IT admins are leveraging automation now more than ever, and with good reason: they’re saving valuable time and resources.
If you are like many IT admins, you often spend countless hours on manual tasks that are prone to errors. On top of that, you must respond to constant change requests, which typically require manual intervention and specialized skills to adjust on-premises infrastructure. From deploying new infrastructure to training new employees, the demands caused by growth and change take up valuable time and resources you probably don’t have.
So what’s the answer? Automation. Increased IT demands are why IT admins are leveraging automation now more than ever. Automation enables IT to easily provision and manage physical infrastructure using software-defined templates and APIs, saving valuable time and resources.
With the ease of point and click
Yet, changing the way you manage your infrastructure and implementing more automated processes can be an overwhelming prospect. The old “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” mentality may be holding you back.
If you are using infrastructure and software built for the last decade, you aren’t reaping the benefits of automated operations. Take the example of a flip phone versus a smart phone. With a flip phone, you can certainly make a call and send a text message, but you can’t do anything beyond just the basics. The smart phone, however, offers calling and texting -- plus a multitude of other technology advancements.
Implementing an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn infrastructure management solution is the key to helping alleviate the concerns of making the leap to automation. Just like with the smartphone, you need a straightforward user interface that anyone can learn — with minimal training. Today’s infrastructure management offerings do just that, letting you navigate the software with the simplicity and ease of point and click technology.
Do more with less
Employing an effective infrastructure management solution allows you to tackle more on your to-do list and utilize staff more efficiently. This means having the ability to add infrastructure and grow capacity without always needing to add people.
More importantly, infrastructure management solutions automate manual tasks, like firmware and driver updates, to help easily deploy new servers and simplify everyday maintenance and monitoring tasks. In addition, the software provides the ability to manage infrastructure across multiple data centers regardless of where they are located—across town or across the globe.
Using infrastructure management solutions, you should be able to get troubleshoot alerts and view core inventory data from one place. This capability allows you to make more informed, faster decisions with better infrastructure visibility.
Automation in action
One of Switzerland’s leading providers of insurance and occupational pension plans, Retraites Populaires, recently installed infrastructure management software to automate their IT infrastructure. With their previous solution, they had to physically connect several different consoles. Because they only had small IT team, they needed a more efficient way to automate infrastructure spread across multiple locations throughout Switzerland.
They selected HPE OneView because it offered a programmatic, software-defined approach to managing infrastructure with efficient workflow automation, a modern dashboard, and a comprehensive partner ecosystem. The software enables Retraites Populaires to monitor, manage, and update its entire infrastructure from a single console—even from across the country.
“We have a small, experienced team to manage our entire infrastructure. HPE OneView offers a single point of entry for configuring our entire solution, even at server levels or storage levels,” says Daniel Pizzolante, systems and network engineer at Retraites Populaires.
By implementing a software-defined, infrastructure management platform with HPE OneView, Retraites Populaires Interactive achieved significant time savings. “Everything is scheduled and automated, so there’s no disruption of service. Overall, compared to our old management process, I have gained three to four hours per week thanks to HPE OneView automation.”
IT Admins: Get ahead with automation
Whether you work for a small company or large enterprise, your job as an IT professional is to keep IT environments running smoothly, while delivering a positive experience to users. And you must accomplish this all while supporting new business requirements and growth. Automation is a must to keep pace with the ever-increasing velocity of digital transformation since it improves execution reliability, repeatability, and efficiency.
If you feel as though you are stuck between a rock and a hard place, consider implementing a well-designed infrastructure management software. This type of automation will help you reduce costs in your operating budget and free up time for value-generating activities.
To learn more, read the recent case study, Retraites Populaires Transforms to Software-defined Automation with HPE OneView. To learn more about how you can implement automation in your own environment with HPE OneView, download the 60-day instant free trial.
Frances Guida
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
FrancesGuida
Frances Guida leads product management for HPE OneView Automation and Ecosystem. Her team drives the direction for solutions that use the unified Composable API, a single, open API native in HPE OneView, to automate the provisioning, configuration, and monitoring of HPE infrastructure. By integrating with this unified API, ISVs can provide solutions that let customers reduce the time spent on managing their environments and accelerate time to value.
