HPE Alletra Unveiled

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced innovations around its Storage-as-a-Service, through expanding its HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. The company is continuing on its shift to a more cloud operations model that is said to address data from edge-to-cloud. With this in mind, the company has announced its new Data Services Cloud Console, Cloud Data Services, and its new cloud-native data infrastructure, HPE Alletra.

12/14/21 – Updated information on HPE Alletra.

Cloud-Based Data Services

To say the cloud has changed things is an understatement. Cloud experiences went from a nice touch to almost a necessity for some customers. More so, customers want a unified and consistent cloud experience throughout. HPE first began answering this call when it introduced its HPE GreenLake Cloud Servies. The company is now building on the strategy behind this idea. According to HPE, they will enable their customers to break down silos and leverage data, wherever it resides, with unified data operations.

HPE has a vision of Unified DataOps, they see this as a path for their customers to accelerate innovation that is driven by data. These insights are important but data is exploding in every step of the process from edge-to-cloud. Exploding data rates increase the chance for insights but also increase complexity which tosses monkey wrenches into everything, fragmenting data visibility everywhere.

Unified DataOps is designed to integrate data-centric policies, cloud-native control, and AI-driven insights to eliminate the silos and complexity of data management and infrastructure, drive operational agility across edge-to-cloud, minimize business risk, and accelerate data-driven innovation. Doing so brings HPE closer to its new goal of becoming an edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company.

In order to hit this vision, the company has announced the three following innovations: Data Services Cloud Console, Cloud Data Services, and HPE Allerta.

HPE Data Services Cloud Console

First up is the Data Services Cloud Console. As the name suggests, this is a cloud console with the goal of delivering cloud operations and unified data operations as a service. This isn’t all brand new, instead, it is built on proven technology (the same technology that underpins Aruba Central). The new console will offer a unified API for HPE-led automation for applications, partner-led, and custom-built data services, and gives developers access to infrastructure and data as code.

HPE will be delivering new cloud data services through the above announced Data Services Cloud Console. This includes the new Data Ops Manager. The company states that this service is for global management of data infrastructure from anywhere, from any device, and intent-based provisioning that brings a paradigm shift to data infrastructure provisioning with an AI-driven, application-centric approach that enables self-service, on-demand provisioning, eliminates guesswork and optimizes service level objectives (SLOs).

They shared a demo of their intent-based provisioning with us demonstrating that storage can be deployed in minutes. Users need to answer just four questions: What type of workload do you need? How many volumes do you want to create? How much storage is needed on each volume? And, Which group of hosts need access to this storage?

Once you have that info, click continue, and it automatically begins to provision and selects the proper hardware for use. It does give you the option to change systems if you like.

After that, users can assign a volume a name and according to HPE, that’s that. The volume is created and attached to the host. Of course, this was a pre-recorded demo and in real-life you may hit a few snags, impressive nonetheless.

HPE Alletra

Finally is the new cloud-native data infrastructure, HPE Alletra. Like everything announced, Alletra is also managed by Data Services Cloud Console. Aimed to deliver a cloud operational experience from edge-to-cloud, HPE Alletra is said to do it all through a single experience.

Customers no longer need to choose hardware as Alletra will run on all-NVMe HPE systems. The two systems include the HPE Alletra 9000, aimed at mission-critical work, and the 6000, aimed at business-critical with six 9’s of availability. The company states that customers will have full visibility and will pay-as-they-go. All of the above is said to be wrapped in AI intelligence that should result in faster troubleshooting and less downtime.

So this raises the important question: Is this a preview of HPE’s future? The company hinted at cloud-centric HPE Primera and Nimble, but also intends to continue on normal releases of the product. If Alletra is successful, it would be of no surprise for the company to continue to add products under that umbrella.