POINT OF VIEW

It’s Time To Prioritize Innovation Over Routine Infrastructure ManagementTo drive faster innovation with agility and efficiency, business leaders are turning to automated infrastructure management. The alternative, maintaining disparate systems without a holistic view or control of their components, is time consuming and prone to human error, putting an enterprise at risk of costly process errors and lag times. Automation enables IT to simplify management and orchestration of Hitachi converged and hyperconverged systems and solutions from a single interface to accelerate time-to-value while reducing risk.

Automate IT Infrastructure Management To Drive Faster Innovation

Data-driven business innovation requires an agile and efficient IT infrastructure to quickly deliver new applications and services. To accelerate this transformation, forward-thinking IT leaders are centralizing and automating enterprise workloads.

In a recent survey conducted by Mike Leone, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, 66% of respondents indicated that their IT environment is more complex than it was two years ago. Moreover, 33% say that the process is overly complex to select, deploy and/or provision resources. In addition, 32% say that their IT organization’s processes to deploy IT services takes too long. That infrastructure complexity and lack of IT agility can be addressed by embracing the automated management and orchestration capabilities of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor (UCP Advisor) software.1

With UCP Advisor you can manage your entire edge-to-cloud infrastructure from a single pane of glass. This abstracted, end-to-end solution realigns IT resources to close the gap between business objectives and efficient execution.

1 ESG Master Survey Results, 2019 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, March 2019.

of respondents say that their IT environment is more complex than it was just two years ago. 33% claim that it is an overly complex process to select, deploy and/or provision technology resources.2

ESG survey data indicates that

66%

1. Automated Management of Physical, Virtual and Cloud Resources

To address the challenges of manual data center processes, there’s a growing movement towards a programmable data center where IT administrators can holistically manage servers, storage and networking components with automation through a single pane of glass.

Automated management of IT infrastructure helps enterprises:

■■ Reduce complex manual processes and the probability of human errors.

■■ Lower provisioning times by up to 90%.■■ Govern the lifecycle of unified compute platforms to simplify cross data center lifecycle management.

■■ Automate firmware upgrades.■■ Manage virtual and physical resources via a single pane of glass. ■■ Automate bare metal operating system deployments.

Automated management and orchestration of IT infrastructure fast-tracks innovation, removes bottlenecks, and lowers administration costs.

2. Increased Agility

Transitioning to a single management framework simplifies IT management across local and remote data centers and improves agility. With IT orchestration software, gone are the days of siloed components and the individual specialists required to manage them.

Streamlined IT management and orchestration through a single tool gives IT administrators and executives:

■■ Centralized management for server, network and storage, across the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform family and across data centers.

■■ End-to-end management of IT infrastructure resources in one place: as much as a 7:1 reduction in management tools.

■■ Day 0 automation with 80% reduction in deployment times (from several days to a few hours) by eliminating hundreds of manual tasks.

■■ Simplified configuration of converged solutions.

For business leaders, the long-term cost benefits of an agile IT framework are significant. IT teams can help deliver data center modernization across one or multiple data centers with a minimal learning curve.

So Why Are You Still Managing IT Infrastructure Manually? Manual IT infrastructure management can be costly and error prone, especially when you factor in infrastructure silos. The inefficiency of managing disparate hardware components affects not only the enterprise’s bottom line, but also its ability to keep up with customer demands and a rapidly changing competitive landscape.

Common Infrastructure Management Challenges Cause Unnecessary PainYour IT team members are probably struggling under the demands of common infrastructure management problems, but they shouldn’t have to. Here are three sources of IT pain that can be eliminated with automation and smart management.

1. Manual Data Center Processes

Most traditional data center processes are manual or reliant on undocumented scripts that don’t scale well. Not only is this inefficient, but it also puts your processes at risk for human error. For enterprises with large amounts of infrastructure, the challenges of manual data center management are multiplied, further increasing costs and limiting growth.

2. Siloed IT Infrastructure Components

Traditionally, data center resources are managed in silos by expensive infrastructure specialists. Enterprises depend on these individual specialists to deploy, administer and support each resource, both old and new. Not only does configuring and administering systems separately drive up IT costs, but it prevents decisionmakers from getting the holistic view needed to fully realize strategic goals.

3. No Alignment Between Business Goals and IT

With manual infrastructure management, there’s often a gap between business objectives and IT’s ability to implement strategic, enterprise-wide change. Without simplified IT management enabled by automation, enterprises risk losing market share to competitors who can quickly scale modern digital solutions.

How Centralized IT Infrastructure Management Can Help The pain points outlined above are all opportunities for improvement with automated software management. Here are three primary advantages of centralized IT management software and what implementation means for your enterprise.

2 ESG Master Survey Results, 2019 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, March 2019.

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3. Improved Efficiency

Enterprises need flexible IT infrastructure solutions with centralized operating capabilities to help IT staff automate management and efficiently support present and future operational needs.

Flexible application integration options allow IT managers and administrators to:

■■ Manage the onboarding of new compute, storage and network components for easy scalability.

■■ Leverage predefined templates and workflows for faster provisioning while reducing risk

■■ Enable business continuity and define data protection policies for full disaster recovery.

■■ Improve data availability, resiliency and recoverability. ■■ Easily create and manage business-defined policies. ■■ Implement additional functionality with plug-in software modules.

An automated management system pools infrastructure resources and provides simplified agile provisioning workflows to accommodate faster innovation and improved business outcomes.

SummaryIn today’s competitive digital landscape, the risks of complacency and staying the course are high. To support next-generation technologies and meet the demands for faster service delivery, simplified management solutions are needed for converged and hyperconverged infrastructure. UCP Advisor lets you simplify deployment and operational management so that you can innovate faster, strengthen business processes and delight your customers.