IT automation for private clouds

Automating the mundane tasks of IT is essential to facilitating and accelerating digital transformation in enterprises. By automating the most requested services and workflows, IT teams can reduce time spent on servicing incidents and issues and focus on offering a public cloud-like experience within the data centre, competitive differentiation and strategic planning.

In a new survey of 2,650 IT decision-makers around the world by Vanson Bourne, commissioned by Nutanix, nearly all (98%) said that automation of IT operations is important to their organisation, with 56% saying it was “extremely important.” In addition, according to Gartner: "By 2022, intelligent infrastructure will add infrastructure machine learning, analytics and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) as software to 60% of HCI and composable integrated systems."

Integration with the ServiceNow IT Operations Management solution enables Nutanix customers to:

• Automatically discover Nutanix private cloud environments with ServiceNow ITOM Discovery capability, giving IT operators end-to-end visibility of Nutanix assets, including HCI clusters, individual hosts, virtual machine (VM) instances, storage pools and dozens more configuration parameters and application-centric metrics. 
• Deliver self-service capabilities to ServiceNow users so they can quickly provision, manage and scale applications via Nutanix Calm blueprints, which are published as service catalogue items in the Now Platform. The Nutanix Calm plug-in is available through the ServiceNow Store. 
• Better manage Nutanix-based private cloud operations via integration with Nutanix’s X-Play automation engine built into Prism Pro. With a new X-Play action for ServiceNow, IT managers can leverage ServiceNow ITSM service to notify their team of incidents and alerts in their Nutanix-powered private cloud environment, such as when a host loses power, or a server is running out of capacity. 

“Automation is the key to harnessing the power and flexibility of private cloud, removing mundane tasks so IT can focus on competitive differentiation through the use of the latest innovations, while future-proofing their infrastructure investment,” said Rajiv Mirani, Chief Technical Officer of Cloud Platforms at Nutanix. “By integrating Nutanix software with ServiceNow's leading digital workflow solutions, we are making it easier to deliver end-to-end automation of infrastructure and application workflows so that private cloud can deliver the same simplicity and flexibility as public cloud services.”

“IT leaders are increasingly demanding more automation across their cloud infrastructures so they can focus on higher-level, strategic drivers of their digital transformation,” said Jeff Hausman, Vice President and General Manager of IT Operations Management at ServiceNow. “Leveraging ServiceNow IT Operations Management to establish visibility into the Nutanix environment will allow customers to better manage their overall operations footprint, proactively remediate issues and protect the efficiency and resiliency of their IT investments.”