Those in IT are usually quite adept at juggling — keeping lots of balls in the air to ensure the organization’s entire IT infrastructure operates as efficiently as possible
From providing desktop support to provisioning and updating compute, storage, and fabric resources, the job of the IT professional is never done. As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate and IT services become ever more complex, the demands on IT become greater every day. Businesses are now managing and consuming IT services across a hybrid infrastructure, and they’re trying to use infrastructure that is usually not designed for these demands. In addition, complex manual processes and non-integrated tools fail to provide the speed and simplicity needed to support current tasks, much less new ideas and applications.
To compete more successfully, CIOs want to move faster without worrying that their IT is holding them back. At the same time, the IT team wants to increase productivity by automating and streamlining tasks. And everyone wants less complexity, so they can spend more time innovating.
So what’s the answer? How can businesses move faster, remove management complexity, and increase productivity? To answer these questions, let’s look at a real world example of a business that achieved those goals with better IT infrastructure management.
No more juggling for Porsche Informatik
Porsche Informatik is one of Europe’s largest developers of custom software solutions for the automobile industry. With more than 1,600 virtual servers and 133 blade servers in two geographically-dispersed data centers, Porsche provides IT services to 450 employees. With 500TB of storage and 12,000 end devices, its environment carries out 1.5 million automated tasks a month. Business-critical applications run across the entire data center, from physical Microsoft Windows clusters to VMware® HA clusters, including in-house developed and third-party programs.
To reduce complexity and streamline management, Porsche needed a single, integrated management platform. The company turned to HPE OneView, an infrastructure automation engine built with software-defined intelligence and designed to simplify lifecycle operations and increase IT productivity.
HPE OneView allowed Porsche to improve productivity by reducing new configuration deployment times by 90%. It also cut admin and engineer management time by 50% and sped up the detection and correction of routine problems by 50%. All of which freed IT staff from routine tasks, enabling them to react more quickly to business requirements and focus on innovation for the business.
An added benefit: a unified API
A key feature in HPE OneView is the unified API that provides a single interface to discover, search, inventory, configure, provision, update, and diagnose across all HPE infrastructure. A single line of code fully describes and can provision the infrastructure required for an application, eliminating time-consuming scripting of more than 500 calls to low-level tools and interfaces required by competitive offerings.
HPE OneView capitalizes on the value a unified API can deliver through the HPE Composable Infrastructure Ecosystem. Together, HPE and their partners build solutions that let customers reduce the time they spend managing their data center or cloud environment. That means businesses can stop juggling and spend more time innovating. A growing list of ISV partners are taking advantage of the unified API in HPE OneView to automate their solutions.
Peter Cermak, IT systems engineer at Porsche Informatik sums it up well. “The [HPE OneView] unified API and Global Dashboard provide a much better, intuitive view of our HPE infrastructure,” says Cermak. “Even people with only basic training can easily see the state of this part of our infrastructure. Not only do we now save a lot of time adding new servers and VLANs, it is also a fire-and-forget task. Previously, we had to re-check and debug profile-related issues but that is no longer necessary. In one operation, staff can configure many servers with identical settings and the time we save enables us to concentrate our work on customer requirements.”
To read Porsche Informatik’s complete success story, click here.
About Paul Miller
Paul Miller is Vice President of Marketing for the Software-defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). To learn how to migrate with ease to HPE OneView, watch this webinar replay. To learn more about HPE OneView, download the free ebook, HPE OneView for Dummies.
To read more articles from Paul Miller, check out the HPE Converged Data Center Infrastructure blog.
