Helping your IT Operations get some sleep

[DaveDavies]

We now live in an age where nearly all companies are essentially technology companies.

Most have back office systems and front end internet web-based portals through which they display their products, providing the ability to purchase and access support for these products, as well as enabling formal and informal interaction with their clients. Many IT systems help automate the manufacturing processes, distribution and warehouse processes. Nearly all have infrastructure from multiple vendors and various levels of support in place.

Everything nowadays is 24x7.

So next time you see your IT Operations people, do thank them for their valiant efforts. Be nice to them even; buy them the occasional coffee perhaps, because they need it.
They are fixing issues, patching operating systems, applying firmware updates, correcting ad-hoc user problems…I could go on…but overall they’re “keeping the lights on”!

These are the things that keep Operations awake at night…and that’s not a metaphor!

IT Operations at Desktop, Dual Monitor

Typically, at least 70% of their time is focused on keeping these lights on, leaving just 30% of their time to work on new projects, the ones that will save the company money, or bring new revenue streams to the company….more often than not involving new technology, products or architectures….you know… the fun ones.

Planned and unplanned downtime is the biggest consumer of their time. Conference calls with vendors – sometimes groups of vendors – trying to establish root cause and ownership of issues and then the urgent remedial action. All whilst absorbing pressure from senior management with constant updates and time to a fix, and the pressure of knowing that there is a cost to the business until resolution.

If we could flip that 70/30 around, IT Operations would be able to bring to market vital innovation for their company much more quickly.

At HPE, we’re taking steps to achieve this flip for our customers, with the rollout of HPE InfoSight for our storage and server-based solutions. HPE InfoSight is an industry-leading predictive analytics platform that brings software-defined intelligence to the data center, with the ability to predict and prevent infrastructure problems before they happen. Leveraging advanced machine learning, the new capabilities of HPE InfoSight pave the path towards an autonomous data center.

Here’s how it works…

1. We build up and maintain a detailed picture of all of our customers’ infrastructure environments – down to OS & firmware revisions…let’s call it the “Stack”
2. If a customer has an issue in their Stack, for example during an OS upgrade, we place a hold notification on all of our customers that have a similar Stack…i.e. “Don’t attempt this OS upgrade at the moment - there is an ongoing support issue being diagnosed and resolved”
3. HPE works to resolve the problem, and updates the notification with regards the fix and releases the hold
4. All customers avoid un-planned downtime – and stress – and continue with their innovation projects

HPE InfoSight collects, analyses and correlates data from millions of sensors every minute and uses this global insight to prevent problems and make sure infrastructure is being used optimally and efficiently. With this insight, combined with leading edge Artificial Intelligence, HPE InfoSight automatically predicts and resolves 86% of problems before they become a problem for you [metric based on an internal study of HPE Nimble Storage installed base, August 2017].

Because of this capability with HPE Infosight, for HPE Nimble there is no L1 & L2 support at all. Not needed. L3 support engineers still exist, and are happy for you to call them directly should you need to. This will be our goal for the entire portfolio.

It’s a “see once, fix for all” approach that has benefits for all of our customers. The data center of the future will be Self-Managing, Self-Healing and Self-Optimising.

…and now we even have an App for it.

The HPE InfoSight App

At HPE we are helping our customers flip the 70/30 ratio around. Let’s have IT looking after itself with HPE Infosight, the foundation of our vision for the Autonomous Data Center.

Dave Davies
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

twitter.com/HPE_UKI
linkedin.com/company/hewlett-packard-enterprise
hpe.com/uk