New Software Tools Help Better Manage Growing Data Center Complexity

While it is exciting to be a part of a growing business, rapid growth can be a challenge. This is because as a business grows it encounters different problems that demand new solutions. Processes and tools that worked in the past may not be ideal for the future.

One of the most difficult areas for a growing business is managing IT effectively. Adding more servers, storage and networking to handle the onslaught of data coming in from more and more customers creates complexity that is increasing day by day.

When a data center is small, IT administrators are well equipped to manage everything manually. As data grows and businesses add additional components to a data center, complexity sets in, making data centers more difficult to manage. Manual intervention caused by firmware updates and configuration changes takes time and is often error prone. At some point, traditional methods of manual infrastructure management reach a breaking point and need to be changed.

Define and automate everything by software

To solve this problem, many organizations are turning to a software-defined strategy, which gives IT a better way to manage increasingly complex data centers. With this type of computing environment, everything (computing, storage and networking) is automated by software. Intelligent software operates and controls IT without human intervention, saving time and reducing complexity.

Software-defined processes include the control, provisioning, configuration and management of the infrastructure, all of which are defined by policies based on the requirements of individual applications. Today, the ability to define a software infrastructure is a critical way for IT to stay ahead of the complexity of data centers.

The story of a cloud hosting company

Opus Interactive is a classic example of how a growing business moves from traditional management of its IT infrastructure to a new software-defined approach. A cloud hosting and colocation services company, Opus Interactive primarily serves clients in the technology, finance and government industries. Over the past five years, they have experienced rapid annual growth of 30%.

With this kind of expansion, they needed to develop their computing capabilities. As more components were added, it was more difficult for them to keep up with manual updates. When the company was smaller, engineers could easily monitor and manually update everything in their data center. Now, dramatic growth created uncontrollable complexity and required more manual labor.

Opus Interactive implemented stand-alone management tools on an ad hoc basis, but these solutions turned out to be temporary fixes to a much larger problem. Since the company had to maintain service level agreements (SLAs) with more than 300 customers, it was imperative to properly maintain its IT infrastructure. They quickly realized that the current processes were not sustainable in the long term.

Infrastructure management has automated everything

Opus Interactive has decided to implement infrastructure management in its data centers, by offering them an integrated tool that software defines all of their IT. Through a single interface, company administrators have automated all management and maintenance tasks.

The company immediately noticed an improvement in its efficiency. The streamlined processes incorporated best IT management practices and created a new holistic way of working. It also provided a unified view of all equipment, firmware and networks. By defining software and automating their infrastructure, Opus Interactive has been able to develop its IT infrastructure quickly and transparently, while reducing costs.

The infrastructure management solution chosen by Opus Interactive was HPE OneView to manage its growing IT environment. They are also using the HPE OneView global dashboard to further consolidate the management of their four data centers from a single location.

By moving to a software-defined infrastructure within their data centers, companies like Opus Interactive are better equipped to handle the expected exponential growth of data as it travels through the data center, the cloud and up to periphery.

For more information on how infrastructure management can help simplify and automate your data center, see the HPE OneView Guide for Dummies.

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About Mat Mathews

^{Mat Mathews is vice president and general manager of Composable Fabric at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Mat has spent 20 years in the networking industry observing, experimenting and ultimately refining his vision for technology. Prior to his current role at HPE, Mat was Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Management at Plexxi. He began his career as a software engineer and holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.}