A discussion on the advancing role and impact from IT automation and how complex IT deployments are forcing managers to seek new productivity tools.

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As Hybrid IT Complexity
Ramps Up, Operators Look
To Data-Driven Automation Tools
A discussion on the advancing role and impact from IT automation and how complex IT
deployments are forcing managers to seek new productivity tools.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Innovator podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into
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.
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).
Welcome, Frances.
Frances Guida: It’s great to be here, Dana.
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?
Guida

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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.
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.
Gardner: IT operations complexity is probably only going to increase, because we are
now talking about pushing compute operations -- and even micro data centers -- out to
the edge in places like factories, vehicles, and medical environments, for example.
Should we brace ourselves now for a continuing ramp-up of complexity and diversity
when it comes to IT operations?
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
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.

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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 Growing in the Data Center.
What’s the Solution?
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?
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.

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Consolidate complexity, transform 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.
There are some organizations in the
world that have the scale of
automation engineering to be able to
do that. But the vast majority of
enterprises don’t have that capability.
And so what we do with composable
infrastructure, HPE OneView, and
our partner ecosystem is we actually encapsulate all of that in our software to find
intelligence. So all you have to do is take that configuration file and apply it to a set of
physical hardware. It brings things that used to be extremely complex down to what a
standard IT organization has the capabilities of doing today.
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?
How to Simplify and Automate
Your Data Center
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.
[Composable infrastructure, HPE
OneView, and our partner ecosystem]
bring things that used to be extremely
complex down to what a standard IT
organization has the capabilities of doing.

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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?
How a Software-Defined Data Center
Lets the Smartest People Work for You
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.
And we at HPE have also done some of the work ourselves in the open source tools
projects. Pretty much every automation tool that’s out there in mainstream use by IT --
we can handle it. That’s where a lot of the conversations we have with customers begin.
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.

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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.
Gardner: How does HPE and the partner ecosystem automate the automation, given
the complexity that comes with the newer hybrid deployment models? Is that what HPE
OneView is designed to help do these days?
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.
The automation benefits – instead
of just going down into the IT
operations – can also go up to
allow more cloud management.

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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 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?
How to Simplify, Automate
And Develop Faster
Guida: Oh, absolutely. We bring physical infrastructure flexibility, and HPE GreenLake
brings financial flexibility. Those go hand in hand. In fact, the example that I was just
speaking about, the online retailer, they are very, very busy during the Christmas
shopping season. They are also busy for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and back-to-
school shopping. But they also have times where they are much less busy.
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.
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.

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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.
How to Drive Innovation and
Automation in Your Data Center
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.”
By spending less on their IT
infrastructure, they are able to spend
more on what their core business
innovation should be.

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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?
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.
How to Accelerate
A Self-Driving Data Center
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.

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Over time, for sure, the industry will get there. We will be forced to get there because we
are going to be able to do that in other execution venues like the public cloud. So the
industry will get there. The whole notion of what we have done with automation of
composable infrastructure is absolutely a great foundation for us as we take our
customers toward these next journeys around automation.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how growing
complexity from the many moving parts in IT deployments have forced managers to
seek new levels of productivity. And we have also learned about the advancing role and
impact of IT composability and automation to better manage today’s dynamic and
extensive data center deployments.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Frances Guida, Manager of HPE OneView
Automation and Ecosystem Product Management at HPE. Thank you so much, Frances.
Guida: I enjoyed our conversation.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this sponsored
BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator IT management strategies interview. I’m Dana
Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HPE-sponsored discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this on to your community, and do come back
next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
A discussion on the advancing role and impact from IT automation and how complex IT
deployments are forcing managers to seek new productivity tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.
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