InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity: How AI simplifies HCI, Part 1 – Intro and demo

EzmeralExperts · ‎08-23-2019

As you may remember from HPE Discover in June, HPE announced that InfoSight is being integrated into HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). HPE InfoSight is a SaaS portal with the intelligence to predict and even prevent infrastructure problems before they happen. I know, I can hardly believe it myself. Now the HPE SimpliVity platform, which includes features such as always-on inline deduplication and compression, and built-in data protection, will be the first HCI solution to include artificial intelligence (AI) using HPE InfoSight.

In this blog series, I am going to walk you through the benefits of InfoSight in an HPE SimpliVity environment. This 4-part series is intended to help IT administrators make the most of the new AI capabilities and show you how easy it can make your life.

Part 1: An introduction to HPE SimpliVity with HPE InfoSight, how it can make your job easier and create a better virtual environment for you to manage
Parts 2-4: A deeper dive into HPE InfoSight with HPE SimpliVity hosts, clusters and VMs

Let’s get started with some comments I’ve heard from customers about their HCI environments.

“I want my environment to be simple and easy to use!!”

I agree. HPE SimpliVity is based on the HPE SimpliVity Data Virtualization Platform, designed from the ground up to be simple and efficient. In fact, it’s the only HCI on the market that comes with a HyperGuarantee, which promises 3-click VM management, and 90% capacity savings across storage and backup combined.

One thing that is a drawback of most HCI, and by extension virtual environments, is the inability to easily see everything in your IT environment. It is frustrating having to click into multiple different consoles or, even worse, the command line interface (CLI). HPE SimpliVity makes it easy, allowing you to see and manage data across the HCI environment, even if that environment spans across multiple geographic locations.

“I want some predictability to my environment.”

Again, I agree. Now, imagine having a simple environment and then having visibility into said environment to see the future. That’s HPE InfoSight with HPE SimpliVity. HPE InfoSight monitors, predicts and reports on the metrics an IT admin cares about in your environment. You can view and generate reports on:

Single dashboard view of your entire HPE SimpliVity environment
Historical capacity consumption, and predicted time to full capacity
Visibility into the top VM’s of your environment by resource consumption
Deep insights into what is consuming your resources at a cluster, host, or VM level

The screen shot below shows an example of multiple data centers on a single HPE InfoSight dashboard.

Figure 1 – Data Center List dashboard

What about the ability to drill down from the Data Center List and view the details for each data center? InfoSight with HPE SimpliVity lets you! If you are going to run out of space in a cluster, wouldn’t it be nice to receive alerts months ahead of time? Of course it would, and InfoSight with HPE SimpliVity tells you. Look at this example – it is easy to see there is no imminent risk for the LA cluster, but the Tampa cluster is trending on a path to full capacity in three months’ time.

Figure 2 – Days Until Full drill-down view

“I don’t want to install anything.”

Agreed, why waste time installing consoles when HPE InfoSight is a cloud-based service that will come with HPE SimpliVity updates. In the second half of 2019, HPE InfoSight with HPE SimpliVity will be released. Registration is easy and takes minutes. Within 24 to 48 hours, you will see your hyperconverged environment like never before.

For more information, watch this overview demo video.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, where I will explain what HPE InfoSight can do at a host level and drill deeper into data efficiency. ‘Til next time.