When Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. shelled out more than $1 billion to buy Nimble Storage Inc., it was not simply padding out its flash portfolio, according to Gavin Cohen (pictured), vice president of product marketing at Nimble Storage.

“The thing that sets us apart more than anything from not just the storage startups, but from all the large storage vendors is the use of predictive analytics,” Cohen said during an interview at this year’s VeeamOn event in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Nimble storage arrays are equipped with an intelligent data analytics platform called InfoSight, Cohen told Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

InfoSight uses sensors to collect data. These sensors stem from the storage array itself but collect data through the network, compute, and even up to the hypervisor. Each day, these sensors collect millions of data points, Cohen explained. Then InfoSight applies predictive analytics and machine learning to the data to predict and prevent problems.

All-flash intelligence

The support experience InfoSight enables is unlike anything customers have seen, according to Cohen. “Eighty-six percent of problems that would normally involve a call to vendor support, we completely end-to-end automate,” he said.

Plus, InfoSight may recognize problems before customers do. And it is not just simple issues like power supply; it might recognize a misconfiguration on the host or a bad host bus adapter, Cohen added.

InfoSight can discover problems that users might mistakenly blame on storage but which originate elsewhere. “Fifty-four percent of the issues that InfoSight resolves are not actually tied to the storage,” Cohen said. These are often “needle-in-a-haystack” problems like VMware settings, he added.

InfoSight’s capabilities are extensible; HPE is now hard at work integrating the product’s data analytics into products such as the 3PAR StoreServ flash storage systems, Cohen concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VeeamOn 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamOn 2017. Neither Veeam Software Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE