HPE Primera Mission-Critical Storage Platform Leverages InfoSight AI

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) announced Primera, a platform that redefines mission-critical storage by delivering simplicity, availability and performance.

It leverages AI platform for operations, InfoSight, to deliver breakthroughs – including 93% less time spent on managing storage ⁽¹⁾, the ability to predict and prevent issues, and accelerate application performance.

Businesses seek to bring new mission-critical applications to market, and support existing ones in order to accelerate speed of business, agiliy and innovation. However, it is nearly impossible for IT to keep up with these demands because they remain tied down administering, tuning, and supporting infrastructure. As a result, IT is forced to sacrifice agility for reliability.

Primera eliminates the compromises and redefines what is possible in mission-critical storage, by blending innovation from across the company’s storage portfolio, to provide simplicity, availability and performance.

Delivering simple, consumer-grade user experience for mission-critical storage

Simple to install: Customers can self-install Primera in less than 20 minutes.
Simple to manage: Storage can be provisioned on Primera withins. Data reduction is built-in and always-on with the flexibility to turn it off.
Simple to upgrade: Built with a service-centric OS that decouples data services so they can be deployed, upgraded, or restarted independently. Primera software can be upgraded by customers in 5 minutes without any disruption.
Simple to own: Customers have the choice to deploy Primera as a service with a managed experience and pay only for what they use through GreenLake. For CapEx purchases, the ownership experience is transformed with ‘Timeless Storage’ for Primera, ending forklift upgrades. Customers get a non-disruptive controller refresh, all-inclusive software, and storage guarantees for data reduction and availability.

Raising expectations of mission-critical storage with 100% availability guaranteed

100% availability guarantee: Primera comes standard with the firm’s Proactive Care and a 100% data availability guarantee without requiring special contracts or onerous terms.
Seeing beyond walls of storage: More than 90% of issues arise from above the storage layer ⁽²⁾ – in the network, server and virtualization layer. Primera sees beyond storage with InfoSight to predict and prevent any disruptions in the networking, application and server layers.
Mission-critical reliability built-in: Primera is architected for HA with multi-node design, transparent BC with the company’s Peer Persistence and data replication. Application-aware data protection via Recovery Manager Central is included, combining with StoreOnce for 15X faster restore and extending to public cloud for cost-effective, long-term retention via Cloud Bank Storage.

Predictable performance for unpredictable application workloads

Performance for consolidating demanding applications: Primera has an all-active architecture that brings parallelism and multi-node performance, which accelerates applications, including 122% faster Oracle performance.
Visibility to consolidate safely: Powered by InfoSight, Primera delivers the visibility for optimizing application workload placement while accounting for application performance characteristics and interactions with other shared applications on an Primera system.
Real-time analytics to maintain predictable performance: InfoSight is now more deeply integrated on Primera with AI models trained in the cloud that are embedded in the array for real-time analytics to ensure consistent performance for application workloads.

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“Intelligence changes everything,” said Milan Shetti, SVP and GM, storage, HPE. “Today’s organizations need a fundamentally new approach to infrastructure operations with an intelligent data strategy. HPE Primera leverages HPE’s unique Intelligent Data Platform to deliver unmatched simplicity, availability, and performance for mission-critical applications, so businesses can focus on harnessing data to drive their business forward.”

“I spend my nights and weekends, as well some serious dollars, managing and upgrading my storage systems,” said Michael York, Sr. systems engineer, Asante. “I’m looking forward to deploying HPE Primera with its self-setup, self-tuning and automatic upgrades that don’t disrupt applications. The extremely simple management experience is something I didn’t know was possible from a high-end platform.“

Primera advances the company’s ‘Intelligent Data Platform’, a portfolio of products and solutions designed to accelerate application performance, transform data management, harness the agility of all clouds, and empower businesses by unlocking hidden insights within data in real time. The platform helps customers transition from delivering storage to unlocking business value with intelligent data.

This platform leverages InfoSight, an AI and ML platform, to deliver autonomous, self-managing storage. It has analyzed application patterns across 1,250 trillion data points over the last decade to predict and prevent disruptions across storage, servers, and VMs, resulting in savings of over 1.5 million hours of lost productivity due to downtime. InfoSight provides the intelligent foundation for all of the company’s storage products, including Primera, creating an end-to-end AI pipeline for self-managing storage.

Primera will be orderable in August 2019.

Additional resources:
IDC white paper (registration required)
Primera infographic

⁽¹⁾ Based on HPE internal testing, compared to previous generation storage arrays
⁽²⁾ Based on recent survey of IT leaders by IDC