Look beyond performance for a holistic management experience that simplifies maintenance and promotes greater agility.
By Beth Stackpole, veteran technology and business journalist.
Reinventing your compute backbone
Companies are modernizing IT environments to accommodate ever-expanding workflows and the new demands of digital business. As they reinvent their compute backbone, it’s important to think beyond the typical speeds and feeds performance criteria when evaluating servers. A critical goal should be to create a holistic management experience that can ensure greater simplicity and agility across a global compute landscape.
Compute resources that once lived in centralized data centers are now being distributed out to the edge, closer to where data is generated and consumed. They are also being moved to the cloud for greater agility and scalability. The result? Servers are spread across edge locations, data centers, colocation facilities, and multiple clouds, creating a sprawling IT landscape that is difficult to manage with a traditional server management approach.
With more complex compute infrastructure, surging workloads, and diverse applications and workflows to manage, IT is left juggling a variety of tools, none of which cover end-to-end management needs. Often, custom scripts are required to orchestrate critical firmware updates and conduct other server maintenance, adding to the complexity – and handing IT organizations more manual work to coordinate and manage.
With a traditional approach, service providers and IT infrastructure administrators are tasked with going site-to-site to manage and coordinate server updates, firmware releases, and other maintenance services. The process is slow, reliant on time-consuming and error-prone manual efforts. Increasingly, this approach doesn’t perform well in a modern, distributed IT landscape.
When the compute lives somewhere else other than home base, you don’t want someone to have to visit the servers wherever they are to manage them,” says Ganesh Subramanian, Senior Manager of Product Management, HPE Compute Software Group. “That gets expensive and creates resource challenges.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that traditional compute management tools are often disjointed and complex, creating bottlenecks and obstacles to transformation. IT personnel end up spending more time on routine tasks like manual fixes and server updates as opposed to having time and energy for strategic work like transformation initiatives.
Given the on-going paradigm shift, IT organizations need to embrace a modern server platform and management solution that will simplify compute management from edge to cloud. “As technology changes so too should the management of it,” says Subramanian.
The modern management duo
HPE has a winning combination for modern server management. Certified and tuned for edge or data center deployment, the new family of HPE ProLiant Gen 11 servers are engineered for a hybrid world, architected to extract more value out of data and designed to accelerate AI outcomes.
Beyond the requisite performance and security requirements, modern server infrastructure should be simple and seamless, enabling easy control of compute resources from edge to cloud. HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers fit that bill, strengthened by HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management. This seamless software as-a-service experience eliminates management complexity by simplifying and unifying operations across the server lifecycle with a cloud operating experience that doesn’t care where compute infrastructure is located.
HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management incorporates functionality from HPE’s suite of management and analytics capabilities including HPE OneView and HPE Integrated Lights Out (iLO). Users can securely configure, monitor, and update HPE ProLiant servers seamlessly from anywhere. “We’re bringing everything into one management tool that simplifies things for customers, so they don’t need various tools,” says Subramanian.
HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management tackles management complexity in three ways:
1) Unifies compute management with a centralized, cloud experience that ensures IT has visibility into the distributed environment and can quickly identify issues and execute server updates in a matter of a few clicks. Users simply log into a URL, and the appropriate servers are connected into the management tool. At that point, everything is visible and serviceable through a simple point-and-click interface and a single pane of glass.
This approach enables IT shops to easily onboard thousands of distributed devices with reduced time-to-deployment while simplifying update tasks by grouping servers and executing bulk actions. “HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management automatically detects what infrastructure is in the environment and based on what software is running, automatically delivers the latest and greatest version while recommending actions,” says Subramanian.
2) Automates tasks to help reduce manual efforts and drive enhanced efficiency of server deployments and updates. Visibility into server health status with alerts to critical hardware failures enables IT to move from reactive mode into proactive troubleshooting and response.
3) Ensures secure compute operations through a zero-trust approach that incorporates multi-factor authentication and security certificates that work in tandem with the security-by-design architecture of the HPE ProLiant Gen11 server family. The combination of capabilities ensures IT organizations can establish governance and compliance controls across the entire landscape.
An open and extensible approach
Given the diversity of the modern IT landscape, a one-size-fits-all management solution is not enough. That’s why it’s important to leverage a management solution that can accommodate different platforms to ensure simplicity and end-to-end visibility across the existing management software portfolio.
HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers with HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management are designed with easy integration and automation in mind through support of REST APIs. The integration capabilities include support for ServiceNow to aid in incident creation as well as support for a VMware vCenter plug-in to further enhance extensibility. “Customers already have existing tools in their armory and bringing in a new tool can be disruptive from an operations standpoint if it doesn’t have all the integration aspects,” says Subramanian.
Today’s computing environments are changing. So must server management strategies to keep pace with the modern distributed compute landscape.
For more information on HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers with HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management, please visit HPE GreenLake Compute Ops Management | HPE.
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Meet Guest blogger, Beth Stackpole.
Beth Stackpole is a veteran journalist covering the intersection of business and technology, from the early days of personal computing all the way into the modern era of digital transformation. As a contributing editor to CIO.com, Computerworld, MIT Sloan, Automation World and other digital venues, Beth’s coverage traverses a range of industries and technologies, including AI/machine learning, data and analytics, automation, cloud, security, edge computing, and supply chain.
She also writes regularly on CIO leadership and management topics. In addition to her high-tech and business journalism work, Beth writes an array of custom editorial content and thought leadership pieces. She is a multi-year recipient of the ASBPE Azbee award for her work on the State of the CIO project as well as a multi-time finalist for the Software & Information Industry Association’s Jesse H. Neal Awards, a program honoring B2B journalism.