Winter 2018

If you want to listen to this as a podcast, click here. 

For the last few Discover events, our storage news went out a couple of weeks before Discover. With so much happening, management only picks the top news to actually go out at Discover. This time the news featured storage – which means it’s a pretty big announcement. And there’s a lot to talk about, so let me dive into an overview of what we announced.

The world’s most intelligent storage

About a year ago, we started talking about the pillars of the HPE Storage point of view: predictive, cloud ready, and timeless. We had posts on ATSB talking about it. But over the year, we’ve refined the pillars and now they are:

• AI-driven
• Built for cloud
• As-a-service experience

“Above” the pillars, we’ve really honed in on what we want to be famous for: intelligent storage. Intelligent storage is focused on unlocking your data’s potential, driving actionable insights, and delivering impact to your business. My colleague Jenna Colleran has a post diving deeper into intelligent storage and why it’s important. If you want to get the jump on understanding it, also check out my Chalk Talk on Unlocking data’s full potential with intelligent storage.

Intelligent storage is AI-driven

One of the pillars is AI-driven. It used to be “predictive” but we think storage needs to go beyond predictive and be AI-driven. HPE InfoSight is leaping from predictive analytics into AI. And there are new features to mention that again, we’ll dive deeper in later in the week. Katie Fritsch has that post and there are a few posts on HPE Storage Tech Insiders (our technical deep-dive blog on hpe.com) that dives into the new features. I’ll summarize what’s new:

• New 3PAR Performance Insights powered by InfoSight prevents performance bottlenecks in real time. I have a podcast with Phill Gilbert from the 3PAR product management team that you can listen to and get a good understand of it.
• Cross-stack recommendations for HPE Nimble Storage goes beyond predictive analytics of your cross-stack environment into making AI-driven guidance to help optimize VM performance by diagnosing root cause of performance bottlenecks.
• New Resource Planner for Nimble is again an AI-driven tool to help optimize workload placement based on available resources and takes the guesswork out of determine which systems have headroom.
• And just for good measure, if you missed it, a couple weeks ago we announced InfoSight for HPE Servers. I have a Chalk Talk that explains it.

Intelligent storage is built for cloud

With more applications being developed for the cloud, enterprises need easy mobility for their hybrid cloud environment (on-premises and cloud). HPE Cloud Volumes is an enterprise-grade, multi-cloud solution with easy multi-cloud mobility. Doug Ko has an article summarizing the HPE Cloud Volumes news. Also check out the deep dive we did around “Built for Cloud” with a focus on HPE Cloud Volumes at our recent Storage Tech Day.

Here’s what we’ve announced:

• HPE Cloud Volumes now support Docker and Kubernetes containers. About three years ago, I remember sitting down with a friend at VMworld and he explained containers to me. For a mixed environment (of traditional IT and containers), your storage has to support both and we do that with both 3PAR and Nimble – and now Cloud Volumes works with Docker and Kubernetes. Back to the Tech Day, check out the deep dive we did around container orchestration.
• HPE Cloud Volumes will expand into UK and Ireland in 2019.
• Completed SoC 2 Type 1 and HIPPA compliance certifications.

Enhancements to the HPE Storage portfolio

HPE Memory-Driven Flash is a new storage architecture built with Storage Class Memory (SCM) and NVMe. We’re announcing availability with 3PAR starting in December and is expected with HPE Nimble Storage in 2019. This is the industry’s first enterprise storage with SCM and NVMe. HPE Memory-Driven Flash can improve latency by 10X over using NVMe SSDs and lowers latency up to 2X and is 50% faster than NVMe all-flash arrays.

You can get the jump on this by watching my SCM and NVMe for HPE 3PAR and Nimble Storage Chalk Talk but Matt Morrissey has an article diving into this topic. This was also a topic at our HPE Tech Day (are you seeing a pattern here?) so check out that deep dive that explained the benefits for SCM over just using NVMe SSDs.  If you want to see an independent view of this, check out the blog posts from indie blogger Philip Sellers talking about why we jumped to SCM (vs NVMe SSDs, which a lot of the competition is doing) and another from Richard Arnold wrapping up all our storage news.

You have been waiting for it so we’re to also announcing Peer Persistence (synchronous replication) for Nimble Storage. This is included free with all Gen 5 Nimble arrays at no extra cost. We’ll have more on this too but here’s my Peer Persistence Chalk Talk.

HPE also announced an enhanced partnership with Cohesity that addresses the challenges of secondary data sprawl and infrastructure silos by consolidating backup, files, objects, test/dev, and analytics on to a single software-defined scale out platform based on Cohesity software with qualified HPE Apollo and HPE ProLiant servers. Beginning in early 2019, customers can order these solutions as single SKU from HPE that will include Cohesity and supported Apollo and ProLiant servers. Simon Watkins has a blog post with the details that includes a podcast I did with Cohesity at Discover.

And we’re announcing the availability of the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 platform – ideal for big data analytics, scale-out software defined storage and other data centric workloads. We have a blog post from Ashwin Shetty on this topic next that includes a walkthrough of the Apollo 4200 Gen10 video I did in Madrid.

Intelligent storage delivered as a service

I was surprised to hear that today HPE manages 500PB of customer data delivered as a service with HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity. That’s significant given we recently announced GreenLake. We’re expanding it to include consumption-based data protection with Veeam. This enables businesses to protect all the right data from any source for application development and digital services delivery. Including the Veeam Availability Suite with HPE StoreOnce in the HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity solution brings an elastic solution with robust support, and strong integration expertise. Available globally, customers can get started with Veeam and HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity quickly, with no capital outlay, and pay only for what they use.  Monthly charges adjust with usage, and HPE meters and plans capacity so that there is always extra capacity ready to meet customer needs. And I have a blog post for this topic from Don Randall from HPE Pointnext that you should check out for all the details.

But wait, there’s more

To access all of the latest ATSB articles on our Discover Madrid news, we used the label Storage News so they all appear on the same page – or I should say 6 per page as we now have 7 posts about the news and I expect a few more in the next couple of weeks.