Unleash the power of your data with Xylos and HPE Alletra

May 7, 2021

We already know that HPE is planning to offer its entire portfolio as a service by 2022, but this week Hewlett-Packard Enterprise did some major storage announcements that help to support its overall vision and strategy. Calvin Zito (the storage godfather) even mentioned: “I have been working for HPE Storage for 37 years, this is the biggest thing we have ever done”.

There were two big announcements:

A unified cloud-based data management solution called “Data Services Cloud Console”
HPE Alletra, a brand new storage array family

Let’s take a closer look!

HPE Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC)

To better understand the concept behind this new approach it’s important to realize that enterprise IT has become more fragmented. Data is not only located in your central datacenter, there are remote sites, another datacenter located somewhere else, you have your public cloud and then there’s of course the edge. All of these environments are usually administrated locally and are not providing any real overview of your entire infrastructure, not to even mention how to handle the migration of data between all of these environments.

By introducing the Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC) HPE wants to abstract data management wherever the data is. Using just one cloud based management user interface, you can manage data on-prem, in the edge, and in the cloud. The DSCC is powered by a common cloud platform with a proven technology foundation based on Aruba Central. An established and solid platform for Aruba networks that today serves millions of devices across thousands of HPE customers.

As we all know provisioning data for workloads today is a complex and time-consuming task, it can also often happen that’s it’s a pure guess what that workload will do or may need. This challenge gets harder as customers scale and add more systems across their entire organisation. DSCC will provide intent-based provisioning, converting a manual process to an intent-based, AI-driven approach. The administrator has to specify the workload type, capacity, and host groups that need access, the DSCC will optimally determine where that data should be stored. The combination of intent-based provisioning and role-based access control enables self-service data infrastructure provisioning. Making it possible to provide that same user experience on-prem like in the public cloud.

The HPE Alletra 6000 models are optimized for business-critical workloads, it ensures 99.9999% availability just like the previous generations of Nimble. The current released performance numbers show a 3x increase of performance compared to the current Gen5 series of Nimble arrays.

The HPE Alletra 9000 models are ideally suited for workloads with extreme latency and availability requirements. It delivers mission-critical reliability for traditional and modern applications, also it comes standard with 100% availability guarantee. Here we also see the HPE Primera DNA, although the first performance numbers shows a doubling of performance compared to the current Primera storage arrays.

Conclusion

HPE’s vision to offer its entire portfolio as a service combined with the plans they made public this week makes me rethink HPE’s position in the market. They are evolving into a cloud company, clearly understanding the way the market is shifting to consumption-based IT. With its HPE Greenlake offerings it’s possible for any customer to run their workloads like they would in the public cloud. We all know the cloud is not a location but a way of working. Now anyone can have this experience in their own data centers or have it managed for you.

More information can be found here:

Data Services Cloud Console: www.hpe.com/storage/dscc

HPE Alletra website: www.hpe.com/storage/alletra