"Finish off" is what HPE seems to do best these days.
They've already started to gut Simplivity. HCI was a massive missed opportunity for them, as they had all the parts from the beginning but their combinations never jelled. Storage basically fell apart, attriting down to just 3PAR (lots of nasty internal politics) and then starving that for resources and field support. I expect Nimble to be digested and fall apart in the same fashion with Nimble executives bailing as soon as their clocks run out in a year at best.
Nimble and SimpliVity together really give HP a solid footing against Dell/EMC/VMWare. Now all they need is their own Hypervisor. (for anyone who doesnt know, SimpliVity has hardware acceleration cards that do dedupe/compression/etc and offload it from the cluster processing store.)
Youve still got the independent Tintri, Tegile, Infinidat, Kaminario for now. And on the HCI side, Nutanix, Pivot3, Atlantis, Stratoscale, HyperGrid.
This makes sense to me as a former sales engineer. There were many phonecalls and meetings where Nimble was the main competition for the customer's storage dollars, pretty much regardless of technical merits we may bring up. "We went with Nimble because it was cheaper" was heard more than once.
With Dell EMC having a large combined storage portfolio, I'm sure HPE was feeling it. Buying Nimble has multiple advantages between getting a foot in the door for more HPE equipment, or just cornering that niche in the market.
The wikipedia entry for Nimble [1] talks a lot about "predictive" technology for their storage devices. But it's not clear to me what they're predicting. "When you need to buy more storage"? Or is it the geometry/layout of the data in order to optimize performance?
They have a service 'infosite' that every array dumps stats to.. From there, they can predict things based on your usage patterns, such as when you are going to run out of disk space, when you should add additional SSD's (if a hybrid setup), when to upgrade controller models to handle increased IO, when a hard drive looks like it might need replaced, etc.
It will also tell you what VM's have the most IO Load in vmware, how much bandwidth you need for replicating volumes, etc.
My regional engineer told me they have one of the largest HP Vertica database clusters in the world to handle all the datapoints..
That said it seems like a great move for HP to finish off their networking/storage business units