Nutanix has bolstered support for ServiceNow with the latest iteration of the Calm app automation and management tool and its Prism Pro monitoring SW. The company says the update enables joint customers to reduce IT infrastructure service management costs and simplify processes and procedures.
Rajiv Mirani, Nutanix CTO, said in a statement: “This strengthened integration with ServiceNow, along with the broader suite of Nutanix automation solutions, will allow IT teams to reduce the amount of time they spend on day-to-day management of their cloud infrastructure, as well as applications, so they can focus on supporting business priorities.”
The first Nutanix-ServiceNow integration was announced in October 2019, with ServiceNow automatically discovering Nutanix systems data: HCI clusters, individual hosts, virtual machine (VM) instances, storage pools, configuration parameters and application-centric metrics. ServiceNow users can provision, manage and scale applications via Nutanix Calm blueprints.
With Nutanix Calm 3.0, joint customers use ServiceNow’s approval flow and audit capabilities to automate app lifecycle events such as upgrades, patches, and expansions. Passwords can be maintained in a central CyberArc vault via a CyberArc-ServiceNow integration.
Users of Nutanix Prism Pro management tool are now able to get and respond to alerts and incidents directly in their ServiceNow portal. They can track infrastructure issues through automatically created tickets in ServiceNow and resolve them in this ticketing system.
Joint customers will be able to limit unintended public cloud consumption. They can incorporate Nutanix cost and security optimisation recommendations into existing ServiceNow workflows by automated ticket creation – which is based on cost savings recommendations and security vulnerability alerts – and assign them to the appropriate owner.
Calm 3.0 adds functionality to provision Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with a Python-based domain-specific language (DSL) for writing Calm blueprints. The Calm DSL has the same capabilities as the Calm UI, but is human-readable version-controlled code that can handle most complex application scenarios.
Nutanix says the expanded ServiceNow integrations are available to customers. Calm 3.0 is current under development.
Competition
Nutanix aims to make its hyperconverged system portfolio easier for ServiceNow customers to use than competitor products. The stakes are high as ServiceNow is used by three quarters of the Fortune 500 and dominates Gartner’s 2019 IT Service Management magic quadrant. The message is that, if customers use ServiceNow and want an HCI system, they should buy Nutanix now.
Dell EMC has an OpenManage integration to enable ServiceNow users to monitor and manage their PowerEdge server infrastructure within the ServiceNow console. There appears to be no specific VxRail integration with ServiceNow.
Cisco’s HyperFlex HCI is managed by Cisco’s InterSight, a SaaS infrastructure management tool. There is a ServiceNow ITSM (IT service management) plugin for InterSight, which provides inventory sync and incident management. That means HyperFlex incidents can be tackled through ServiceNow.
HPE’s OneView, the precursor to InfoSight, had an integration with ServiceNow in 2016. It synced hardware catalog entries across platforms, bi-directionally tracked hardware physical events and presented these events as service tickets in the ServiceNow workflow. Blocks & Files understands InfoSight has inherited this capability.
