By Paul Miller, HPE VP portfolio Marketing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Tom Herrmann, VP Global Strategic Alliances, VMware
Customers tell us their top challenge is to deliver innovation fast enough while controlling cost and risk. This is especially acute when they have to do that across hybrid cloud while trying to ensure security, compliance, and mission-critical availability.
At HPE and VMware, our goal is to help customers solve these challenges through a software-defined approach to deliver a seamless hybrid cloud experience. Throughout our 18-year history of collaboration and innovation between HPE and VMware, we have continued to deliver the industry’s broadest portfolio of integrated and certified solutions. As a result, more VMware solutions run on HPE servers than any other brand.
We want to highlight a few things that fuel our success to make our partnership unique and how it creates value for you.
HPE and VMware: The Past Is Prologue to a Future of Innovation
HPE and VMware share a commitment to innovation as we continue to help customers capitalize on the advantages of the software-defined data center and hybrid cloud. Our customers can save as much as 30-40% on private cloud deployments, provision applications up to 20X faster, and get to market up to 15X faster to capitalize on competitive advantage. Together we are providing secure solutions centered around increasing agility and reducing operational overhead—critical for digital transformation.
Driving Down Costs While Increasing Flexibility with a Modular Architecture
HPE defined the Composable Infrastructure category. With more than 1,600 customers, HPE Synergy is the first platform in the industry architected from the ground up for Composable Infrastructure. It is gratifying to see other competitors validate our leadership, but they are 3 years behind as Phil Davis, President Hybrid IT and Chief Sales Officer noted in this blog post.
HPE Synergy was the first composable infrastructure certified to run VMware Cloud Foundation. HPE Synergy and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) provide a powerful combination to help our customers accelerate their transformation to the software-defined data center. The combined solution provides a modern infrastructure that supports hybrid configurations. Ultimately, HPE Synergy matches VMware Cloud Foundation characteristics—simple, software-defined, and flexible to meet changing workload demands. That means your business can respond to emerging needs faster with a secure platform that consolidates traditional, private, and cloud-native workloads onto a single integrated infrastructure. And that platform drives higher efficiency within the data center through software-defined data management.
Additionally, HPE Synergy reduces complexity and cost through the use of HPE Virtual Connect and eliminates the need for a top-of-rack (ToR) switch. This allows deployment of large scale SDDC environments, driving greater efficiency in the way it scales storage and compute independently — there by helping our customers avoid costly overprovisioning scenarios.
Then there’s the bottom line. HPE Synergy drives down the cost per virtual machine by 29% compared to older blade infrastructures. That’s a compelling value proposition for most any customer!
Making Composable Infrastructure a Practical Reality
How is a traditional hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) different than a composable one? Most traditional infrastructure solutions predate virtualization. As a result, they typically require new physical servers and customized networking and storage solutions to support new applications. Companies often need to build out additional silos of infrastructure to support different workloads — which increases data center costs and complexity. A composable infrastructure eliminates the need for workload‐specific environments. It provides composability-disaggregated compute and storage resources on the same platform. Now your resources can be dynamically combined to meet the unique needs of any application, along with better application performance and a more agile, cost-effective data center overall. With traditional HCI, you scale out compute and storage as a single block. With composable HCI, you can scale them out independently.
HPE Synergy and VMware vSAN deliver the first and leading composable infrastructure available today to run VMware environments. With HPE Synergy, the frame is the base infrastructure that pools resources for compute, storage, and network fabric. Pair this unmatched flexibility with VMware and you have a perfect vSAN composable solution—with complete control to scale compute and storage independently so you can meet workload needs while containing costs. With traditional rack servers, compute and storage don’t scale independently limiting options and increasing costs.
Running Enterprise-Class Apps at the Edge
HPE Edgeline directly integrates with operation technologies (OT) which makes it the industry’s first converged OT solution and the first IoT edge solution certified for running VMware. The combination allows our customers to run the same, unmodified enterprise-class applications and management software stacks at both the edge and in the cloud. It also offers proven data center server-grade processing and storage at the edge.
Imagine the harsh conditions on an oil rig—not ideal for modern data center environments. HPE Edgeline was built with this environment in mind. Customers have successfully deployed this solution in just that kind of challenging environment with more than 100 IoT assets collecting data. Despite the remote locations of the rigs, they are able to perform all the local data collection, reporting, and optimization needed – while maintaining access to global data for company-wide reporting. Most importantly, our customers have a highly available, modular system that they can deploy quickly, without any compromise in performance or capabilities.
Streamline Infrastructure Management
Just announced, HPE OneView 4.1 continues to streamline infrastructure management. Teams can intelligently manage infrastructure as workloads by deploying, updating, and automating clusters with cluster profiles and perform rolling cluster updates directly from vSphere clients. Pre-built integrations for VMware products such as vCenter, vRealize Operations, vRealize Orchestrator, and vRealize Log Insight allow our customers to manage their entire VMware and HPE portfolio from the environment they prefer. By integrating HPE infrastructure management features directly into VMware, administrators can be more efficient as they use familiar toolsets to deploy, manage, and update HPE infrastructure resources directly from the vCenter console.
Teams can deploy a Kubernetes environment from the HPE OneSphere catalog to an existing VMware cluster. The same container workloads can be deployed on a Kubernetes cluster running in AWS or a private VMware cloud without any application code changes, so dev/test and production environments can be in different clouds for agility and cost benefits. That means developers can use standard Kubernetes tools consistently across clouds. And consistency across cloud environments simplifies manageability, increases agility, and improves overall operational efficiency.
We have a large presence at VMworld in Las Vegas and later this year in Barcelona where we will be showcasing many the technologies highlighted above, please visit us at www.hpe.com/events/vmworld.
To learn more about our joint solutions please visit HPE and VMware Alliance pages.
