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Modernize IT Operations: Meet HPE Datacenter Care

By Gerry Nolan

Gerry Nolan Worldwide Senior Director, HPE Pointnext Operational Services Portfolio

Customers are asking a lot more from their IT support providers these days, and rightly so. The technology of today’s businesses is – to borrow the old GM slogan – not your father’s data center. It’s a complex, dynamic suite of multi-vendor solutions that includes both on-prem and public cloud plus IT is constantly expanding its scope as companies push new business models and require new innovative IT solutions. It’s a mix of heavy-duty workloads like SAP running alongside front-end, cloud-native apps. There’s a growing emphasis on performance and automation, plus more focus on security and compliance.

IT Organizations will benefit from access to additional expertise, insight, and best in class proven advice to meet these IT challenges.

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How far we’ve come (and how far we still need to go)

Take backup, for instance. Back when I started my career 30+ years ago, part of my IT role was performing backups overnight for a large company in London. I remember carrying boxes of tapes all the way down Oxford Street to a secure location. I used to wonder how long it would take to recover from an outage if one occurred. So many elements would have to work perfectly including physically transferring the tapes back to the datacenter, loading the data then getting all the applications and systems operational. Would the process work, how long would it take, what could go wrong, had we identified and mitigated all the potential risks? In the years I worked in that role, I don’t recall anybody ever testing the backup & recover process!

Fast forward to 2018, it’s incredible how far data storage has come. Now IT organizations have a host of backup options from public cloud to all-flash to hybrid to hyperconverged. But how far have companies’ backup strategies come? We’ve all read about the increases in data loss incidents and seen the headlines about WannaCry and the rest of the ransomware gang. A survey from Nationwide Insurance last year found more than two-thirds of small businesses don’t even have a disaster recovery plan, about half of them think it would take their business at least three months to recover from a natural disaster.

You may be thinking it’s mainly smaller companies that are at risk, but unfortunately that’s not the case. I’ve worked with more than one large organization that found itself struggling to restore data when they lost a major part of their storage array, simply because no-one tested the processes end to end.

There’s an important role here for IT support partners in providing insights and guidance – to say something like: “Hey, we see that you guys spend a lot of time doing backups, and we think there’s a more effective way to approach it. We work with a lot of customers globally. We've seen what a good backup strategy looks like. Would you like us to help you assess the impact of your backup strategies, and help you become best-in-class?"

A new level of partnership

With that kind of partnership in mind, HPE Pointnext has expanded and enhanced HPE Datacenter Care our personalized, relationship-based operational service. We’ve added new benefits for you under our enhanced Datacenter Care Advantage options.

HPE Datacenter Care is an environment based operational service. We cover your entire IT – HPE and multivendor from core to cloud. And it provides personalized support & help via an assigned support team, including an Account Support Manager who becomes an extended member of your IT team to ensure the service is customized to your needs and delivering value at all times. We also provide a Critical Event Manager for severe incidents to ensure all the right people are engaged and kept updated through to resolution. In addition we provide a SPOC for all issues and questions where you get 24*7 access to specialized COE experts plus special priority for incidents and parts.

After nearly 7 years delivering significant value to customers we are now excited to introduce a series of new optional capabilities under our Datacenter Care Advantage options to help IT address specific challenges.

A good way to think of these are recipes for success in particular IT scenarios like Security, Performance, Cloud, IT strategy, Automation and many more. Sticking with my backup example, here’s a quick look at Datacenter Care Advantage: Backup Analysis Services. We’ve added three new services: Business Impact Analysis, Backup Impact Analysis, and Backup Efficiency Analysis.DCCare 2.0 blog.png

Taken together, these services can help you ensure the high levels of data availability and protection you need to power new and legacy applications and workloads. We can work with you to guard your data wherever it resides – in traditional on-prem infrastructure, private or public cloud. And we can do that while ensuring that data protection doesn’t become a performance bottleneck.

I’ve focused on backup in this blog, but HPE Datacenter Care can help you at every point on the wheel of evolving customer needs pictured above, and I’ll delve into some more of those in upcoming posts. Some 4,000 of our largest customers currently rely on the advanced level of experience and specialist expertise that HPE Datacenter Care provides. And now, we’re adding new depth and dimension to this service that already is unique in the IT industry.

Meet us in Madrid

Join us at HPE Discover Madrid 2018, coming up November 27-29 to learn more. I would like to invite you to the following sessions and demos to meet experts and discuss this topic further:

  • DEMO 1101: "Modernize IT operations with HPE Datacenter Care" Your IT environment is more complicated to run and maintain than ever. Learn about HPE Pointnext’s strategies to modernize IT operations with HPE Datacenter Care, by optimizing day-to-day tasks, streamlining technology management and transforming the approach to IT ops. By employing these modernization strategies, HPE Datacenter Care provides you an ecosystem of experienced experts to partner with you to solve the pressing needs of today and help you build your data center of the future.
  • Session B6889: "Your IT landscape has changed, have you changed how you run it?", Presented by Gerry Nolan. Most IT teams are underfunded and overwhelmed from the growing complexity of running IT operations and the increased expectation to move faster and be more cost effective. HPE Pointnext has experience helping customers re-imagine their entire IT operations and change the way IT is run, from the edge to the cloud. This session will provide insights and demonstrate how customers can improve their experience, simplify IT operations and allow their IT team to focus on key projects with the help of HPE Datacenter Care.

Additional Resources: 

 About the Author: 

Gerry Nolan.jpgGerry Nolan is the Worldwide Senior Director for the HPE Pointnext Operational Services Portfolio which generates approx $6B annually. In this role his goal is to enable a best in class customer support experience. His responsibilities include defining and executing the overall product management strategy, developing new service capabilities and enabling the end to end value chain from portfolio to delivery. This translates into optimal IT and business outcomes for HPE customers. 

Gerry brings to his position a well-established background in information technology and professional services where he has worked for over 30 years. Prior to taking on his current role he held other positions in HPE including leadership for HPE’s Hyperscale Support Services, HPE’s Mission Critical Services business and HPE’s Customer Technical Training business. 

 

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