HPE decided to move the transformative pivot from being a leader in enterprise storage to becoming the leader in data management
Data has the potential to transform the business of the organization by accelerating innovation, improving the customer experience, and driving operational efficiency
Kamal Kashyap, Director-Storage, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India
Can you give us an overview of HPE storage portfolio?
HPE has always been an innovation leader in enterprise storage. We have helped organizations –in all major verticals – power their mission-critical applications with their data. With a portfolio of best-in-class solutions for online storage, backup, and archival storage – HPE data and storage solutions provide complete edge to cloud solutions to handle data across its lifecycle.
In recognition of our customers’ changing needs, we decided to move the transformative pivot from being a leader in enterprise storage to becoming the leader in data management. In 2021, HPE unveiled a data services platform that delivers on our Unified DataOps vision for a new data experience that brings a cloud operations model to wherever data resides and unifies data operations. This data services platform, available through HPE GreenLake, consists of three new innovations that simplify data operations from edge to cloud, including:
- Data Services Cloud Console, a cloud console that delivers cloud operational agility and unified data operations as a service
- Cloud data services, a suite of software subscription services that radically simplify and automate global infrastructure management at scale
- HPE Alletra, a portfolio of cloud-native data infrastructure solutions designed to power data, from edge to cloud. We have recently launched HPE Alletra 5000 which is simple, reliable, and cost-efficient hybrid storage – designed for both general purpose and secondary workloads. It goes much further to bring the cloud experience to your on-prem storage while radically simplifying operations across the lifecycle.
In India, most organizations across all verticals viz. manufacturing, automotive, oil & gas, banking, and telecom trust HPE compute and storage infrastructure for their mission critical and business critical environments.
We have continuously raised the bar and have set the standard for reliability as well as performance and have led the way with storage as-a-service. And we have set the pace in customer experience with the industry leading AIOps. Some additional examples from our portfolio of solution offerings include:–
- Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions for every workload, from business-critical apps to distributed edge: Powered by the predictive intelligence of HPE InfoSight, and capable of running even your most demanding workloads, HPE’s hyperconverged offerings viz. HPE SimpliVity and HPE dHCI redefine what HCI can be. Self-managing, self-optimizing, and self-healing, and AI-driven HCI solutions that deliver the simplicity, efficiency, and economy of hyperconverged for our customers entire environment.
- The HPE Apollo 4000 family: Intelligent data storage servers that are architected to unlock the business value of data at any scale, with ideal economics. Combining an ultra-dense and flexible architecture optimized for data storage-intensive workloads with the ability to easily deploy and manage in a scale-out environment, HPE file storage and object storage solutions span customers’ needs, from affordable NAS for file sharing to durable petabyte-scale storage for Big Data and software-defined storage.
- HPE StoreOnce Catalyst for immutable backups that can’t be encrypted, modified, or deleted ensure that we cater to all customer needs for data. Industry-leading backup and restore speeds mean that customers can meet shrinking backup windows and recovery service level agreements. These latest innovations and offerings bring the cloud operational model to where data lives, accelerates digital transformation, streamlines data management, and helps our customers innovate faster than ever before.
What are the Challenges Faced by the Hybrid Cloud Storage Market?
Every organization is undergoing digital transformation to accelerate the speed of business, reimagine the customer experience, drive efficiency, and accelerate innovation. Data, cloud, and AI are three forces that are shaping this transformation. The data is creating outcomes, cloud has set the standard for agility and AI is driving insights and autonomous operations.
This transformation is changing everything for data storage and data management. Data is no longer only on-premises but highly distributed across edge, on-premises, and cloud. In order to support application workload deployments, data storage provisioning needs to shift from slow, arcane processes that hold business and IT back, to self-service, instant provisioning that accelerates business outcomes. The data storage needs to change from manual, administration driven operations to cloud-native and AI-driven operations to deliver the agility of cloud and in return free IT resources.
With data quickly becoming the most essential asset of every organization, the ability to store, access, protect, analyze, and mobilize the data across the data lifecycle has become a strategic imperative for organizations.
Hence, IT has the opportunity to shift from managing storage to managing data — but many organizations lack the means to make this shift. The data management remains massively complex, as it is built on a complex web of fragmented infrastructure, processes, and administrative tools that span production, disaster recovery, backup, archive, and analytics. This complexity comes at a cost to agility, innovation, and business risk.
A recent ESG data management survey of IT decision makers found that 93% of surveyed organizations see the complexity of storage and data management as an impediment to digital transformation. Also 95% of them view better data utilization as a top 10 business priority, and 94% want to bring the cloud experience on-premises.
We strongly believe that it’s time to reimagine data and infrastructure management to break down silos and eliminate complexity to accelerate data-driven transformation. HPE’s Unified DataOps delivers a new data experience that radically simplifies infrastructure, enables the customers to safeguard data seamlessly against threats and disruptions, unlocks data by streamlining access to the data innovators, and mobilizes data across clouds. It is underpinned by cloud operational agility, this data experience gives customers the flexibility and agility of the cloud in their on-premises environments, allowing them to move faster than ever before.
What are the top reasons a customer should choose HPE Alletra 5000?
Data has the potential to transform the business of the organization by accelerating innovation, improving the customer experience, and driving operational efficiency. Achieving this kind of data innovation requires a generational shift in the application landscape, but it also entails the complexity of deploying and maintaining more infrastructure than ever before. HPE Alletra 5000 delivers simple, reliable, cost-efficient hybrid storage for general-purpose workloads. It is a cloud-native data infrastructure powered by HPE GreenLake platform, which provides a cloud operating and consumption experience to customers wherever data lives.
Here are the top reasons a customer should choose HPE Alletra 5000:
- Go faster with the cloud experience: HPE Alletra 5000 can be leveraged to simplify on-prem storage with the speed and agility of a cloud operational experience. The customer can deploy it in minutes, upgrade transparently, and manage from anywhere. Unlike traditional storage management, HPE Alletra 5000 enables line of business (LOB) and database admins to effortlessly provision storage and accelerate app deployment—freeing up IT resources to work on strategic, higher-value initiatives.
- Optimize price performance for general-purpose workloads: HPE Alletra 5000 helps you to harness the flash performance and disk economics of ultra-efficient architecture which is designed from the ground up to deliver fast, consistent performance, and industry-leading data efficiency for your workloads. It also helps to slash the storage costs and footprint with always-on data reduction that delivers up to 5x more space savings without performance penalty.
- Rely on six nines availability—guaranteed: HPE Alletra 5000 leverages a proven AI-driven platform to guarantee resilient 6x9s data availability for every customer and every array. 2 It’s a cost-nothing, do-nothing guarantee—and with HPE InfoSight predicting and preventing problems, your arrays get smarter, better, and more reliable every day.
- Get the HCI experience without limitations: HPE Alletra disaggregated HCI (dHCI) delivers a hyperconverged experience that includes business-critical speed and resiliency alongside independent scaling of compute and storage.
- Consume as a service, on-demand: You can shift from owning and maintaining data infrastructure to simply accessing and utilizing it. HPE Alletra 5000 helps customers to avoid over- and under-provisioning concerns, CAPEX budget constraints, and complex procurement cycles by choosing a flexible, as-a-service consumption model with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.
- Accelerate business outcomes: HPE Alletra 5000 empowers you to transform from IT operator to service provider, which means you focus on accelerating outcomes, not managing infrastructure.
How HPE Alletra 5000 can help enterprises to bring cloud experience to on-prem storage?
HPE Alletra 5000 is a cloud-native data infrastructure powered by the Data Services Cloud Console on the HPE GreenLake platform. It simplifies on-prem storage with the speed and agility of a cloud operational experience. This makes the underlying infrastructure invisible while shifting operations to be app, not infrastructure, centric. With its recent launch, we are extending the HPE Alletra family with a hybrid array.
HPE Alletra 5000 leverages the industry’s most advanced AIOps for infrastructure, HPE InfoSight, to deliver autonomous operations and always-on, always-fast apps. It predicts and prevents disruptions before they occur across the stack, pinpoints issues between storage, VMs, and under-utilized virtual resources. With HPE Alletra 5000, you can easily scale without disruption by growing the capacity and performance of a running system independently and non-disruptively.
The customers can also leverage SaaS-based HPE Backup and Recovery Service to simplify hybrid cloud data protection with instant restores, rapid recovery on-prem, and cost-effective long-term retention in the cloud. It is uniquely designed to provide guaranteed 6x9s availability and unprecedented efficiency for general-purpose and secondary workloads. The management of HPE Alletra 5000 is extremely simple. Since it’s fully cloud native, the customers can globally monitor and manage their entire fleet of block storage from a single SaaS-based cloud console that’s accessible from any location, on any device. That makes managing hundreds of systems across geographies as simple as managing one.
Since introducing HPE Alletra, we’ve received great customer feedback on our intent-based provisioning feature, which allows our customers to automate and optimize app deployment. And with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, one can consume everything as a service – enabling them to shift from owning and maintaining data infrastructure to simply accessing and utilizing it.
