Highlights:

  • The new platform is composed of composable, standardized building blocks that can be configured for various software-defined storage requirements, including switches, commodity storage, and compute nodes.
  • The brand-new GreenLake for Block Storage is touted as the first scale-out, disaggregated block storage to offer a 100% data availability guarantee.

In addition to announcing new disaster and backup recovery data services with uptime guarantees, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. recently launched an offering of hybrid file and block storage which will be available on-premises with as-a-service pricing.

The company’s two-year-old HPE Alletra Storage platform, which aims to provide on-premises storage with cloud-like management, is the foundation for the new file and block offerings.

Alletra Storage MP is the new modular storage solution that scales independently and supports block and file stores on the same hardware.

No matter the workload or storage protocol, the company said that a single cloud platform is used to deploy, manage, and orchestrate data and storage services.

The new platform comprises composable, standardized building blocks that can be configured for various software-defined storage requirements, including switches, commodity storage, and compute nodes. The hardware will be offered as-a-service through HPE’s GreenLake portfolio, enabling customers to manage on-premises equipment like a cloud service.

Dave Vellante, the Chief Analyst at the market research firm Wikibon, said, “HPE has declared 2023 the year of storage. This is a positive in that a focus on storage could bring about a mix of higher gross-margin business.”

High-Speed File Storage

GreenLake for File Storage is a service that manages workloads having intense data with a capacity of hundreds of gigabytes per second. The service, which combines flash storage from Vast Data Inc. and GreenLake cloud management, is based on a disaggregated, shared-everything, modular architecture created for the exabyte scale, according to HPE.

The newly-launched GreenLake for Block Storage has been named as the first scale-out, disaggregated block storage that guarantees 100% data availability. In addition to being optimized for mixed workloads, HPE offers a better price/performance ratio than previous storage platforms.

According to Simon Watkins, Senior Manager of worldwide product marketing for HPE storage and cloud data services, a user of the company’s 3PAR 7000/8000 storage array can switch to GreenLake for Block Storage and get comparable performance for half the cost, 66% better price/performance, and a 100% availability guarantee with cloud-like management.

Cloud Experience On-Premises

The latest offering “brings the speed and agility of the cloud experience to your on-prem storage,” Watkins wrote. “HPE GreenLake for Block Storage simplifies operations across the lifecycle — from rapid deployment to automated provisioning to invisible upgrades.”

With GreenLake for Block Storage requiring a monthly subscription fee, Alletra Storage MP will be sold on a capital expenditure basis.

Backup, recovery, and disaster recovery are now all supported by GreenLake in a unified manner. Using the global cloud platform from HPE, GreenLake for Disaster Recovery offers continuous data protection across numerous virtual machines in a unified, automated manner.

By utilizing unified management and a single data catalog for workloads running on private and public clouds, GreenLake for Backup and Recovery secures on-premises and cloud workloads. Additionally, it offers entirely as a service orchestration based on policy and billing based on consumption.

Although HPE has no on-premises alternative to S3 object storage of Amazon Web Services Inc., HPE is reportedly close to launching one.

HPE has historically squeezed storage R&D and had to catch up through acquisitions, according to Vellante. Nevertheless, these updates are a positive sign that the company is getting the best out of homegrown and outside technologies. He said, “While many of those acquisitions have paid off, Antonio Neri is setting a course better balancing organic investments, partnering and acquisition. This announcement contains all three, with HPE storage OS intellectual property, the VAST file system and Infosight AIOps from Nimble.”