HPE Debuts Framework, Ezmeral Unified Analytics, Cloud Data Protection

Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Tuesday debuted the Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework and new platforms for hybrid cloud deployments. Ezmeral Unified Analytics will address the surge in organizations’ data, while new services will take aim at cyberattacks. All in all, the vendor intends to help customers enact digital transformation, modernize their data practices and protect assets from cyberattacks. Throughout all of that, it remains focused on the hybrid and on-premises markets, rather than public cloud.

HPE’s Keith White

“While the majority of data still resides on-premises, and not in the public cloud, other types of data that is collected, processed and managed at the edge – outside of traditional data centers or public clouds – is expected to grow to more than 50% at the edge by 2023, according to Gartner,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Commercial Business Group.

With that in mind, HPE released its Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework.

“HPE is providing organizations with the industry’s most comprehensive set of proven methodologies that identify the critical capabilities required to achieve an optimal hybrid cloud operating model for their business needs,” White said.

The framework applies regardless of where an organization lies in its cloud journey, White said.

Importantly, HPE is emphasizing business outcomes rather than specific technologies, through the use of its framework. The longtime hardware vendor, though, will indeed push the its infrastructure products in sales opportunities, representatives conceded during a Q&A with journalists. Certainly that bodes well for HPE channel partners seeking to help customers do hybrid cloud deployments with the brand.

What Makes Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework Different?

HPE developed the framework after more than a decade of helping organizations implement cloud. And it stands out from rivals’ approaches, White said.

“Unlike other frameworks, which are largely focused on transitioning to public cloud environments, our framework specializes in broader transformations across private cloud, public cloud and the edge,” White said.

Domains within the HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework include Strategy and Governance, People, Operations, Innovation, Applications, DevOps, Data and Security. Partners can help clients assess their maturity levels across these fields and benchmark themselves against peers.

“In addition, it provides organizations with a common vernacular and aids in developing an actionable roadmap to meet critical digital imperatives to support a path to modernization,” White said.

HPE’s GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud Platform targets on-premises environments with services including support for storage, AI, machine learning, high-performance computing and container management.

Moving Over to Data: Ezmeral Unified Analytics

Meanwhile, on the data side, Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, said Ezmeral Unified Analytics represents the first cloud-native solution on-premises. It’s also open source, so enterprises avoid proprietary technologies.

“Until now, organizations have been stuck with legacy analytics platforms that were either built for a pre-cloud era and lack cloud-native capabilities, or require complex migrations to public clouds, risking vendor lock-in, high costs and forcing adoption of new processes,” Lall wrote in a Sept. 28 blog.

Ezmeral Unified Analytics will solve those problems, Lall said. It will do so by …

… housing a variety of analytics, SQL and data science users, for starters. Plus, clients can expect reduced ownership costs of up to 35%. There are good reasons for that, Lall said.

HPE’s Vishal Lall

“Instead of requiring all of your data to live in a public cloud, HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics is optimized for on-premises and hybrid deployments, and uses open source software to ensure as-needed data portability,” Lall said.

Ezmeral Unified Analytics can work with large data sets (also called “lakehouses”). Get the scoop on all the technology enablement and details in Lall’s blog.

For partners, the big takeaway comes in the form of more choice to offer customers.

“HPE Ezmeral is advancing the data analytics market with continued innovations that fill a gap in the market for an on-premises unified analytics platform, helping enterprises unlock insights to outperform the competition,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president at IDC.

Also as part of the Ezmeral portfolio, HPE unveiled Data Fabric Object Store. It combines S3-native object store, files, streams and databases into one data platform. It works from the edge to the cloud. HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Object Store lets users orchestrate apps and data, no matter where they reside, from one interface. It’s available on bare metal and Kubernetes-native deployments.

More on the Ezmeral Portfolio

Both HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics and HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Object Store will be available as HPE GreenLake cloud services. The analytics portfolio will go live in November; the data fabric offering will come in 2022’s first quarter.

HPE launched the Ezmeral Marketplace last March. ISVs create analytics engines and environments. To that point, HPE on Tuesday named six new ISV partners: NVIDIA NGC, Pepperdata, Confluent, Weka, Ahana and gopaddle.

The Ezmeral Partner Program now features 37 solution partners. These partners offer expertise in big data, AI/ML, Apache Spark and more.

Everyone Needs Data Protection These Days

Finally, HPE introduced its new GreenLake cloud services for hybrid cloud data protection. These take aim at cyberthreats and ransomware. The reality of cyberattacks looms every day for organizations, having soared since COVID-19 sent people to work from home. To help combat those problems, HPE now offers data protection as a service.

“It is completely effortless to install,” said Omer Asad, senior vice president of HPE Cloud Data Services.

Tom Black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage, agreed.

“Now customers can secure their data against ransomware, recover from any disruption, and protect their VM workloads effortlessly across on-prem and hybrid cloud environments,” Black said. “While these are game-changing outcomes for customers, I’m equally as excited about the future of making data protection as simple as configuring recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives.”

For HPE Storage itself, the new platform further serves the transformation of the division into a cloud-native data services business, Black said. As such, the DPaaS platform offers Zerto’s disaster recovery service with backup from HPE Backup and Recovery. (HP bought Zerto this year.)

“These new services give customers the flexibility to modernize data protection – from rapid recovery to ransomware protection to long-term data retention – either on-premises or in the public cloud with operational simplicity,” Black said.

HPE GreenLake for data protection also includes HPE Backup and Recovery Service for VMware.

The data protection platform comes with the InfoSight App Insights, too. HPE Partners can view customers’ application workloads and keep them optimized. As part of that, HPE talked up its CloudPhysics SaaS service. That feature simulates a cloud migration, optimizes workload placement and assesses infrastructure. In essence, it gives partners the information they need to tailor hybrid cloud solutions for their clients. Indeed, partners get to have “strategic conversations” and increase their close rates, said Sandeep Singh, vice president of marketing at HPE Storage.

All HPE partners – think ISVs, colo providers, service providers, distributors and traditional channel partners – may sell and deploy each of the new platforms.