VIDEO | Infinidat Field, CTO: Intelligent Software Leads to AI

VIDEO | Infinidat Field, CTO: Intelligent Software Leads to AI

(US and Canada) Infinidat’s Field Chief Technology Officer Ken Steinhardt and Chief Marketing Officer Eric Herzog speak with Robert Lutton, VP of Sandhill Consultants, about the meaning of AI Ops, storage management versus IT management, the best approach to integrating the two, and Infinidat’s measurement of return on investment.

Steinhardt credits Gartner for coining the term AIOps. AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination. Contrary the history of traditional IT management that was manual, the world today has numerous data points that require software, he explains. 

Steinhardt maintains that there is a need for intelligent software, which leads to the term Artificial Intelligence (AI). The essence is to have good software equipped with AI to look for anomalies that humans would not be able to catch as quickly, he asserts.

Speaking about storage management, Steinhardt recalls the past when storage was a “second-class citizen;'' it was considered peripheral in a CPU-centric world. Organizations solely cared about operational aspects like performance and availability of resources, he states.

The 1990s saw the evolution of heterogeneous storage, states Steinhardt. He remembers documenting the first storage management product in the world. The personal computer supported mainframe storage management back then. Things have radically changed, says Steinhardt. The best enterprise storage systems in the market today are more sophisticated than the complete end-to-end systems available a decade ago, he adds.

Steinhardt emphasizes the management aspect of storage systems. He indicates that they need to be managed as standalone identities connected to networks, which are further connected to servers that need to be managed as well.

According to Steinhardt, with the prevailing concerns of performance, availability, and utilization of resources, storage management has transformed into AIOps. Since individual pieces need to be managed at a level that is beyond human pace, Infinidat has developed a technology called Infiniverse, says Steinhardt.

Infiniverse is a cloud-based environment that enables the company to gather telemetry data from user systems without interfering with user data. Steinhardt states they can do predictive analysis to avert issues before they become problems while maintaining the optimum level of security.

He stresses that, although AIOps has grown huge, overall IT management is still a requirement. Steinhardt mentions that, as a result, companies like ServiceNow and Virtana have emerged. The IT operations management (ITOM) visibility of ServiceNow and Virtana's virtual wisdom integrate with the InifiniBox storage systems to provide direct visibility and satisfaction to users and customers, says Herzog.

Steinhardt emphasizes that through these technologies organizations can consolidate and reduce costs while improving the simplicity of operations and the reliability of infrastructure. 

Herzog explains that having autonomous automation software allows them to cut capital and operational expenditures. He concurs that integration with automation capabilities of AIOps across data centers using packages like Service Now accelerate applications. These factors determine the return on investment, adds Herzog.

Concluding, Steinhardt sheds light on the need to allow intelligent software to identify issues so that people can do more value-added work for organizations.

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