Not a day goes by when I don’t think about the bizarre life we lead here at Inteleca—peering under the hood of many of the largest IT departments in North America, witnessing first-hand the challenges that fall under the good, the bad, and the ugly. And throughout that voyeuristic life we lead, there’s one constant I see far too often: IT departments struggling with the sheer magnitude of tasks thrown at them on a seemingly minute-to-minute basis.

So, why so overloaded and overworked? Simply put, most enterprises still have the majority of their most critical applications running on-premises. And because of that the data center is now a hub for all applications, whether the workloads are managed there all the time or not.

Now, of course, with the advent of solutions from the likes of VMware and others, the software-defined data center to cloud has greatly streamlined enterprise operations. That said, one must also calculate the ever-growing number of apps an enterprise continues to add—something that continually adds to the overload.

So, what’s the solution? As it pertains to IT lore, there’s the fabled self-healing data center, a magical place where next-gen intelligence manages workloads and all challenges in a Narnia-like manner where magic elves appear to make all right in the world. Sounds too good to be true—yeah … we’re not there yet people.

But that all said, there’s hope. With the latest release of vRealize 6.6 management platform that delivers the pinnacle of what is possible, it has set the stage for what is to come. So, back to the self-healing data center that eludes us all. There’s the promise of a new world order for the IT admin who struggles daily with the ever-present onslaught of demands—perhaps that new world order will soon free up time to tackle the bigger projects and leave the grunt work to the virtualized elves.

Now with vmWare, automated remediation delivers fixes to most routine issues and shuffles workloads where there is outage to ensure business continuity, making the burden of workload placement almost a thing of the past—at one time this was a major task that took up much of an IT department’s time.

And, according to VMware’s website (and I quote):

This platform manages workload placement, automation and remediation based on policies rather than rules. vRealize Operations 6.X brought automated remediation and predictive distributed resource scheduling (pDRS), among other key functions, into the mix for today’s dynamic workloads. vRealize Operations today delivers all the ingredients for a self-healing data center in one platform: automation, lifecycle management, proactive alerting, predictive scheduling and a single but extensible point of control.

Ultimately, the fully automated, self-healing data center ought to be able to run even more efficiently than one run manually, but today that remains elusive, especially for shops running an amalgam of tools for data center, cloud and a variety of applications.  In fact, a recent Forrester report shows that IT still fights a lot of fires in capacity management. Yet interviews with VMware cloud management platform users show a 20% improvement in overall efficiency, a 75% reduction in unplanned downtime, and a 10% reduction in hardware costs.

So, there it is … old-school is now out of school and on vacation—at least close to it.