Simplifying and Unifying the Data Center with a Composable Data Fabric
Blog Post
By Kate Davis
More data than ever is flowing to and through data centers. To get a handle on it all, CIOs and data center operators are seeking efficiency through software-defined storage (SDS). An estimated 68 percent of IT decision makers surveyed by Enterprise Strategy Group said they had committed to SDS-based projects this year alone, while Gartner predicts that the market for SDS will overtake the traditional enterprise storage market by 2020.
At Discover, we'll take SDS further with a vision for unifying all data center storage assets as a combined resource pool that can be flexed and paired with compute and networking to address any workload -- seamlessly and instantly. We call this approach a composable data fabric, and it's made possible by our proven StoreVirtual technology.
Specifically, StoreVirtual provides a set of common data services that are embedded in every ProLiant server and Hyper Converged appliance, as well as HPE Synergy, Helion OpenStack, and newer infrastructure for Network Functions Virtualization. Integration with a management API -- in this case, HPE OneView -- allows for manipulating that capacity as a combined whole while also accessing associated compute and networking. All of it is orchestrated in software.
That's a crucial shift compared to what we've had previously, in which individual standalone instances would be virtualized. Server storage would sit alongside Hyper Converged storage which would sit alongside bare metal, and so on. Nothing worked cooperatively. Composable data fabric changes that.
There's a lot that goes into bringing a composable data fabric to life. Supporting every type of storage instance is key, and so at Discover we're announcing plans to extend StoreVirtual support for both structured and unstructured data across bare metal, virtualized, and containerized applications.
We're also enhancing HPE OneView to make it easier to automate management of all data center resources. We have also upgraded support to include both the Hyper Converged 380 and Synergy, the industrys first fully composable infrastructure system.
Lastly, we're beefing up the Distributed Cloud Networking platform with further automation and cloud orchestration across physical, virtual, and container applications while support for 25 gigabit Ethernet ensures that servers and storage have the bandwidth for peak performance.
Put simply, with a composable data fabric we're bringing you one step closer to what Forrester Research calls the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), in which infrastructure is expressed as code.
And it comes at an important time. The Idea Economy is putting pressure on organizations of all sizes to bring new ideas to market at cloud speed. Infrastructure can be made to deliver that, but only if it's built from the ground-up for composability. With StoreVirtual, OneView, and HPE Synergy, we now have that sort of platform. We invite you to come learn more about it at Discover. See you in Las Vegas!
Kate Davis, worldwide manager for Software-Defined Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has spent the last decade bringing to market unique storage technologies.