HCI 2.0 takes the Institution of Engineering and Technology to the next level

[Matt_Shore]

Kevin Lewis, the Infrastructure Manager at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, knew it was time for a change. “We got the impression that our previous service provider wasn’t bothered about having our business,” says Lewis, who leads a team of thirteen infrastructure engineers at one of the world’s largest engineering institutions, with over 158,000 members in 153 countries.

The cost of storage was a bit of an issue for the IET. As a charity the IET must achieve significant objectives and goals for the wider engineering community in the UK but must do this as a charity while being responsible to donors, and accountable to ensure ROI for technology investments.

The IET inspires, informs, and influences the global engineering community to design a better world, by building the profile of engineering and technology, by changing outdated perceptions and by tackling the skills gap. That is why it is critical that the IET ‘walks the walk’ by representing infrastructure requirements to the wider IT community, and to business at large.

“It’s only been a month, but it looks like we have an extra 27% of storage capacity saved.”
 – (Kevin Lewis, IET)

Lewis had to work within a rigorous framework of best practices for delivering IT services, while managing and motivating his team through a period of significant change, which included refurbishing the IET headquarters during the global pandemic

Out with the old

Running 160 VMs on six disparate hosts was putting a strain on the IET’s ageing IT estate, as more people needed to work more intensively remotely. It was time for the old legacy infrastructure to go, and the search was on for a replacement.

Lewis was most impressed by the advances HPE had made in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), when compared with competitors. HPE Nimble Storage dHCI allows for a flexible configuration that balances loads on VMs and removes overprovisioning, whilst allowing organisations to scale their data centre storage independently of compute resources—something that was not possible under legacy HCI.

Running on top of that is HPE's AI-powered InfoSight, a management system that monitors and warns of issues before they happen. In many cases, the problem is solved before human intervention is needed.

“When we saw the tech and heard the AI stuff—how this intelligent infrastructure forecasts failures—when this was explained, well, that’s when we really were sold,” says Lewis.

HPE InfoSight is the industry’s most advanced infrastructure management system. Every second, it collects and analyses millions of data points from systems across the globe. Since 2010, it has analysed more than 1,250 trillion data points and saved enterprises more than 1.5 million hours of lost productivity.

Using the power of cloud-based machine learning to drive global intelligence and insights for infrastructure across servers, storage, and virtualised resources, HPE InfoSight radically simplifies IT operations.

"Taking out that first-line support and having it all done by machine intelligence really counts,” says Lewis. “If we do phone, we get straight to a person who can actually help—there is no need to log a ticket and wait for a response. That was a decision maker,” he says.

In addition to the support and maintenance advantages, Lewis says the IET is seeing significant savings from HPE Nimble Storage dHCI’s advanced compression and deduplication capabilities.

“It’s only been a month, but it looks like we have an extra 27% of storage capacity saved. This is not just because of eliminating unused space, but actual compression and dedupe. It means we can bring servers that had been hosted in the cloud back on-premises, potentially saving us tens of thousands a month. HPE took the time to discover the use case and look at our current usage and match the systems.”
 – (Kevin Lewis, IET)