5 Things You Need To Know About HPE's Game-Changing Store More All Flash Storage Capacity Guarantee

HPE's All Flash Storage Capacity Guarantee

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Monday stepped up its 100 percent channel Nimble all flash storage sales offensive with an iron clad storage efficiency guarantee that is expected to significantly reduce the sales cycle for solution providers

"It's a blockbuster," said Dave Kresse, the vice president and general manager of the HPE Nimble business, in an interview with CRN. "A lot of people make claims in this industry. We are past claims. This is about guarantees and standing behind our commitment that we have the most effective capacity AFA (all flash array) on the market today. We are putting our money where our mouth is. We think this is going to have a huge impact."

Kresse said he believes the iron clad guarantee puts the heat on competitors that have qualifiers around all flash storage efficiency citing specific workloads. "This HPE guarantee is very cut and dry," he said. "Guaranteed most effective capacity on the market. In many cases with this guarantee it is going to accelerate the deal by shortening or eliminating the POCs part of the process."

Here are the five things you need to know about HPE's Store More guarantee.

The Store More Guarantee

The HPE Store More guarantee is a pledge that that the HPE Nimble all flash array will deliver the most effective storage capacity of any all flash array on the market.

Specifically, the Store More Guarantee assures customers that they will be able to store more "data per raw terabyte of storage" than any other vendor's all flash array.

HPE is promising to provide "incremental storage for free" if it is not able to meet the "storage efficiency" of an all flash competitor. The guarantee covers all new HPE Nimble all flash storage models

Under the Store More guarantee, the customer must agree to certain conditions with regard to copying the data to the new Nimble all flash array. "Once the customer data is on the Nimble array, we'll do a comparison of the effective capacity," said John Quinn, founder and principal of Merrimac Solutions, an Aurora, Ill. cloud and data center solution provider. "What HPE is promising here is the ability to dedupe and compress the customer's data better than any other vendor."

Quinn, for his part, expects the HPE Nimble Store More guarantee in one fell swoop to reduce the average sales cycle by one third, leading to as much as a 40 percent increase in his HPE Nimble business over the next year. "This is like the Red Sox adding (home run hitter) Bryce Harper to the lineup," said Quinn. "With the Store More guarantee I see us closing deals that used to take more than a quarter in just 60 days.

Shortening The Sales Cycle

Some partners expect the Store More guarantee could reduce the sales cycle for HPE Nimble deals by as much as one third, taking what might have been a three month quarterly sales cycle to a 60 day sales cycle.

Sakthi Chandra, senior director of product marketing at HPE Nimble Storage, said the Store More guarantee is aimed at overcoming sales objections from customers engaged in exhaustive head to head proof of concept (POC) comparisons.

"It takes time for customers to understand data reduction, usable capacity and overhead," Chandra said. "Customers have to painfully go through this in a POC (proof of concept). What the Store More guarantee does is allow the reseller to take all those objections off the table. We believe this is going to escalate the velocity of closing a deal. An average all flash POC could take two weeks just to figure out how much capacity can be stored. We believe this will eliminate that piece of the deal."

The Store More guarantee, in fact, comes with a lot of customers confused by the different storage efficiency comparisons being made by storage vendors. "Some vendors are focusing on usable capacity, others are focused on storage overhead, but no one has come out with a crystal clear, black and white, no strings attached guarantee like this."

HPE's Next Generation Nimble All Flash Arrays

The Store More guarantee is accompanied by the launch of HPE's next generation all flash arrays that HPE says deliver up to a three times improvement in price performance.

The new HPE Nimble arrays include an entry level model that starts 6 Terabytes of raw capacity scaling up to a high end model with four petabytes of storage capacity at less than one millisecond latency.

The "midmarket" sweet spot of the new Nimble AFA line packs a whopping 220 percent gain in price performance over the last generation, said Kresse.

"That is huge," he said. "That is going to be very well received by partners and customers."

Another big game changer is that the new all flash arrays have always on inline deduplication, said Kresse. That always on inline duplication takes the heritage of Nimble, which started as a hybrid storage company, and takes it to another level, said Kresse. "We have pushed the envelope further out with this solution," he said. "We still believe we have the best hybrid solution on the market."

HPE is also offering "cloud ready solutions" that support public or private cloud all flash workloads, said Kresse. "That is a big part of our value proposition which is different than what anyone else in the industry is talking about," he said.

SCM And NVMe Support Is Key For New Nimble All Flash Arrays

The new HPE Nimble Storage all flash arrays now support Storage Class Memory (SCM) and NVMe (Non Volatile Memory express protocol for faster performance).

That support for SCM and NVMe is going to be key as those new technologies making all flash more economical over the next six to 18 months, said Kresse.

"Customers are going to want to take advantadge of SCM and NVMe," he said."That is going to be important. When customers invest in infrastructure with HPE we are really future proofing it for them with SCM and NVMe."

HPE InfoSight Predictive Analytics Software Is Still The Biggest Game Changer For Partners and Customers

HPE Nimble's InfoSight predictive analytics software is still the heart of the go to market motion for partners, said Kresse.

HPE partners, for their part, say Nimble InfoSight – with its ability to automatically resolve what HPE claims is 86 percent of storage issues with its AI based software –has altered the balance of power in the all flash market to HPE's favor.

"HPE InfoSight allows us to predict and prevent issues before they happen," says Kresse. "It delivers an unparalleled product and support experience for partners. All of the benefits of InfoSight continue to be delivered in this new platform. It continues to be the big differentiator for us."

HPE InfoSight is being rolled out across the complete HPE software defined stack. Last November, HPE released InfoSight on 3Par and is expected to release it on other platforms including Simplivity.