See how HPE InfoSight is busily (and transparently) at work powering AIOps for today’s modern IT environments, incorporating four key elements – data, machine learning, cloud, and as a service.
If I was asked to point out three things in the consumer industry today that differentiated it from everything that came before it, I’d say: Ease of use. Simplicity. And AI-driven automation. The obvious examples that come to mind are ride hailing with the Uber app, binge watching on Netflix, or navigating through Google Maps. Look behind the scenes with these services and you’ll find sophisticated infrastructure, machine learning techniques, and user-centric workflows, among other technologies. Consumers really don’t care about how it works – as long as the service is easy to manage, updates automatically, is available when needed, and lives up to the expected quality.
The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform has led the market with “the cloud that comes to you.” The platform has been designed to deliver simplicity, automation, and agility to our customers. Check out the new HPE GreenLake for Block Storage announcement we made recently. My colleague Simon Watkins outlines how this storage-as-a-service really simplifies provisioning storage to the extent that even line-of-business owners or application admins can use to accelerate app deployment.
AIOps at the heart of HPE GreenLake for Block Storage
A key underpinning of the platform is a capability commonly known to infrastructure teams as AIOps. For more than a decade, our industry-leading AIOps engine – HPE InfoSight – has helped customers streamline IT operations. Just as these modern-day tenets are fundamental to consumer AI apps, InfoSight is designed to take advantage of all four:
- Data – Telemetry data, never customer data, extracted from software sensors embedded in our infrastructure
- Machine learning (ML) – Advanced ML techniques used to train this performance data
- Cloud – Leverage the computational abilities of the cloud to analyze historical data from our global install base, and
- As a service – A software as-a-service (SaaS) platform with seamless upgrades and no software to download
The goal of AIOps is to make IT operations seamless and easy – to the extent that infrastructure starts to disappear in the background. The effort to constantly manage systems should be replaced with intelligent automation. And the alerts should be replaced with 1-click prescriptive actions that the user can take to avert any application disruption.
But this requires several things: Observing the applications and their usage of underlying resources. Observing user patterns (like IT administrators for instance) for managing their IT. And then combining these observations with the collective knowledge gathered from other similar IT environments.
Now, you can probably tell how this would require the four AIOps tenets just listed to all work together.
How we make infrastructure invisible
Let’s go over a few benefits that you gain from HPE InfoSight today – and how they contribute to our vision of making IT operations seamless and effortless.
Wellness information and alerts – This is a true innovation designed to alleviate the time IT teams spend on infrastructure management. The information ranges from the overall health of your systems, capacity, performance, to impending system issues down to hard drives and storage volumes. A key differentiation here is the way HPE InfoSight applies contextual insights to show only the most pertinent and important alerts and information. It also offers personalized performance recommendations and best practice advice for optimizing resources and planning capacity.
Automated software upgrades – I would say this is delivered at two levels. First, the platform itself being SaaS, as I alluded earlier, administrators are always on the latest version with the newest functionalities. Second, the upgrades for the systems managed – storage systems, compute, and virtualized software – are seamless as well. In fact, if HPE InfoSight learns of incompatibilities between, for example, the storage OS and a VMware software version, it will alert the admin and automatically skip the storage OS, thereby preventing disruptions arising from the incompatibility.
Support ticket automation – This is truly industry first. Have you ever been in an applications-down situation where you have had to deal with support teams from multiple vendors troubleshooting the issue for days? This capability alleviates such situations. If HPE support finds and fixes an infrastructure issue with one enterprise customer, HPE InfoSight ensures that no other customer across its install base would face that same issue again. This is how we have consistently predicted and prevented 86% of issues1 for our customers over the past decade. You can expect more innovation from HPE in this regard soon, so stay tuned.
Self-manageability – This is one of our key design principles for infrastructure. Making progress on digital transformation initiatives is fundamentally difficult if IT teams constantly find themselves managing their data infrastructure. The tasks of ensuring enough capacity, performance headroom, virtualized resources, and such need to be on autopilot. HPE InfoSight addresses this end-to-end – from intelligently identifying the right resources for new workloads using intent-based provisioning, to tracking resource usage historically and alerting you exactly when you should add more capacity. InfoSight also recommends adjustments to your VMs to accommodate the changing application landscape and more. This alleviates the need for you to purchase managed IT services unless you absolutely require customization.
Our approach to AIOps offers clear advantages
For most other vendors, AIOps often entails predicting capacity, proactively recommending addition of more compute or virtual machines on a host, and offering a suite of dashboards with performance metrics. I would argue these are relatively trivial, given how easy it can be these days to deploy a simple linear regression ML model with rule-based alerts.
Our approach has been fundamentally different, as we bring the cloud to you with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform. We have been deliberate in investing in our data science and support automation efforts with an eye toward providing improved automation, ease of use, and greater simplicity. The result? We’ve created an industry-leading cloud experience for your organization.
To learn more, visit HPE InfoSight or log onto the HPE InfoSight portal.
1 Based on HPE Nimble Storage’s installed base
Ronak_Chokshi
Ronak leads product marketing for HPE InfoSight. He has 18+ years of industry experience spanning IoT, big data, machine learning, and AI platforms. He has led product marketing activities targeting IT, data scientists, engineering, and business personas. He holds a M.S. degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.E. in Electronics Engineering from Gujarat, India. When not working, Ronak loves to spend time with his wife and two children and explore life through reading and traveling.
