Intersight Cloud Orchestrator (ICO) Series - Enhanced Intersight Capabilities with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

By Arvin Jami posted 01-21-2022 15:08

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As one of the first enterprise storage vendors to integrate with Cisco Intersight, Hitachi has enabled a magnitude of storage management capabilities that will now be able to be done via Cisco Intersight with the goal of saving end administrators time and frustration.

Within Cisco Intersight management platform, admins can utilize the concept of tasks and workflows to easily manage their hybrid IT environments.

Tasks are essentially a library of functions which leverage API invoke calls that can be custom or provided by Cisco out of the box. These tasks can be compiled to create workflows to enable quick and easy automation of infrastructure without being code experts. This provides true single pane of glass orchestration through Cisco Intersight, reducing the need for datacenter admins to host multiple screens to complete functions.

The following tables show the current capabilities of Hitachi VSP in orchestration with tasks and workflows provided by Intersight to end users:

Table 1. List of support tasks for Hitachi VSP

Table 2. List of supported workflows for Hitachi VSP

To compliment these capabilities Hitachi Vantara in conjunction with Japan’s ITpro division have released the next series reference architecture (RA) guide, Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions: Leveraging Hitachi Storage with Cisco Intersight for Consolidated Management and Automation.

URL: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/architecture-guide/cisco-adaptive-solutions-leveraging-storage-with-cisco-intersight-for-consolidated-management-automation.pdf

This RA explores the benefits of integrated management with Cisco Intersight compared with conventional methods using multiple management interfaces. When creating a virtual environment for enterprise workloads with Cisco Intersight with VSP integration, on average 50 hours of time is saved over the course of a year and there is an 80% reduction of the number of screens required to complete such operations:

To further enhance end user capabilities Cisco and Hitachi have enabled the parallel loop task operation in conjunction with the Hitachi VSP. Now users are able to utilize parallel loop within workflows to allow multiple executions of common storage functions. For example now with parallel loop, administrators can create multiple host groups within a single workflow by simply specifying count within the parallel loop function.

To learn more about parallel loop task visit: https://intersight.com/help/saas/resources/Workflow_Designer#operations_-_parallel_loop_task

Also check out the following videos to see ICO with Hitachi VSP in action:

Workflow purpose: Create a new VM: https://youtu.be/oaGG23cwHAY

Workflow purpose: Expand storage capacity of a VM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXeZhqoLq-4

We look forward to expanding additional capabilities for the Hitachi VSP, and want to thank our customers and partners. For more information on the Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions program visit www.hitachivantara.com/cisco.

Tune back in for future updates!
Arvin

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Tanmoy Panja

05-19-2022 14:34

Very Informative !!

Chayan Sarkar

05-04-2022 11:43

Good one

Dipta Kundu

04-26-2022 12:44

Nice Article

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