The company has announced more details about its composable data fabric strategy, made possible by extending its StoreVirtual technology across all its form factors, to serve as the basis of its strategy for making software-defined ubiquitous in the date centre.

Ric Lewis, SVP and GM, Converged Data Centre Infrastructure at HPE

LAS VEGAS – Today, at HPE Discover, HPE announced that they have extended their software-defined storage strategy. The company first announced its composable data strategy a year ago at Discover. Now they have presented much more detail, announcing they have created a composable data fabric through the extension of their StoreVirtual technology throughout their data centre form factors, and also announced plans to extend it to the relatively few components it does not yet touch.

“A year ago we were saying this and no one had ever heard it before,” said Ric Lewis, SVP and GM, Converged Data Centre Infrastructure at HPE. “We had a bold vision of an infrastructure that could flex to the needs of any workload. The idea was to get the infrastructure to flex dynamically to the needs of workloads and give a cloud-like experience in the customer’s own data centre.

“We announced this last year, but had been working on it for three or four years,” Lewis added. “Now, instead of just talking about it this year, we are delivering it.”

“This wasn’t something we suddenly came up with,” said Manish Goel, SVP and GM Storage. “The trend lines have been there for a decade or more. First came converged, which hid the complexity of integration, but there wasn’t fundamental change in how the stack was conceived. It was just hidden from the customer. Since then we have been on a mission to virtualize every level of the stack.”

“The all-flash data centre and software defined storage is something we have talked about for the last five years, and one of the things we are announcing here is around software defined storage,” said Brad Parks, director of go-to-market strategy and enablement for HPE Storage.

Specifically, what HP is doing now is announcing that it is implementing a strategy to unify all data centre storage assets as a combined resource pool through adding their StoreVirtual SAN software technology to each.

“We call this approach a composable data fabric, and it’s made possible by our proven StoreVirtual technology,” said Kate Davis, worldwide manager for Software-Defined Storage Marketing at HPE. “StoreVirtual provides a set of common data services that are embedded in every ProLiant server and Hyper Converged appliance, as well as HPE Synergy, Helion OpenStack, and newer infrastructure for Network Functions Virtualization. Integration with a management API — in this case, HPE OneView — allows for manipulating that capacity as a combined whole while also accessing associated compute and networking. All of it is orchestrated in software.”

“We have created this distribution engine for software defined storage that spans every model,” Parks said. “We are starting to see interest from service producers and other customers in doing this, but who don’t want to do it in pieces, and by having the same software stack across all form factors, we are able to deliver that.”

While the StoreVirtual technology is not new to HPE – it was originally acquired with LeftHand networks in 2008 and redeveloped and rebranded over time – using it in this way, as the basis for a common platform, is new.

“That’s a crucial shift compared to what we’ve had previously, in which individual standalone instances would be virtualized,” Davis said. “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.”

HPE is now announcing plans to extend StoreVirtual support for both structured and unstructured data across bare metal, virtualized, and containerized applications. Parks said the plan is to deliver on these over the year.

HPE OneView, which began life as a server management tool, has been greatly expanded into a broader management role.

“We’re also enhancing HPE OneView to make it easier to automate management of all data center resources,” Davis said. We have also upgraded support to include both the Hyper Converged 380 and Synergy, the industry’s first fully composable infrastructure system.”