Behind the Scenes with HPE OneView
March 31, 2017 • Blog Post
IN THIS ARTICLE
How to automate IT Infrastructure for businesses of all sizes
By Jennifer Goforth Gregory
Its 3 p.m. and Mansfield Oil needs to know where their trucks are, what deliveries were made and what products are currently on each truck. As a broker between refineries and stores, Mansfield Oil must be as efficient as possible with all of their resources from vehicles to manpower to technology since their entire business model depends on being on time and accurate.
But managing the applications required to track vehicles was time-consuming and stretched their small IT department, preventing them from being able to focus on other revenue-generating IT projects. The solution? Automating and standing up infrastructure very quickly using HPE OneView, which provides a single infrastructure manager across HPE and third-party infrastructure. Mansfield Oil was then able to present a new face to their customers through mobile apps, and enable their employees to be more efficient.
With limited IT resources, Mansfield Oil is using HPE OneView to do five to ten times the amount of work that their staff was previously able to handle, says Paul Miller, Vice President of Marketing, Converged Data Center Infrastructure at HPE. Since the transportation industry is very competitive, with tight margins, its important that they quickly bring new applications online to increase efficiencies to employees.
Automating Infrastructure Management Means Saving Time and Money
Most IT departments use multiple management applications to maintain their infrastructure. HPE OneView allows IT to collapse all these complicated tools into a single management platform that can be supported by one generalist as opposed to many specialists. This frees up expensive IT resources so they can work on revenue-generating projects instead of day-to-day maintenance.
HPE OneView is basically a super hub. Administrators can deploy the application using the right infrastructure with only a few clicks, says Miller. Companies can now integrate with cloud engines, such as VMware or Microsoft, as well as apps, tools and DevOps engines
Recently, Columbus Communications used HPE OneView to implement a new server stack for three remote islands. It only took three hours for this task. Before HPE OneView, I estimate we would have sent a total of 10 people, including engineers, to each island, with travel expenses, and dedicated a full week to implementing the three sitesall on a break-neck schedule. Our time and money savings is huge, says Sebastian Rodriguez, Senior Systems Architect, Columbus Communications.
Customers are also able to get more mileage out of their infrastructure investments by using HPE OneView for data analytics. During planning, the IT department can run what-if scenarios to see when servers will reach capacity. The analytics also provide customers with information on where to run their workload to keep their current infrastructure running as long as possible.
The Future of Infrastructure Management
As our world becomes even more software-defined, orchestrating IT infrastructure will be critical. By using HPE OneView to integrate key technologies, companies will continue to expand their capabilities. HPE plans to continue extending HPE OneViews management platform across an increasingly wider set of HPE and third-party infrastructure.
The heart of the next-generation data center will all be about increasing automation to where the data center will be completely managed by software, says Miller. It will become a software-defined data centerless human intervention, fully automated to where the infrastructure can automatically provision to the needs of the application that are being run.