Building a Data Foundation to Accelerate Automation with Ansible

As we transition into the next era of information technology, organizations face increasing pressure to deliver value to customers more rapidly. As well as higher quality, flexible access to data and applications and uncompromised security. Concurrently, they must manage growing complexity, including increasingly distributed hybrid cloud architectures and data sprawl – and accompanying costs – in order to remain competitive.

To address these and a range of other associated pressures, many enterprises are turning to Red Hat’s Ansible automation platform. Benefits are numerous, including enhancing efficiency, realizing greater value in IT and network infrastructure management, fostering workforce collaboration, breaking down silos and significantly improving operational speed and scalability. And all while reducing downtime and costs.

Sounds like what major decision makers might call a “no brainer.”

But to fully leverage these Ansible driven benefits, enterprises must invest in infrastructure specifically designed to integrate with the Ansible platform. Which is where we come into the picture.

Working closely with so many organizations across a broad range of industries has provided Hitachi Vantara insight that has helped us design our infrastructure platform with the business success of our customers in mind. And that includes making sure their data infrastructure is ready to support whatever it is they want to do next.

Enhancing Data Value with Ansible Across a Range of Industries

Hitachi Vantara’s experience spans many industries, enabling us to design Ansible solutions to suit highly specific use cases. Examples include:

• A financial services organization which needed to adhere to stringent regulatory requirements and ensure robust security measures to protect their sensitive data. Manually managing compliance and security across large, complex IT infrastructures can be time consuming and error prone. But by designing a data infrastructure well suited to take advantage of Ansible's automation platform, we helped ensure secure transactions between Ansible and the host environments with seamless integration and interoperability.
  
  
• Streamlining inventory management for retailers who often struggle with this task across multiple locations, to ensure stock levels are accurate and respond quickly to opportunities and challenges in demand. As anyone in retail can attest, manual processes can lead to business disruptions such as errors, stock outs and overstock situations. With Ansible, retailers can automate the process of updating inventory levels and supply chain processes across all locations.  Provided, that is, their data and storage infrastructure is designed to support such operational complexities.
  
  Hitachi Vantara can help them meet these challenges by developing reasonable code modules to provision and manage storage, compute, networking and cloud resources across diverse, hybrid cloud environments.
  
  
• Automating the drug discovery and development processes in the biotech/life sciences industry; a crucial step in driving business innovation. Our deep experience gives us insight into this unique multi-stage process, including data collection, analysis and regulatory compliance. Here again, managing these processes manually can be time consuming and prone to error. Ansible can automate the integration of data from various sources ensuring researchers have access to the accurate, up-to-date information they need.
  
  To ensure that automating the extraction, transport and loading processes of large data sets meets these business needs, an infrastructure platform must support high performance computing clusters used for computational drug discovery and automating the deployment and scale of resources as they are needed. Through unified configuration management, our solution standardizes management tools and APIs by defining infrastructure configurations using code, thus abstracting away the differences. This eliminates tool fragmentation and leads to a more elegant way of taking full advantage of Ansible automation.

The Benefits of Ansible Support

Benefits of Ansible automation supported by a resilient data foundation include:

• Integration excellence: Hitachi supports Ansible plugins for infrastructure modules with fundamental and advanced use cases as playbooks.
• Improved infrastructure efficiency: Accelerating and optimizing Ansible’s ability to automate routine tasks frees up IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Enhanced security: Supporting secure transactions between Ansible and the host enables regular automated checks and updates reducing the risk of data breaches.
• Better compliance: Task optimization simplifies tasks and minimizes fact gathering, improving Ansible automated compliance checks and ensuring all systems adhere to regulatory standards.
• Reliable data and storage management: 100% availability guarantee from Hitachi working with Ansible automation safeguards backups and recovery processes.

Hitachi integrates natively into Ansible through host inventory, playbooks and core modules.

In the modern information technology era, businesses require excellence from their IT infrastructure vendors. They seek flexibility and seamless, secure integration within their operational environments. And this now includes support for Ansible.

They also need solutions that eliminate guesswork, thereby reducing the critical time needed to deliver value and maintain competitiveness without the burden of assembling proprietary and costly solutions. This requires experienced partners like Hitachi Vantara with proven expertise across a range of industries.

Get Your Ansible Automation Journey Started Today

To learn more about applying our Ansible experience and infrastructure expertise to address your challenges, we encourage you to follow us in any of a number of specialized places.

We’re continuously updating and developing enhancements to provide customers with the choice they need in the era of AI. And we’re committed to driving innovation to address specific needs across a broad set of industries.

For guidance and tips, follow our GitHub repository. Join the ranks of our vibrant community forum where your voice matters. Share your experiences, spark curiosity with questions and forge connections with fellow enthusiasts.

• Go to “hitachivantara/vsponeblockansible” GitHub repository to receive notifications for all conversations and new releases.
  • Star the repository to bookmark it and show your support.
  • Fork the repository if you want to contribute or make your own modifications.
• In Ansible Galaxy, follow our project page, “hitachivantara”.
  • Following us allows you to receive updates and notifications about new releases and changes.
  • Star the project to show your support and make it easy to find later.

Better yet, reach out to Sree Lakshmi Lanka, Dir. of Product Management and our product team here to get the conversation started. No better time than the present to put the power of Ansible automation to work for your organization. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Read more

• Blog: Unleash the Power of Automation with VSP One Block Storage Modules for Red Hat Ansible
• Hitachi Vantara Center of Excellence: "Create HUR PAIRS with Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 and Hitachi VSP One Block Ansible Modules"
• Github Public Repository for Hitachi NAS Modules for Red Hat Ansible
• Hitachi Support: Hitachi Support
• GitHub: Hitachi vspone-block-ansible
• Ansible Galaxy: Hitachivantara.vspone_block