HPE Applies AI and Analytics to Storage Management

Earlier this year, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquired Nimble Storage to gain in part access to predictive analytics software that the company had developed to automate the management of storage systems aimed primarily at the midmarket. HPE today announced it is extending that capability, now known as HPE InfoSight, to the higher HPE 3PAR family of storage systems.

In addition, HPE says it has extended the capabilities of that predictive analytics software to include a recommendation engine that employs machine learning algorithms to help IT organizations improve storage performance and proactively eliminate downtime. HPE InfoSight, for example, can pinpoint specific virtual machines that as “noisy neighbors” are consuming too many resorurces.

Vish Mulchand, senior director for product management and marketing for the Storage Division of HPE, says HPE is now moving to make advanced analytics a standard element of its storage portfolio that comes embedded on all its systems.

“You don’t buy InfoSight,” says Mulchand.

Mulchand says HPE InfoSight is part of a larger HPE effort to build autonomous data centers where the management of compute, storage and networking are increasingly automated. It’s not clear how long it will take to achieve that goal or, for that matter, what role humans will play in managing the data center.

What is clear is that the amount of IT labor required to manage a data center environment is going to decline in the years ahead. Many of the manual tasks that consume most of the time spent managing a data center will soon be eliminated. In theory, that should make it a lot simpler for more organizations to consume IT at much higher levels of scale by deploying more applications. Of course, right now nobody knows just how many applications the average organization will really want to deploy, assuming that the cost of managing those applications one day drops to zero.