HPE InfoSight Is The Right Tool For The 'Intelligent Era:' Milan Shetti

HPE is building out its InfoSight cloud-based artificial intelligence management tool with new capabilities that will help partners better understand customers’ environments and initiate more intelligent sales conversations.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is building out its InfoSight cloud-based artificial intelligence management tool with new capabilities that will help partners better manage their customers’ on-premises and cloud-based IT infrastructures.

The new capabilities, including a workload planner, an intelligent multi-tenant recommendation engine, and further integration with HPE’s GreenLake consumption-based IT model, will help partners provide a wide range of new services to clients, said Milan Shetti, senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s Storage Business Unit.

An expanded InfoSight will help partners better understand customers’ existing environments as a way to initiate more intelligent sales conversations, provide break-fix services for their entire environment, sell platform refreshes and upgrades, focus infrastructure for specific workload requirements, and add advisory services, Shetti told CRN.

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“Those five things will help [partners] accelerate InfoSight adoption as the data management browser,” he said.

Partners’ growing adoption of InfoSight comes as the IT industry is entering what Shetti called the dawn of the “intelligent era,” which he said is characterized by AI-driven infrastructure management as well as using AI to get insight from data and build intelligent enterprises.

“What does the intelligent enterprise look like?” he said. “It’s always on and fast, with the flash capabilities. It’s agile and cloud-driven. And it has machine learning and AI infrastructure management at scale as well as for getting insight from the data.”

Infrastructure complexity means it is no longer possible to look manually at log files or talk with multiple vendors to troubleshoot issues, determine how best to place workloads or manage data, Shetti said.

“Imagine the scenario where [a partner sales rep] just walks in and goes, ‘Hey, just so you know, your workload on this machine is changing, and we can tell you how it’s changing. You’re going to need to move these VMs to a new [HPE] Gen10 server and add some more storage ports to it. And here’s why,’” he said. “It’s a very installed-base-aware, rich conversation the seller can have, rather than prying information from the client.”

The new workload planner also lets partners and their customers do “what-if” scenarios, Shetti said. “What if I do this? What if I do that? The partner can say, ‘Yeah, here is what your environment will look like,’” he said.

HPE is now adding more services to both the workload planner and the new recommendation engine, Shetti said. “More applications now show up in the workload planner, and more recommendations show up in the workload planner in production,” he said.

For HPE GreenLake customers, the workload planner will work with HPE’s Cloud Cruiser cloud consumption analytics technology to do cloud costs and analysis, according to Shetti.

“Cloud Cruiser and InfoSight actually complete each other because Cloud Cruiser has the metering as well as cost estimates of workloads, whereas InfoSight has the topology as well as the workload-down visibility in a machine-learning way of what’s happening in the infrastructure. ... Our strategy is integrating these components together as a service,” he said.

InfoSight is an increasingly valuable tool as HPE expands its use cases across storage and server infrastructure, said Chris Case, president of Sequel Data Systems, an Austin, Texas-based solution provider and longtime HPE partner.

InfoSight’s new workload planner will be an invaluable part of expanding and managing customer environments, Case told CRN.

“Customers are looking at whether to move more workloads to the cloud or keep them on-premises,” he said. “With InfoSight’s workload planner, we can look at a workload and say, ‘You should definitely keep it on-premises,’ or ‘You should move it to the cloud.’ Customers every day talk about going to the cloud. The more information they have, the better.”

Looking forward, Shetti said one of the top requests that come from InfoSight customers and partners is for the technology to be available in heterogeneous environments in order to bring intelligent management to legacy non-HPE infrastructure.

“I would love to do it,” he said. “Watch this space. We don’t have anything there yet today. But this is an area we are seriously considering because this is the power of InfoSight. ... I call InfoSight a data browser. If we can enable InfoSight to be the data management browser for customers, we will have changed how infrastructure is managed forever.”