HPE Storage GM Shetti: InfoSight Road Map Includes SimpliVity, Synergy, ProLiant And GreenLake

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is stepping up its autonomous data center march with a plan to bring its InfoSight predictive analytics software to SimpliVity, ProLiant, Synergy and even GreenLake.

First on the road map is SimpliVity, which is set to be outfitted with InfoSight by the end of this year with Synergy and ProLiant getting the InfoSight facelift by the end of the first quarter next year, said HPE Storage Division General Manager Milan Shetti.

"A year from now, all of HPE's products are going to be InfoSight-capable," he said, referencing the technology gained from last year's Nimble acquisition.

HPE also is on the march to integrate InfoSight with the HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity consumption-based services platform, said Shetti. "Pay-per-use and predictive analytics are going to be in a very tight closed loop so partners will know when somebody is going to need more [storage] capacity," he said.

The power of the predictive analytics platform is providing partners with a "high-velocity" sales motion with powerful data analytics centered on where workloads are best suited to run in a hybrid IT multi-cloud world, said Shetti.

The GreenLake-InfoSight combination, in fact, will bring unprecedented insight into storage economics for on-premises private cloud and off-premises with public cloud, said Shetti.

"Questions about how much customers are paying for storage and how they can plan better will be addressed," he said.

InfoSight's 10-year history of providing predictive storage analytics has given HPE a machine-learning- and artificial-intelligence based platform that puts the company at least a decade ahead of competitors in the autonomous data center race, said Shetti.

"HPE has a unique and sustainable advantage with InfoSight," he said. "Nimble InfoSight has been learning infrastructure for the last 10 years. That is 10 years' worth of data based on the InfoSight machine-learning algorithm. None of our competitors can shorten that."

Shetti compared the advantage that HPE has with InfoSight to Google's machine-learning advantage with its search engine.

"It's a well-known fact that Google has so got much data with machine learning with the search engine, nobody else comes close to the market share Google has," he said. "That lead exists for a long time because machine learning learns over time."

Putting InfoSight across the full HPE product portfolio is going to propel it forward with data analytics from the world's No.1 infrastructure company, said Shetti. "InfoSight is now going to have all this infrastructure information that it is learning from so its predictions will get better and better and better," he said.

HPE also is bringing InfoSight to the intelligent edge, outfitting its Edgeline converged edge systems with the software.

"As we add InfoSight to the full HPE portfolio including Edgeline, the insight we get will tell us what data should be at the edge, what data should be in the core and what data should be in the cloud," he said. "That is an intelligence that only we will have from InfoSight because we are connecting it from edge to core to cloud."

That will open the door for partners to provide analytics, data and consulting around the Internet of Things, said Shetti.

"What partners are going to be able to do now is extend their services from the edge to the core to the cloud, intelligently placing data where the data should reside," he said. "That is a trend starter. In the next 20 to 30 years, this is how business is going to get done."

Al Chien, president of Dasher Technologies, Campbell, Calif., said putting InfoSight across the entire HPE portfolio creates a new customer experience.

"The integration of Nimble's InfoSight into the rest of the enterprise portfolio is a game-changer," said Chien. "It's going to be on everything. This is going to help customers manage their infrastructure seamlessly."

Chien credited HPE CEO Antonio Neri with a next-generation software-defined infrastructure vision that is second to none.

"HPE has acquired assets and innovated around those core competencies in a way that gives the company a deeper and wider story," he said. "It is not piece parts. We are now talking about how customers want to consume IT versus what they want to buy."