HPE Brings Nimble Predictive Analytics To 3PAR Storage

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has started following through on a promise to extend the predictive analytics capabilities of its Nimble Storage acquisition across a wide range of its products with new enhancements to its HPE 3PAR storage arrays.

HPE on Tuesday said it has added new predictive support automation to its HPE InfoSight software, which came with the company's early 2017 acquisition of Nimble Storage, and extended that support to its HPE 3PAR.

HPE also introduced new automation tools aimed at helping DevOps teams more easily develop new applications for on-premises infrastructure featuring 3PAR.

[Related: HPE Updates OneView, OneSphere With Eye On Enhancing HPE Synergy For New Clouds, Workloads]

Customers are looking for the ability to scale their infrastructures up and down in a cloud-like fashion while being more thoughtful about where their data is located from the cloud to the data center to the edge, said Phil Davis, HPE's chief sales officer.

A business' storage system needs to be able to handle workloads which reside anywhere, Davis told CRN. "Having storage intelligent enough to handle all that is very important," he said.

HPE storage already offers predictive analytics with artificial intelligence and machine learning to not only predict outages but to also find storage bottlenecks, Davis said. It is also cloud-ready with the ability to move data depending on customer requirements, he said.

"Customers need to know their infrastructures are future-proof," he said.

HPE is doing so with the expansion of predictive analytics using its HPE InfoSight software from Nimble Storage, Davis said.

"We have predictive data from thousands and thousands of Nimble arrays in the field," he said. "Now we're extending that to 3PAR. Previously, we were focused on predictive analytics in the 3PAR box itself. Now we will be offering more broadly with 3PAR in our first expansion. There will be further expansions."

This is about using predictive support automation to learn as issues are reported, and then take advantage of what was learned, said Vish Mulchand, senior director of product management and marketing for HPE's storage division.

If InfoSight sees an issue, HPE engineers analyze, find, and fix it, Mulchand told CRN. Those fixes then go to the entire installed base where the software looks to see if there are similar issues, and fixes them automatically.

"For example, if InfoSight detects a signature that applies to your system, it fixes it, and tells you it was fixed," he said. "We can tell customers, 'Hey, we see some of the same fingerprints as other issues that should be fixed.' Those fixes can be manually or automatically fixed. This is currently what Nimble was doing effectively. And now we're expanding it to 3PAR."

The second major enhancement to 3PAR is the ability to work with modern DevOps tools to expand 3PARs applicability to new workloads.

While 3PAR has been integrated with Docker and Mesosphere DC/OS, it now also works with Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, giving it a full range of automation and integration with the leading container platforms, Mulchand said.

HPE also introduced a new plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator to improve self-service storage automation through pre-built workflows, and is offering new pre-built blueprints for configuration management tools including Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, along with software development kits for Ruby and Python software development, he said.

Going forward, HPE will continue to expand its performance analytics, including the ability to predict performance with certain workloads and automatically move workloads to storage arrays that are less utilized, Mulchand said.

HPE will also be improving the ability to move data to the cloud to be used by cloud-based applications without giving up control of that data to the public cloud providers, he said.

HPE's enhancement of 3PAR with the changes to InfoSight are a big deal to customers, said Dan Molina, chief technology officer at Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and long-time HPE channel partner.

"We have a large customer base with 3PAR," Molina told CRN. "And the power of InfoSight is second to none. It leverages artificial intelligence to pinpoint problems without the need of a third-party tool. So it's a winning combination."

Molina said his understanding is that over half of all trouble tickets opened with Nimble Storage were not related to the storage, and that InfoSight pinpoints problems quickly. "It gets us answers," he said.

DevOps has become an important new part of Nth Generation's business, and tools like Docker will be a big part of the company's upcoming annual Nth Symposium conference to be held in October in Anaheim, Calif., Molina said.

"We like how HPE has continued to expand its ecosystem," he said. "The greater the integrations, the better the results for customers."