Global business technology firm, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has unveiled the next phase of its composable strategy, including expanded delivery of cloud services through an open hybrid cloud platform.
The foundation for this cloud platform is composability, and HPE says the announcement, made at its HPE Discover 2018 in Madrid this week, provides new capabilities to accelerate customer innovation, including AI smarts and availability on ProLiant DL and Synergy servers.
HPE says its solution is the industry’s first open hybrid cloud platform based on composability and provides speed, scale, choice and economics.
Of course, for this to make sense, an explanation of just what “composability" is, is in order. Typically, and historically, an infrastructure is rigid – the business has compute, storage and network resources. A workload owns a set of resources, and another workload owns a different set.
{loadposition david08}However, a more fluid set up is to have resource pools dynamically allocating resources as needed, and automatically. In other words, the environment itself composes an infrastructure to meet the needs of a workflow. The silos are broken down so any workflow can come in, use any available resources, then release them back to the pool for the next workflow.
This allows companies to buy less infrastructure, and IT departments to spend less time provisioning and managing infrastructure.
Next, the infrastructure is published as APIs so applications can think of it as code rather than physical devices. This provides greater automation capabilities, and for all of it to be managed by software.
A composable infrastructure, therefore, makes data centre resources as readily available as cloud services. HPE has been walking a journey on transforming its infrastructure to a composable platform, driven by a focus on giving customers cloud agility, code-based server construction and deconstruction, and ease of scale — both up and down — within their own data centre. Ultimately, customers can have their own private and hybrid cloud solutions with decreased administrative effort.
What’s new today is HPE’s announcement on the next phase of its composable strategy, delivering built-in AI-driven operations with HPE InfoSight, additional new intelligent storage solutions, an innovative fabric built for composable environments, and new updates to HPE OneSphere, the as-a-Service hybrid cloud management solution.
The new cloud stack gives customers greater choice across composable-infrastructure building blocks, including rack servers through HPE Composable Cloud for ProLiant DL and the Synergy platform through HPE Composable Cloud for Synergy.
“Our customers want to innovate faster, with greater automation and intelligence,” said Phil Davis, president, Hybrid IT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
“Building on our innovation in creating the composable category and industry-leading HPE Synergy offering, today’s announcement of the HPE Composable Cloud for ProLiant DL and HPE Composable Cloud for Synergy delivers unprecedented customer choice and scale across all clouds. With our new open hybrid cloud platform, enterprises of all sizes can now manage, provision and deliver workloads and apps instantly and continuously to accelerate innovation.”
The new HPE open hybrid cloud platform also makes available a fabric for composable environments, managed as a resource by HPE OneView, simplifying the network, lowering costs and improving operational efficiency. This Composable Fabric was previously introduced inside HPE Synergy and is now available on the HPE ProLiant DL rack server range, self-configuring the network and delivering dynamic workload balancing to improve performance and reduce over-provisioning by up to 70%, HPE says. The Composable Fabric will also be available on HPE SimpliVity.
New updates to HPE OneSphere provides organisations with the ability to provision bare-metal-as-a-service through HPE OneView automation, along with enhanced insights and governance features.
HPE further states Composable Cloud can aid IT departments to deploy new infrastructure up to 90% faster and decrease lifecycle operations up to 97%.
“Organisations are demonstrating an ever-growing appetite for automation, scalability and openness to aggressively accelerate development and operations,” said Thomas Meyer, Group Vice President at IDC. “With composable cloud, HPE aims to deliver a foundational pillar with those attributes in mind to help customers accelerate their digital transformation in a hybrid cloud world.”
HPE Composable Cloud for ProLiant DL rack servers will initially roll out in the US, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia starting in Q1 2019.
HPE SimpliVity with Composable Fabric will be available in December 2018 in the US, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia.
HPE OneSphere is currently available in the US, UK and Ireland, with additional countries targeted in the coming year.