from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cube conversation I'm here with Dave faithful who is the chief architect at WEEI and we're going to chat about intelligent storage and specifically HPE intelligence story storage Dave good to see you again thanks for coming on alright so HP uses this you know everybody has these cool marketing terms intelligent storage intelligent storage platform it sounds pretty cool what's it all about well HP has it has done a really good job at developing their storage platform to leverage AI and machine learning and deliver some useful analytics and information to their customers and here's know what they're doing they are from a machine learning perspective taking their entire install base of storage devices gathering that information not personal information such as you know what the data is that sits in the storage but more of the performance we understand it's this type of application it's this type of data and here's how it performs across all these different varmints and they're sharing that with their customers to say if you have this type of data on your storage here's the optimal performance settings to be able to to get the most out of your storage in the best performance additionally they're using a I machine learning that that same idea to give customers heads-up on when they might run into trouble either from a break fixed perspective you know for instance you've got some drives that maybe family you've got a controller that's acting up you've got a connectivity issue someplace all the way to you don't have a performance issue yet but trends we see with your data types may deliver some poor performance under these conditions be aware of that so they're giving insight to to their customers by leveraging everything that they're learning across your entire install base which is pretty neat and they're taking that same capability that they have on storage and applying that so there compute environments as well so think about I think about this one from from an HP perspective they're able to give their customers through their info site application the ability to see and discover performance issues and constraints well before it ever happens to avoid customers from having to find that out the hard way so there's a really good example of the application of AI we talked about AI like it's some mysterious thing it's really machine intelligence and machine learning and and I think it's a practical application because it's relatively narrow you're talking about predictive analytics around infrastructure and being able to you know identify potential hotspots taking the humans out of the equation to do some of that stuff that is really not value-add for the business freeing up time to do some other things is that the right way to think about it that's exactly the right way to think about it you're absolutely right with this type of intelligence you don't need to have IT administrators digging through logs to try to figure out where performance problems are after they've already occurred instead you're getting this information before it ever occurs and you're able to head it off at the pass so I liked the nimble acquisition HPE that one things you like about Nimbo you think nimble you think info site one of the other things I like about the acquisition is if I understand it correctly they've they think you pointed this out they drove that technology across its entire portfolio and you think about three power eight PE made the three power acquisition gosh 10 years ago now to 2010 and that was kind of the gold standard for simplicity for high-end storage they had great metadata reports and and now you know nimble you fast forward has a sort of modern version of that with with AI and predictive analytics the fact that HPE has taken that and pushed it across the portfolio and I think even into into compute into servers as well is it's an impressive you know use of a technology sometimes companies buy tech and they just it sits there for years and they don't do anything with it so your thoughts on that yeah no I think it's I think you're absolutely right HPE did it right now they leverage this technology to add additional value to their compute platforms such as their ProLiant brands and their synergy platform so it's the it's it's it's a very smart thing to do and it's a very good use of that technology from the nibble acquisition and you know Minh see where HP E is heading alright with you know predictive analytics across their entire portfolio so it's all about that that insight to information right and be able to head off problems before they occur yet at the same time how do we optimize or you know automatically optimize our environments based on all of this this information which organization has never had you know access to before so WEEI you guys are a trusted partner of your customers you work with large customers they they look to you you're not trying to jam a specific solution down their throat you think about financial advisors you know here's an insurance policy well if if they're getting a Vig on that insurance policy you go oh wait a minute you guys have to be agnostic so my question to you as a sort of the trusted advisors what's the sweet spot for HPE storage where is it's you know best fit okay that's a trick question right no the it really depends on the platform so you know when we talk about nimble and we talked about info site you know there is a marker segment that that fits well in as well as you know the same could be said for 3par for example and and now we're there new releases the primary storage platform you know I think you'll see a lot more adoption but one of the things that all of those platforms have in common is the ability to connect into data center automation and provisioning strategies and so that's where from our perspective from W nice perspective the value that we're adding around customers is how do we architect that that IT service delivery model that's cloud like in nature and what are the platforms that allow us to easily enable those those provisioning models so irrespective of the the the vendor name on the bezel what are you looking for in a storage platform well what we're again what we're looking for is the ability to to do a couple things one so easily integrate into a provisioning model and to automation are they you know are there investments made by the OEM into the API calls that we can now leverage to connect to either public services or to on-prem compute resources and to software-defined networking in other areas that we that we need to connect you when we're kind of creating those mile two mile three automation automations that you know that enable us for vision loss you know the other thing we're looking for of course is availability reliability you know and performance so you know selecting the right storage platform based on the customer need based on cost or the things that you know that go into that but you're absolutely right we're designing architectures at wi based on customer's business needs right based on how well it fits into their environment and how well that they can maintain those you know those cloud like IT service delivery models and once we understood what those business requirements are what the IT requirements are what their relationships with different services might be and their preferences for four different types automations then we work with them to introduce the right storage platform and HP has a nice portfolio of storage platforms that fit into many many different hybrid cloud and hybrid IT environments all right good stuff Dave thanks for taking us through some of your perspectives on HPE of specifically in storage in general appreciate it Thanks all right thank you for watching we'll see you next time this is david ontei with the cue