- Automation efforts to date have focused on speeding up processes rather than eliminating them
- Nokia thinks that by focusing on reliability instead of speed, it can eliminate the fear factor around changes and automate data center operations more effectively
- Some of the work it is doing on data center automation could eventually end up in the telco realm
True automation can sometimes feel like a pipe dream. However according to Mike Bushong, VP of Data Center at Nokia, that’s because incumbent vendors in the data center arena have been doing it wrong.
Bushong said that until now, most efforts around data center automation have focused on speed. But, he argued, the focus should really be reliability. Why? Because if you can make things safer, it’s easier to go faster.
“Automation isn’t an exercise in speed, it’s an exercise in reliability,” he said.
Basically, rather than, say, speeding up the time it takes to write a script —which Bushong said is just the speed of typing — what you want to do is speed up the processes that make implementing automation and subsequent changes so time-consuming.
“I would argue that our industry has not solved the right problem. It’s not about building a bigger engine, it’s really around how do we add the controls required so you have confidence when you make the change. When you do that right, a bunch stuff follows out from that,” he continued.
“If all you want to do is make it faster to type things in and remove typos, send your team to a typing class. The goal of automation isn’t to do that. I’m trying to remove the human time that sits in between these tasks.”
Nokia thinks it has been able to do just that with its new Kubernetes-based Event-Driven Automation (EDA) platform for data centers. The platform comes with a variety of tools, including digital twin capabilities, GenAI assistance and integration with wide range of IT and cloud management systems.
Taking the fear out of “push to prod” Fridays
It’s that digital twin bit that Bushong said makes prospective customers’ eyes light up. Why? Because today, they’re afraid of making changes. There is, after all, a reason for all the memes about pushing tweaks into production on a Friday (the joke being that doing so will ruin everyone’s weekend).
“It’s lore that you don’t make changes,” Bushong said. But thanks to the digital twin capability, Nokia is enabling data center customers to know what will happen before it happens. Basically, “we’re letting an entire industry of people who are afraid to make changes the ability to make changes on a Friday.”
AvidThink Founder Roy Chua said Nokia’s approach is a “neat idea,” adding it was “a smart move” to leverage Kubernetes since most cloud data centers already have it installed and the requisite knowledge roles in place.
But while he’s “hopeful that it will be embraced by the community, it's not clear yet what the uptake will be and how multi-vendor environments will start rolling it out.”
Bushong said interest in Nokia’s version of automation appears to be quite high. Out of the 85 customers he said he’s spoken with about Nokia’s new EDA platform, “the take rate is 100%.” That doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily purchase the product, but it demonstrates that “interest is high in the idea that reliability is the problem to solve," he said.
Chua also pointed out that the platform “adds a necessary automation and orchestration layer to their data center networking product lines that can expand into other domains in the future.”
Indeed, Bushong said there are elements of the EDA platform that can carry over into the telco cloud realm. That’s already a direct discussion point he’s had with “dozens” of service providers.
But it’s all about sequencing, he concluded. The idea is to get good at doing it in the data center before expanding to other areas, rather than settling for being average across multiple segments at once.