Infinidat and Virtana have announced the integration of Infinidat’s Infinibox storage arrays with Virtana’s VirtualWisdom Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) platform that uses AIOps to automate and optimise IT infrastructure operations.
AIOps is the use of artificial intelligence applied to IT operations, and builds on the collection of telemetry from applications and IT infrastructure to detect problems and respond to them — either directly or by alerting IT staff. However, the ultimate aim of AIOps is to deliver infrastructure that is largely self-managing.
According to the two firms, the new integration provides cross-domain visibility into mission-critical application workloads that run on InfiniBox storage, while extending Virtana’s IPM solution across a broader range of customer environments.
This makes it a win-win situation, especially for customers that have both Infinidat storage and have deployed Virtana — but according to Infinidat Vice President Erik Kaulberg, there is more to it than that.
“I think the broader story is that no one’s operating with this scale, or this fidelity, across these two pieces of the infrastructure stack,” Kaulberg told Blocks & Files. It was requests from large organisations which are joint customers that drove the integration, he added.
Infinidat has already deployed its own AIOps technology, but this is restricted to monitoring and optimising Infinidat arrays. For customers to get the full benefit, AIOps has to cover the entire infrastructure, Kaulberg said, and this means operating at three levels.
“First, you have AIOps capabilities inside the box. This is things like our neural cache, which drives data placement, plus a lot of other intelligence at the system level that essentially makes each InfiniBox storage array a self-driving or self-managing type environment,” he explained.
Then there is AIOps outside the box, which in Infinidat’s case pulls together the intelligence of all the individual InfiniBox systems via its InfiniVerse cloud service. The third part is the broader AIOps ecosystem.
“The first two are all about what Infinidat can see, which is quite a bit — we can we can go all the way up to host-level actions, we can see VMs, that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, most customers with complex IT environments need a solution that knits together the intelligence — not just from the storage, but also from the compute, from the software layers and the entire stack,” Kaulberg said. And that’s where Virtana fits in.
“VirtualWisdom visualises the service delivery across the infrastructure stack, mostly eliminating the human component in mapping applications to service tiers, to their infrastructure services, so our tool allows you to do all of that automatically,” said Virtana VP of Product Management Jon Cyr.
For its part, Virtana said that it brings to the party the ability to ensure uptime, availability, and performance, combined with advanced capacity forecasting.
The Infinidat-Virtana integration is available immediately to Virtana customers. Some customers have been involved in beta testing for the past several months, so it is already incorporating feedback from customers with Infinidat systems, Cyr said.
