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A proposal document we've seen from a Nimble Storage reseller has shown that Nimble is branding its Proactive Wellness feature as Infosight.

What it means: Nimble Storage uses its customer array sensor data to predict, amongst others: when a storage array will fill up; when a drive may fail, complete with an automatically-opened service ticket to fix it; and to offer optimised configuration details to improve performance.

Thousands of telemetry sensors collect "heartbeats" every 5 minutes from almost all of Nimble's deployed systems, we're told. The arrays send logged sensor readings back to the company. Critical and/or anomalous data is identified at their service centre and customers are alerted about critical changes in the array.

Nimble's documentation [PDF] from January this year described Proactive Wellness thus:

Nimble Storage delivers unique proactive system health capabilities that increase uptime by helping customers address issues before they escalate.

Nimble's support staff can also perform secure remote troubleshooting, configuration, and problem resolution; provide peer insights; and offer customised guidance."

Additionally it goes on to describe Infosight, which was then in beta test:

• Disk Monitoring - All disks are actively monitored; a disk failure will automatically invoke a hot spare to kick in and self-heal. It will also report via email to the storage administrators as well as generate a call home event and open a support case with our support group.

• Additionally Nimble executes a proactive daily analysis on telemetry data the system sends to our support organisation looking for any undesirable trends and allowing proactive support should a problem be detected in advance.

• Enclosure monitoring- All FRUs are actively monitored and reported including enclosure temperature and fan speeds. Any event causing these to be outside normal engineering parameters will generate an email notification to the storage administrator as well as a call home event.
• Historical performance monitoring - The Nimble array will track historical information locally up to 180 days, additional long term historical information on trending, capacity and performance is collected and reported with our "Infosight" a customer web portal designed to provide detailed historical information based off the daily telemetry data that the system reports to our support centre.

Infosight is currently in the final stages of beta operation and is expected to release to general customer availability within this quarter. Since this is a reporting function and not an operation function customers can gain access to this during this beta phase if they so desire.

Infosight screenshot. Click for a larger view.

The Infosight service will predict when capacity would be reached in time for additional capacity to be added to the array.

A Nimble spokesperson said: "The company has developed analytics that uses technology to provide insights on storage trends to its customers, helping each customer benefit from the knowledge of all others. Consider it best practices on steroids."

Proactive Wellness appears to have applied for a trademark for Infosight in February this year.

El Reg understands that the Infosight service will be announced this quarter. ®

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