The next phase of software-defined infrastructure is artificial intelligence (AI) powered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), according to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). And to this end, the vendor announced it started shipping its HCI product SimpliVity with InfoSight, its AI-management tool, as well as one-click cluster upgrades and integration with its data protection software StoreOnce.

“HCI already represents simplicity for the VM [virtual machine] administrator,” said David Wang, director of product marketing for storage at HPE. “You’re going to have faster time to market, you’re going to have easier management because you’re eliminating silos. But HCI hasn’t solved that problem of day two and beyond.”

HCI improves resource efficiency by scaling compute and storage. But it still requires VM admins to react to unexpected disruptions and application delays, and also to make tradeoffs between efficiency and performance or resiliency and capacity as they scale their environments, he explained.

“This is an opportunity for us to rethink what HCI should do,” Wang said. “Software defined was the last decade. We’ve moving from software-defined to AI-driven, and that’s allowing infrastructure to be autonomous using cloud-based machine learning to predict and prevent issues, where infrastructure is not just efficient but self-optimized.”

That’s where InfoSight comes into play.

HPE first announced that it planned to extended InfoSight to SimpliVity, continuing its efforts to push AI into the data center, at its annual HPE Discover conference in June.

HPE acquired the InfoSight technology from Nimble Storage, which it bought for $1 billion in 2017. A year later, it added an AI recommendation engine to the platform and expanded InfoSight across its 3PAR storage portfolio. This push continued last November, when HPE announced that InfoSight now supports its Synergy composable infrastructure, ProLiant servers, and Apollo systems for high-performance computing and big data analytics workloads.

The first release of InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity includes three new capabilities, Wang said. The first is support-case automation. This includes automated alerts and advance notice of problems. HPE’s install base — more than 100,000 systems — provide the data, and machine learning determines which other customers are likely to suffer from the same issue. “We provide that advance notification,” he explained. “You’re gonna hit this potential bug, but we’re able to get ahead of it for you.”

InfoSight for SimpliVity also enables predictive resource planning, which can help customers forecast future resource usage and give them guidance about where they will need to grow. “We can tell customers in exactly 90 days you’re going to run into this environment, and you’re going to need more capacity,” Wang said.

And the third capability, called global insights, gives customers visibility and analytics into system, performance, and capacity utilization across their entire multi-site HCI deployments.

Additionally, SimpliVity now has one-click cluster upgrades, which enables IT administrators to upgrade firmware, hypervisors, and the HPE software stack across multiple data centers. “It really solves the day 2 and beyond problems of lifecycle management: How do I patch my infrastructure with confidence and ease? We make the infrastructure intelligently simple to upgrade,” said Chuck Wood, product marketing manager for HPE SimpliVity.

HPE expects these new AI-based capabilities to help it gain market share in the hotly contested HCI sector. Dell EMC, running VMware software, remains the largest HCI supplier with $533.2 million in revenue and a 29.2% share, according to IDC’s latest quarterly report.

Wang, however, points to VMware’s Project Magna as proof that VMware’s playing catchup when it comes to AI. That vendor previewed its AI-based “self-driving data center” project at its annual VMworld event in August. But it’s not yet shipping Project Magna in VMware’s vSAN-based HCI software stack.

“As a team we saw the news, and their message was largely the same as InfoSight,” he said. “What’s really interesting is VMware understands the world is moving beyond software-defined and needs to be AI-driven as well. Not only are we the first with this ability, but we have over a decade of analyzing virtualized environments with AI.”

HPE’s HCI fleet, he continues, “has more cars, more data, more learning, and ultimately it’s going to drive better insights” compared to the Dell-VMware vXrail HCI systems. “We see a huge competitive advantage.”