HPE Boosts Storage, Hyperconvergence Products With AI

Two announcements from Hewlett Packard Enterprise highlight the potential for artificial intelligence to make systems more autonomous and adaptable to changing workload demands.

HPE has beefed up its SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform and its Primera storage system to include AI capabilities and composability features from HPE Synergy and HPE Composable Rack.

HPE defines a composable infrastructure as one that abstracts compute, storage, and networking resources from their physical locations and can be managed by software through a web-based interface. The idea is to make data center resources as readily available as cloud services and is the foundation for private and hybrid cloud solutions.

In both cases, the new AI capabilities are intended to make systems more autonomous to achieve better resource management, greater efficiency, and higher performance without requiring manual intervention.

HPE SimpliVity is the company’s flagship hyperconverged infrastructure platform. In addition to the hardware, the platform includes a hypervisor, software-defined storage and virtualized networking. This enables multiple nodes to be clustered together for shared resources.

Now, HPE is adding its predictive analytics service InfoSight to SimpliVity. InfoSight continually tunes the infrastructure to improve performance, resiliency, and efficiency. HPE says InfoSight will provide SimpliVity customers global visibility and analytics into detailed system, performance, and capacity utilization insights, along with support automation and signature detection into complex problems.

Primera is a relatively new storage platform that combines HPE’s ProLiant, Nimble, and 3PAR storage systems. HPE is making a braggadocios promise of 100% uptime with Primera. By integrating it with Synergy and Composable Rack, the company claims it will allow customers to deliver services on an intelligent cloud platform, offering the flexibility to support any application and service level agreement (SLA) with cloud-like agility, extreme resiliency, and seamless scalability.

By making composable solutions AI-powered, HPE’s on-premises hardware behaves more like a cloud model, where resources are allocated and deallocated as needed without any user involvement beyond asking for the resources and then releasing them when they are done. SimpliVity already has it; now Primera has it.

It’s all part of HPE’s overall strategy of moving everything to the GreenLake model of metered consumption of on-premises hardware, rather than outright purchase of the hardware. It mirrors the usage model of cloud providers like AWS and Azure but is on-premises and inside the company firewall. Many companies are unable to move some or any of their business to the cloud due to regulations, while others have moved to the cloud and moved back.

HPE plans to make all of its product offerings available through the GreenLake program by 2022.―Network World