Extending HP DaaS reach with more choice and flexibility

It’s an “everything as a service” world, and we’re all living in it.

As we move from the information age to the experience age, there has been a major shift in the way we work and play. Consumers want products and services that automatically renew themselves and are more convenient to consume, and it’s no different in the working world.

More than 40 percent of small and medium-sized companies consider “as a service” critical to their organization1. Our goal for HP Device as a Service (DaaS)2
is to deliver that same type of user experience for computing. By combining hardware, intelligence, and lifecycle services, we simplify how IT organizations allocate and manage their devices while improving reliability and satisfaction. There is also the bonus of freeing up IT resources to focus on other priorities, not to mention greater financial predictability.

Additionally, 70 percent of companies are planning for or considering investing in effective analytics tools and skills3. HP TechPulse is a cornerstone of HP DaaS and enables HP Service Experts4 to deliver superb management. This unique analytics technology monitors and predicts device health to help customers proactively manage multi-OS device environments and mitigate issues before they impact productivity.

Today, HP announced new enhancements for its partners and customers.

Enabling our partner ecosystem to plug and play

HP’s commitment to its partners is stronger than ever. The new enhancements in HP DaaS enable HP partners to accelerate their ability to easily offer the benefits of the “as a service” model to customers. This includes:

·         Multi-customer view for partners – This new capability allows partners to view incidents and reports for multiple customers from a single dashboard and logon, provide data-driven recommendations for optimization to their customers, and spot trends in their installed customer bases to structure more efficient responses to incidents. With this new dashboard view, partners can easily change from viewing key indicators for all customers to individual customers with a click of a button.

·         Business review templates – A new tool that helps partners more quickly and easily hold rich business reviews with their customers and to identify areas for optimization.

·         Added incidents to all HP DaaS plans – Incidents are alerts that flag issues that need to be addressed and they show up on the analytics dashboard of the HP DaaS portal; channel partners can now report on them to their customers.

·         New integration service – Incidents generated by HP TechPulse can interact with ServiceNow5, a leading IT services management system. With this add-on service, partners can use their helpdesk ticketing system to track and resolve incidents from HP TechPulse along with other IT issues they are tracking with ServiceNow before they affect users.

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HPE announces improved provisioning, compliance enhancements and new cost insights to HPE OneSphere

Transforming from a traditional environment to a digital organization often means your apps live in multiple data centers, across many clouds, and at the edge of your network. Hybrid cloud merges on-premises IT with public cloud to deliver many advantages, but it can also introduce new challenges in operational efficiency and multi-platform administration. A comprehensive, unified, hybrid-cloud management solution, like HPE OneSphere, helps alleviate these challenges.

Introduced earlier this year, HPE OneSphere is an as-a-Service hybrid-cloud management platform. Through a unified view in HPE OneSphere, IT operations and developers can compose hybrid clouds capable of supporting both traditional, virtualized, and cloud-native applications, while providing business executives the cost insights they need to make informed business decisions on their cloud utilization.

This week at HPE Discover Madrid 2018, HPE announced improved provisioning, compliance enhancements and new cost insights to HPE OneSphere, designed to give customers even more hybrid cloud management capabilities and drive greater simplicity across their hybrid-cloud estate.

Delivering private cloud automation through enhanced provisioning

One of the new updates announced this week is the enhancement of the Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) capabilities, to enable IT to quickly provision Kubernetes clusters on AWS and on-premises VMware environments with just a few clicks. Fully functioning container deployments and microservices can now be deployed automatically to either public or private cloud environments, reducing complexity and inconsistency.  Furthermore, HPE OneSphere integrates with public and private repositories, automatically importing Helm charts deployable through the built-in catalog or APIs, hence increasing DevOps productivity and time-to-market for cloud native apps.

In addition, the introduction of a Bare-Metal-as-a-Service (BMaaS) through HPE OneView automation. This new capability, which will be available January 2019, gives IT Operations a simple approach to manage the allocation of bare metal services to ongoing projects across the enterprise, providing a standard interface to HPE infrastructure.

Deeper information for line of business (LOB) execs with advanced cost insights

These new product enhancements also include customizable cost and utilization graphs, which are designed to provide IT, developers, and LOBs with greater insights into usage and spending, thus enabling them to make better business decisions. The update also includes improved visibility and accountability across hybrid cloud assets through a new tag discovery feature that allows users to use their existing tag structure from public clouds and import it directly into HPE OneSphere so they can create reports based on specific tags. Both of these features improve control and streamline the process of cost management across user groups, projects and departments.

Greater control of IT resources with increased compliance and governance features

Also announced this week are a set of new governance features for HPE OneSphere, including the option to implement policy-based access to applications and resources. This provides IT with the ability to assign and control cloud access for specific users and reduce risks through better visibility and access controls. In addition, HPE OneSphere can now provide basic compliance information of AWS and Azure environments, giving IT greater control of public cloud resources.

Since launching HPE OneSphere, HPE has been laser-focused on enhancing our hybrid cloud management platform -- one that exceeds the speed and agility today’s ITOps, developers, and business leaders need to drive their business forward without sacrificing governance and control. The recent updates to HPE OneSphere were designed around HPE’s vision of helping customers simplify processes and accelerate digital transformation across the entire business—changing how organizations of all sizes get their arms around their hybrid cloud resources

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Fast, Simple and Secure Orchestration of Operational Technologies at the Edge with HPE Edgeline

The edge can be categorized as anywhere that’s not the data center or cloud, and consequently encompasses a variety of environments - a manufacturing floor, oil rig, truck or a power plant.  It is one of the biggest sources of “big data”, since much of this data is simply parameters measured from the physical world e.g. pressure, temperature, light, vibration etc. Customers desperately need an efficient method to acquire, store, analyze and act on this data in order to be successful. To this end, they are looking to deploy IT technologies into the OT environment such as a manufacturing floor or oil rig, and physically converge the two domains and go further than simply an organization or process change. In this post we will look at how HPE is leveraging our strengths in enterprise IT hardware and software into the OT space, and making it fast, simple and secure for customers to achieve this goal.

The challenge with automation:

Setting up converged OT is confusing and suboptimal

Take a scenario where the customer wishes to deploy an IT system on a manufacturing floor to collect data from sensors on equipment, analyze it to get insights, and immediately take control action to improve the outcome. First, they need to identify the appropriate edge platform that can talk to the OT devices already in the environment, but yet has sufficient horsepower and capabilities to manage huge volumes of data and run demanding analytics.

This system must then be physically installed into the factory floor, have firmware updated to the latest versions, the Operating System (OS) installed from bare metal, and applications loaded on top of it. When a high-performance enterprise class system is setup, this activity may necessitate expensive IT specialists to be deployed onsite to manage each and every deployment. Furthermore, basic systems like gateways or Industrial PCs, will force a manual installation of firmware and software on each system, leading to long setup times and possibly inconsistent end states.

Once the system installation is done, the customer needs to figure out how to “talk” the right industrial protocols to interact with the equipment they’d like to monitor. For example, they will need to find the correct driver for the OT I/O hardware (e.g. CANbus, MOBDUS or TSN) integrated in their edge system and spend significant time to ensure that it can be consistently installed, performs to expectations and is secure. Then the user needs to find drivers for the endpoint devices inside the monitored equipment such as a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) or Distributed Control System (DCS), understand how to extract data from its registers, and map these to data tags that an application can use. The collected data tags need to be routed via a workflow to the appropriate analytics application, and once insight is obtained, the entire flow must be reversed to control the equipment. Much of this requires custom coding today and results in a solution which has not been stress-tested, hardened or secured to enterprise IT levels. The ability to scale this blueprint easily to other lines, sites or companies is also doubtful.

Finally, once the solution is deployed it must be managed and maintained, and this is not a typical skillset found within the OT engineers and technicians working on the manufacturing floor. But it is also frequently not cost effective to station IT specialists at each site to handle issues as they emerge, putting customers in a conundrum.

The solution: HPE delivers the system, software and services to make converged OT easy

HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems is a new class of high-performance, high-density, Converged OT systems that are ruggedized to be deployed in harsh edge environments. In addition to bringing full datacenter-grade enterprise IT compute, storage, networking, and systems management capabilities to the edge, Edgeline can also directly interoperate with operational technologies (OT) (i.e. “Convergence of IT and OT”) typically found at the edge e.g. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) or SCADA systems. This physical integration of data acquisition, control systems, and industrial networking into an Enterprise IT platform, enables the Edgeline to “talk” with industrial equipment on the oil rig or manufacturing floor over MODBUS or PROFINET, as easily as it can send Augmented Reality (AR) overlays to a tablet over WiFi.

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