Earlier this month, HPE announced their new HPE Alletra Storage MP offerings. During the announcement, CEO Antonio Neri reiterated HPE’s commitment to customers from four years ago to make everything in HPE’s portfolio available ‘as a service’ under the HPE Greenlake branding and services. The move to ‘as a service’ represents a changing customer demand and need for flexibility while keeping complexity at bay.
This month’s storage announcement is much more than just moving storage ‘as a service’. As enterprises are moving to consolidate the complexity of their operations while remaining flexible to meet their ever-changing needs, Alletra aims to address this from a storage perspective.
Enterprise data management
Over time, the data landscape has grown incredibly complicated. Alletra takes a swing at simplifying, and protecting, the data landscape for enterprises through a single experience.
Enterprise data used to be consolidated in corporate data centers. Today, data is spread from edge-to-cloud and in a myriad of silos. Simplifying the data estate is a must but, in reality, incredibly complicated.
Alletra’s approach is automation and intelligence while breaking down the silos for both block and file storage. The solution leverages an AI-based cloud operation to manage the data estate from edge to cloud. Tom Black, EVP and GM of HPE Storage put it best in pointing out that Alletra provides a “single interface to management all of your data across on-prem and cloud.” This is a big step forward for enterprise storage.
The complexity around data for enterprises is not new. However, Alletra addresses many of these complexities with a single, automated solution to manage the ever-growing data estate.
HPE Alletra under the hood
As mentioned, Alletra manages both file and block storage. No need to continue managing them separately. Alletra’s modular approach eliminates the need to purchase different solutions of varying sizes for each need.
Managing data resources is one thing. Protecting them is another thing entirely. Alletra’s new file, block and protection services come, in part, from their acquisitions of VAST Data and Zerto.
The integration of VAST and Zerto into Alletra creates a simplified approach that also brings simplicity to protection of data. Providing protection to data has long-since been a problem for enterprises. Alletra integrates both file and block storage along with protection of data. Now enterprises can create policies across their entire storage estate.
Alletra is 100% SaaS-based which means it can be setup in a matter of minutes across a customer’s entire storage fleet. As part of the intelligence build into Alletra, it can also recommend deployment options.
Beyond foundational block and file storage, Alletra includes the intelligence to support sophisticated applications like SAP running on top. Understanding top-tier, complicated applications is key and often a bridge too far for many infrastructure solutions.
Final thoughts
HPE’s Alletra storage announcements bring a huge opportunity for customers leveraging HPE Greenlake by simplifying a historically, and increasingly complicated space. Adding data protection along with application awareness further simplifies the solution and builds confidence among customers that a) their applications are supported, b) applications are protected and c) data policies can be enforced.