Not unlike the rest of the industry, HPE is moving to a subscription-based, everything-as-a-service business with its GreenLake offering, and earlier this week, the company announced that its storage business is the latest to receive that treatment.
HPE unveiled a new storage-as-a-service subscription model that gives channel partners a cloud software-based provisioning platform with a bevy of features. It features a new Data Services Cloud Console, a suite of new subscription storage data services, as well as new storage systems such as all-NVMe Alletra 6000 and 9000 systems.
The new cloud-based data services are all available with the HPE GreenLake pay-per-use, on-premises cloud services platform.
“Organizations face a complex web of fragmented hardware, software, and manual processes, making it difficult for them to compete and innovate in a constantly changing marketplace,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE in a statement. “HPE was the first to recognize the need to deliver a unified and consistent cloud experience, from edge to cloud, with HPE GreenLake.”
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The latest announcement has been a long-time coming, according to Tom Black, HPE Storage senior vice-president and general manager, but it’s going to elevate the competition across the mission-critical storage market.
“Our CEO, Antonio Neri really came out extremely strongly in 2018, saying that we were going to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company. That wasn’t an idle comment,” Black told reporters on a virtual briefing prior to the official announcement. “With our cloud console, we’re giving people the ability to manage not just their classic data centre assets, but manage their edge assets at scale.”
Black says the key to building the new cloud-native, software-defined storage platform was leveraging Aruba’s cloud-first Aruba Central software and transforming it into a SaaS-based storage-as-a-service platform. Before leading the storage business at HPE, Black was the head of the Aruba cloud-first software switching business.
HPE dropped its storage data services announcement right before Dell Technologies’ touted its own as-a-service platform called APEX during its World Digital Experience conference on May 5.
