HPE Beefs Up Intelligent Storage Strategy, Introduces New Class

HPE DISCOVER MADRID — Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Tuesday focused a handful of storage announcements on product enhancements, expansions and the introduction of HPE Memory-Driven Flash. The announcement was made at HPE Discover 2018 in Madrid.

In addition to introducing the new HPE Memory-Driven Flash, the vendor announced advancements to its Artificial Intelligence for Operations (AIOps) platform called Infosight; expansion of HPE Cloud Volumes to the U.K. and Ireland; an enhanced partnership for secondary workloads with Cohesity; and the expansion of HPE GreenLake for backup to include Veeam.

“The message that we want to bring to the market is around the concept of intelligent storage and what AI is doing to the infrastructure,” Ivan Iannaccone, vice president and general manager 3PAR at HPE, told Channel Futures. “AI is amazing and is certainly making storage less boring.”

HPE is expanding workload management by adding machine-learning (ML) capabilities to HPE InfoSight, part of its 2017 Nimble acquisition. HPE incorporated the InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform on 3PAR, just months after acquiring Nimble.

The latest ML intelligence capabilities reduce risk and manual work when planning for new workloads, the company said They include:

HPE’s Ivan Iannaccone

Focusing on the more storage-centric news, HPE introduced a new class of storage built with Storage Class Memory (SCM) and NVMe – HPE Memory-Driven Flash. HPE Memory-Driven Flash accelerates application performance for HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble storage.

According to HPE, the new storage offers lowers latency up to 2x and is up to 50 percent faster than all-flash arrays with NVMe solid state drives (SSDs).

“Not only is this new media but it will change the way we think about block services in the next 10 years,” said Iannaccone.

HPE developed the HPE Memory-Driven Flash in partnership with Intel and also leverages the next generation of NVME. Availability is scheduled for next month for HPE 3PAR, as a non-disruptive upgrade, and availability for HPE Nimble storage is expected in 2019.

HPE Cloud Volumes is a multicloud storage service currently available in North America. Availability is being expanded to the U.K. and Ireland in 2019. HPE Cloud Volumes service capabilities are also being expanded including support for container platforms, such as Docker and Kubernetes; and completed SoC 2 Type 1 certification for customers with stringent compliance controls and HIPAA compliance for health-care customers.

HPE’s enhanced partnership with Cohesity for secondary workloads and backup over hybrid cloud is now qualified for HPE Apollo and HPE DL 380 servers.

Additional enhancements to HPE’s storage portfolio include: Peer Persistence for HPE Nimble storage, for always-on availability for enterprises through multi-site synchronous replication with automatic failover; and the availability of the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 platform for data-centric workloads.

HPE’s GreenLake, which is a-consumption-as-a-service model for backup as a service now includes Veeam software — that’s in addition to integration with Commvault.