Infinidat’s Infinibox arrays have been integrated with ServiceNow’s ITOM Visibility so they can show up and be managed within ServiceNow’s IT estate operations.
ServiceNow provides IT systems management as-a-service and is widely used across businesses, boasting more than 4000 customers. Its latest release uses AI technology to help fix problems in a customer’s IT estate. IT Operations Management (ITOM) Visibility is a suite of ServiceNow offerings including Discovery, Service Mapping, Certificate Inventory and Management, Graph Connectors, Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Firewall Audits and Reporting.
Erik Kaulberg, Infinidat’s VP for cloud and business alliances, said: “Our integration with ServiceNow is a natural extension of Infinidat’s multi-pronged AIOps strategy … We’ve heard a clear need for this integration from large mutual customers, and our … InfiniBox API coupled with ServiceNow’s extensible Discovery Patterns approach made it easy to get it done.”
Infinidat says the integration extends ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box Discovery capabilities to provide visibility into InfiniBox systems, broadening Infinidat’s ecosystem of multi-vendor AIOps capabilities for large-scale enterprise and service provider environments. Discovery can detect and understand all components of Infinidat’s storage systems and add them to the ServiceNow CMDB.
It automatically builds dependency relationships between the InfiniBox systems and components, host systems, and attached networks. The CMDB inclusion forms a foundation for event correlation, log analysis, and other capabilities in ServiceNow’s product suite. This means ServiceNow AIOps systems and workflows include Infinibox arrays in the data infrastructure for which they provide centralised monitoring.
It also means Infinidat customers can use ServiceNow Service Mapping to understand what services are powered by InfiniBox and build migration plans when becoming InfiniBox customers.
Kaulberg told us there are three aspects to Infinidat’s AIOps features:
- In-house InfiniVerse AIOps;
- Roll-you-own, general purpose analytics — elasticsearch, Dynatrace, Splunk, etc.;
- Pre-packaged independent AIOps — Arxscan, Continuity, Dell EMC SRM, Device42, Galileo, NetApp OCI,Veritas APTARE, VMware vRealize, Xorux and more.
Kaulberg said that there is “a very broad and level AIOps playing field … with no clear winner”. In his view Infinidat “really does have presence across all three of the AIOps areas: in-house, roll-your-own, and pre-packed offerings. He said: “We’ve invested before the market consolidates in AIOps.”
Kaulberg suggests AppDynamics is a level above such infrastructure players, and Infinidat would plug in via an intermediary.
Availability
The updated Discovery and Service Mapping software options with the Infinidat integration are available immediately for download from the ServiceNow Store. Each discovered InfiniBox requires four ServiceNow Discovery Subscription Units, available from ServiceNow representatives.
General AIOps support
Infinidat recently said it had a strong AIOps momentum and we suggested it didn’t have much third-party AIOps support. We were wrong.
In fact AIOps is now provided by an ecosystem of third parties, not just a few specialised suppliers such as AppDynamics and Virtana.
Infinidat lists a plethora of suppliers with which it has links: Arxscan, Continuity Software, elastic, Device24 Array IO, Galileo Suite, Splunk, VMware, Veritas and Xorux plus others.
The intention is that Infinidat will fit in with its customers’ preferred AIOps approaches.
