies Education Services offers advanced automation courseware to help you start developing the skills you need to be ready for success.  As soon as you start putting your learning into action – you’ll start to see some great opportunities and you’ll get skilled to think out of the box when challenged to find a solution.

Register for an upcoming session and upskill in digital transformation. You can expect to hear from our Global Lead Instructors on topics from emerging tech themes AI, Data Protection, Security to the latest tools Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes. Dell Technologies we’re constantly sharing knowledge with our teams to bring you tried and tested use cases to help you learn more.

Technology is evolving at a rapid pace. To stay on top of emerging tech tools, hot topics, industry trends and all things automation – join our Instructor Sessions Automation series for a bite sized learning experience. Don’t miss this awesome learning experience.

For more information and to register for an upcoming Dell Instructor Session, get started here.

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