HPE recently announced the extension from InfoSight beyond their storage arrays onto their server platforms Proliant, Synergy and Apollo.
Until now, HPE InfoSight was the AI-driven support platform for HPE Nimble storage and more recently their 3PAR arrays as well.
For those storage platforms it delivers a global insight into the status and health of the storage infrastructure, and with the data collected if delivers predictive analytics and gives recommendations to tune and optimize the environment.
One of the strong points of InfoSight is its Cross-Stack Telemetry, where it measures millions of sensors of the state of the systems.
Since it has a connector to your vCenter server, it can collect information from your hypervisors and partially the underlying hardware as well. All depends of course the data that is delivered by that hypervisor.
By adding HPE InfoSight to the hardware server level, this information will be much more detailed, and will give insights as well for environments not running VMware vCenter based environments.
How will all this magic happen?
So far, InfoSight is collecting all those data points through the Nimble controller and the Service Processor of the 3PAR array.
For servers it seems to be quite easy as well, since HPE already had that data collector build -in in every HPE server equipped with iLO4 and iLO5 (so servers from Gen8 and above) called the AHS Active Health System. It also includes a web-based viewer that provides recommended repair actions based on experience and HPE best practices.
It is that tool, used currently by HPE Support, that will be sending all its data to the HPE InfoSight database. And on that data, all the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence magic will be executed to give you a more proactive support experience.
One important thing here of course is of how all that data from those millions of ILO’s out there can be send to the HPE InfoSight database. This will be done initially through the use of the iLO Amplifier Pack. This will collect all the data of all iLO instances and send it to HPE InfoSight. In a later phase this will be done as well through HPE OneView, which seems to me a better option since I know more companies using OneView instead of iLO Amplifier Pack.
Get prepared for HPE InfoSight for Servers
iLO Amplifier Pack? Never heard of it? Mmm you should have read more my blog in the past since I created this article on iAP already in September 2017…
You can find it here:
http://www.bitcon.be/firmware-management-and-reporting-made-easy-check-out-ilo-amplifier-pack/
iLO Amplifier Pack is an at scale inventory and update management tool which enables customers with large Gen8, Gen9 and Gen10 HPE server deployments to get rapid up-to-date inventory and automate firmware and driver updates. It also assists in manual and automated recovery of systems with corrupt firmware. It scales to thousands of servers reducing personnel and downtime.
So, start deploying the VM-based appliance to get ready for HPE InfoSight for servers. Expected availability date of InfoSight is January 2019. You will just need to update the iAP appliance to the latest version.
I will post an article soon in the How-To section with more details of the installation and configuration of iAP.
Be sure to check out this great ChalkTalk on InfoSight for Servers by Calvin Zito aka HPEstorageguy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGEbpTuQCCU
For more information or demo’s and implementation, you can always contact BITCON IT consultants.
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