HPE launches unified data platform to accelerate private cloud sales and cut infrastructure costs

HPE expands hybrid cloud stack with unified private cloud and AI-ready storage updates - SiliconANGLE

HPE expands hybrid cloud stack with unified private cloud and AI-ready storage updates Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today is expanding its hybrid cloud and data platform portfolio with new private cloud, storage and cyber resilience offerings designed to simplify infrastructure modernization and prepare enterprise data environments for artificial intelligence workloads. The announcements focus on integrating virtualization, the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers, storage and data protection into what executives described as a unified operating model spanning core, edge and cloud environments. They include the fourth generation of HPE Private Cloud, expanded file and object storage support in the HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 platform, new agentic AI management capabilities and additional cyber resilience features in HPE Zerto Software. The new and enhanced products are meant to address enterprises' struggles with rising virtualization costs, operational complexity and fragmented AI deployments, said Angel Penilla, vice president of private cloud product and engineering at HPE. "AI is not just running in one place," he said. "Most organizations have AI sprawl, and so every single business unit is talking about how to adopt it. Even within small organizations, there's a lot of fragmentation." Penilla said HPE's strategy is to provide "one operating model, control plane and one dedicated stack for AI that can flow from the core to the edge." The company said its updated HPE Private Cloud platform now supports unified management of virtual machines and Kubernetes containers through a single interface powered by HPE Morpheus Software. The offering also adds support for the latest HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers and expanded migration and backup integrations with Veeam Software Corp.'s backup and recovery software and HPE's Zerto disaster recovery platform. Penilla said customers "are looking for the flexibility of that disaggregated build-your-own, but also all the benefits of an appliance." HPE is also positioning the platform as an alternative for the growing number of organizations reassessing public cloud strategies because of AI inference requirements and concerns about sensitive data exfiltration. "Hybrid is becoming more hybrid than ever," Penilla said. "A lot of the AI workloads are moving on-prem or to the edge." Enterprises increasingly want to keep AI-related data on premises even when using cloud infrastructure for model training, said Gokul Sathiacama, vice president of products for HPE Storage. "Model builders want very low latency," he said. "They want to use the cloud because they don't have infinite resources on premises. However, the reason they're bringing the models back on premises for inferencing and [retrieval-augmented generation] is because some of the data that they want to compare is very sensitive." As part of the storage updates, HPE added native file support to the Alletra Storage MP X10000 platform, which was previously focused on object storage for AI and analytics workloads. The system now supports both file and object access simultaneously. "We have a key-value store, and we built an object and file namespace on of it that we can run all at the same time for different workloads," Sathiacama said. The company also expanded the system's scale to 16 nodes and 23 petabytes of raw capacity and introduced support for remote direct memory access-enabled file storage to accelerate AI pipelines. HPE further announced enhancements to its HPE Data Fabric Software, including conversational AI interfaces, policy-based data movement and expanded governance features intended to help customers manage data across edge, core and cloud environments. "This allows us to bring multiple sources of data, whether the data lives at the edge, in the core or in the cloud, and provide a single federated namespace to our customers," Sathiacama said. Cyber resilience was another major focus of the announcements. Stephen Bacon, vice president of cyber resilience and data protection solutions at HPE, said organizations increasingly view resilience as a business imperative rather than simply an information technology function. "Resilience has really become a defining organizational capability," Bacon said. "It's no longer just an IT concern or a security conversation." HPE Zerto Software 10.9 introduces AI-driven protection capabilities, recovery automation and expanded support for HPE's VM hypervisor environment. The company also added support for the Model Context Protocol to enable AI tools to interact directly with Zerto in what Bacon described as "a structured, governed and auditable way. "Cyberthreats are constant and increasingly sophisticated," Bacon said. "What really matters is resilience -- the ability to absorb an event, recover as fast as the business requires and continue operating." HPE said most of the newly announced capabilities are available immediately, with additional unified VM and container management features and expanded storage scale-out capabilities scheduled for release later this year.

Partners: HPE's New Unified Data Platform Is Poised To 'Supercharge' Private Cloud Sales Growth

"HPE is revolutionizing the private cloud experience whether it's a traditional workload, a containerized workload or an AI workload," says CPP Associates' Michael Maher. "This reduces total cost of ownership for the customer, while at the same time adding functionality and value." HPE's new fourth-generation private cloud with a unified data platform and a simplified "single pane of glass" management platform for all workloads from traditional VMs to next generation AI inferencing is set to accelerate HPE private cloud sales growth, partners told CRN. "This is going to supercharge our HPE private cloud sales growth," said Michael Maher, director of professional services at CPP Associates, Clinton, New Jersey, one of HPE's top partners. "It is almost irresistible if you are a customer. HPE is revolutionizing the private cloud experience whether it's a traditional workload, a containerized workload or an AI workload. This reduces total cost of ownership for the customer, while at the same time adding functionality and value. Customers can now keep day to day operating costs under control while they invest in the infrastructure to drive their business forward for the next generation." Maher's comments came after HPE announced what it called a new unified private cloud data platform aimed at helping customers "reduce cost" with a simplified modern infrastructure platform for traditional virtualized workloads, cloud native workloads and even next generation AI inferencing workloads. The new unified platform includes new native file storage, scale out block storage, agentic AI management, HPE Zerto software enterprise grade data protection and integration with the Veeam data platform with data protection for HPE private cloud. Ultimately, Maher (pictured above) said, the new fourth-generation platform is bringing the "power of the hyperscaler public cloud providers" to customers in a private cloud self-service hybrid cloud operating model that encompasses public cloud, private cloud and even next generation AI solutions at the edge. "With the new operating model HPE is providing a complete end-to-end solution with data protection and agentic AI," he said. "All you have to do is supply your data and go!" he said. As part of the new operating model, HPE has renamed its HPE Private Cloud solution as the HPE Private Cloud PC3000 and refashioned it with new features including unified management of traditional VMs and Kubernetes on a single platform with "scaling" for cloud native workloads. The new Private Cloud PC3000, HPE said, also includes a "streamlined upgrade path" to the enterprise edition of HPE Morpheus software for multicloud management and hybrid cloud orchestration. HPE also fine-tuned the HPE private cloud portfolio, singling out HPE SimpliVity as the PC1000 hyperconverged private cloud, the PC3000 as the disaggregated private cloud, the PC7000 as the managed private cloud for large scale enterprises and HPE Private Cloud AI as purpose-built for AI. Bob Panos, president of American Digital, Schaumburg, Ill., said he also expects the new unified private cloud platform to provide a big private cloud sales boost. "We're now providing simplicity with a single plane of glass management where we can look closely at the economics of each workload," he said. "Maybe that cloud workload will be less expensive on prem. If that's the case let's use private cloud on prem. And if you're using AI workloads in the public cloud why not look at HPE Private Cloud AI and do it on prem where it will be more secure with data sovereignty. There are a lot of benefits that you can sell. It all comes down to simplifying the IT administrator's job which saves time and money!" Panos credited HPE CEO Antonio Neri with building out a first-class hybrid cloud stack that he said is unmatched in the market. "They bought OpsRamp for monitoring, Morpheus Enterprise for provisioning," he said. "HPE has built the future model where you can log into Morpheus and can get whatever workload you want provisioned whether it is public cloud, PC3000 or PC 7000 workloads. Now you have flexibility through a single pane of glass to figure out where the workload should go. It doesn't matter what the hypervisor is or cloud environment. You are giving the customer simplicity." That simplicity is critical given the rising prices in traditional VMware environments, providing customers an option to look at an HPE's KVM hypervisor as an alternative to VMware, said Panos. "Customers want to look at alternatives to VMware," he said. "I have big customers that are trying to eliminate VMware entirely because of VMware price increases of several hundred percent. This single pane of glass enterprise level provisioning does everything VMware was doing with vCenter. Customers can now start looking at moving workloads that aren't super critical to HPE VM Essentials. It reduces costs and gives them simplicity with a single pane of glass management." Broadcom VMware declined to comment. Todd Burkhardt, co-president, customer engagement and CIO for Nth Generation Computing, San Diego, said he "absolutely" expects the new private cloud portfolio to accelerate HPE private cloud sales growth. Burkhardt said customers are increasingly looking at leveraging HPE VM Essentials and private cloud to move workloads off Broadcom VMware. "Customers are looking at reducing their Broadcom bill and using that to spend on hardware to keep projects moving forward," he said. "HPE is well-positioned with VM Essentials and Morpheus. They continue to invest in engineering for those products. I have never seen HPE move this quickly with their own homegrown solution." The new fourth-generation HPE private cloud portfolio is a big leap forward, said Burkhardt. "The HPE private cloud platform is definitely more mature, taking it from Simplivity all the way to a fully managed private cloud," he said. "HPE having a full-stack private cloud portfolio gives them an advantage over the hyperscalers and some of the other OEMs out there," he said. "It is truly a mature platform. One of the best things (HPE CEO) Antonio (Neri) did was to leverage best of breed solutions with acquisitions like Morpheus and Zerto and data protection from Veeam. Customers have the comfort level of having best of breed solutions without vendor lock in. It gives customers confidence and flexibility to move from one backup platform to another supported by GreenLake." The single data platform with file and block storage on the Alletra MP X10000 is a "huge" advantage for HPE in the storage market, said Burkhardt. "That gives customers one solution for both file and block and then you have the B10000 that can scale for AIOps," he said. "It's a well-rounded portfolio. It's a great story." HPE now has the best portfolio and channel program it has ever had in 30 years of partnering with Nth Generation, said Burkhardt. "This is by far the most complete portfolio HPE has ever had from compute to storage to backup and disaster recovery," he said. "It's very exciting along with the new channel program. The profitability has also never been better." Burkhardt credited HPE Vice President of North America Channel Jeremiah Jenson for reinvigorating HPE partner program profitability."Jeremiah has done a great job incorporating new incentives that have made HPE more competitive with other channel programs out there," he said. "HPE is getting partner's attention with the new incentives!" Burkhardt said he expects Nth Generation's HPE sales to be up double-digits this year even with the memory shortage and supply chain crisis. Ultimately, customers realize that they need to make significant technology investments to remain competitive in the AI era, said Burkhardt. "We've seen large deals that we thought customers would delay or maybe even put off completely and then have them come back and spend four to five X what they would have spent 18 months ago and shockingly issuing a PO (purchase offer)," he said. "We're seeing commercial and public sector customers continue to move forward with their projects given price increases and supply chain delays. That speaks to the HPE portfolio with offerings like Compute Ops Management (COMs), Morpheus and the management visibility HPE is providing. With HPE we're helping customers modernize their data center and reducing their server footprint, cutting back on rackspace and cooling by moving to Gen12 servers." C.R. Howdyshell, CEO of Independence, Ohio-based Advizex, a Myriad360 company, said the new HPE private cloud portfolio offers customers "options" in the wake of the challenges they are facing with both Broadcom VMware and public cloud. "Customers are looking for options to start de-risking the challenges with Broadcom and public cloud," he said. "Customers want more effective ways to run their workloads without compromises from a technology perspective. This gives customers a single point of accountability with robust technology behind it. It is a robust technology platform that is easy for customers to consume."