Hewlett Packard Enterprise used day one of its Discover conference for IT professionals and decision-makers in Las Vegas as the launching pad for a host of new partnerships and products.
Chief among them is a new global alliance agreement with Docker Inc., the popular San Francisco-based maker of containerization software that enables solution providers and IT departments to build and deploy platform-agnostic applications. The new deal commits HPE and Docker to collaborative sales, engineering, support, services, and knowledge sharing ventures aimed at helping customers more easily embrace agile development methodologies.
“In order to survive and thrive in the idea economy, companies must transform the IT experience so that lines of business and developers can innovate faster, smarter and fearlessly,” said Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of HPE’s Enterprise Group, in a press statement. “Together with Docker, we are making it easier for IT to deploy and manage containers, while giving organizations solutions that optimize their investments and power a new generation of applications that are the business.”
Docker integration figured prominently in one of HPE’s product announcements today as well. Beginning this month, a new Docker-Integrated Volume Plugin will enable HPE’s flash-optimized 3PAR StoreServ arrays to provide persistent storage for Docker containers.
Other flash storage enhancements announced today include the addition later this month of a new 7.68 TB solid-state drive to the 3PAR family and the further addition in the second half of the year of a 15.36 TB SSD. According to HPE, the new drives turn HPE 3PAR StoreServ devices into the densest and most scalable all-flash arrays in the industry.
Also unveiled today at Discover were:
- A new “composable data fabric” vision that utilizes HPE StoreVirtual technology to turn disparate data center storage assets into a unified, software-defined resource pool.
“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,” wrote Kate Davis, HPE’s worldwide manager for software-defined storage marketing, in a blog post.
- Updates to the HPE Helion cloud portfolio, including a new software suite for delivering and managing traditional, virtualized, cloud native, and containerized applications; Helion CloudSystem 10, a new combination hardware/software solution for building and deploying enterprise-grade cloud environments; a new platform-as-a-service offering named HPE Helion Stackato 4.0; the new HPE Cloudline 3100 server; and new HPE service offerings for IT transformation and workload migration.
“Organizations require their own right mix of traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds and the flexibility to support applications spanning different technologies, architectures and delivery models. The HPE Helion portfolio gives customers a simple, powerful set of options, offering the breadth and coverage they need,” said Bill Hilf, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Cloud, in a press release.
- The launch of OneView 3.0, the latest edition of HPE’s infrastructure automation solution. The new release includes a dashboard that provides a centralized view of globally-distributed physical, virtual, hyperconverged, and composable resources; simplified management of network switches via integration with HPE’s Intelligent Management Center; and support for provisioning individual physical servers or entire virtualization clusters through integration with HPE Helion CloudSystem 10.
“Our mission is to make IT simple for customers. Whether they are managing and maintaining infrastructure, running traditional applications or developing new revenue generating services on cloud native applications, HPE OneView is the infrastructure automation engine built to make that all possible,” said Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager for converged data center infrastructure at HPE, in a press statement.
- Immediate support for SAP HANA data sources in HPE’s Recovery Manager Central solution and support for Oracle databases beginning next month.
HPE’s Discover event continues through Thursday.
