Leverage AI to Make Smarter Storage Decisions
Making Smarter Storage Decisions With HPE Nimble
Lisa, a storage engineer for a manufacturing company, checks her email on Monday morning to find a system alert for a storage array. Instead of spending time on strategic IT projects as Lisa had planned that day, she has to drop everything and troubleshoot a low-level problem. Her HPE Nimble array, however, rarely needs that type of time-intensive maintenance thanks to AI-driven proactive insights from HPE Infosight.
“Today, what clients are demanding from storage is radical simplicity. That means less time to install, manage and operate it,” says Mike Tradewell, Minnesota storage sales specialist for HPE.
6 9s of Availability
HPE Nimble meets these demands while offering business insights, analytics and automation—all wrapped in a radically simple package. HPE Nimble boasts 99.9999% guaranteed availability. It also features automatic issue resolution 86% of the time, 79% lower operational expenses, and cloud protection for data. The intelligent, self-managing storage system utilizes predictive analytics to provide a total support service to users.
Simplicity Through Automatic Issue Detection and Resolution
Ted Letofsky, solutions architect at Evolving Solutions, emphasizes that Nimble is right-sizable to the needs of clients. A single business unit may be able to use one kind of Nimble array while the data center may use another to handle enterprise workloads. “There is a uniform look, fit and feel to the interface regardless of type or scale,” Letofsky says.
Nimble gives businesses the ability to cluster together multiple storage arrays into one management interface. When the workload changes, the storage can scale up in terms of capacity and performance without changing the way the administration works.
Nimble users also benefit from automatic detection and resolution of issues. If a code issue is detected, Nimble creates a signature around it and correlates it across all the collective installs across all clients to find other environments that may run into the same issue. The system is not able to be upgraded until the issue is resolved in the environment. “The code just gets smarter and better through time,” Tradewell says.
The piece that makes this powerful detection and resolution possible is HPE InfoSight, which resulted from a desire to reinvent clients’ support experience. InfoSight provides analytics, AI, and automation across all HPE solutions—giving Nimble the capability to automatically resolve issues 86% of the time. Sensors that collect data on five-minute intervals are engineered into Nimble’s DNA, translating to about 70 million data points of information collected and correlated into the Nimble array daily. “When clients deploy our solutions with InfoSight, it’s as if they’re getting a full time equivalent on their staff looking over their shoulder,” notes Tradewell.
Reduced Operating Costs
InfoSight resolves Level 1 and Level 2 errors in an automated fashion, with the remaining 14% of Level 3 errors handled by HPE engineers. This allows businesses to spend less time managing storage and more time managing applications and responding to the needs of business.
The skill set of these IT team members can be applied to more beneficial aspects of an IT organization. As a result, an organization can better deploy their skills to focus on technology innovation and transformation. “If you peel away people and resources, spend less time managing storage and more time managing the application, that’s where you get that 79% operations expense saving,” says Tradewell.
Letofsky highlights that Nimble’s reporting capabilities allow organizations to immediately act on the insights they gain, cutting much of the time and resources that are normally required. Clients can also give management direct access to InfoSight to create, run, and gather automated reports, allowing IT leaders to direct staff resources to more strategic needs, resulting in time and labor savings.
Data Center Success
Evolving Solutions’ clients have seen success with HPE Nimble. For example, one client analyses large amounts of customer data and has large ingest performance needs. The client utilizes Nimble with InfoSight to enable their work. When the client needed to add capacity, Evolving Solutions leveraged InfoSight to granularly look at every piece of the environment that touched the storage. The Evolving Solutions architecture team knew exactly how fast and latent the data throughput was, how much it grew over given amounts of time and what the behavior and growth trends looked like. Nimble’s intuitive interface allowed the client to scale up its storage without having to learn a new way of administering it.
The industry is taking notice of efficiencies made possible by HPE Nimble. “HPE Nimble is an extremely robust solution,” Letofsky notes, and that means that clients can leverage predictive analytics, scalability and superior support to better direct organizational resources.
Learn how Evolving Solutions can help your organization implement a smarter storage strategy.
