As the collaboration between Cisco and Hitachi continues to expand, Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) storage administration capabilities from Intersight Cloud Orchestrator (ICO) have grown, enabling it to handle a majority of tasks that were previously exclusive to native Hitachi management tools, such as Hitachi Storage Navigator, Ops Center, or Unified Compute Platform Advisor.
Many customers will benefit from the saved time and improved usability when using Cisco Intersight, providing a single pane of glass to manage not only their compute and virtualized resources but also their underlying storage, with the added advantage of automation workflows through ICO.
As more customers adopt this administration model, Hitachi Vantara has released two best practices guides covering all tasks within Cisco ICO that can be integrated into workflows to administer the Hitachi VSP.
The first guide covers general best practices for both user-defined and system defined workflows, including storage provisioning, in-system replication, and VMware-based operations. Furthermore, users can expect the following outcomes when adopting the Intersight administration model using these best practices:
- View a unified inventory of storage assets.
- Reduce the operational load on infrastructure administrators because Cisco Intersight eliminates the need to transition between the operation screens of the management software of each piece of infrastructure equipment when using conventional operations management.
- Delegate the enabling of repetitive tasks to novice team members using the ICO workflow.
- Provide role-based access control (RBAC) to resources within the data center from a single platform.
- Eliminate the need for managing data center ecosystem separately because all components can be managed from Cisco Intersight.
For more information, see the guide: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdfd/architecture-guide/vsp-with-cisco-intersight-cloud-orchestrator.pdf
Additionally, customers seeking to extend the life of their older Hitachi or third-party storage systems by virtualizing these systems behind a VSP using the Hitachi Universal Volume Manager (UVM) function, can refer to the second guide. This guide covers best practices for all relevant tasks that can be compiled into user defined-workflows. Using UVM from ICO provides the following benefits:
· Use Cisco Intersight in combination with Hitachi VSP to manage storage systems that might not natively be supported from Cisco Intersight.
· Extend the life of older storage arrays by virtualizing the hardware behind Hitachi VSP.
· View a unified inventory of storage assets after the third-party or legacy system has been virtualized behind the target VSP.
· Virtualized systems gain all capabilities offered by the Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) of the VSP system.
· Reduce the need to purchase additional storage by using existing disk sets with compression and deduplication capabilities provided by VSP.
· Perform hot migration of external to internal resources non-disruptively.
For more information, see the guide: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdfd/architecture-guide/vsp-universal-volume-manager-with-cisco-intersight.pdf
Visit the Hitachi booth B14 at Cisco Live 2024 Amsterdam to witness our latest demonstration showcasing Cisco ICO capabilities using the VSP. Hitachi and Cisco maintain an ongoing collaboration to integrate additional storage capabilities into Intersight, tune back into our next announcement for information about further enhancements.
Best,
Arvin