For the last 10 years, HPE Nimble Storage has been redefining the storage landscape with game-changing innovations across intelligence, predictive support, and hybrid cloud. By rethinking and modernizing storage, we’ve empowered our customers to accelerate applications, drive agility, and speed innovation.
By rethinking and modernizing storage, we’ve empowered our customers to accelerate applications, drive agility, and speed innovation. We’ve done this via four disruptive innovations that not only illustrate how HPE Nimble Storage has continually done things differently over the last decade, they’ve been key enablers of Nimble Storage’s impressive growth story.
Disruptive Innovation #1: Ensuring always on, always fast apps with AI-driven intelligence
Legacy storage today takes too much of your time — time spent managing, upgrading, and fighting fires. You want your infrastructure to be self-managing, self-healing, and self-optimizing — but this is much easier said than done. According to IDC, more than 90% of problems affecting applications occur outside of storage, which means storage resiliency and performance alone aren’t enough to protect your business. With countless variables and potential issues across the infrastructure stack, ensuring applications stay up and fast requires an intelligence with visibility and insight beyond what humans can see.
HPE Nimble Storage was built from day one with artificial intelligence in mind. We pioneered the use of predictive analytics and global intelligence with HPE InfoSight. Since 2010, HPE InfoSight has analysed more than 1,250 trillion data points from over 150,000 systems across the infrastructure stack — saving customers more than 1.5 million hours of lost productivity. Leveraging advanced machine learning to predict and prevent 86% of problems before customers even realize they have an issue, HPE InfoSight’s intelligence goes beyond storage to provide deep insights into virtual infrastructure that improve application performance and optimize resources.
Since first transforming IT operations from break-fix to predict-and-prevent a decade ago, HPE InfoSight has continued to lead the way as the industry’s most mature and advanced AI for infrastructure. Storage competitors have seen the impact of HPE InfoSight and attempted to emulate it. They may imitate the messaging, but they don’t come close to matching HPE InfoSight’s breadth of telemetry, full stack visibility, applied machine learning, and prescriptive actionable recommendations. HPE InfoSight is truly one of a kind.
Disruptive Innovation #2: Premiere support redefined
Delivering great support is key to building brand loyalty and customer retention. Since its inception, Nimble Storage has maintained a laser focus on providing the industry’s most enviable support experience.
Predictive support automation with HPE InfoSight has eliminated Level 1 and Level 2 support, providing customers with direct access to expert Level 3 technical support engineers (TSE) with deep expertise in storage, servers, OSS, hypervisors, and applications. The TSE has all the tools at his or her disposal to fix issues quickly — typically in under 45 minutes — with rapid root cause analysis that eliminates days (and sometimes months) of troubleshooting, not just on your storage array but across your entire infrastructure stack.
Removing the complexity of traditional support models results in 73% fewer support tickets, 85% less time spent resolving storage-related trouble tickets, and 69% faster time to resolution for events that necessitate Level 3 support. This is premiere support redefined. It’s a world class support experience that you uniquely get — as standard — as an HPE Nimble Storage customer.
Disruptive Innovation #3: Making storage effortless
Complexity is the silent killer of IT productivity. From the beginning, the first Nimble Storage array shipped with a clear mission — to make storage effortless. Our guiding principle was to make storage so invisible that our customers would rarely even think about it. Throughout the past decade, Nimble’s ultra-efficient CASL architecture has made it radically simple for any IT generalist to deploy, provision, operate, and upgrade.
Customers can self-install the system in minutes. There are no knobs or configurations to adjust, and always-on data services and app‑aware intelligence eliminate performance and efficiency trade-offs. Pre-built automation with virtualization and container stacks enables containers to be spun up and down in seconds. And with HPE Nimble Storage scale-to-fit, you can grow the capacity and performance of a running system independently and non-disruptively.
This effortless user experience across all aspects of the storage lifecycle means that customers spend substantially less time and allocate fewer resources managing HPE Nimble Storage, resulting in 79% lower IT operational expenses.
Disruptive Innovation #4: Unlocking true hybrid cloud
Every IT leader today looks at the hybrid cloud as a potential enabler of innovation, with fluid resources that move easily across every cloud, a unified experience for both enterprise and cloud-native applications, and multi-cloud flexibility to maximize IT agility and unlock new business insights. But they also come to realize the often overwhelming challenge of fragmented clouds, which increase IT complexity and starve business potential.
HPE Nimble Storage solves this problem with HPE Cloud Volumes, a suite of enterprise cloud data services that instantly enables a true hybrid cloud. HPE Cloud Volumes provides block storage as a service with seamless data mobility between cloud and on-premises storage. Customers have full access to true enterprise-class storage management capabilities with the agility, ease of use, subscription pricing, and offloaded infrastructure management of a true cloud-based service.
Usage spans a variety of use cases, including backup, disaster recovery, test/dev, running enterprise applications in the cloud, and using public cloud–based services (e.g., compute) for analytics and other purposes.
In contrast to competitive cloud storage offerings, there are no egress fees when restoring data on premises and the service is much simpler and less expensive to use than those vendors running a storage operating system in the public cloud.
Innovation that delivers business value
HPE Nimble Storage’s 10-year track record of disruptive innovation has delivered significant business value for our customers. This was recently validated by research and analysis independently conducted by IDC to document how customers are realizing significant value by utilizing HPE Nimble Storage to improve their IT agility, application performance, and availability.
After transitioning to HPE Nimble Storage, IDC calculates that interviewed customers achieve average annual benefits of $3.06 million per organization — which translates to a seven-month payback and a return on investment (ROI) of 487% — by leveraging IT/storage staff efficiencies, improved performance/reliability, better business results, and lower costs.
The road ahead
Since its inception a decade ago, HPE Nimble Storage has set the bar for disrupting, simplifying, and modernizing storage to help customers accelerate their transformation. Ten years on and the innovation continues apace. Just in the past year we have defined a new HCI market category with the introduction of HPE Nimble Storage disaggregated HCI (dHCI) and transformed data protection with the announcement of HPE Cloud Volumes Backup.
So, as I look back with pride on HPE Nimble Storage’s history of redrawing the storage landscape and defying the status quo, I am even more energized about the road ahead.
The story of HPE Nimble Storage has only just begun.
Check out these resources for more details:
Watch the HPE Nimble Storage Chalk Talk
Read the “Business Value of HPE Nimble Storage” IDC White Paper
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