Hitachi Vantara hopes to improve the resilience of its customers’ cloud workloads through a package of consulting and managed services, called Hitachi Application Reliability Services, delivered from physical and virtual Application Reliability Centres (ARC).
This is all very legacy enterprise IT department-focussed. The vendor says that cloud operating models are complex with a variety of application types, limited visibility into how apps and infrastructure align, security issues and time consuming IT-DevOps co-ordination. Infrastructure of course includes Hitachi Vantara storage systems. The company claims its consultants and services can improve this situation with a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Frank Antonysamy, Chief Digital Solutions Officer at Hitachi Vantara, said: “Hitachi Vantara’s Application Reliability Centres and engineering-led cloud operations enables our clients to achieve true DevOps by fully integrating operations with engineering.” In his view: “Achieving KPI-driven outcomes for cloud workloads requires a fundamental shift from simply managing infrastructure to managing the efficiency and reliability of the applications.”
The geographically dispersed physical and virtual ARCs’ centres of excellence, are where cloud applications are monitored and optimised by Hitachi V’s professional services to ensure client-defined KPIs are consistently achieved. The first physical centers will be in Dallas, Texas and Hyderabad, India.
The services on offer should gladden a legacy IT department when it’s worried about piratical DevOps inroads into its sphere of influence:
• Cloud Advisory Services to Define Cloud Modernisation Strategies: consulting services that provide a comprehensive assessment of each client’s application portfolio, in terms of application cost, reliability and criticality, to create a strategy for cloud adoption. Customers can better determine which workloads make financial and operational sense to be kept on-premises or moved to the cloud, and which applications should be retired, rehosted and re-architected.
• AI-Driven Accelerators and Observability: These leverage claimed 360-degree observability to provide smarter insights into the health of cloud services and automate root-cause analysis and issue remediation to deliver up to 25 per cent improvement in mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
• SRE Strategies and Management: Using SRE KPIs and principles (fault tolerances, error budgets and a common backlog), IT teams can better collaborate to establish and meet their organization’s SLOs and goals for application and data performance, governance, compliance, and cost. The combination of these strategies with integrated release management can yield up to 15 per cent improvement in change failure rates.
• Resilience Engineering Services: Engineer resiliency into workloads through fault-awareness, fault-tolerance and self-healing capabilities and adoption of failure identification and prevention strategies such as Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). This service validates resilience through various chaos engineering techniques and integrates them with any existing CI/CD pipelines.
• Application Modernization and Migration: Hitachi has implemented SRE principles into its Application Modernization services to help organizations optimise applications for innovation, performance and cost. A portfolio of proven blueprints and accelerators have helped hundreds of clients build, deploy and modernize applications for the cloud.
This introduction of Hitachi Application Reliability Services builds on its September 2021 launch of Cloud FinOps Services. Hitachi Vantara’s FinOps consulting services assess clients’ cloud consumption costs relative to benchmarks and identify areas where costs can be optimised delivering average savings of up to 30 per cent. It says this includes an always-on, managed service to optimise and govern cloud spend against business objectives. This includes automated enterprise-wide cloud consumption reporting, resource tracking, cost monitoring and continuous cost optimisation through right-sizing and usage of correct cloud services.
Comment
Pure Storage has a FinOps approach and so too does NetApp with its Spot portfolio. The Pure approach is based on giving FinOps teams information about Pure’s product capabilities and performance and looks rudimentary when set against NetApp and Hitachi Vantara.
NetApp’s Spot portfolio is based on SaaS services and doesn’t have the heavyweight (and traditional) consulting aspect that is part of Hitachi Vantara’s offering. If an IT department needs lots of in-person hand-holding to get the DevOps beast controlled then Hitachi Vantara has the people to do it
Hitachi Application Reliability Services are available now from Hitachi Vantara
