Bringing intelligence to storage, an AI story

[Graham-M]

InfoSight was, first and foremost, a way to deliver a service when it started out.  It allowed the Nimble Storage engineering team to quickly find and fix problems by collecting and analyzing telemetry data.  As time progressed, the volume of data points simply grew bigger and bigger and the AI engine inside InfoSight became smarter and more able to find and resolve problems automatically, even before they occurred.

This pool of data is unique to HPE, many others in the Storage space claim to have true AI for their products, but in order to have that you need masses of data to work with……and we have billions upon billions of data points to call upon, collected over nearly 10 years.  With the addition of 3PAR in early 2018, and now HPE ProLiant DL servers, this data lake continues to grow with incredible speed and it’s only increasing our capabilities to serve, and to amaze, our customers further.

Why is this important?
Well, HPE InfoSight is rapidly becoming a cornerstone in our service capabilities and works to radically improve our customer’s experience.  Show someone a snazzy looking piece of software and they “might” be impressed, there are plenty of cloud based analytics tools that can show nice pictures, graphs, charts and provide you with a reasonable level of information if you input the right data.  However, explain to people how the platform has shown true value to customers, then that’ll really change the conversation.

One such example is as follows:
A manufacturing company in the US had so many problems with decreasing storage, they were actually lining up additional budget to invest in a new array simply because they couldn’t afford to shut down the one they had,

When they heard about what InfoSight was capable of, they asked us to hook it up to their 3PAR array and have it take a look.  The InfoSight platform discovered a single “bully” VM that was taking up a ton of resource due to a problem with some installed software.  Once that VM had been shut down, fixed and restarted, the space released was such that significant investment in a new array wasn’t necessary.

That outcome was significant for that particular customer and the capabilities of HPE InfoSight don't stop there.  Features such as Cross Stack Analytics have also proved invaluable for service providers such as Basefarm in Norway, who proactively use this to detect problems with their customers VMware environments.  This radically improves their reaction times and allows them to return servers to operation up to 80% faster than previously experienced.

Another customer told us that, during a Nimble Proof of Concept, InfoSight actively diagnosed and solved a different problem caused by extremely high latency which was outside of the storage stack.

As you can see, not only does HPE InfoSight keep an eye on the array it’s connected to, but it can drill down to find specific issues and even detect problems elsewhere in the IT stack.  This level of service only comes with years of data and AI-driven intelligence and with what we have planned next…..well, you’ll have to wait and see.

Talk to your HPE representative today about how your organization might benefit from HPE InfoSight, but not just from the software, but the whole experience.

Interesting in finding out about HPE's innovation in Storage?  Why not come along to our Intelligent Storage Innovation Tour?  We have events running in the UK and Ireland over the next couple of weeks, please click to find an event near you to register.

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Graham Muncer
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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