How Hyperview Uses Digital Twins to Manage IT Infrastructure

Today’s IT infrastructure is a complex, multi-layered entity that takes many forms.

On the edge in a container. A data room within a building. A cage in a colocation facility. A virtually managed infrastructure by a cloud provider like Microsoft Azure. Or a combination of all of them–and with many organizational actors, suppliers, and responsibilities.

So, how does one grapple with the inherent complexity of IT infrastructures and the services it provides? The first step is to understand it.

At Hyperview, our mission is to make critical infrastructure think. The first step in doing so is to model a digital twin of an IT infrastructure in near real-time. The digital twin is then continuously fed data to ensure all changes to the real-world environment are captured and kept up to date.

This concept of digital twins can be found in many applications, including video games. The programmers and artists mimic the physical world using physics and mathematics rules codified within a gaming engine. Physics rules dictate that an object that goes up, must come down. So, when you throw an object within a game, it will behave the same way as you would expect in the real world. Although not perfect, gaming engines continue to get better at delivering a true-to-life experience to the end user. Another way of looking at is the video game is a digital twin of the real world, albeit for entertainment.

In business, physics or rules-based digital twins are applied to complex systems, such as airplanes, building, cities–and even medical diagnostics. These digital twins have proven to be invaluable for conducting feasibility and ‘what if’ analysis within a set of predefined boundary conditions, prior to real world application.

Diagram: Hyperview collects data from network-connected IT assets during auto-discovery, then recreates each one as a digital twin in the platform.

Another way to create digital twins is by using a data-based process.

Data-based digital twins are created by observing a real-world infrastructure as its natural habitat and attempting to construct a digital representation of it. Data is gathered about each object. Then, it is run through an analysis engine to produce its digital twin. Once set, the digital twin will reflect any changes to its real-world counterpart in near real-time. It can be also used to uncover hidden interactions between the various components of the system. As well, it can provide an historical view of the the system’s behavior under various real situations. Use cases include situational awareness, proactive maintenance operations, root-cause analysis, security, and automation.

With Hyperview, our platform uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to create a digital twin of a user’s data center or hybrid IT infrastructure. The digital twin is automatically kept up to date, providing the end user with an accurate snapshot of the health of their current environment, along with all past changes to it.

As with gaming engines, we continue to improve our platform with every release. Our goal is to deliver the most true-to-life digital version of IT infrastructures–both physical and logical–to enable better decision making around efficiencies, performance, and risk.