HPE unveils new private cloud & storage services for AI era

HPE has announced an expansion of its private cloud portfolio with new offerings aimed at simplifying hybrid IT modernisation while enhancing cyber resiliency, data availability, and energy efficiency for its storage customers.

The newly announced HPE Private Cloud Business Edition incorporates HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, enabling customers to benefit from reduced virtual machine (VM) licence costs—reportedly by up to 90 percent—and adding estimated total cost of ownership savings of up to 2.5 times through disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI). This move seeks to provide businesses with broader flexibility in managing virtualised workloads across diverse architectures, such as edge environments and data centres.

Fidelma Russo, Executive Vice President of Hybrid Cloud and Chief Technology Officer at HPE, said: "Enterprises are at a pivotal moment in IT modernisation where they must address escalating management complexity and increasing virtualisation costs to free investments for core growth areas. We are the leader in disaggregated infrastructure and our private cloud combines that leadership with new software for unified virtualisation and cloud management. HPE is giving customers the choice, simplicity and cost efficiencies to outpace the competition and re-invest in innovation."

The HPE Morpheus Software family, composed of HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software, is now generally available. The offerings are designed to support unified cloud management for larger enterprises and service providers, with both versions including the HVM hypervisor from HPE and licencing per socket to help reduce total ownership costs. VM Essentials customers will also have the option to upgrade to the full HPE Morpheus Enterprise product.

HPE states that the new AI-driven features automate infrastructure setup and ongoing lifecycle management, with AIOps predicting and preventing up to 86 percent of issues. This automation is intended to free up IT resources and enable simplified oversight of critical systems.

Roberto Valenta, Corporate Technology & Operations IT Manager at Aeropuertos Argentina, commented on the deployment: "HPE Private Cloud Business Edition has paid for itself with what we are saving on legacy support contracts, as-a-service consumption, datacentre space and energy efficiency. The performance, scalability and reliability are the backbone of our mission-critical workloads from flight tracking to airport arrivals and departures. Business Edition powers our vision to deliver faster, stress-free services that reduce waiting, check-in, and security times for flyers."

In support of data protection, Commvault has been named the first ecosystem partner to offer image-based VM backup and recovery for VM Essentials, with the release scheduled for May.

HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software has been validated to run on a range of hardware platforms including Dell PowerEdge servers, NetApp AFF arrays, as well as HPE ProLiant Gen 11 and Gen12 servers. According to HPE, the adoption of ProLiant Gen12 servers could allow customers to save up to 27 percent on virtualisation software, reduce annual power costs by 65 percent, and achieve a seven-to-one reduction in data centre footprint.

The integration of VM Essentials with HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 is reported to lower total cost of ownership by up to 48 percent, increase performance by up to 10 times, and deliver enhanced security capabilities and storage management for the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000.

HPE is also introducing new Cloud Platform Services focused on virtualisation modernisation. These services include dedicated assessments, re-platforming, infrastructure modernisation, data migration, staff education, and ongoing infrastructure management to simplify virtualisation for enterprises of varying sizes.

In the area of data resiliency, HPE unveiled several new guarantees for the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000, designed to protect data, optimise power consumption, and eliminate the risk of data loss or downtime. The Zero Data Loss and Downtime Guarantee offers high-availability and synchronous replication via active peer persistence, while the Cyber Resiliency Guarantee gives users access to recoverable immutable snapshots and expedited recovery support in ransomware scenarios. The Energy Consumption Guarantee ensures system operations remain within set power thresholds for optimal performance.

Jim O'Dorisio, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Storage at HPE, said: "Modern enterprises demand storage that is intelligent by design and agile by architecture. With new guarantees built on our industry-leading AIOps and disaggregated storage, we're delivering a future-ready solution that allow customers to evolve their hybrid cloud data strategy based on business demands."

HPE has also announced expansions to its StoreOnce backup and recovery appliance portfolio with the introduction of the StoreOnce 3720 and 3760 models, which are targeted at remote office, branch office, and small- to-medium-sized business (SMB) deployments. These appliances scale from 18TB to 216TB of local usable capacity, with options to expand to 648TB through cloud storage, and offer 20:1 data reduction and backup speeds up to 25TB per hour. Security features include multi-factor authentication, encryption, and immutable data storage.

The StoreOnce backup appliances are evaluated to provide 67 percent greater density for space-constrained environments and use 29 percent less power, in addition to being compatible with various backup software platforms.