Brent Sullivan, VMware, Sr. Director, Global Strategic Alliances
At VMware, we’ve worked closely with HPE to completely change the dynamics of a Software Defined Data Center journey. In the 18 years we’ve been collaborating, we’ve managed to create the industry’s most complete portfolio of tightly integrated and jointly engineered systems – the results of which are bringing brand new efficiencies to our clients.
Showcasing the best of our partnership
It’s always worth explaining where we are with our alliance and the different products available to our customers. We felt that HPE Discover was the ideal place to do this.
At the event, held in Las Vegas, we had several key sessions dedicated to explaining how we collaborate with HPE.
The first was focused on the powerful combination of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and HPE Synergy. Both tools look at how an enterprise can manage infrastructure using software: while VCF simplifies the path to a complete hybrid cloud, HPE Synergy gives organisations the backbone to support their transition to hybrid IT.
In this session, attendees heard about how a joint architecture could power their software-defined data center and support their business with future growth.
Our second session was about securing VMware Horizon virtual desktops with NSX. As attendees were aware, traditional networking security solutions are not cost-effective and can be cumbersome to manage. We explained how NSX takes a new approach by securing east-west traffic within the data center. What’s more, NSX micro-segmentation and edge services can be deployed on HPE Synergy to lead to improved security and simpler networking for VDI.
For attendees who were seeking an innovative solution for storage latency, a session on persistent memory (PMEM) with HPE and VMware vSphere 6.7 offered them a glimpse into what was possible. PMEM offers persistence at near-DRAM memory speeds in large capacities to change the storage versus memory paradigm used by databases, analytics and file systems. Customers will see better business results through dramatically improved database and analytics performance.
The audience was also able to learn from use cases and workflows. These were designed to show how it was possible to leverage PMEM in a vSphere 6.7 environment running on HPE platforms and remove storage latency bottlenecks. As well this, the audience learnt about early PMEM adoption by application developers who were disrupting common design principles.
The final session was focused on next-generation storage architectures with Intel and VMware vSAN. Attendees heard about how the industry-leading, optimized configuration of Intel Xeon Scalable processor, Intel Optane SSDs and VMware vSAN on HPE hardware could provide businesses with high gains in storage performance.
As well as our conference sessions, we also wanted to bring our integrated solutions to life with demos. The first focused on HPE OneView partner integrations with VMware and Microsoft solutions, and the second looked at transforming a software-defined infrastructure on a HPE ProLiant foundation for an always-on resilient enterprise.
We also held a successful training session based on the architecture and features of HPE Recovery Manager Central (RMC), including HPE RMC for VMware and HPE RMC for Microsoft Hyper-V. Those attending had the opportunity to learn how to create snapshots and recovery sets with HPE StoreOnce appliances and how the data can be sent to the cloud with StoreOnce Cloud Bank.
We also managed to find time to give back to the community. In the booth, HPE, Vmware, and our customers put together 300 backpacks stuffed with supplies for Las Vegas area Title 1 schools.
All in all, HPE Discover was a great annual event for us. No doubt next year will be just as exciting, so do make sure you attend.
To learn more about the solutions that were highlighted at Discover, simply visit the HPE and VMWare alliance website.
