Intelligent Storage for the Evolving Data Center Delivered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise

INTELLIGENT STORAGE FOR THE EVOLVING DATA CENTER DELIVERED BY HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

SUMMARY The modern datacenter is rapidly evolving. Composable infrastructure, convergence, cloud solutions, and the rise of advanced analytics are challenging IT architects and IT operations teams alike. Traditional storage infrastructure is limited in its ability to keep pace with this evolution.

Intelligent storage systems learn from the environment and dynamically adjust behavior as needed. This enables smarter data placement, all while predicting future needs and even potential failures. This intelligence also leads to dramatic increases in reliability, while reducing complexity and operational costs.

Moor Insights & Strategy (MI&S) believes Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) delivers solutions that address these complexities with a combination of intelligent management software and storage products engineered for intelligence. HPE offers a set of storage solutions that provide both the performance tiering required for modern workloads and the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled analytics that drive intelligence storage.

DATA HAS BECOME TRANSFORMATIVE Data is changing. The nature of data (and how it is processed) is in the midst of a radical shift. The growth in edge computing, multi-cloud architecture, and advanced analytics in the enterprise brings new data into the datacenter at a volume and velocity that is unparalleled.

Additionally, the rise of architectures such as converged infrastructure, hyper- convergence, virtualization, and composable infrastructure introduces new complexities into the world of enterprise IT.

This shift impacts all elements of IT workflows and influences how software functions and how storage, servers, and datacenters are built. Intelligent storage transforms how data is utilized by embedding knowledge directly into the infrastructure (e.g., storage

access and usage patterns by many of the processing elements that consume that storage).

There are a number of trends guiding this shift.

AI drives the new enterprise. As infrastructures evolve and compute capabilities grow, the nature of business-critical workloads changes as well. Analytics and AI-based decision-making is now a standard part of every enterprise data processing workflow. Analytics are fed by increasingly large amounts of data, not only collected from new sources such as the edge, but also from more traditional sources which are generating larger quantities of data than ever before.

It is a multi-cloud world. The rapid rise of public and private cloud infrastructure offers IT architects even more options to abstract workloads from resources and increase efficiency. While the promise of the cloud is enticing, the reality is that most enterprise IT organizations require a blend of on-premises infrastructure and cloud technologies.

Intelligent storage solutions incorporate technologies that address the complexities introduced by cloud computing models.

FIGURE 1: THE MODERN DATACENTER INFRASTRUCTURE

Source: Moor Insights & Strategy

Data growth is unpredictable. The world of information processing is still coming to terms with the demands of analytics, edge computing, and other new data intensive workloads. Over-provisioning is wasteful and inaccurate growth estimates can stall the momentum of a business.

Storage that is delivered as-a-Service addresses this uncertainty by delivering a consumption-based model that aligns with an organization’s specific needs. This intelligent deployment of storage can dramatically lower capital expenditures and can, according to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, save as much as 30 percent in infrastructure cost.

Data protection is now a critical capability. As enterprises are increasingly fueled by data, the need to protect that data is now a critical part of every IT deployment. Compliance regulations often force stringent data backup requirements, while increasing security threats necessitate the ability to quickly recover data in real-time.

Data protection that spans on-site and cloud-based storage is critical in the modern datacenter. Intelligent data protection leverages intelligent deduplication and automated data placement algorithms to efficiently manage backup and recovery.

Analytics fuel an organization’s decision making, but it is also increasingly utilized by IT organizations to control the infrastructure. Storage solutions that manage data are ideally served by an infrastructure that is AI-driven.

Management tools that utilize machine learning and AI-driven analytics are the cornerstone in the deployment of an intelligent storage architecture.

Virtualization and cloud technologies enable flexibility, but they also drive the need for tools and architectures that simplify and guide decision-making for IT administrators. There are dozens of parameters to consider when making any decision in a dynamic datacenter.

Migrating workloads between various cloud services and virtualized resources requires constant monitoring across the infrastructure, an understanding of the capacities and constraints involved, and the ability to make split-second decisions.

To address the new realities of data, IT organizations must deploy infrastructure that is adaptive and composable. They must gain insights from their data they need to empower it, care for it, protect it, and make it accessible. Storage needs to be intelligent to unlock the data’s potential.

INTELLIGENT STORAGE The complexities of the modern datacenter place tremendous demands on the management of data and storage systems which can quickly become the bottleneck in any datacenter. Intelligent storage becomes the foundation of the hybrid cloud world.

Intelligent storage continuously learns in its hybrid cloud surroundings to provide a transformative data experience that aligns with business needs. To this end, intelligent storage is:

• AI-driven, leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning to provide the foundation for context-aware intelligence about how data should be managed; • Built for cloud, ensuring data is available for any workload located anywhere through its life cycle by quickly extracting actionable insights; • Delivered as-a-Service, with the flexibility required to meet shifting consumption and investment needs.

As workloads migrate between on-premises servers and cloud infrastructure, the mobility of the associated data becomes a critical workflow that must be managed. Migrating compute workloads is a well-understood problem, while the impact on data storage is less obvious.

Unlike applications, stored data has limited portability. For example, large datasets can take hours or days to migrate, potentially inhibiting the movement of a workload between an on-premises resource and a resource in the cloud. At the same time, workloads can have vastly different needs from the storage that provides their data. Analytics and deep learning have different access patterns and performance requirements than a hosted desktop solution, for example. Smart data placement becomes a critical need for IT.

This new way of thinking about data and workload placement naturally requires a fresh examination of datacenter storage architecture. A transformation is occurring in how an organization's information architecture influences its datacenter architecture.

There are tangible benefits to having intelligence built into the datacenter to guide the placement of workloads including cost. Data mobility, including the ability to move data between clouds, is achieved when intelligent storage systems ensure data is deployed where the applications that consume that data are located. The seamless integration and mobility between on-premises data and cloud is a critical attribute of intelligent storage.

Additionally, intelligent storage ensures storage systems deliver the correct set of performance and availability guarantees by learning from the environment and adapting based on usage and workload. This could be supporting high-performance analytics or simply identifying and adapting to shifting virtualized workloads.

A storage system that understands and adapts to its environment can also predict failures before they occur. AI-driven analytics derive insights from intelligent storage systems into emerging challenges and alert IT operations staff before problems arise. In practice, intelligent analytics can deliver an amazing “six nines” (99.9999 percent) of availability.

The foundation of the hybrid cloud world is storage –storage that can learn and adapt, predict failures, manage data in complex multi-cloud environments, and deliver insights into the overall operation of business-critical workflows. These abilities reduce operating expenses while easing the operational burden of IT practitioners.

AI-DRIVEN ANALYTICS AND INTEGRATED MANAGEABILITY Intelligent storage in the hybrid cloud world is driven by quick decisions. These are informed by detailed operational analysis and self-learning across the infrastructure, bridging the traditional datacenter and the cloud. HPE provides this intelligent storage capability with HPE InfoSight and HPE OneView coupled with infrastructure components that are engineered for intelligence.

FIGURE 2: HPE INFOSIGHT

Source: HPE

According to HPE, HPE InfoSight predicts and resolves 86 percent of problems before many HPE customers even know that anything is amiss. This capability plays a crucial role in enabling HPE's “six nines,” or 99.9999 percent, availability across the installed base.

HPE InfoSight is not just for basic storage array operations as it also looks at critical elements of the storage architecture. For example, the solution can assist in troubleshooting VMWare issues by pinpointing the root-cause of performance problems between storage and virtual machines.

Today, HPE InfoSight provides the intelligence behind HPE Storage and is a vital enabler of the hybrid cloud world. HPE is working to extend HPE InfoSight across the infrastructure, bringing the power of AI-driven analytics to the entire datacenter.

HPE OneView is a breakthrough infrastructure management framework and underpins HPE’s intelligence storage. The framework is the foundation of the software-defined datacenter and uses a template-driven approach to provisioning, updating, and deploying servers, storage, and network. This approach dramatically reduces the risk of human error in datacenter operation. HPE OneView works to bring autonomy across the infrastructure and is a crucial enabler of HPE's composable infrastructure vision.

FIGURE 3: HPE ONEVIEW

Source: HPE

MI&S believes HPE InfoSight and HPE OneView give IT operations teams the capability to manage the modern datacenter and work together, along with intelligently instrumented storage solutions, to enable the autonomous datacenter.

BUILT FOR CLOUD Enterprise datacenters are no longer composed just of servers, storage, and networking. New technologies and capabilities enable new models of utility-driven compute which can take the form of both on-premises and off-premises cloud solutions that enable a multi-cloud datacenter.

HPE not only delivers products for the datacenter, but it also provides a comprehensive and growing portfolio of cloud technologies. These cloud solutions integrate with HPE storage solutions to provide a truly intelligent experience for IT that is built for cloud.

HPE Cloud Volumes delivers proven availability that Moor Insights & Strategy believes is more durable than cloud storage. HPE Cloud Volumes allows easy migration of data to the public cloud so dev/ops teams can leverage, using cloud tool sets that they are used to. HPE applies this intelligence to see, manage, and automate storage no matter where the data lives. At the same time, HPE Cloud Bank Storage provides archiving, disaster recovery, and long-term retention. According to HPE customer surveys, this provides a potential savings of as much as 20 times that of a public cloud solution.

DELIVERED AS A SERVICE HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity provides the flexibility of public-cloud infrastructure with an on-premises solution and enables consumption-based usage of resources that are hosted on-site within an enterprise datacenter. This delivers the benefits of on-site infrastructure with the business model benefits of hosted cloud solutions. HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity eliminates overprovisioning to save up to 30% on storage costs by deploying workloads when they are needed, which frees up staff to focus on the business. HPE makes it easy for customers to upgrade and/or migrate to intelligent storage with financial flexibility, which helps reduce the burden of paying for two platforms.

HPE PointNext services teams deploy and manage these solutions directly, taking the pain out of deployment. HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity, as delivered by HPE PointNext, offers pre-configured solutions for workloads such as SAP HANA, Apache Hadoop, open source databases, and a range of others.

HPE STORAGE PORTFOLIO HPE provides a workload-optimized flash portfolio that addresses all of the attributes of intelligent storage. This portfolio also serves as the architectural foundation for seamless data mobility and protection.

HPE Nimble Storage and 3PAR storage arrays are built with hundreds of embedded sensors to measure every aspect of an array’s performance and operation. These sensors are aggregated and digested by machine learning algorithms operated by HPE. The learnings are then used to drive recommendations to both HPE’s customers and support teams, where potential issues can be surfaced before they turn into real problems.

HPE Nimble Storage products deliver best-of-breed performance for mid-range to high- end application workloads. The product set also includes advanced instrumentation that works in concert with HPE InfoSight to drive real-time, AI-driven recommendations to IT operations teams.

FIGURE 4: THE HPE STORAGE PORTFOLIO

Source: HPE

Additionally, HPE 3PAR storage products deliver tier-1 scale capabilities paired with the same InfoSight AI-driven analytics that underlie HPE Nimble Storage products. HPE 3PAR solutions are the storage cornerstone of HPE’s composable infrastructure.

These storage solutions also include data protection technologies. Both HPE Nimble Storage and HPE 3PAR seamlessly integrate with HPE StoreOnce backup solutions as

well as industry-leading data-protection solutions offered by companies like Veeam Software and Cohesity.

Put simply, HPE delivers intelligent storage solutions that match the requirements of workloads across the modern datacenter. These solutions have the flexibility to scale from basic file storage to high-performance data delivery for advanced analytics workloads, all intelligently enabled by HPE’s InfoSight and OneView technologies.

CONCLUSIONS The modern datacenter evolves rapidly and IT Architects and IT operations teams struggle to comprehend and address challenges posed by composable infrastructure, convergence, cloud solutions, and the rise of analytics. Storage moves more slowly than the workloads that consume the underlying data. Meanwhile, data becomes more critical in the world of modern analytics and AI-driven decision making.

MI&S believes HPE delivers solutions that answer the challenges of these new complexities with real technologies that enable the vision of an intelligent and hybrid cloud world.

IT architectures are becoming more complex. HPE InfoSight and HPE OneView, coupled with intelligent infrastructure solutions like HPE Nimble Storage and HPE 3PAR, turn that complexity into convenience.

The hybrid cloud world has arrived.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THIS PAPER

CONTRIBUTOR Steve McDowell, Senior Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy

PUBLISHER Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy

INQUIRIES Contact us if you would like to discuss this report, and Moor Insights & Strategy will respond promptly.

CITATIONS This paper can be cited by accredited press and analysts but must be cited in-context, displaying author's name, author's title, and "Moor Insights & Strategy." Non-press and non-analysts must receive prior written permission from Moor Insights & Strategy for any citations.

LICENSING This document, including any supporting materials, is owned by Moor Insights & Strategy. This publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or shared in any form without Moor Insights & Strategy's prior written permission.

DISCLOSURES This paper was commissioned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Moor Insights & Strategy provides research, analysis, advising, and consulting to many high-tech companies mentioned in this paper. No employees at the firm hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this document.

DISCLAIMER The information presented in this document is for informational purposes only and may contain technical inaccuracies, omissions, and typographical errors. Moor Insights & Strategy disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions, or inadequacies in such information. This document consists of the opinions of Moor Insights & Strategy and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

Moor Insights & Strategy provides forecasts and forward-looking statements as directional indicators and not as precise predictions of future events. While our forecasts and forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forecasts and forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of publication for this document. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forecasts and forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.