Antonio Neri took over as HPE’s CEO in February last year. Since then we’ve seen some senior management changes and a refocusing of the company’s messaging. HPE is one of the most important suppliers of enterprise IT equipment – second to Dell EMC in servers, third in storage systems behind Dell EMC and NetApp and third behind Cisco and Huawei in enterprise networks (see my Figure). It is also one of the largest suppliers of enterprise systems management software. Its OneView offering – retained when most of its software was offloaded to Micro Focus in 2017 – is widely used by large organisations, especially in government, manufacturing and telco sectors.
At HPE Discover in Madrid in November last year HPE announced its Composable Cloud strategy – an advanced set of elements from which its largest customers can build on-premise systems integrated with multi-cloud services (see my Figure). The components are:
- Cloud Advisory and Professional Services – provided by PointNext, which is HPE’s services arm retained after the majority was offloaded to CSC to form DXC.
- OneSphere – its SaaS-based multi-cloud management solution, which currently covers AWS, Azure, Google, Cloud 28+ public cloud services alongside VMWare and KVM hypervisors, bare metal servers and Azure stack running on-premise; it allows users to manage compliance and controls, workload-optimised applications, managed services, storage and ‘composability’.
- OneView – its IT infrastructure management software solution, which works with unified (high-level RESTful) APIs to allow users to deliver template-driven lifecycle management.
- Composable Fabric – this layer in the model is based on the company’s Synergy converged infrastructure platform and enhanced with its acquisition of Plexxi in 2018; it allows customers to build out cloud, IT Operations, DevOps and facilities ‘engines’ and developer toolkits.
- InfoSight – this software, which came in with the acquisition of Simplivity, provides server and storage management functions; it sits over the top of the virtualised hardware, allowing admins to predict and avoid problems. In use HPE claims it will allow SDN solutions to be set up without extensive networking knowledge.
- Intelligent Storage – its storage ‘system’ using ML and AI to provide data management in a hybrid cloud environment.
- GreenLake – HPE’s pay-as-you go model allowing users to add or subtract storage capacity without having to open a purchase order for new arrays.
By announcing the architecture HPE is able to demonstrate its hard work in designing software-defined virtualised systems, allowing administrators to monitor and manage their resources through tools based on ML and AI algorithms. Traditionally HPE’s system required a lot of manual scripting, so it’s good to see it adding automation. It has spent a lot of energy over the years adding security through encryption and authentication to its equipment; users should also be able to add modern MDR services over the top. It has a theoretical advantage in allowing more East/West network traffic in the composable fabric layer than the typical North/South traffic of traditional ‘leaf and spine’ SDN approaches, including Cisco’s ACI.
In practice HPE’s architecture can be used to build sophisticated systems. My Figure shows an elemental view, closer to how a physical system will be built. Obviously the number of specific components available at launch was limited – such as the inclusion of just VMWare’s vSAN and Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform in the ‘partner ecosystem’ layer. Existing HPE customers won’t be able to use older HPE, or much gear from other vendors, in building one of these systems; but that perhaps is not the point. In announcing and demonstrating its Composable Cloud HPE demonstrates the depth of its knowledge and vision in building highly virtualised hybrid cloud systems bridging on-premise, cloud services and pay-as-you go parts. The announcement shows product capability, rather than a specific product.
All enterprise IT vendors want to embed products with their Intellectual Property (IP) into their high-end systems. Server market suppliers fall into two groups. In particular:
- Suppliers of proprietary servers (IBM and Oracle) spend a lot of time making sure they can form part of the open world by adding Linux and integrating their processors into the Open Source software world.
- Suppliers of ‘industry standard’ servers (HPE and all the others) spend a lot of time making sure their solutions can be stitched together to make sophisticated large-scale solutions equivalent to the proprietary ones.
Understandably neither of these groups can achieve its aim completely, but we can’t blame them for trying. Failing would make the first set irrelevant and the second, commoditised.
HPE’s Composable Cloud is not particularly easy to comprehend, even for those of us following the company closely. Nevertheless it demonstrates a strong vision of how to build more efficient, flexible systems and the kind of resources its PointNext services division can use to deliver future consumption-based offerings. I’m looking forward to seeing one of these systems working in practice.
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