The Transformational IT Infrastructure
An accomplished and resourceful product management professional, Paul poses a solid understanding of the strategic and operational aspects of product and software services business.
Is there still a need for third-party maintenance services?
As the impact of COVID-19 continues to influence businesses around the world, third-party maintenance (TPM) has become a more prevalent and trusted means of ensuring uptime in IT data centers.
The starting point for many customers is the budget, and third-party support can help carve out more space for strategic projects. TPM can slash 30-40 percent off your OEM costs. It’s as easy as switching coverage.
While budget may drive customers to alternative support, it is the excellence in service delivery that keeps them ascustomers. TPM does more to ease the support burden on enterprise IT professionals, with expert engineers, hundreds of spare parts depots, and 24/7 global customer service.
What is DMSO, the new service concept all about and why should organisations consider a DMSO strategy for their IT?
Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize (DMSO) is a new service concept that provides organisations with a fully integrated approach to managing critical infrastructure.
As businesses continue their digital transformations, they depend on data that resides on-premises, in public and private clouds, devices at the edge and networks and operation centers that span the globe. Managing these complexenvironments is increasingly becoming more difficult. Exponential increases in time, labor and cost, as well as the complexity of navigating a maze of service providers to establish clear accountability and support, requires a more
intelligent and flexible approach.
With DMSO, clients will maximize uptime, improve operational speed, eliminate IT chaos, and boost return on investment – ultimately accelerating their digital transformations.
-Discover – Holistic, accurate listing of data center assets across OEMs, with automated IT asset discovery anddependency mapping and comprehensive coverage of servers (physical, virtual, and cloud), desktops, edge devices and peripherals;
-Monitor – Server and storage monitoring hardware (storage, server and network) and software (OS Monitoring, Linux, Windows, VM)
-Support – Event filtering and remediation for hardware, operating systems and network hardware
(predictive/proactive alerting and ticket integration) OS remediation (patch management, updates) and network incidents (management, configuration, root cause);
-Optimize – Enable client efficiencies and ensure uptime with capacity management, CPU utilization and cloud cost controls).
How can organisations ensure that their IT infrastructures are efficient?
IT teams have more data about their networks’ status than ever before, but they are also being confronted with an overwhelming number of alerts on network management systems. The sheer time devoted to sifting through and evaluating alerts to identify actionable items often delays response and compromises network performance.
Network analytics comes to the rescue here. Machine learning applied to the network layer enables identification of true network errors in real time, so they can be immediately addressed. When combined with intelligent eventsuppression that prevents alert overload, network analytics solutions help deal with incidents before they affect business services.
Without high-quality network analytics, the network becomes a blind spot where operational impacts can’t be easily traced.
How can organisations accelerate digital transformation?
Machine learning and AI are now playing their part in IT hardware maintenance, simplifying the support and maintenance of hardware through automated support processes
With the ongoing talent crunch and the growing list of responsibilities before CIOs, taking advantage of outside resources is vital. Taking care of storage, server, and networking equipment is a great place to integrate third-partysolutions.
What pain points are you seeing from organisations in the current IT landscape?
• Poor visibility to network performance
• Tool consolidation
• Scalability and performance issues within current toolset
• Access to data to drive more informed business decisions
• Support of new or emerging technologies e.g., cloud and SDX Administration overhead/time
• New features and functionality in a new tool (current tools haven’t been updated/stripped down features)
What IT and technological trends are you seeing now and what are your predictions for 2021?
The long-predicted Internet of Things (IoT) data explosion is finally arriving. The average organization is already managing nearly 10 petabytes of information but a rapid expansion of device-generated data is due.
An enduring IT talent gap is making it difficult to marshal the skilled professionals required to run the data center, resulting in an urgent need for alternatives.
Although edge computing is lacking the business models to support it and is therefore unlikely to hit high gear in 2021, enterprises will be preparing their infrastructure for a more distributed future and enhanced automation.Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will advance, and the SD-WAN stampede will continue.
The real news, however, will again be artificial intelligence (AI). The vast and growing volumes of IoT and consumer data will provide plenty of “food” for AI “thought.” Applications based on classic machine learning algorithms will give way to more powerful deep learning solutions. At the same time, AI will fuel a resurgence in the lacking the business models to support it data center, as enterprises realize the shortcomings of processing massive data sets in the cloud and invest in high-density, AI-ready installations on site.
Do you foresee more organisations adopting automation and AI as part of their IT infrastructure?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) for IT operations, or AIOps, is gaining momentum in the data center industry. Armed with machine learning algorithms and promising transformational impacts, AIOps is delivering a number of advantages. Among the top outcomes data center managers are reporting:
Visibility: AI solutions help centralize data from a wide array of monitoring systems into a single application, providing managers a better view.
Prioritization: AI solutions are helping to point data center administrators to mission critical problems.
Root Cause Identification: AI spares administrators long and frustrating troubleshooting efforts, and some systems will automatically file the trouble ticket, fault details, and replacement parts or other needs for administrator or engineering attention.
Predictability: Data centers have moved from solely reactive maintenance to more proactive scheduled maintenance based on predictive analysis.
How can organisations improve their vendor asset management strategies?
Data centers have changed, and the concept of infrastructure continues to evolve radically as businesses move to implement digital transformation in its many forms. This requires a more strategic approach to maintain physical and virtual infrastructures and gain insights through automation and analytics. This is the genesis of DMSO, which represents a new way to deliver value and help transform critical infrastructure into a strategic business asset.
How can organisations improve visibility of their IT assets?
Asset Discovery offers a holistic, accurate listing of all IT assets across your hybrid cloud infrastructure. The service provides customers a single source of the trust, allowing them to better understand their full hardware andsoftware asset inventory, data center dependencies and warranty details. Asset-level reporting includes complete device detail and documentation across physical, virtual, blade and clustered systems. Device detail includes:
-Device information including the hostname, serial number, model, CPU, memory & hard disk details
-Operating System with version number
-IP and MAC addresses, and their relationships (mapping to corresponding ports)
-Installed software and services (running or stopped)
What are the latest trends in service delivery and ticket tracking for fault resolution?
Customer portals and mobile apps give customers remote access and control over the maintenance of their data center and IT infrastructure in real-time. Mobile apps offer several key features that mirror the capabilities of the customer portal. These features include:
-Submit, edit and view incidents
-Monitor escalation process
Is there still a need for third-party maintenance services?
As the impact of COVID-19 continues to influence businesses around the world, third-party maintenance (TPM) has become a more prevalent and trusted means of ensuring uptime in IT data centers.
The starting point for many customers is the budget, and third-party support can help carve out more space for strategic projects. TPM can slash 30-40 percent off your OEM costs. It’s as easy as switching coverage.
While budget may drive customers to alternative support, it is the excellence in service delivery that keeps them ascustomers. TPM does more to ease the support burden on enterprise IT professionals, with expert engineers, hundreds of spare parts depots, and 24/7 global customer service.
What is DMSO, the new service concept all about and why should organisations consider a DMSO strategy for their IT?
Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize (DMSO) is a new service concept that provides organisations with a fully integrated approach to managing critical infrastructure.
As businesses continue their digital transformations, they depend on data that resides on-premises, in public and private clouds, devices at the edge and networks and operation centers that span the globe. Managing these complexenvironments is increasingly becoming more difficult. Exponential increases in time, labor and cost, as well as the complexity of navigating a maze of service providers to establish clear accountability and support, requires a more
intelligent and flexible approach.
With DMSO, clients will maximize uptime, improve operational speed, eliminate IT chaos, and boost return on investment – ultimately accelerating their digital transformations.
-Discover – Holistic, accurate listing of data center assets across OEMs, with automated IT asset discovery anddependency mapping and comprehensive coverage of servers (physical, virtual, and cloud), desktops, edge devices and peripherals;
-Monitor – Server and storage monitoring hardware (storage, server and network) and software (OS Monitoring, Linux, Windows, VM)
-Support – Event filtering and remediation for hardware, operating systems and network hardware
(predictive/proactive alerting and ticket integration) OS remediation (patch management, updates) and network incidents (management, configuration, root cause);
-Optimize – Enable client efficiencies and ensure uptime with capacity management, CPU utilization and cloud cost controls).
How can organisations ensure that their IT infrastructures are efficient?
IT teams have more data about their networks’ status than ever before, but they are also being confronted with an overwhelming number of alerts on network management systems. The sheer time devoted to sifting through and evaluating alerts to identify actionable items often delays response and compromises network performance.
Network analytics comes to the rescue here. Machine learning applied to the network layer enables identification of true network errors in real time, so they can be immediately addressed. When combined with intelligent eventsuppression that prevents alert overload, network analytics solutions help deal with incidents before they affect business services.
Without high-quality network analytics, the network becomes a blind spot where operational impacts can’t be easily traced.
How can organisations accelerate digital transformation?
Machine learning and AI are now playing their part in IT hardware maintenance, simplifying the support and maintenance of hardware through automated support processes
With the ongoing talent crunch and the growing list of responsibilities before CIOs, taking advantage of outside resources is vital. Taking care of storage, server, and networking equipment is a great place to integrate third-partysolutions.
What pain points are you seeing from organisations in the current IT landscape?
• Poor visibility to network performance
• Tool consolidation
• Scalability and performance issues within current toolset
• Access to data to drive more informed business decisions
• Support of new or emerging technologies e.g., cloud and SDX Administration overhead/time
• New features and functionality in a new tool (current tools haven’t been updated/stripped down features)
What IT and technological trends are you seeing now and what are your predictions for 2021?
The long-predicted Internet of Things (IoT) data explosion is finally arriving. The average organization is already managing nearly 10 petabytes of information but a rapid expansion of device-generated data is due.
An enduring IT talent gap is making it difficult to marshal the skilled professionals required to run the data center, resulting in an urgent need for alternatives.
Although edge computing is lacking the business models to support it and is therefore unlikely to hit high gear in 2021, enterprises will be preparing their infrastructure for a more distributed future and enhanced automation.Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will advance, and the SD-WAN stampede will continue.
The real news, however, will again be artificial intelligence (AI). The vast and growing volumes of IoT and consumer data will provide plenty of “food” for AI “thought.” Applications based on classic machine learning algorithms will give way to more powerful deep learning solutions. At the same time, AI will fuel a resurgence in the lacking the business models to support it data center, as enterprises realize the shortcomings of processing massive data sets in the cloud and invest in high-density, AI-ready installations on site.
Do you foresee more organisations adopting automation and AI as part of their IT infrastructure?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) for IT operations, or AIOps, is gaining momentum in the data center industry. Armed with machine learning algorithms and promising transformational impacts, AIOps is delivering a number of advantages. Among the top outcomes data center managers are reporting:
Visibility: AI solutions help centralize data from a wide array of monitoring systems into a single application, providing managers a better view.
Prioritization: AI solutions are helping to point data center administrators to mission critical problems.
Root Cause Identification: AI spares administrators long and frustrating troubleshooting efforts, and some systems will automatically file the trouble ticket, fault details, and replacement parts or other needs for administrator or engineering attention.
Predictability: Data centers have moved from solely reactive maintenance to more proactive scheduled maintenance based on predictive analysis.
How can organisations improve their vendor asset management strategies?
Data centers have changed, and the concept of infrastructure continues to evolve radically as businesses move to implement digital transformation in its many forms. This requires a more strategic approach to maintain physical and virtual infrastructures and gain insights through automation and analytics. This is the genesis of DMSO, which represents a new way to deliver value and help transform critical infrastructure into a strategic business asset.
How can organisations improve visibility of their IT assets?
Asset Discovery offers a holistic, accurate listing of all IT assets across your hybrid cloud infrastructure. The service provides customers a single source of the trust, allowing them to better understand their full hardware andsoftware asset inventory, data center dependencies and warranty details. Asset-level reporting includes complete device detail and documentation across physical, virtual, blade and clustered systems. Device detail includes:
-Device information including the hostname, serial number, model, CPU, memory & hard disk details
-Operating System with version number
-IP and MAC addresses, and their relationships (mapping to corresponding ports)
-Installed software and services (running or stopped)
IT teams have more data about their networks’ status than ever before, but they are also being confronted with an overwhelming number of alerts on network management systems
What are the latest trends in service delivery and ticket tracking for fault resolution?
Customer portals and mobile apps give customers remote access and control over the maintenance of their data center and IT infrastructure in real-time. Mobile apps offer several key features that mirror the capabilities of the customer portal. These features include:
-Submit, edit and view incidents
-Monitor escalation process
