Artificial intelligence (AI) can really lighten the load for IT administrators. By automating repetitive tasks, AI helps IT teams handle more infrastructure efficiently and minimizes the chances of human error. AI can react to infrastructure faults faster than a human can. It effectively manages capacity and performance, alerts admins about data protection concerns, and even helps control costs in cloud settings. Now, AIOps tools are becoming essential in storage management. Most storage vendors are adopting AI-based tools to leverage the large amounts of management data their systems produce, leading to quicker improvements in storage management.
Let’s look at what some key storage suppliers are offering with their AIOps tools.
Dell has rolled out APEX AIOps, a SaaS solution that provides observability and management across various IT systems. APEX offers insights into infrastructure health, detects capacity and performance anomalies, forecasts performance, and identifies security risks. It integrates well with Dell’s on-premise, edge, and multicloud setups, along with all Dell storage systems.
Hitachi Vantara includes AI-driven tools in its Hitachi Ops Center. This platform provides system configuration tools, performance analytics, and data protection features. It focuses on datacentre management and utilizes AI and machine learning to forecast performance and predict faults, while also managing virtual machines and optimizing data from different storage systems.
HPE offers InfoSight AI for its storage products like Alletra and Nimble. It automates hardware management, including downtime predictions and capacity forecasting, and is free for users with a support contract. InfoSight integrates seamlessly with HPE’s OneView management tool.
Huawei’s Data Management Engine (DME) acts as an operations platform that focuses on performance prediction and fault identification. It checks for balance in data loads and can perform root cause analyses on failures. Huawei also supports cloud and virtualized environments through its AIOps capabilities.
IBM provides Storage Insights for managing block storage and supports technologies from various vendors, including Dell EMC and Hitachi. IBM Turbonomic brings multiple data points together for cloud cost optimization, working alongside Instana for automated resource management and incident handling.
Pure Storage has launched Pure1 AIOps, a SaaS platform focused on storage management. It features storage optimization tools, workload placement, and lifecycle management. Plans are in place for an AI copilot that will include threat detection and performance management capabilities.
NetApp’s Keystone Storage as a Service offers AIOps solutions, allowing users to create cloud-like experiences with on-premise hardware. The system employs the BlueXP digital adviser, built on the Active IQ platform, to predict usage, capacity, and detect security anomalies. Active IQ also optimizes storage health and costs and supports various NetApp products.
On the other side, there are third-party and open-source AIOps solutions. Many of these tools aim to support multi-vendor environments. For instance, Digitate’s ignio offers automation and observability as a SaaS tool. The open-source community has developed tools like AIOpsTools, Grafana, and Prometheus, but these tend to be more component-based rather than full solutions. Additionally, cloud providers are beginning to add AIOps capabilities. For example, AWS’s Amazon Lookout for Metrics offers performance monitoring and detects anomalies for various cloud apps, even if it isn’t specifically focused on storage.