According to a global survey of CIOs, 75-percent of respondents admit that the network is impacting their organisation’s ability to achieve business goals. A ZK Research study found that 35-percent of all network downtime is due to human error.
The single biggest inhibitor of this is the lack of network automation and lack of integration of the network with other IT operations and tool chains.
According to Brocade’s Malaysia Country Manager, Sean Ong, legacy IT infrastructure has held back businesses from innovating on their terms, with IT departments having had to say “no” to new business opportunities.
Modern IP technologies however, have the power to really optimise the network, and this thinking has been the basis to Brocade’s new server-based automation platform.
According to Ong also, there is a good number of Brocade’s VCS Fabric technology installations and Ethernet fabric installations in Malaysia, and this is an addressable market that have potential of ‘evolving’ into Brocade’s Workflow Composer network automation solution.
Network automation across domains
Brocade Workflow Composer (BWC) is a network automation platform that automates the entire network life cycle and integrates with cross-domain workflows. Being able to automate across domains is important, as some workflows that exist to achieve an important outcome, such as reducing time-to-resolution, involves a few parties and must cut across siloes.
For example, detecting a network device issue and then creating and assigning a help desk ticket to a network operator.
This is one example of a turnkey workflow that can be automated by BWC, and notably, there are three types of workflow automation that BWC enables – turnkey, customisable and do-it-yourself.
These are supported in multi-vendor environments, although automation in turnkey mode involves templates of commonly faced network issues and is optimised for Brocade equipment, Ong had admitted.
Cross-domain workflow automation, can eliminate transfer delay and reduce execution from weeks or days to just seconds.
Automatic troubleshooting and remediation
In the event of a switch failure for example, it takes less than a minute to create a helpdesk ticket with documentation of the issue and to try resolve the switch failure with an automatic restart.
In the past, an engineer would have had to be notified to log in remotely to check and try to manually troubleshoot the event.
Businesses that want to automate more complex workflows that are unique to their business, can enlist the help of Brocade NetDev Professional Services and also leverage DevOps methodologies, open source technologies and a thriving technical ecosystem.
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