HPE Discover: Lot of Storage Announcements

From Calvin Zito, The HPE Storage Guy (aka The Storage Godfather), Hewlett Packard Enterprise

In this blog article, I want to give you an overview of some huge news from HPE Discover 2019.

If you’d rather watch a video, this Chalk Talk is the same information.

We are making a series of announcements at Discover – the most significant announcements we’ve made in the last 10 years. I have a number of Chalk Talks diving into most of the topics. I’m only going to talk about things at a high-level or this would turn into an 10,000 word article, so click the Chalk Talks if you want to learn more. We’ll also have articles in the coming days and weeks that go a lot deeper than I can talk to these topics.

The Intelligence Era
Intelligence changes everything. Look, IT is really complex and getting a handle on everything is too complex for humans to solve. We believe that intelligence is key to infrastructure management – to find and resolve problems across the stack, not just storage. Intelligence is key to hybrid cloud complexity – because hybrid cloud hasn’t made things easier. And intelligence is key to data management – knowing where is the optimal place for data to live during its lifecycle.

Every enterprise will need to have an intelligent data strategy, where your data is always on and always fast, automated and on-demand, hybrid by design so data is accessible and usable across your cloud environments, and applies global intelligence for visibility and lifecycle management.

Intelligent Data Platform
Our strategy is to deliver an Intelligent Data Platform that turns data challenges into business opportunities. It begins with workload-optimized composable systems. The Global Intelligence Engine infuses the entire infrastructure with intelligence. The Automated application and data management layer offers pre-built automation connectors as well as application aware protection.

Let me summarize what we announced:

It starts with our new next-gen mission critical storage platform, HPE Primera.
It extends into how we are providing customers with on-premises private cloud that starts with some enhancements to SimpliVity and a new platform Nimble Storage dHCI.
Next we’re focused on enabling a true hybrid cloud solution for containers with Goggle Cloud’s Anthos.
And then for AI and Machine Learning, we’re helping make that mainstream with BlueData and GPU as a service.

Here’s my Intelligent Data Platform Chalk Talk.

The most intelligent storage for mission-critical apps – Primera
Let’s look at Primera. Customers using traditional tier-0 storage like Dell EMC PowerMax have to trade off easy to Image from my Primera Chalk Talkuse and agility to get resilience and performance. We realized we had an opportunity to bring together the ease of use of Nimble Storage, the predictive and AI capabilities of InfoSight, and the proven resilience and performance at scale of 3PAR – to redefine mission critical tier-0 storage. Introducing the most intelligent storage for Mission Critical Apps, Primera.

It delivers:

On-demand experience so storage is instantly available
App-aware resiliency backed with 100% availability guarantee
Predictive acceleration so apps aren’t fast some of the time but fast all the time with embedded AI

There’s a Chalk Talk with a lot more on HPE Primera.

HPE SimpliVity news
Next, let’s look at what’s new with SimpliVity. First is delivering on our promise to manage our infrastructure with InfoSight and we are bringing InfoSight to SimpliVity. InfoSight started with Nimble Storage and we continue to extend it across our infrastructure. InfoSight on Simplivity is an amazing combination of the AI driven insights from InfoSight gained by observing, learning, predicting, recommending, and acting with the ease of use of SimpliVity.

Couple of other things to mention with SimpliVity:

SimpliVity 325 that’s for remote offices in scalable 1U enclosure with an AMD EPYC processor and all-flash storage
SimpliVity 380 storage-optimized node for long-term storage, with a large-capacity system.

Check out the InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity Chalk Talk I have to learn more.

Nimble Storage dHCI

Next is Nimble Storage dHCI. Nimble Storage dHCI is the simplicity of hyperconverged infrastructure with the flexibility of converged. It combines the most secure server, ProLiant with the self-anaging experience of Nimble Storage.

It’s intelligently simple with native, full-stack intelligence from storage to VMs and policy-based automation.
It’s resiliency with over 6-9s of measured data availability and consistent, high performance
Built for efficient scale with the ability to independently scale compute and storage non-disruptively.

Here’s a link to Nimble Storage dHCI Chalk Talk with more. You can read more about dHCI too in this blog: ‘Give me more…hyperconverged please!‘

HPE and Google Hybrid Cloud

Click to enlarge

Hybrid clouds have largely been available for stateless workloads. Many next generation applications are being developed with containers. So the announcement with HPE and Google Cloud address this. With the HPE and Google Hybrid Cloud solution, we are now able to deliver a true hybrid cloud optimized for container-based workloads.

There’s a data plane that can deliver bidirectional data mobility and consistent data services. This is delivered in partnership with Google Cloud’s Anthos with HPE Nimble Storage on premises and HPE Cloud Volumes in the cloud. HPE Cloud Volumes already connects to Azure and AWS compute and now Google Cloud Platform compute giving you multi-cloud flexibility. And using Google Cloud’s Anthos, built on Google Kubernetes Engine, brings along the container-based workload flexibility.
Next is multi-cloud flexibility to have the ability to leverage multi-cloud compute with HPE ProLiant on-premises.
And third layer is an application control plane so that your apps are portable. The unified hybrid management is through Google Service Mesh.

Finally, we also offer the HPE and Google Hybrid Cloud with HPE GreenLake so it can be optional delivered as a service.

I don’t have a Chalk Talk about this – but Sandeep Singh talks about it in this blog post: Introducing: True hybrid cloud for containers

HPE BlueData
The final topic is AI and ML. HPE is helping make AI easy and real with BlueData software, that we acquired in late 2018. This is enabling an ‘as-a-service’ experience so data scientists can stitch together pipelines in a matter of minutes. This is a game changer. Think of BlueData as a hypervisor for containers – a fully orchestrated containers stack. It taps into the existing data pools instead of requiring new silos of data lakes. It also virtualizes the underlying hardware, including making GPUs as a service – and those GPU cycles are very expensive.

The BlueData software is now available on HPE Apollo systems, with third party hardware and natively in the public cloud. I don’t have a chalk talk on this but we do have blog articles on Around the Storage Block where you can learn more as well as at hpe.com/info/bluedata.

Summing it up
The intelligence era is important for customers to consider and to transform from operators to a strategic partner. HPE is positioned to address the requirements of the intelligence era – the announcements I’ve shared show that HPE is laser focused on doing that – through global intelligence, workload-optimized composable systems, true hybrid cloud, and AI and ML for the mainstream.

Additional ressources:
Visit our Around the Storage Block blog as we dive deeper into the news I shared in this overview.

This link is to all storage news related articles. This also includes news from the past so you’ll want to look at the most recent (on the top) articles.
Here’s a link to a playlist of all my videos on YouTube. The most recent ones will be on the top.