Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is looking to harness the power of artificial intelligence to prevent data center outages. 

The company today unveiled a new AI engine that uses data from customers’ infrastructure to identify common technical issues, find the early signs and provide advance warning to administrators. It’s set to roll out as part of a forthcoming update to the HPE InfoSight monitoring platform.

HPE obtained the latter product after acquiring Nimble Storage Inc., a maker of flash arrays, for $1 billion earlier this year. InfoSight was originally built to help the roughly 10,000 companies that rely on those arrays gain a better understanding of their storage infrastructure and spot potential problems. They’ll be among the first beneficiaries of the new machine learning engine, but HPE is not limiting its focus to Nimble hardware alone.

The company plans to extend InfoSight’s capabilities across its entire storage portfolio. In the first step toward that goal, HPE will launch a new version of the product for systems from its popular 3PAR array family.

The release is set to bring two significant new features for customers. The first is the ability to better pinpoint the source of storage-related problems affecting virtual machines, which can be tricky to track down manually because multiple components may to be blame. One way this visibility can come in handy is by making it easier to identify resource-hungry VMs that don’t leave enough resources for their neighbors.

The other feature, which is set to arrive further down the road, will enable InfoSight to automatically send information about potential technical problems to HPE’s support personnel. Coupled with the other AI capabilities baked into InfoSight, the addition could help administrators fix issues considerably faster than if they had to figure out everything on their own. Faster response times in turn can help mitigate the impact of outages and even avoid some entirely.

HPE plans to release the new AI engine and InfoSight for 3PAR in January. According to the company, they’ll be available to customers at no additional charge.

Image: HPE