HPE promises 100% reliability with its new storage system

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has multiple enterprise-class storage choices, offering products under the Nimble, 3PAR, and ProLiant brands, plus the enterprise storage software of InfoSight, developed by Nimble. You can add Primera to that list, a new high-end storage array that’s billed as a self-managing platform that uses AI techniques to deliver 100% reliability guaranteed.

The Primera offering borrows some technology from the company’s existing products, including the InfoSight AI capabilities developed by Nimble and the underlying distributed storage architecture of 3PAR.

Primera was announced last week at HPE’s Discover event in Las Vegas. Phil Davis, chief sales officer for HPE, said in the announcement keynote, “If you think about traditional storage, it’s full of compromises and complexity. Do I want fast or reliable? Do I want agility or simplicity? But not any more. We’re going to combine the simplicity of Nimble with the intelligence of Infosight and mission-critical heritage of 3Par and we’ve created a new class of storage that eliminates the traditional compromises and truly redefines what is possible with storage.”

Davis said Primera will run out of the box with just a few cable connections and be can be autoprovisioning storage within 20 minutes. That means no need for IT consultants to install and configure the hardware.

The more workloads you add to a storage system, the more unpredictable latency becomes. Using InfoSight’s parallelism, Primera improved throughput and latency of an Oracle database by 122% over the prior storage system, which HPE did not identify.

HPE said more than 90% of storage issues are actually outside of the storage array and in the network and VM layer, and that Primera is designed to find, recognize, and fix those problems without manual intervention.

InfoSight is the real secret sauce here. Over the past decade, it has analyzed more than 1,250 trillion data points, spanning storage, servers, and virtual machines. HPE says that through cloud-based machine learning, it has saved its customers over 1.5 million hours by predicting and preventing thousands of disruptions and providing automated recommendations.

This is the first time anyone has offered 100% availability for storage. Companies have always hedged their bets with 99.9999% uptime promises, but HPE is putting the promise in writing. If customers do experience an outage with Primera, they will receive an outage credit that’s worth up to 20% of the value that can be utilized for future upgrades and purchases.

Primera will become the company’s top enterprise-class storage option going forward when it ships in August. Customers will be able to deploy Primera either on-premises or as a cloud service through the HPE GreenLake program.