The next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator podcast series examines the role and impact of automation on IT management strategies.
Growing complexity from the
many moving parts in today’s IT deployments are forcing managers to seek new
productivity tools. Moving away from manual processes to bring higher levels of
automation to data center infrastructure has long been a priority for IT
operators, but now new tools and methods are making composability and
automation better options than ever.
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us learn more about the advancing role and impact from IT automation is Frances Guida, Manager of HPE OneView Automation and Ecosystem Product Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What
are the top drivers, Frances, for businesses seeking higher levels of
automation and simplicity in their IT infrastructure?
Guida: It
relates to what’s happening at a business level. It’s a truism that business
today is moving faster than it ever has before. That puts pressure on all parts
of a business environment -- and that includes IT. And so IT needs to deliver
things more quickly than they used to. They can’t just use the old techniques; they
need to move to much more automated approaches. And that means they need to take
work out of their operational environments.
Gardner: What’s
driving the complexity that makes such automation beneficial?
IT means business
Guida: It again
starts from the business. IT used to be a support function, to support business
processes. So, it could go along on its own time scale. There wasn’t much that
the business could or would do about it.
 |
| Guida |
In 2020, technology is now part
of the fabric of most of the products, services, and experiences that
businesses offer. So when technology is part of an offering, all of a sudden
technology is how a business is differentiated. As part of how a business is
differentiated, business leaders are not going to take, “Oh, we will get to it
in 18 months,” as an answer. If that’s the answer they get from the IT
department, they are going to go look for other ways of getting things done.
And with the advances of
public cloud technology, there are other ways of getting things done that don’t
come from an internal IT department. So IT organizations need to be able to
keep up with the pace of business change, because businesses aren’t going to
accept their historical time scale.
Gardner: Does accelerating
IT via automation require an ecosystem of partners, or is there one tool that
rules them all?
Guida: This
is not a one-size-fits-all world. I talk to customers in our HPE
Executive Briefing Centers regularly. The first thing I ask them is, “Tell
me about the toolsets you have in your environment.” I often ask them about
what kinds of automation toolsets they have. Do you have Terraform or Ansible or Chef
or Puppet or vRealize Orchestrator
or something else? It’s not uncommon for the answer to be, “Yes.” They have all
of them.
So even within a customer’s environment,
they don’t have a single tool. We need to work with all the toolsets that the
customers have in their IT environments.
Gardner: It
almost sounds like you are trying to automate the automation. Is that fair?
Guida: We definitely
are trying to take some of the hard work that has historically gone into
automation and make it much simpler.
Guida: Oh, absolutely.
You can’t have a single technology that’s going to answer everything. Is the end
user going to interface through a short
message service (SMS) or are they going to use a smartphone? Are they going
to be on a browser? Is it an endpoint that interacts with a system that’s completely
independent of any user base technology? All of this means that IT has to be
multifaceted.
Even if we look at data center
technologies, for the last 15 years virtualization has been pretty much the
standard way that IT deploys new systems. Now, increasingly, organizations are
looking at a set of applications that don’t run in virtual machines (VMs),
but rather are container-based. That brings a whole other set of complexity
they have to think about in their environments.
Complexity
is like entropy; it just keeps growing. When we started thinking about
bringing a lot more flexibility to on-premises data center environments,
we looked holistically at the problem ... at a deeper level.
Complexity is like entropy; it just keeps growing. When we started thinking about bringing a lot more flexibility to on-premises data center environments, we looked holistically at the problem. I don’t think the problem can only be addressed through better automation; in fact, it has to be addressed at a deeper level.
And so with our composable
infrastructure strategies, we thought architecturally about how we could
bring the same kind of flexibility you have in a public cloud environment to on-premises
data centers. We realized we needed a way to liberate IT beyond the boundaries of
physical infrastructure by being able to group that physical infrastructure
into pools of resources that could be much more fluid and where the physical
aspects could be changed.
Now, there is some hardware
infrastructure technology in that, but a lot of that magic is done through
software, using
software to configure things that used to be done in a physical manner.
So we defined a layer of
software-defined intelligence that captures all of the things you need to know
about configuring physical hardware -- whether it’s firmware levels or biased
headings or connections. We define and calculate all of that in software.
And automation is the icing on
that cake. Once you have your infrastructure that can be defined in software,
you can program it. That’s where the automation comes in, being able to use
everyday automation tools that organizations are already using to automate other
parts of their IT environment and apply that to the physical infrastructure
without a whole bunch of unnatural acts that were previously required if you
wanted to automate physical infrastructure.
Gardner: Are
we talking about a fundamental shift in how infrastructure should be conceived
or thought of here?
Consolidate complexity via automation
Guida: There
has been a saying in the IT industry for a while about moving
from pets to cattle. Now we even talk about thinking about herds. You
can brute-force that transition by trying to automate to all of the low-level application
programing interfaces (APIs) in physical infrastructure today. Most
infrastructure today is programmable, with rare exceptions.
But then you as the organization
are doing the automation, and you must internalize that and make your
automation account for all of the logic. For example, if you then make a change
in the storage configuration, what does that mean for the way the network needs
to be configured? What does that mean for firmware settings? You would have to
maintain all of that in your own automation logic.
Gardner: And not only is that automation going to appeal to the enterprise IT organizations, it’s also going to appeal to the ecosystem of partners. They now have the means to use the composable infrastructure to create new value-added services.
How does HPE’s composability
benefit both the end-user organizations and the development of the partner ecosystem?
Guida: When
I began the composable ecosystem program, we actually had two or three partners.
This was about four years ago. We have now grown to more than 30 different
integrations in place today, with many more partners that we are talking to. And
those range from the big, everyday names like VMware
and Microsoft to smaller
companies that may be present in only a particular geography.
But what gets them excited is
that, all of a sudden, they are able to bring better value to their customers.
They are able to deliver, for example, an integrated monitoring system. Or
maybe they are already doing application monitoring, and all of a sudden they
can add infrastructure monitoring. Or they may already be doing facilities
management, managing the power and cooling, and all of a sudden they get a
whole bunch of data that used to be hard to put in one place. Now they can get
a whole bunch of data on the thermals, of what’s really going on at the infrastructure
level. It’s definitely very exciting for them.
Gardner: What jumps
out at you as a good example of taking advantage of what composable
infrastructure can do?
Guida: The
most frequent conversations I have with customers today begin with basic
automation. They have many tools in their environment; I mentioned many of them
earlier: Ansible, Terraform, Chef, Puppet, or even just PowerShell or Python; or
in the VMware environment, vRealize
Orchestrator.
They have these tools and really
appreciate what we have been able to do with publishing these integrations on GitHub, for example, of having a community, and having
direct support back to our engineers who are doing this work. They are able to
pretty straightforwardly add that into their tools environment.
If they don’t begin there,
they start back in basic IT operations. One of the ways people take advantage
of the automation in HPE OneView -- but they don’t realize they are taking
advantage of automation -- is in how OneView helps them integrate their
physical infrastructure into a VMware vCenter
or a Microsoft
System Center environment.
Visualize everything, automatically
For
example, in a VMware vCenter environment, an administrator can use our plug-in
and it automatically sucks in all of the data from their physical
infrastructure that’s relevant to their VMware environment. They can see things
in their vCenter environment that they otherwise couldn’t see.
They can see everything from a
VM that’s sitting on the VM host that’s connected through the host bus adapters (HBAs) out
to the storage array. There is the logical volume. And they can very easily
visualize the entire logical as well as physical environment. That’s automation,
but you are not necessarily perceiving it as automation. You are perceiving it
as simply making an IT operations environment a lot easier to use.
The
automation benefits -- instead of just going down into the IT
operations -- can also go up to allow more cloud management. It affects
infrastructure and applications.
For that level of IT operations integration, VMware and Microsoft environments are the poster children. But for other tools, like Micro Focus and some of the capacity planning tools, and event management tools like ServiceNow – those are another big use case category.
The automation benefits – instead
of just going down into the IT operations – can also go up to allow more cloud
management. Another way IT organizations take advantage of the HPE automation ecosystem
means, “Okay, it’s great that you can automate a piece of physical infrastructure,
but what I really need to do -- and what I really care about -- is automating a
service. I want to be able to provision my SQL database server that’s in the
cloud.”
That not only affects infrastructure
pieces, it touches a bunch of application pieces, too. Organizations want it all
done through a self-service portal. So we have a number of partners who enable
that.
Morpheus
comes to mind. We have quite a lot of engagements today with customers who are
looking at Morpheus as a cloud management platform and taking advantage of how
they can not only provision the logical aspects of their cloud, but also the
physical ones through all of the integrations that we have done.
Automatic, systematic, cost-saving habit
Guida: I want
to talk about a customer who is an online retailer. If you think about the
retail world -- obviously a highly dynamic world and technology is at the very
forefront of the product that they deliver; technology is the product
that they deliver.
They have a very creative
marketing department that is always looking for new ways to connect to their
customers. That marketing department has access to a set of application
developers who are developing new widgets, new ways of connecting with
customers. Some of those developers like to develop in VMs, which is more old
school; some of the developers are more new school and they prefer container-based
environments.
The challenge the IT department
has is that from one week to the next they don’t fully know how much of their
capacity needs to be dedicated to a VM versus a container environment. It all
depends on which promotions or programs the business decides it wants to run at
any time.
So the IT organization needed
a way to quickly switch an individual VM host server to be reconfigured as a bare-metal
container host. They didn’t want to pay a VM tax on their container host. They
identified that if they were going to do that manually, there were dozens and
dozens -- I think they had 36 or 37 -- steps that they needed to do. And they
could not figure out a way to automate individually each one of those 37 steps.
When
we brought them an HPE Synergy infrastructure -- managed by OneView,
automated by Ansible -- they instantly saw how that was going to help
solve their problems. They were able to change their environemnt from
one personality to another in a completely automated fashion.
When we brought them an HPE Synergy infrastructure -- managed by OneView, automated with Ansible -- they instantly saw how that was going to help solve their problems. They were going to be able to change their environment from one personality to another personality in a completely automated fashion. And now they are able to do that changeover in just 30 minutes, and instead of needing dozens of manual steps. They have zero manual steps; everything is fully automated.
And that enables them to
respond to the business requirements. The business needs to be able to run
whatever programs and promotions it is that they want to run -- and they can’t be
constrained by IT. Maybe that gives a picture of how valuable this is to our customers.
Gardner: Yes,
it speaks to the business outcomes, which are agility and speed, and at the
same time the IT economics are impacted there as well.
Speaking of IT economics and
IT automation, we have been talking in terms of process and technology. But businesses
are also seeking to simplify and automate the economics of how they acquire and
spend on IT, perhaps more on a pay-per-use basis.
Is there alignment between
what you are doing in automation and what HPE is doing with HPE GreenLake? Do the
economics and automation reinforce one another?
They have HPE GreenLake integrated
into their environment so in addition to having the physical flexibility in
their environment, they are financially aligning through a flexible capacity
program and paying for technology -- in the way that their business model works.
So, these things go hand-in-hand.
As I said earlier, I talk to a
lot of HPE customers because I am based in the San Francisco Bay Area where we have
our corporate headquarters. I am frequently in our Executive Briefing Center
two to three times a week. There are almost no conversations I am part of that don’t
lead eventually to the financial aspects, as well as the technical aspect, of
how all the technology works.
Gardner: Because
we have opened IT automation up to the programmatic level, a new breed of
innovation can be further brought to bear. Once people get their hands on these
tools and start to automate, what have you seen on the innovation side? What have
people started doing with this that you maybe didn’t even think they would do
when you designed the products?
Single infrastructure signals innovation
Guida: Well,
I don’t know that we didn’t think about this, but one of the things we have
been able to do is make something that the IT industry has been talking about
for a while in an on-premises IT environment.
There are lots of
organizations that have IT capacity that is only used some of the time. A classic
example is an engineering organization that provides a virtual desktop infrastructure
(VDI) capability for engineers. These engineers need a bunch of analytics applications
-- maybe it’s genomic engineering, seismic engineering, or fluid dynamics in the
automotive industry. They have multiple needs. Typically they have been running
those on different sets of physical infrastructures.
With our automation, we can
enable them to collapse that all into one set of infrastructure, which means
they can be much more financially efficient. Because they are more financially
efficient on the IT side, they are able to then devote more of their dollars to
driving innovation -- finding new ways of discovering oil and gas under the
ground, new ways of making automobiles much more efficient, or uncovering new
secrets within our DNA. By spending less on their IT infrastructure, they are
able to spend more on what their core business innovation should be.
Gardner:
Frances, I have seen other vendors approach automation with a tradeoff. They
say, “Well, if you only use our cloud, it’s automated. If you only use our
hypervisor, it’s automated. If you only use our database, it’s automated.”
But HPE has taken a different
tack. You have looked at heterogeneity as the norm and the complexity as a
result of heterogeneity as what automation needs to focus on. How far ahead is
HPE on composability and automation? How differentiated are you from others who
have put a tradeoff in place when it comes to solving automation?
We
have had composable infrastructure on the market for three-plus years.
Our HPE Synergy platform now has a $1 billion run rate. We have 3,600
customers around the world. It's been a tremendously successful business
for us.
Guida: We have had composable infrastructure on the market for three-plus years now. Our HPE Synergy platform, for example, now has a more than $1 billion run rate for HPE. We have 3,600 customers and counting around the world. It’s been a tremendously successful business for us.
I find it interesting that we don’t
see a lot of activity out there, of people trying to mimic or imitate what we
have done. So I expect composability and automation will remain fundamentally
differentiating for us from many of our traditional on-premises infrastructure competitors.
It positions us very well to
provide an alternative for organizations who like the flexibility of cloud
services but prefer to have them in their on-premises environments. It’s been
tremendously differentiating for us. I am not seeing anyone else who has anything
coming on hot in any way.
Gardner: Let’s
take a look to the future. Increasingly, not only are companies looking to
become data-driven, but IT organizations are also seeking to become data-driven.
As we gather more data and inference, we start to be predictive in optimizing
IT operations.
I am, of course, speaking of
AIOps. What does that bring to the equation around automation and composability?
How will AIOps change this in the coming couple of years?
Automation innovation in sight with AIOps
Guida: That’s
a real opportunity for further innovation in the industry. We are at the very
early stages about how we take advantage in a symptomatic way of all of the
insights that we can derive from knowing what is actually happening within our IT
environments and mining those insights. Once we have mined those insights, it creates
the possibility for us to take automation to another level.
We have been throwing around
terms like self-healing for a couple of decades, but a lot of organizations are
not yet ready for something like self-healing infrastructure. There is a lot of
complexity within our environments. And when you put that into a broader heterogeneous
data center environment, there is even more complexity. So there is some
trepidation.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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