AIOps Supercharges Storage-as-a-Service: What You Need to Know
Simplifying IT operations is an ever-evolving promise that the IT industry makes to customers, and many vendors fail to deliver. In an interesting twist, though, the deployment of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) in enterprise data storage is actually living up to the promise – and more.
AIOps supports scalable, multi-petabyte storage-as-a-service (STaaS) solutions, enabling enterprises to centralize operations and improve cost management. The flexibility of capacity and workloads are better managed, powering an increased pace of innovation and supporting digital transformation. AIOps is a dynamic way to simplify IT operations, reduce administrative overhead, and add a predictive layer onto the data infrastructure ‒ all without disruption or compromise.
So, what is this AIOps that is driving an evolution of storage, and why should enterprise IT leaders care? AIOps is an approach that combines automation with analytics and some form of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning, or better yet, deep learning, on a multi-layered technology platform. Infinidat’s Neural Cache is a great example of AIOps technology, which provides deep learning capabilities within InfiniBox® and InfiniGuard®.
Neural Cache enhances data storage with built-in intelligence that optimizes application environments and performance over time, essentially delivering a zero-touch, set-it-and-forget-it experience. This software capability, which forms the core of our technical differentiation in the market, dynamically adapts to changing application, user and performance demands – without administrative overhead. Much to the benefit of enterprises and service providers, it enables 100% SLA-based guarantees, predictive abilities, and optimal combinations of underlying media. At Infinidat, we call this AI in the box. But AI is not only inside the storage platform. Infinidat has taken it further to a concept that we refer to as AI outside the box. This is, in short, a consolidated AIOps environment across all Infinidat solutions. Our AI-outside-the-box offering is InfiniVerse®, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that forms the basis for an end-to-end dynamic perspective on a customer’s entire Infinidat environment – and a critical mechanism for our support team and automation to effectively take care of all of our customers. InfiniVerse gives customers the IT “superpowers” of advanced predictive analytics, early issue detection, and proactive support – key to enable the storage-as-a-service experience for Infinidat customers, without an additional charge.
We have also broadened our Infinidat ecosystem for integration with third-party AI technology partners, enabling customers to leverage cloud automation, orchestration and AIOps platforms. Our AIOps ecosystem includes more than 10 platforms that can coordinate with our storage systems, such as:
- Arxscan Arxview
- Continuity AvailabilityGuard
- Dell EMC SRM
- Device42 ArrayIQ
- Elasticsearch
- Galileo Performance Explorer
- NetApp OnCommand Insight (OCI)
- SolarWinds SRM
- Splunk
- Veritas APTARE
- VMware vRealize Suite
- Xorux STOR2RRD
Infinidat’s APIs make it easy to integrate AIOps tools with our solutions, and we are happy to work with new ecosystem vendors to provide InfiniBox and InfiniGuard support for their AIOps platforms. Stay tuned for more announcements expanding that ecosystem soon!
All that said, though, just putting together the technical pieces to deliver AI in the box and AI outside the box is not a complete solution to achieve the true storage-as-a-service experience. Flexible consumption-based pricing is a critical component of any full storage-as-a-service offering.
Infinidat has been offering consumption-based pricing models since 2015, and the company has steadily added capabilities to align with customer needs. Today, Infinidat offers FLX and Elastic Pricing. FLX is a complete OpEx business model launched in 2019. Elastic Pricing is a unique blend of CapEx and OpEx. These choices allow customers to purchase Infinidat offerings anywhere on the payment spectrum ranging from CapEx to OpEx. When combined with comprehensive AIOps capabilities, the result is a STaaS experience that is tailored to enterprise requirements and economics throughout the deployment lifecycle.
Our AIOps technology, ecosystem, and business model set a new bar for storage-as-a-service capabilities at scale. To talk to an Infinidat representative or partner about how AIOps could help your organization, click here.
