mValent survey highlights application complexity

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By Jeff Feinman

August 19, 2008 — Enforcing configuration consistency across multiple environments is the main factor in automating configuration, change and release management actions in application infrastructures, according to figures from mValent.

The company, which sells automation software for application infrastructures, gathered input about IT teams’ priorities in managing applications and services for its study, titled “Challenges on the Road to Automating Application Infrastructure,” released on Aug. 14. Among the 286 IT professionals who took part in the survey, 38% called configuration consistency the key factor in automating the application infrastructure, while 33% identified improving staff productivity through automation as the primary consideration.

From the survey results, “the need for automated tools to manage all of the moving parts associated with the infrastructure that supports complex, distributed, mission-critical business applications is clear,” said Jim Hickey, mValent’s chief marketing officer.

Not surprisingly, the current economic slowdown shaped many responses, with 92% of the respondents identifying cost containment as a top priority. Additionally, 44% said their most important projects this year have to do with business applications, and 33% called IT audit and compliance the most important project focus. Speeding deployment of new applications and implementing management processes to improve IT are other priorities, respondents said.

Virtualization hasn’t been met with much enthusiasm; about 40% of survey respondents said virtualization has made their environment more complex or has made no difference at all.

“[Virtualization] lessens the problems in one area but adds to workloads and complexity in others,” Hickey said. “Because virtualization enables a ‘cut and paste’ mentality for server instances, there’s been an explosion in the number of instances. Someone needs to manage those instances and keep the configurations in sync. Hardware and power costs are down, but administrative costs are up.”

The survey found that 50% of IT staffs employ more than 10 people to manage configuration changes to applications and Web servers, middleware, databases and operating systems. Each hour of application downtime can cost companies more than US$100,000, according to those respondents.

According to mValent, installation and configuration of middleware assets and databases are time consuming for most IT teams, taking anywhere from six hours to more than a whole business day. Installing new database instances is the most complex task facing these teams.

For application and Web servers, the most difficult task is finding and fixing configuration problems. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents said it can take three and a half hours to fix such problems.

Related Search Term(s): automation, virtualization, mValent

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