Taking Composable Infrastructure to the Next Level: HPE Unveils Software-Defined Upgrades to Simplify Hybrid IT

IT today is all about going hybrid. Organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry are looking to transform their technology infrastructures as they seek to become digital businesses. And that often means leveraging private clouds as well as public cloud services in addition to their traditional IT.

The adoption of hybrid IT environments has been on the rise as more companies discover the benefits of such a strategy. In a study released in February 2016, research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) said 58 percent of the 6,159 organizations it surveyed worldwide are embracing cloud by using public or private cloud for more than one or two small applications or workloads. That was up from 24 percent 14 months earlier.1

Respondents said they expected to increase their cloud spending by an average of about 44 percent over the next two years, and more than 70 percent of heavy cloud users said they were thinking in terms of a "hybrid" cloud strategy.

HPE fully understands the trend toward hybrid IT and is committed to making the transition as easy as possible for customers, and to simplifying the management of this new environment once it’s in place. At last year’s Discover London we introduced a new category of composable infrastructure, and then this year in June we launched HPE Synergy, which is at the foundation of our hybrid IT strategy. HPE Synergy lets IT operators treat infrastructure as code, enabling them to deliver infrastructure that can respond as quickly as their organization demands.

Since then, we have been busy validating HPE Synergy with nearly 100 early access customers across a range of industries. I’m pleased to share that HPE Synergy is now available for customers to order.

At this year’s Discover London, we unveiled updates to HPE’s software-defined infrastructure and cloud portfolio that extends HPE Synergy benefits even further. The announcements included:

 

• HPE Hyper Converged 380 Operating Environment, a software update to HPE’s award-winning all-in-one virtualization solution, includes new workspace controls. These allow IT managers to compose and recompose resources for different lines of business, making it easier and more efficient for IT to act as an internal service provider to the organization. HPE Hyper Converged 380 is earning industry accolades for its consumer-inspired user experience that makes managing virtual machines simple for IT generalists – it was recently recognized by CRN as a 2016 Tech Innovator in Data Center Infrastructure.

• HPE Synergy with HPE Helion CloudSystem 10, bringing together our composable infrastructure with our OpenStack®technology-based hybrid cloud platform to enable customers to run bare metal, virtual, containerized and cloud-native applications on a single infrastructure and dynamically allocate and reallocate infrastructure for unmatched agility and efficiency.

 

The latest developments from HPE underscore our aim to make hybrid IT easy for organizations. That has been one of the company’s key strategies since the beginning of the year, and it will continue to be a focus going forward.

Through these new enhancements and increased integration, we’re making it easy for enterprises to run applications in multiple computing environments, whether it’s on traditional IT, their own private cloud or a public cloud service.

Having to string together various technologies in a hybrid IT environment is difficult to do and can take months or even years, depending on the size and scope of the effort. We’re looking to remove that complexity from the process, which is something our customers have been asking for as they move to a hybrid world. To address this, we have been growing an ecosystem of partners to help customers plan for and rapidly implement HPE Synergy into their environment so they can quickly capture the benefits of composable infrastructure.

A true hybrid IT infrastructure should enable companies to migrate business applications and workloads from one computing environment to another seamlessly. HPE Synergy introduced a new class of composable infrastructure that is unmatched by competitors. By extending HPE Synergy with new cloud and hyper-converged offerings, we’re helping customers to deploy and manage infrastructure with cloud speed and efficiency so IT can focus on adding value to the business instead of maintaining infrastructure.

Developments such as the ones unveiled at Discover London are the latest examples of how HPE is helping organizations make a smooth transition to a hybrid IT environment that will help power the business in the years to come.

 

1International Data Corporation, “Cloud View 2016,” February 22, 2016.