HPE Announces AI for SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure
HPE has ported over the InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform from its 2017 acquisition of Nimble to its SimpliVity line, adding AI to the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), as announced in an Oct. 28 press release.
With this announcement, HPE claims the following capabilities are now incorporated into its flagship HCI platform:
- Ability to complete cluster upgrades with just one click
- Optimization for edge computing
- Cloud connectivity
Late in 2017, HPE announced that the 3PAR product was getting an upgraded version of InfoSight to bolster the capabilities of that storage line.
Courtesy: Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Our Take
This is great news for hyperconverged users looking for more insight into their infrastructure. The ability to predict component failures and proactively remedy a possible event is indeed noteworthy and valuable.
The addition of predictive analytics to HCI will improve systems’ availability and management in addition to saving time and money.
There is, however, a small “gotcha” when it comes to how all of this is marketed. Until recently, HPE has referred to the InfoSight platform as a predictive analytics platform. In fact, in the 2017 acquisition announcement of Nimble, it referred to InfoSight in this manner throughout the article.
I think we can all agree that AI is made up of several components, like machine learning, predictive analytics, etc. But I would state that AI is the sum of all its parts, not that each part is AI. One would not assume that someone who’s found a spark plug has a car. Really, it’s just a spark plug. Unless HPE has truly built in a full AI experience – which based on my read of the press release, I do not believe to be the case – then it’s clear HPE’s marketing team has taken a few liberties with its definition of the InfoSight capabilities as “AI”. It isn’t. Don’t believe the marketing hype for a second.
I’m not beating up on HPE for introducing new and valuable capabilities into SimpliVity, but I am calling out its marketing team’s use of “AI” as a buzzword.