LAS VEGAS: Looking to put the past behind it, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has made a number of announcements at Discover 2016, with at least one more major set of IoT announcements still to come. The announcements span everything from flash and containers, to cloud and composable infrastructure, and reinforce HPE’s belief that innovation will separate it from the competition.
During her keynote on Tuesday HPE CEO and President Meg Whitman announced a major customer win, adding at least some of the cloud storage services business Dropbox had previously been buying from Amazon Web Services. Just how lucrative the deal is remains unknown, but HPE is apparently now a big Dropbox customer too.
As interesting as the Dropbox and other customer stories were, the biggest news IMHO was the partnership with Docker. While I’m certain that both parties are free to make similar arrangements with competitors, the deal marries the leader in composable infrastructure and the leader in composable applications, said Docker CEO Ben Golub.
We still have a way to go before composable is a significant piece of the IT puzzle, but containers are really hot. According to IDC, containers have emerged, reinvented by Docker, as a disruptive technology that works in conjunction with VMs and cloud system software.
“Containers are a new form of virtualization that is drawing tremendous interest in the industry as applications shift toward cloud models and are often seen as a direct replacement for hypervisor-based virtualization,” said IDC’s Gary Chen, research manager, Software-Defined Compute. “However, the reality is that containers and VMs work at different layers of the stack and don’t necessarily compete.
The HPE/Docker partnership covers sales, go-to-market, engineering, support, services and knowledge sharing. Deliverables include: Docker ready HPE Servers; Docker ready Converged and Composable HPE Systems; joint go-to-market for Docker Datacenter; and enterprise-grade Docker support and consulting services. In addition they will collaborate on HPE contrainer-enabled technologies that are integrated and tested with Docker; as well as HPE investments to Docker-enable its cloud and software portfolio through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), the Docker plugin framework and Docker Datacenter development licenses.
After Docker, I thought the OneView 3.0 announcement was most interesting. Due out in Q3, OneView is an ‘infrastructure automation engine built with software intelligence that streamlines provisioning and lifecycle management across compute, storage and fabric and enables IT staff can control resources programmatically through a unified API.’
“The world is going to software defined,” said Paul Miller, VP of Marketing, Converged Data Center Infrastructure, HPE. OneView is the brain of converged solutions, and hyperconverged, and composable, he added.
The latest OneView enhancements include: a new global dashboard; simplified end-to-end management of heterogeneous network switches; and integration with HPE Helion CloudSystem 10 which provisions individual physical servers or entire virtualization clusters directly from the CloudSystem console. Additional OneView feature upgrades/news include: new provisioning for HPE ProLiant DL platforms; new monitoring support for the HPE Apollo series; migration from virtual connect environments to HPE OneView 4X faster and with zero downtime or service disruption; and growing partner HPE OneView ecosystem with SaltStack, SUSE, Eaton and nLyte.
A year ago, composable infrastructure was not much more than a conversation, but today it has really changed the way people are thinking about infrastructure, said HPE’s Ric Lewis;, SVP & GM, Converged Data Center Infrastructure. “The beauty of it is instead of just talking about it, we’re delivering it.”
There were a lot of elements to the cloud announcements, which could be broken down into two groups — Helion and Helion managed cloud and service broker capabilities. Due out in the second half of the year, the Helion news included:
-HPE Helion Cloud Suite, a software suite enabling customers to deliver and manage all applications — from traditional, virtualized, cloud native and containers — across a broad range of infrastructure environments;
-HPE Helion CloudSystem 10, a hardware and software solution to build and rapidly deploy an enterprise grade cloud environment and offering integration with HPE OneView 3.0 for automatic provisioning of cloud resources from bare metal infrastructure;
-HPE Helion Stackato 4.0, a complete and open application development platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution, powered by Cloud Foundry, designed to speed the delivery of cloud native applications; and,
-HPE Cloudline 3100 Server, offering industry leading economics for service providers.
The second group included: a new management portal for HPE Helion Managed Cloud; and the addition of Microsoft Azure to the HPE Helion Managed Cloud Service Broker. Both are expected to be available later this year.
While disk is not going to go away — HPE was quick to mention that it still sells tape — flash is the (current) future of storage, and it is quickly replacing disk in applications where speed and performance matter. According to IDC, which just crowned HPE as the new king of storage, flash — both all flash arrays (AFAs), up 87.4% year-over-year to $794.8 million, and hybrid flash arrays (HFAs), accounting for 26.5% of the overall storage market, with $2.2 billion in revenue — is substantially outselling disk. The total enterprise storage market was $8.2 billion for Q1, and revenue declined 7% YoY.
As part of its all-flash datacenter news, HPE announced:
-7.68 TB SSDs are available now, starting from$20,748;
-15.36 TB SSDs will be orderable and shipping 2H 2016, starting from$40,000;
-the Docker-Integrated Volume Plugin for HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage will be available this month from the HPE Storage GitHub page at https://github.com/hpe-storage/python-hpedockerplugin;
-HPE Recovery Manager Central (RMC) with support for SAP HANA and 3PAR File Persona is currently available at no additional charge to customers who have an existing RMC licenses and a valid support contract.; licensing for new customers starts at $1000;
-HPE Recovery Manager Central for Oracle (RMC-O) will be available in July for a list price starting at $2500; customers with an existing 3PAR Recovery Manager for Oracle license and a valid support contract can upgrade at no additional charge; and,
-File Persona enhancements will be available in 2H of 2016.
Taking a break from its hectic Hollywood schedule — it will be featured in the upcoming film ‘Star Trek Beyond’ — The Machine is going open source. HPE has announced it is inviting the open source community to collaborate on its initiative to reinvent the computer architecture, what it is calling Memory-Driven Computing.
The developer tools available now include the following four contributions of code:
-fast optimistic engine for data unification services;
-fault-tolerant programming model for non-volatile memory;
-Fabric Attached Memory Emulation; and,
-performance emulation for non-volatile memory bandwidth.
HPE plans to enhance this code as well as release additional contributions, focused on everything from changes to Linux that enable it to run on The Machine to example applications that demonstrate how The Machine can significantly improve application scale and performance.
DISCLAIMER: Both airfare and hotel were looked after by HPE.