Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today added artificial intelligence-based predictive analytics and automation capabilities to its 3PAR StoreServ data storage systems lineup.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage is a family of flash-optimized systems that can handle some of the most intensive and unpredictable modern data center workloads. It’s the company’s top-of-the-line storage system, designed for running software applications that need to be able to scale out on demand.

But modern applications do not always run as they’re supposed to, and when problems occur it often takes hours to remedy them. With that in mind, the company is embedding its HPE Infosight Predictive Analytics platform into the 3PAR system, allowing users to spot issues before they happen and take action to remedy them.

HPE Infosight is a cloud-based AI platform that collects and analyzes application data continuously. It provides a predictive analytics framework that gives users the ability to resolve performance problems and pinpoint the root cause of issues between the storage and host virtual machines. HPE obtained the technology through its $1 billion acquisition of Nimble Storage in March 2017, promising to add its capabilities to 3PAR at a later date.

“[HPE Infosight] enables HPE storage to grow continuously smarter and more reliable,” said James Kobielus, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE. “In real-time, the solution observes, learns, predicts, prevents, pinpoints root causes, automates issue resolution and enforces intelligent case automation to drive higher levels of storage availability.”

HPE said the new integration enables a “better experience” for its customers, helping to minimize the possibility of known issues cropping up within their application deployments.

“As they promised in the wake of the [Nimble Storage] acquisition, HPE has now extended InfoSight coverage to the HPE 3PAR StoreServ product line,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president at International Data Corp. “This is a big win for 3PAR customers, who can expect to benefit from InfoSight’s artificial intelligence- and machine learning- informed real-time optimizations to drive higher performance, better availability, lower cost and improved system-level efficiencies.”

On the performance side, HPE is making it easier for users to run software containers, virtualization environments and DevOps on its 3PAR systems. The company said it’s offering new toolsets to automate and manage these workloads in their on-premises data centers and also in private cloud environments.

“In addition to existing integration with Docker and Mesosphere DC/OS, HPE 3PAR now works with Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift to offer best-in-class automation and integration with the leading container platforms,” the company said.

Kobielus said today’s updates demonstrate how HPE is trying to build an automated, intelligent and self-improving storage product line that embeds machine learning and other AI tools for adaptive operations.

“Today’s key announcements will help it to compete in a cloud storage market in which AI-infused optimization, automation and management features are fast becoming a core competitive differentiator,” Kobielus said. “Clearly, it’s in most HPE 3PAR customers’ best interest to upgrade ASAP. The enhancements will help customers’ improve the availability of existing storage resources under tight budget and staff constraints.”

The update also includes a new plugin for VMware Inc.’s vRealize Orchestrator tool that adds self-service automation capabilities to the platform. HPE is also adding some new blueprints for configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef and Puppet, plus new software development kits for the Ruby and Python programming languages that developers can use to automate storage functions.

The company said the new features, including HPE Infosight, are being made available to all of its 3PAR customers starting today at no extra cost.

Image: HPE