HPE’s cloud announcements at its Discover event had a decidedly multi-cloud texture, as the company announced four new and refreshed cloud solutions.

LAS VEGAS – At its Discover customer event here, HPE announced four product updates to its HPE Helion cloud portfolio. While its Helion public cloud may be gone, the company is doubling down on its hybrid and private cloud capabilities with the enhancements to its portfolio, attempting to turn what has been something of a weakness in the past into an area of strength.

“We are making a number of enhancements to our cloud portfolio, all designed with a simple story,” said Antonio Neri, executive vice president of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

“Where the Helion portfolio largely fits in is in helping customers transforming to a hybrid infrastructure,” said Jay Jamison, Vice President of Product Marketing at Hewlett Packard. “Helion’s strategy enables customers to do two things – to achieve a multi cloud environment that meets their needs, and to have a full set of end-to-end solutions to deliver the hybrid cloud. Our differentiation is that we provide a comprehensive set of choices that provide an end-to-end solution for enterprise customers to handle the full spectrum of applications, whether existing, virtualized, containerized or cloud native, and across any infrastructure stack.”

While the four solutions announced cover a broad range across the cloud spectrum, only one of them is new. That is the HPE Helion Cloud Suite, which provides delivery and management of traditional and cloud native applications operating in heterogeneous hybrid-cloud environments. Its capabilities are not new, however. Essentially it takes several elements that had been available separately before, and bundles them together in a suite designed to be easier for customers to consume.

“Helion Cloud Suite takes the best of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and brings them together with our best tools to create the best suite for managing hybrid clouds,” said Omri Gazitt, VP of Products and Services for HPE Cloud. It also ships with HPE Helion Stackato and HPE Helion OpenStack 3.0.

“The cloud suite brings the products together, but the long term goal is to integrate them together as a single suite,” said Edwin Yuen, Director, Product Marketing, HPE Cloud.

The Cloud Suite combines a complete set of operations management capabilities, cloud orchestration, big data analytics and service based compliance, abilities. It includes full-stack automation for rapid delivery of services and applications, and provides both a common simplified, self-service storefront for IT and developers, and a complete development environment for both traditional and cloud-native applications.

“If you want security and compliance for your sensitive workloads, Cloud Suite has it,” said Mark Interrante, Senior Vice President, Engineering Cloud Business Unit at HPE.

“Cloud Suite comes in three editions,” Gazitt indicated. “The Express edition automates infrastructure management. The Premium edition has the Express capabilities, and adds IaaS and dev-ops capabilities as well. The Ultimate Edition has more advanced capabilities, including the ability to manage workloads across multiple public clouds.”

Despite the fact that it has nothing which is new, Yuen said that its united nature makes It a very significant product.

“It allows customers, and the partners who sell our products to them, to address the basic customer question ‘what do I buy,?’” he said. “It is a single solution that has all the capabilities to do hybrid cloud.”

HPE Helion CloudSystem 10 integrates the software from the Cloud Suite with HPE hardware in an engineered solution to provide a foundational building block for building a private or a hybrid cloud.

“CloudSystem 10 takes software from our Cloud Suite and brings it together with our hardware,” Gazitt said. “Our vision now is to take the Helion Cloud suite and marry it deeply with our hardware.”

New in CloudSystem 10 is full integration with HPE OneView 3.0, HPE’s infrastructure management software, which adds the ability to discover, manage and dynamically designate cloud resource tiers by leveraging the underlying hardware characteristics. Cloud System Automation (CSA) for unified storefront is also new.

HPE Helion Stackato 4.0, is an application development PaaS solution for cloud native applications, and the first .0 release of the product since HPE acquired it from ActiveState last July. The new version gives developers a container based solution that includes a certified Cloud Foundry service, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow and extensibility to new and existing application services.

“Staccato 4.0 is a true multi-cloud native solution, which lets developers build apps faster and deliver them anywhere,” Neri said.

Gazitt indicated that Staccato 4.0 now has a control plane that is aware of multi-clouds the user is running.

“It is based on an open underpinning [Cloud Foundry], but is hardened and made enterprise ready,’ he stated. It connects to existing app services with a service catalogue, and includes an integrated pipeline to automate, build, test and deploy into a Cloud Foundry environment.

“That’s what enterprises tell us is the missing link for them,” Gazitt said.

The final new offering is aimed at the cloud service provider market The CL3100 is an extension of the HPE Cloudline storage server portfolio designed to meet cloud service providers’ dense storage requirements. Its 1U form factor is 75 per cent smaller than the 4U CL5200 storage server, so requires a smaller footprint.

“This is the latest generation of open computing dense storage, and is optimized for that,” Gazitt said. “It is designed for Hadoop, Cassandra and other big data workloads. It is also very power efficient – very dense storage with low power for the industry.”

The HPE Helion Cloud Suite, HPE Helion CloudSystem 10, HPE Helion Stackato 4.0, HPE Helion Cloudline 3100 are all targeted for availability in the second half of 2016.