It’s that time of the year again: normally in Las Vegas, this year behind my PC in Belgium: HPE Discover goes virtual because of the reason that we all know meanwhile.
Nevertheless is HPE able to create a complete agenda with a lot of sessions that could interest anyone in the IT world. That is why they call it this year the Edge to cloud event. Through the years HPE has grown its portfolio to run any type of workloads from the edge over the ‘traditional’ core data-center to the cloud… Any cloud.
Also this year HPE adds some exciting announcements of new products to make this portfolio more complete to address the needs in 2021 and beyond.
Lets take a look at the announcements of this week:
HPE GreenLake Lighthouse
First announcement at HPE Discover is HPE GreenLake Lighthouse. Lighthouse will be operational behind the GreenLake Central portal that is the main entrance for HPE GreenLake users. It will make the life of the GreenLake users easier by delivering ready to use blueprints to deploy various workloads in an orchestrated way through GreenLake Central. It will be Lighthouse then that will communicate with the IT infrastructure components like compute, storage, networking and the various hypervisor and container software layers on top of it to deploy these workloads in a faster and more agile way.
All the information that I got so far is that the Lighthouse software will be running on-premises near the ‘gear’ and will it receive the instructions from the GreenLake Central portal through API’s in a secure communication channel.
Initially Lighthouse will be there for Virtual Machines and Container workloads. This will be extended over time for other workloads as well.
As soon as more details become available about Lighthouse I will update this article. Stay tuned!
HPE GreenLake Cloud-native security – project Aurora
The next announcement is called project Aurora.
HPE already had since the release of Gen10 servers a unique security offering with Silicon Root of Trust, where the security of the execution of software on these Gen10 servers can be guaranteed up to the hardware silicon on the motherboard. Several use cases were already shown by HPE where it proofs that untrusted/hijacked firmware will not be executed since not trusted by the silicon on the hardware.
More recently HPE added the Supply Chain trust that guarantees the customer that the server that they are buying is build in their country (mainly for the US) to avoid intrusion of other not-trusted’ individuals, companies or countries.
HPE adds now with Project Aurora and end-to-end trust foundation from the hardware up to the workload layer with the various software layers in between like OS, hypervisor and other middle-ware platforms.
Every layer will be validated and is protecting the layer above, guaranteeing a stronger integrity of data in the entire stack.
With this HPE can increase the data value through attestation and verification, and can identify attacks in a faster way and protect the investments.
As soon as more practical information becomes available I will update this post.
HPE Compute Cloud Console
Maybe the most interesting offering for me being an infrastructure geek (did you take a look at my homelab already?) is the announcement of the Compute Cloud Console. Something that we could expect after the announcement 1 month ago from Data Service Cloud Console (aka Storage Central) and the already long existing Aruba Central.
Where Aruba Central delivers cloud-based management of the Aruba networking wired and wireless devices, and recently Data Services Cloud Console delivers cloud-based management of the new Alletra storage platform, it is now the moment to add a cloud-based management sauce on top of the HPE server portfolio. HPE confirmed there will be no new server line for this, and that the current portfolio will be supported over time.
As soon as I get more details on which platforms and what will be the requirements, I will let you know in this article or through follow-up posts. Stay tuned or subscribe on my blog to get notified automatically.
Just my opinion: for the sake of ease can we just call it Compute and Storage Central please? 😉
HPE ecosystem expansion – Microsoft, Intel, Nutanix, Veeam & Qumulo
HPE expands also its current GreenLake portfolio with some new offerings.
Microsoft
HPE announced the expansion of its HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform to include support for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server. The new HPE GreenLake cloud services deliver the agility and flexibility organizations are looking for in a scalable, simplified, and cloud-native architecture on-premises. Joint customers can consolidate virtualized Windows and Linux workloads for efficiency, and run production workloads using a familiar, hybrid environment. This announcement complements HPE’s broad portfolio of hyper-converged infrastructure offerings now available via HPE GreenLake, including HPE SimpliVity and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI.
This is no small amount of customers, either; according to research from IDC, some 70% of critical production applications remain outside the public cloud, in a secure single-tenant environment and at the edge.
In addition to providing a cloud-like experience, HPE said customers will benefit from a cloud-like operating model as well, as GreenLake is a consumption-based service.
Know that Azure Stack was already part of HPE GreenLake since the announcement in 2018, it is now adding the hyper-converged infrastructure experience in the game as well.
Intel
One announcement that I will need to take a more in-depth look at is the one with Intel. HPE developed together with Intel a first-of-its-kind so unique in the market feature that the ability to activate and add new capacity at a processor and persistent memory level. Which could be important when charging used resources in a pay-as-u-use model in any cloud.
Nutanix
Another announcement in the same area is the one with Nutanix. They announced an expanded partnership to accelerate hybrid cloud and multi-cloud adoption by offering Nutanix Era, a multi-database operations and management solution, bundled with HPE ProLiant servers, as a service through HPE GreenLake. The fully managed cloud service enables customers to deploy applications and databases in minutes and benefit from the agile, elastic, and pay-per-use capabilities of the cloud while gaining the governance, visibility and compliance of an on-premises environment.
Qumolo
Also Qumolo strengthens is partnership with HPE. Qumulo announced an integration with HPE GreenLake Cloud Services to offer customers the Qumulo® File Data Platform delivered as-a-service. This collaboration provides a modern cloud experience with on-premises control to meet the needs of today’s unstructured data demands across industries. This news comes on the heels of Qumulo’s expansion of its global operations to Asia-Pacific and its strategic partnership with HPE to deliver data solutions to that region.
HPE acquires AI start-up Determined AI
1 day before the event HPE announced that it has acquired Determined AI, a San Francisco-based start-up that delivers a powerful and robust software stack to train AI models faster, at any scale, using its open source machine learning (ML) platform.
HPE will combine Determined AI’s unique software solution with its world-leading AI and high performance computing (HPC) offerings to enable ML engineers to easily implement and train machine learning models to provide faster and more accurate insights from their data in almost every industry.
“Determined AI’s unique open-source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure,” said HPE’s Justin Hotard.
The event is free of charge, so feel free to register and attend the live sessions. Afterwards all sessions will be available for replay as well.
Go here to get registered: HPE Discover 2021
More information on the announcements can be found on the HPE Newsroom page: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/discover.html
Side note on the featured image: this is how HPE Discover would look like as a real event, my home office desk is not so impressive so will not post a picture of that…
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