The Data Center Evolution
The data center has evolved to become a critical part of enterprise infrastructure by hosting critical services, ensuring a secure environment for data, and providing high performance connectivity to users. Data centers are built using a complex mix of network hardware, software overlays, underlays, and controllers that must be managed and secured despite the constant changes required due to enterprise applications and services. This is placing an increased burden on network operations teams to manage the creation of, and ongoing changes associated with, complex and precise configurations. Manual methods of managing network operations are slowing down innovation and inhibiting the network from keeping up with the speed of business. To reach the speed you need, your data center must be agile, and it must be automated.
Automating & Orchestrating Data Center Operations
Orchestrating network changes is necessary to meet the demand for faster deployment of applications and services, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of security. Itential uniquely delivers the ability to automate and orchestrate the deployment of any ongoing changes across all your data center technologies and ensure those changes maintain compliance.
Outcomes
Reduce Security Risks
Incorporate automated compliance validation to reduce security risks that may occur as a result of network changes.
Innovate Faster
Quickly create new orchestrations and easily expand existing automations to include new vendors and technology within the data center.
Increase Velocity of Changes
Deploy and manage changes at scale to enable the network team to do much more in much less time.
Enable Self-Service
Enable end users to order applications in a self-service manner and deliver the necessary infrastructure within minutes.
Itential Data Center Automation & Orchestration Use Cases
- Streamline Day 0/1 Device Onboarding & Deployment
Zero-touch deployment and provisioning for top-of-rack devices, routers, switches, and software overlays.
Learn More - Mitigate Config Drift & Ensure Network Compliance
Automate device backups and bulk configuration changes, standardize all devices configurations with Itential’s Golden Configuration templates and mitigate config drift with automated remediation of configuration on routers and switch fabrics and automations.
Learn More - Simplify Day 2 Change Management
Orchestration of maintenance windows and configuration changes, including fully automated pre- and post-checks with intelligent analytics.
Learn More - Orchestrate Across Multi-Domain, Multi-Vendor Networks
Automate network operations across a single domain or extend automation to orchestrate management across multi-domain and multi-vendor networks, integrating with IT systems for full closed-loop orchestration.
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Hear From Our Customers
Armstrong Automates & Accelerates Infrastructure Service Delivery
Armstrong World Industries faced a growing backlog of service requests and the limitations of their homegrown orchestration system. By adopting Itential’s event-driven platform, they automated workflows, integrated tools like ServiceNow, and reduced service delivery times from days to minutes while achieving measurable ROI.
Customer Quote
Users now get faster service delivery because Itential automates the entire process. What used to take days now takes minutes, and that’s a massive improvement for us.
Eric Anderson
Senior Infrastructure Architect at Armstrong
Major U.S. Airline Leverages Itential to Automate Software Upgrades, Reduces Time from 4 Months to 4 Hours
With a nationwide device inventory of over 3,500 Cisco IOS devices, this major U.S. airline needed to ensure network OS upgrades on a consistent basis. Typically, their network team only had the capacity to perform software upgrades once every 18 months, creating significant security concerns.
Customer Quote
Before Itential, our best engineer took 4 months to write an Ansible script for upgrades that, with Itential we had working by lunch.
Manager of Network Engineering
Major U.S. Airline
Building an Automation Factory to Transform Network Service Delivery
By implementing an Automation Factory Model with the Itential Platform at the core of their strategy, Colt was able to rapidly and successfully progress their automation journey to enable true end-to-end orchestration. This has resulted in increased velocity to roll out many high-impact use cases without having to reskill their team.
Customer Quote
For Colt, we have standardized our operations on Itential as their workflow based solution allows us to run all of those workflows and ingest many different types of APIs with a fairly high ease of use.
Joan Espin Garcia
Director of Network Platforms & Solutions Architecture, Colt
RUSH Automates NetOps to Respond Quickly to Critical IT Needs & On-Demand Patient Care
The RUSH University Medical Center team tackled their challenges of supporting a sprawling network that supports three hospitals and over 30 remote sites by adopting Itential to reduce operational bottlenecks, streamline mundane tasks, and respond quickly to critical IT needs — improving the efficiency of healthcare delivery while maintaining patient safety.
Customer Quote
The game-changer for us with Itential is how it abstracts the complexity of automation. In the past, scripting and automation were intimidating because they required you to be a programmer first and a network engineer second. But with Itential, you don’t need to be a developer to create impactful automations. You can take building blocks and create workflows that solve real problems quickly and effectively, without the need for manual intervention.
Uzair Khan
Manager of Network Services, RUSH University Medical Center
Leading Health Insurance Provider Sunsets Legacy HPNA, Reduces Device Backups from Hours to Minutes with Itential
With a network spanning 16,000 devices, this leading health insurance provider needed to move away from its legacy HPNA system to streamline operations. Previously, device backups took hours to complete, creating operational inefficiencies. By adopting Itential, they automated and accelerated backups, reducing execution time from hours to minutes while modernizing their network management approach.
Customer Quote
I think that Itential is everything we want to do that HPNA couldn’t do right out-of-the-box.
Senior Network Engineer, Leading Health Insurance Provider
Enhance & Accelerate Data Center Automation with Itential’s Low-Code Orchestration Platform
Itential supports multiple southbound options for interacting with the network and data center elements, including Cisco NSO, Ansible, scripting, Terraform, cloud APIs, and SDN controllers; allowing users to orchestrate even the most complex multi-vendor networks. Users can gain greater velocity for their data center deployments by leveraging the capabilities of the Itential Platform as well as our collection of pre-built components, to immediately start implementing orchestrating in their data centers and can dramatically reduce the time normally associated with development, testing, and deployment of orchestrated workflows.
Users can gain greater velocity for their data center management and operations by leveraging the capabilities of Itential’s automation and orchestration solution such as:
Low-Code Workflow Canvas
Drag-and-drop workflow canvas for network engineers and non-programmers to build integrated workflows that enable the automation of any CLI-based network devices and API cloud services.
Configuration Management & Validation
Orchestrate network device and software overlay configurations with Itential’s federated inventory of network CLI devices and API services together for easy visibility and management. Quickly create and manage Golden Configuration templates that can be used to validate changes for compliance against traditional CLI devices and modern API services.
Leverage Existing Automation
Whether it’s using Python, Ansible, Terraform or any other technology, Itential allows you to take any existing automations and integrate them into Itential’s Platform so they can be augmented with pre-check and post-check processes and integrated with any common IT systems like ServiceNow, Infoblox, and Slack.
No-Code Integration with Everything
Integrate operational processes and connect your entire IT ecosystem such as ticketing, change management, inventory, monitoring tools, and any network technology with Itential’s library of open integrations to 100+ systems.
Pre-Built Workflows for Data Center Use Cases
Increase the networking team’s productivity right out the gate by leveraging automations from Itential’s growing library of Pre-Built Workflows and assets. The library includes many ready-to-run data center orchestrations like software upgrades, EVPN provisioning, and network device changes that can help network teams overcome change backlog and free up more time.
Learn More with Itential Content
Blogs
- Data Center Evolution & The Importance of Infrastructure Orchestration Technology
- Overcoming the Automation Limitations of Network Domain Controllers for VXLAN Data Center Changes
- If You’re Not Automating Your Data Gathering, It’s Time to Start
- More Impact, Same Effort: Orchestrating Your Automations
- NetDevOps, Self-Service, & Evolving the Network Change Process to be Consumable by Everyone
- Scaling Network Automation: Scripts vs. Integrated Workflows
- Automating Network Changes from Ticket Creation to Ticket Closure
Other Resources
- How to Publish & Expose Network Automations as a Service with Itential
- Network Automation & Orchestration Evaluation Guide
- Network Automation vs. Network Orchestration
- Itential Platform Demo Overview
- How Itential Helps NetDevOps Teams to Rapidly Design & Build Network Automations (NFD 31)
- How to Deliver Self-Service Network Automation with Itential & ServiceNow
- Network Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model
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