Five Things You Need To Know About HPE’s InfoSight

Hewlett Packard Enterprise continues to make dramatic improvements in the powerful InfoSight artificial intelligence (AI) engine powering its Primera and Nimble storage offerings. Here are five things you need to know about the InfoSight AI based advantage.

HPE InfoSight Is Driving Primera, Nimble Channel Sales

HPE’s InfoSight is proving to be a big competitive differentiator driving sales gains for Primera and Nimble in competitive shoot-outs with HPE storage competitors, HPE partners said.

“With Nimble and Primera we have an amazing storage story for customers,” said Dan Molina, chief technology officer for Nth Generation, San Diego, one of HPE's top enterprise partners and No. 297 on the 2020 CRN SP500. “We are expecting both Nimble and Primera to grow at a double digit clip.”

The latest enhancements to Primera- with the ability to take “dynamic action” based on embedded InfoSight analytics- and Nimble – with the addition of cross-stack InfoSight analytics for Hyper-V- are helping drive sales gains for both platforms, said Molina.

InfoSight’s across the board analytics for storage, compute and networking is providing HPE a huge competitive advantage over competitors, said Erik Krucker, CTO at Comport Consulting, an HPE Platinum partner, No. 314 on the CRN SP500.

“The ability to go across storage, server and networking gives HPE a leg up in the marketplace,” said Krucker. “Owning that entire stack is key for HPE. They have all that rich telemetry and data that they can analyze to make recommendations to customers with predictive information on failures and bottlenecks. HPE has a complete vision for what they are doing with InfoSight with analytical data across the entire IT spectrum.”

AI Acceleration: 90,000 Data Points Every Four Seconds

With InfoSight running across a wide set of the HPE server and storage offerings, HPE is now delivering 90,000 data points every four seconds on its intelligent storage management service, said HPE Vice President and General Manager of HPE Primera and Nimble Storage Omer Asad.

The InfoSight cloud service - which delivers customers proactive actions to avoid storage failures- is now a whopping eight petabytes. That’s a mind boggling “competitive advantage” for HPE given the size of the data-lake that can deliver AI based intelligent data storage management, said Asad.

Over the last decade, HPE says it has analyzed 1,250 trillion data points to predict and prevent disruptions with InfoSight.

The AI based data set is automatically resolving 90 percent of storage incidents before they result in downtime or performance issues, said Asad.

“We are constantly mining that (InfoSight) meta-data through AI and deep learning methodologies to provide our customers a pro-active response- before a problem actually happens,” said Asad. “That data allows us to warn Primera and Nimble customers to avoid 90 percent of incidents before they happen.”

With machine learning, every problem discovered for a particular data set allows other customers in the future to avoid that same issue, said Asad.

Primera Embedded AI InfoSight Intelligence

HPE has updated the mission critical Primera platform with an embedded AI engine that is delivering a new era of autonomous intelligent storage management.

“We have taken that InfoSight model and pushed it down on to the Primera system to enhance that 100 percent availability guarantee that we are giving our customers,” said Asad.

Specifically, HPE said Primera’s embedded AI based InfoSight engine takes “action” on its own to self correct system operations in real time.

“We have taken a sub-set of the (InfoSight) machine learning models and we have embedded them into Primera,” said Asad. That embedded intelligence is doing the critical AI analytics to determine whether a specific workload can be added to the system without an impact to application performance, he said.

“While there may be more capacity, the system might not have enough memory, CPU horsepower or IOPS (input/output operations per second) to be able to support that workload,” said Asad.

InfoSight Hyper-V Nimble Cross Stack Analytics

HPE has also beefed up InfoSight’s Hyper-V capabilities opening the door to new Nimble InfoSight cross stack analytics for both VMware and Hyper-V environments.

“We have added a lot more back end intelligence,” said Asad. “Now we can do cross stack analytics insider Hyper-V and VMware. All of these predictive engines are bringing cross stack analytics down to our machines.”

The Hyper-V capabilities “radically” simplifies VMware-Hyper-V cross stack analytics flagging “abnormal performance issues between storage and VMs, and underutilized virtual resources,” said HPE.

Erik Krucker, CTO at Comport Consulting, an HPE Platinum partner, No. 333 on the CRN SP500, said the Hyper-V cross stack analytics combined with the VMware cross-stack analytics is a major addition to Nimble.

“Enabling cross stack analytics with Hyper-V is a big deal,” he said Krucker. “It’s important for non-VMware customers. There are a lot of customers running Hyper-V as an alternative to VMware. To be able to give those customers the ability to leverage InfoSight is huge. It’s definitely a differentiator in the marketplace. This gives Hyper-V customers the ability to get that same rich experience out of the InfoSight analytics engine.”

AI-Based Storage Intelligence Opens Door To Application Consolidation

The HPE Primera InfoSight advantage is opening the door for customers to consolidate applications on the 100 percent availability guaranteed platform, HPE Director of Storage Marketing David Wang.

“Customers have historically flown blind when they’re trying to figure out how many workloads can they put on the same platform,” he said. “In light of today’s world that we live in people want to control costs so they want to be able to consolidate apps on the same platform. But they haven’t been able to do that (until now with HPE InfoSight on Primera and Nimble).”

Customers have typically run complex applications on different storage platforms because of the technical issues that often crop up when managing multiple mission critical apps on a single storage platform, said Wang.

More often than not, customers end up creating storage silos leading to more storage complexity because they lack the real time “visibility” provided by HPE InfoSight, said Wang.

“They are flying blind,” he said. “What we are doing is allowing customers to be able to make their infrastructure to go further. They are able to run more applications on the same shared storage environment. They don’t have to worry about interactions between applications with noisy neighbors, performance degradation and uncertainty because the predictive analytics and real-time dynamic changes happen within the system. It ensures them they can consolidate applications and that those applications are always on and always fast.”

Not Done Innovating – Taking AI Based Data Intelligence To The Final Mile

The latest HPE InfoSight updates move the edge to cloud platform as a service powerhouse closer to the vision of autonomous storage data management.

“We’re not done innovating,” said Wang. “We’re moving to autonomous operations. Take the concept of robotics, intelligence drones or self-driving cars. The one common characteristic across all those devices is they are actually acting on intelligence. We’re taking intelligence to the final mile which is about acting on the intelligence (that we are gathering) in real-time.”

Partners can expect HPE to take autonomous operations to the next level in the coming months as it moves aggressively to make autonomous and dynamic intelligent data-management a reality, said Wang.

The Embedded AI engine in Primera is key to driving that real time storage data intelligence, said Wang. “We run machine learning locally in Primera,” he said.

“Because of the architecture of Primera we have now taken that machine learning to the next level,” he said. “We are running these models within the system and actually taking action to intelligently and dynamically optimize and self- heal the platform.”

HPE’s 90,000 data points every four seconds is making InfoSight smarter and smarter with each passing minute – providing HPE an insurmountable competitive AI advantage for storage management, said Wang.

HPE’s AI based InfoSight storage platform for Primera is the equivalent of a self-driving car automatically braking when an object is in front of the car in real-time, said Wang, while competitors are still focused on cars that rely on drivers to get from one point to another.

“We can drive predictive analytics, while our competitors are trying to catch up with us by building out pretty GUIs (graphical user interfaces) and web portals,” said Wang.