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Audience:  IT Decision Maker

Narrative for Storage Automation

Introduction

Organizations are drawn to the promise of AIOps to maintain resiliency by leveraging AI-driven intelligence and automation for quick and accurate decisions.  AIOps uses artificial intelligence to simplify IT operations management through acceleration and automation of problem resolution in complex modern IT environments.

In a recent blog by Sanjay Chandru, he sets the stage for guiding you on Best practices for taking a hybrid approach to AIOps.  A key capability that empowers IBM Z IT ops teams and accelerates your journey to AIOps is to act swiftly to resolve issues with intelligent automation

In this blog, we will focus on Storage Automation, through which repetitive and time-consuming storage tasks can be transformed into best practice policies that can be initiated on command or triggered by an event; both requiring minimal human intervention.

Challenges and customer needs

Seasoned IT Management and Operations mainframe veterans are retiring and leaving the workforce. Because of this, many large organizations are wondering how this will affect their business. These open positions are being filled by less experienced employees.

Storage Administrators are continuously faced with the risk of costly outages and unexpected events that could disrupt their storage environments and cause expensive downtime. With the complexity of hybrid multi-cloud architectures and the wealth of operational data that comes along with it, integrating cloud storage into their z/OS environments is a challenge for Storage Administrators. Alleviating storage concerns and costs that come along with years of stored cold data is a top priority for them.

Customers need powerful tools to detect these anomalies and improve productivity and data availability by intercepting errors and task failures before they occur. This in turn, leads to higher availability and less manual human intervention to keep storage environments running smoothly.

Customers also need less expensive options for storing cold mainframe data. Due to the requirements to keep cold data stored for long periods of time, customers need a faster, cost-effective solution to backup and keep air gap secure copies of their cold data to drive resilience in the event their storage hardware is disrupted. 

How IBM can help IBM provides best-in-class solutions to the challenges customers face as described above. For customers concerned about keeping up with disruptions and preventing outages, IBM has a host of industry-leading automation capabilities that vastly reduce human intervention. IBM offers a web UI within IBM OMEGAMON for Storage called the RDM Viewer which allows customers to not only monitor but also to drill down and “take action” by scheduling automated fixes to data sets and allowing for robust sorting and filtering limiting the number of errors that can occur.

IBM Advanced Allocation Management ensures storage systems and users higher productivity by boosting data availability by proactively intercepting z-37 type abend errors before they occur. By using Advanced Allocation Management, Storage Administrators are aided in detecting & fixing out-of-space conditions and in turn provide continuous system availability for users.

IBM Advanced Catalog Management ensures that Storage Administrators have complete coverage while monitoring and managing ICF catalog resources that detect incidences through smart alerting and notifications to decrease manual tasks leading to improved productivity and faster recovery.

IBM Advanced Reporting & Management for DFSMShsm helps keep your HSM environment free of errors and inefficiencies that cause outages, data losses, and wasted money by proactively zooming in on HSM problems to determine inconsistencies and the status of your HSM environment. Customers can know the status of scheduled tasks for HSM data backup and migration including missed volumes and errors that might put your data at risk.

With these capabilities listed above, IBM provides a unique set of storage automation capabilities that help detect and automatically fix storage-related incidences.

“Predictive analytics improve storage efficiencies and the ability to identify anomalies and address those issues without human intervention saves on OPEX and makes a great case to continue investing in storage software as workloads continue to converge” IDC

Client Outcome 
 
IBM’s Storage software solutions give customers the tools to proactively respond with problem identification and storage automation abilities, leading to less downtime and the need for human intervention.

·       Improved productivity & data availability

·       Automated space allocation

·       Smart alerts & notifications

·       Faster incident identification & resolution

·       Reduction in manual human intervention

·       Integration with IBM’s Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP)

What are my next steps?

Depending on where you are on your journey to adopting more of these AIOps best practices we are sharing the following resources to obtain a deeper understanding:

·       To assess your current stage of AIOps maturity and identify action-oriented next steps for adopting more AIOps best practices, inquire about the 15-minute online AIOps Assessment for IBM Z.

·       Join the AIOps on IBM Z Community to follow this blog series about best practices for taking a hybrid approach to AIOps

·       And finally, to research our IBM Z products that are implementing AIOps technologies to improve operational resiliency visit our product portfolio page.