HPE doubles down on composable infrastructure with OneView

LAS VEGAS – Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) kicked off its first major conference as a separate entity by focusing on what HP’s enterprise division has long been known for — providing solutions to manage complex IT environments and opportunities for deep integrations across a portfolio of software, hardware, and services.

At its HPE Discover customer event, the company announced the release of OneView 3.0, an infrastructure management application that applies software-defined intelligence to various HP enterprise on-premises systems including ProLiant, BladeSystem, Hyper-Converged Solutions, and Synergy. OneView is built to deliver applications quickly, provides workload template automation and offers an API for integration with other systems.

It’s the next step for HPE in pushing out its composable model of IT infrastructure management that it introduced with Synergy. OneView 3.0 allows organizations not running Synergy servers elements of a composable-style infrastructure management, which Ric Lewis, senior vice-president and general manager of converged data centre infrastructure at HPE describes as “infrastructure that can flex to the needs of any given workplace.”

To be flexible in adapting to the way an IT shop chooses to manage its infrastructure, a new dashboard in this version of OneView will provide a single view of infrastructure of many different flavours.

“It’s a little bit like converged infrastructure, except that was about bringing storage and fabric together,” Lewis explains. “This is built from the ground up to self-discover resources to help the user deploy workloads.”

New to this version of OneView is a unified dashboard that can provide a single view into multiple data centres that work across different form factors. Health and monitoring details are displayed for legacy storage arrays or all-Flash storage alike.

“We’re talking about the whole system put together and designed to do this capability,” Lewis says. “You can’t do all of what Synergy can do, because that was designed for this. But it can do a lot of it.”

Synergy, HPE’s new converged platform, was unveiled last December and hit general availability in April. It marked the introduction of composable infrastructure from HP, and now OneView is being designed to take advantage of it for shops running HP systems that aren’t converged.

OneView also promises to integrate with Intelligent Management Centre to provide end-to-end management of heterogeneous network switches.

While OneView isn’t designed to reach into cloud environments, HPE has addressed that with a new software offering in its Helion line with CloudSystem 10. It allows for easier provisioning of physical servers or virtualized clusters from CloudSystem’s console. HP says this should cut down on the number of organizational baton passes when provisioning physical infrastructure.

“Previously you’d have to provision all your infrastructure and then go back into OneView and take additional steps. Now that’s all automated in the scripting,” says Brad Parks, director of marketing strategy and enablement at HPE.

From a mile-high view, HPE’s Helion Cloud Portfolio combines its hardware and software offerings into a solution that can vary to fit just about any imaginable IT infrastructure requirement. The different elements of the suite can be added on to create an infrastructure package that includes storage, networking, software and services. With an eye on the trend of enterprises moving to operate in some form a hybrid cloud model, HPE is offering a way for its current customers to integrate more deeply into their environments, and for prospective customers, the prospect of a turnkey solution.

As HP describes them, the four main pieces of the Helion stack include:

• HPE Helion Cloud Suite, a new software suite providing delivery and management of traditional and cloud native applications operating in heterogeneoushybrid-cloud environments
• HPE Helion CloudSystem 10, a fully engineered system providing a foundational building block for rapid cloud deployment and automated provisioning of cloud resources from bare metal infrastructure through deep integration with HPE OneView 3.0
• HPE Helion Stackato 4.0, a complete application development PaaS solution designed to speed the delivery of cloud native applications
• HPE Cloudline 3100 Server, offering industry-leading economics for service providers

HPE says that the new Helion products will be available in the second half of 2016. OneView 3.0 is slated for a third-quarter release.