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.
And it seems like the demands on IT become greater every day. That’s because the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, and IT services are becoming ever more complex. 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 IT holding them back. 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 Informatik 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 Informatik to stop juggling and improve productivity:
- Reduced new configuration deployment times by 90%
- Cut admin and engineer management time by 50%
- Sped up the detection and correction of routine problems by 50%
- Improved system availability by 30% to ensure the delivery of business-critical applications
- Freed IT staff from routine tasks; enabling them to react more quickly to business requirements
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 the HPE composable 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 realizes the value of APIs, which is why they have created the HPE Composable Partner Program. 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 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.”
Read the complete success story. Learn more about HPE OneView.
Paul Miller is Vice President of Marketing for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Paul’s organization is responsible for all marketing content and sales enablement tools to help HPE customers get the best product and solution experience.
To read more articles from Paul Miller, check out the HPE Shifting to Software-Defined blog.
