Kategorie: technology

How AIOps can drive performance

Imagine your IT applications, services and infrastructures running like a high-performing Formula 1 race car — with its engine and gears running smoothly as the driver accelerates through the straights and decelerates while its tires and suspension hug the track through the curves.
However, even when the race is running smoothly, obstacles arise, track conditions change, engine parts overheat, or tires and suspension parts give out.
So professional world class racing teams — much like teams managing and operating highly complex IT systems, applications and services — are constantly managing unexpected situations and issues that can become very expensive if not handled quickly and intelligently.
Even if your team has the most advanced engineering, conducts the most professional and experienced planning, and drives the most attentive operations management in production, you’re unlikely to avoid the unexpected.
Successful IT operations management teams, just like winning racing teams, know that the challenge is not “if” service-impacting incidents occur, but “when”.
Once you expect the unexpected, imagine what your team must do to react with agility. You can work towards operating more proactively to ultimately minimize or prevent them. How would you better anticipate, prepare for and improve responsiveness? How would you automate problem triage, investigation and resolution activity when incidents occur?
How AIOps helps teams operate more intelligently, proactively and flexibly
Whether you’re running a world-class racing team, or a world-class IT operations team, imperatives for success include the following:
1. Navigate through the noise.
Imagine if your company had a way to navigate and cut through alarm noise in an automated way, regardless of the type of workload, environment or tool generating the alarm. Instead of getting inundated with notifications for every monitoring threshold crossed, teams are notified only when specific service level parameters are met. Any and all related events are grouped together in context into an incident that is easy to consume, understand, share and take action on.
2. Investigate and take corrective action faster.
The key to making good decisions and taking action is confidence. Your team’s confidence gets a turbo boost when they are immediately and continuously empowered with critical and relevant data and contextual information to quickly assess what’s happening, what is being impacted, and receive guidance with automated steps to resolve the problem. Operating more intelligently will help get your business back on the track and running smoothly with fewer pitstops.
3. Get ahead of the curve.
It’s imperative to react to problems when they flare up, but to reduce ongoing operational expenses (OPEX) and gain efficiency, teams must operate more proactively. Imagine if you could prepare your teams ahead of time with automated steps to quickly restore service when problems occur and empower team members of any skill set to take action with confidence. This was the case for Nextel, a leading service provider in Brazil.
4. Use the past to fix the present and predict the future.
Imagine if your company had an early warning detection system that alerted teams when current conditions were actually indicators of worsening problems that are likely to occur. When a high-performance race car has low tire pressure, low fuel levels, or high engine temperature, it’s not a big leap to predict that a spin out or burn out is likely to occur if these issues are left unattended.
In highly complex, dynamically changing IT production environments it’s not so easy. But if you can see a trend line of incident activity, identify where similar smaller, less urgent indicators led to more severe problems in the past, and get a prediction of those potential problems before they impact apps and services, it can be simpler to avoid costly outages and slow-downs.
Continuous machine learning improves and fine tunes operations over time. To do so, analysis and curated information is needed that warns you when likely problems are building and what could be done to prevent or at least mitigate it.
Operating proactively is intended to keep you on the track and avoiding unnecessary pitstops altogether.
5. Deploy and operate to current needs, and easily adapt to changes later.
Even the best racing strategies and plans can change. Some obvious factors such as weather conditions, driver resilience and pole position can disrupt even the best plans.
Operations teams are challenged with stakeholder demands to run on new platforms, shift workloads to different environments or make continuous updates requiring significant adjustments to support functions and procedures. Management tools help control these disruptions, providing they are flexible enough to allow you to deploy in the manner and on the platform(s) you need them to, and easily change as you adopt more modern platforms — all without causing extra transition pain or disruption.
Operating with flexibility is like ensuring all the necessary spares for your high-performance vehicle are readily available and ready to fit without customization.
How to ensure the right AIOps tools under the hood
Like any world-class racing team, IT operations management teams rely on market-proven, time-tested and high-performance tools to keep their businesses running at the highest level.
The latest version of the industry leading IBM Netcool Operations Insight (v1.6) rises to that challenge, with new significant AIOps capabilities under the hood that help enable teams to respond intelligently and quickly when service-impacting problems inevitably happen. The solution can also help you observe what teams do to investigate, diagnose and resolve problems, plus observe performance and incident trends, to then learn what’s working and what can be improved proactively.
Learn how Netcool Operations Insight can support your high performance ITOps and DevOps teams with the latest in AIOps tools and capabilities to be more intelligent, proactive and flexible. Then check out the five concrete steps you can take in moving from ITOps to AIOps, and get ready to embrace the operations challenges of your next race.
The post How AIOps can drive performance appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Cloud innovation in pig weighing helps farmers improve safety and profitability

For many people, the mention of a “hearty breakfast” or “flavorful meal” conjures up the quiet sizzle, smoky flavor and savory aroma of bacon. Pork enthusiasts can count on their beloved bacon to deliver a consistent quality and experience — and that’s no accident. Pig farmers and processors know all too well that a pig’s weight and fat percentage are critical for pig production. If the animal weighs too much, it requires additional costly processing, and if the animal is too small, it fetches a lower market price. So, farmers are paid less if a pig’s weight is out of the acceptable range, which varies by country. Hitting this just right is one of the biggest challenges of pig production and dictates a farmer’s profitability.
In the four months or so that a farmer prepares a pig for production, he or she is typically only able to weigh a pig a few times. This gives little opportunity to adjust the animal’s diet and hit the target weight range by the pre-set production date. To estimate a pig’s weight, the farmer has three options: take the pig out of its pen and force it onto a scale, climb into the pig’s pen and measure the pig from head to tail and around the girth, or conduct a visual inspection. These manual processes are likely to yield inaccurate results, can be highly stressful for the pigs, and can be extremely difficult, time-consuming and dangerous for farmers. Imagine trying to corral or get in the pen with an approximately 110 kilogram (240 pound) scared animal. Truthfully, pig weighing is a bit of a guessing game, but these manual processes are how farmers around the world have done it for decades. Until now.
Transforming from manual to digital animal production
At Smart Agritech Solution of Sweden, we develop digital solutions for innovative animal production. Our startup is the brainchild of Per Eke-Göransson, an inventor and former pig farmer. He says, “Manual weighing is a painful task for both humans and animals. After having weighed pigs for years, manually in the summer heat, I started to think that there must be an easier way. The solution hit me after long and hard thinking, and I realized exactly how to do it.”
In the 1980s, Per had the idea to use photographs to create optical measurements to calculate a pig’s weight. However, his idea was ahead of its time: cameras were too expensive and technology was too immature. Per got a patent and invested in a 15-year-old algorithm that the Swedish Agricultural Institute of Farming had developed. Finally, photography and machine-learning technology have caught up, and Per partnered with a butcher and a technician to turn his idea into reality.
We contacted the IBM Garage because we had this genius concept, but we needed a system, cloud services, developers, quality assurance and so on. Plus, as a small startup, we wanted to boost the credibility of our solution with backing from a huge IT company. We knew no one would question IBM.
Addressing farmer challenges through cloud innovation
At the IBM Garage in Copenhagen, we participated in an IBM Design Thinking Workshop and a cloud innovation architecture workshop for Pig Scale, our digital pig-weighing solution. We greatly appreciated how well organized the process was and how much we involved the user’s perspective.
For our first minimum viable product (MVP), we decided to create assets that would have the biggest impact at EuroTier, the world’s largest farming conference, in Hannover, Germany. The deliverables included a clickable prototype to demonstrate how the front-end solution works, a conference booth design explaining the solution and its value for the farmer, and a video illustrating a pigsty and how we use machine learning and visual recognition to capture and analyze a pig’s weight.
With the IBM Garage, we built our MVP on IBM Cloud with IBM Watson Machine Learning. Every day, with no stress to the pigs or danger to the farmer, the solution will capture accurate 2-D photographs of pigs in their pens; determine their weight, growth rate and readiness for production; and alert the farmer about any growth anomalies. This allows the farmer to quickly adjust a pig’s diet to get the pig’s weight into the most profitable range.
The Pig Scale concept was extremely well received at EuroTier. In fact, more than 125 farmers, competitors and system integrators from around the world requested to buy our product or even purchase our company. We had never seen anything like it.
With such positive feedback on the first MVP, we quickly secured funding to build the second MVP — Pig Scale’s back-end system. We are currently working with the IBM Garage and the IBM Watson iLab team on the second iteration. Stay tuned because Pig Scale is going to be something to squeal about.
To schedule a complimentary four-hour IBM Garage consultation, click here.
The post Cloud innovation in pig weighing helps farmers improve safety and profitability appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Cloud chapter two: How a hybrid cloud strategy can transform business

In the first chapter of cloud, we saw that enterprises were primarily focused on cost management and driving new workload innovation on the cloud. This included everything from building cloud-native applications to migrating less complex and more easily portable workloads to the public cloud. While adoption has grown rapidly, to date only about 20 percent of enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud according to a study by McKinsey & Company.
We’re now beginning chapter two, which is focused on driving the remaining 80 percent of enterprise workloads to the cloud. This will help businesses unlock new insights and value from their data using next-generation tools like artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, blockchain and more. These workloads are often mission critical and run the heart of the enterprise. It will not be easy pickings and a one size fits all model will not work.
Driving new business value with hybrid cloud solutions
While the possibilities are endless, the cloud journey can be daunting for enterprises who have unique regulatory and data requirements and are currently running anywhere from five to 15 different clouds from multiple providers.
This is why businesses need to consider a hybrid cloud approach, which helps them build, deploy and manage applications and data running on-premises, in private clouds and in public clouds from multiple vendors. With a combination of innovative technology and industry expertise completely underpinned with security, as well as a focus on open solutions and enterprise grade, IBM is already helping move some of the world’s largest enterprises into the next chapter of cloud.
For example, Harley-Davidson Motor Company, an American iconic motorcycle manufacturer, is using IBM Cloud, AI and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to reimagine the everyday experience of riding. Their LiveWire H-D Connect service, built on the IBM Cloud, provides cellular connectivity and links a LiveWire owner with their motorcycle through their smartphone using the latest version of the Harley-Davidson App. This platform is the foundation on which Harley-Davidson will provide its riders with new services and insights available for its first-ever production electric vehicle.
Delivering enhanced global reach, scale and services
The need is clear across nearly every industry and geography from clients like Harley-Davidson to other major brands like ExxonMobil, Vodafone Business, and Whirlpool. They want to infuse existing IT and private cloud environments with new public cloud capabilities like AI and analytics in a secured, globally consistent manner. Moreover, they need to be able to easily choose where to deploy their workloads across multiple environments (on-premises, private and public cloud), which requires a commitment to open source and increased automation and management.  This hybrid cloud approach is helping our clients launch new business services, completely transform user and employee experiences and much more.
That’s why IBM continues to unveil new capabilities and services across our entire hybrid cloud portfolio, as well as expand the global reach, scale and services of the IBM public cloud. Here are just few public cloud features that IBM has introduced in this year:

Our sixth IBM Cloud region, which is in Sydney, Australia, and features three availability zones for high availability and resiliency.
IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) providing the logical isolation and security of a private cloud with the availability, cost-effectiveness, and scalability of the public cloud, simplifying the deployment of secure, available, and resilient workloads.
IBM Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud for AIX and IBM i workloads with use cases such as disaster recovery, dev/test environments, and partial IT infrastructure moves and more.
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions integration of VMs and containers along with IBM Cloud security services and additional infrastructure options.
New IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services to provide encryption key management with a dedicated cloud hardware security module (HSM) built on the only FIPS 140-2 level 4-based technology certification offered by a public cloud provider.
Managed Istio and Managed Knative on the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service so that developers can quickly build and deploy enterprise-scale container-based and serverless applications across hybrid environments.

And with the close of the Red Hat acquisition, we are bringing together Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies with the unmatched scale and depth of IBM innovation and industry expertise, and sales leadership in more than 175 countries. Together, IBM and Red Hat will accelerate innovation by offering a next-generation hybrid multicloud platform. Based on open source technologies, such as Linux and Kubernetes, the platform will allow businesses to securely deploy, run and manage data and applications on-premises and on private and multiple public clouds.  This consistency regardless of deployment (private, public or a third-party cloud) will be a game changer for the IBM cloud strategy.
This continued dedication to innovation and client-first transformation has helped IBM build a $19.5 billion cloud business with clients relying on IBM Cloud to help them turn the page on the next chapter of their cloud journeys.  It’s going to be an amazing journey…..hop on, strap in and let’s go!
Learn more about the next chapter and what analysts are saying about the hybrid cloud.
The post Cloud chapter two: How a hybrid cloud strategy can transform business appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud