Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) updated its Primera and Nimble Storage with new automation capabilities that use artificial intelligence (AI) so they can act on insight from operations to optimize the performance of those systems. The updates are targeted at bridging the gap between the agility of public cloud-based storage platforms and the reliability of on-premises storage.

For its high-end Primera storage platform, HPE has bolstered the capabilities of its InfoSight predictive-analytics system to provide real-time self-correcting of system operations. It does this by dynamically optimizing resource utilization to support more consistent performance.

For its Nimble mid-tier storage platform, InfoSight now provides easier management of virtual machine (VM) environments and allows customers using Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor with cross-stack analytics to gauge performance issues between storage and VMs.

Omer Asad, VP and GM of HPE’s Primera and Nimble Storage, explained that those platforms are currently taking in hundreds of thousands of data points every 30 to 90 seconds.

“We’re bringing that data into an InfoSight database, which is about 8 petabytes big,” Asad said. “We’re using and applying machine learning and deep learning techniques on that to provide our customers with a much better support experience, proactive management experience, and proactive troubleshooting.”

HPE acquired the InfoSight technology from Nimble Storage, which it bought for $1 billion in 2017. InfoSight uses AI to analyze millions of sensors across the globally connected installed base and uses this data to help predict and prevent problems. HPE has since been extending the InfoSight reach across its storage and data center platforms.

Primera, which HPE launched last year, also gains HPE’s Peer Persistence product that allows an organization to replicate to a third site to recover from a metro-area disaster and asynchronous replication over greater distances with a one-minute recovery point objective. For Nimble, the Peer Persistence integration provides for a three-site replication including to the cloud compared to the previous two-site replication support.

Primera is also gaining all non-volatile memory express (NVMe) support that improves performance density and on-demand storage automaton that is optimized for virtualization and containers. Asad linked this move to HPE’s acquisition of big data software vendor BlueData in 2018, and analytics data management company MapR last year. Those two companies have since been integrated into HPE’s Container Platform.

Asad noted that the platform enhancements bolster the top-end performance of the Nimble platform nearly to the base settings on the Primera platform. But, that a highly tuned Primera system will still provide a substantial performance advantage over Nimble.

Primera remains HPE’s top-tier offering as it’s more of “highly available, redundant, and mission-critical architecture with active four-way controllers and dual-paths to all systems,” Asad said. “It’s a more reliable and a predictable system with 100% availability guaranteed. He did note that performance also plays a part in the Primera offering, but “it’s about that predictability, availability, and reliability.”

For Nimble, Asad said that it was possible to fine-tune the performance of the system, but that its main focus was on maintaining simplicity and still providing six-nines availability for “general purpose applications.”