This week Hewlett Packard Enterprise (remember: don’t call it HP Enterprise) is unveiling its first major infrastructure product announcements as an independent company since it’s break-off from HP Inc., the printer and PC division.
If the announcements HPE is making at its Discover event in London this week are any indication of future intentions on the infrastructure side, then the company is focusing on helping customers maximize their internal data center operations.
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Perhaps the biggest headline emerging from Discover is the introduction of HPE Synergy – which company officials say is a new class of what it calls composable infrastructure.
The idea behind Synergy is there are pools of compute, network and storage capacity in a single system and a central composer hardware/software tool built into the system automatically configures the resources any application needs. Apps are meant to use the resource, then return it back to the pool for the next workload to use.
HPE Meg Whitman and HPE are making moves this week at Discover in London.
This model is in contrast to users buying siloed racks of compute, network and storage separately and attempting to configure them. HPE says it’s the next-generation advancement beyond hyperconverged infrastructure, which has compute, network and storage components packaged together in a single appliance, but those resources are not as flexibly composable as HPE says Synergy is.
HPE isn’t the first company to approach this idea of composable infrastructure, says IDC analyst Jed Scaramella. Cisco has its own M series of blades that it says are composable as well. HPE says its big differentiator is that Synergy uses a single API (application programming interface) that developers can write their apps to and Synergy will take care of assembling the necessary infrastructure for the applications.
HPE had other big news this week too, including a partnership with Microsoft on public cloud and hybrid cloud computing. Microsoft Azure will be HPE’s preferred public cloud option, while HPE infrastructure will be the preferred hardware for Microsoft private and hybrid clouds. It’s a symbiotic. The move is extra important after HPE announced that it would no longer continue its own public cloud efforts.
HPE is also looking to get into the cloud brokerage management area with the launch of Helion Cloud Service Broker. It’s a market that other companies, like Dell, have attempted to play in with not huge amounts of success. HPE is hoping that the combination of a composable infrastructure, combined with a public cloud platform from Microsoft, and a cloud brokering software will provide an end-to-end infrastructure lineup for customers.
Stay tuned to see if it works.