HPE on Monday announced general availability of HPE InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity, previously announced at HPE Discover in June, and the availability of single-click cluster upgrades across a cluster and federation. The vendor also preannounced HPE StoreOnce with SimpliVity, for modernized data protection.

HPE InfoSight is artificial intelligence for operations with predictive analytics and machine learning. What AI means for HPE SimpliVity, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), is simplified virtual machine (VM) management, which frees up IT staff to focus on innovation.

HPE’s David Wang

“What we’re excited about with this new announcement is we’re taking the SimpliVity experience to the next level,” David Wang, director of product marketing, storage business for HPE told Channel Futures. “We see the opportunity to look at Day 2 and beyond; it’s about elevating hyperconverged and reimaging the HCI experience beyond just software-defined – it’s really about – infusing SimpliVity with AI.”

The first rollout of HPE SimpliVity with HPE InfoSight enables predictive resource planning and global visibility and analytics into detailed system, performance and capacity utilization insights, as well as support automation with automatic alerts and signature detection into complex problems.

With the latest release of HPE OmniStack software 3.7.10, available for SimpliVity systems, the vendor also is making available single-click upgrades for firmware, hypervisor and SimpliVity software stacks across the entire federation.

“What we’re able to do through the software is allow for automatic rebalancing across each cluster and across the nodes so that you always have consistent performance during the upgrade process,” said Wang.

HPE also announced modernized data protection with HPE StoreOnce integration. This integration enables an app-aware data protection solution with rapid recovery and policy-based automation for simple management and cost-effectiveness. It also complements the native backup and recovery capability built into SimpliVity.

“As SimpliVity continues to grow and move into larger enterprises with larger deployments, customers are asking for a lower tier backup for long-term retention and compliance purposes — that’s what the StoreOnce integration offers,” said Wang.

Charles Wood, product marketing for SimpliVity at HPE, noted that companies of any size can benefit from the new StoreOnce integration.

HPE’s Charles Wood

“They can move backups off the SimpliVity tier, free up space, and put long-term backups on StoreOnce as a very good, cost-effective tier,” he said.

Until now, customers could use third-party tools to do this, but the StoreOnce integration they will have a seamless way to accommodate long-term backups.

This new capability will be available later this year.

HPE also announced that Nimble Storage dHCI is available globally.