New storage innovations built for today’s hybrid cloud world

[StorageExperts]

Without a doubt, hybrid cloud was a hot topic at the recent HPE Discover and AWS re:Invent events, where HPE announced new storage innovations built for today’s hybrid cloud reality.

In my last blog, I talked about what a built-for-cloud storage experience entails:

• Run any workload, anywhere
• Easy data mobility
• Cloud done right

These are now foundational elements and guiding principles on how HPE develops our storage products and cloud services and solutions.

7 storage innovations built for hybrid cloud

Today, I'm excited to discuss these major cloud advancements, showcased at both HPE Discover and AWS re:Invent:

1. HPE Cloud Volumes goes global—We are expanding our enterprise-grade multicloud storage service into the UK and Ireland cloud regions. This provides nearby data access for the two most popular European regions serving the UK and mainland Europe. Both regions will be rolled out during calendar year 2019.

2. HPE Cloud Volumes gets certified for SoC 2 Type 1 and HIPAA compliance—If your company needs to adhere to regulatory compliance, or you are in the healthcare sector, you probably already know what these mean. In short, we are talking about enabling compliance and healthcare customers to store their data on HPE Cloud Volumes, knowing this enables them to meet their regulatory compliance requirements.

3. HPE Cloud Volumes now supports containers—This is a big one and I’ll elaborate with some details here. Then look for more to come from my technical counterparts who will soon share some real use cases and demos.

• Support for major container platforms—Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere. Check. Amazon EKS. Check. We’re supporting the Docker Volumes API and Kubernetes FlexVolume drivers and any distributions that uses them.
• Move apps with data for real hybrid cloud—Part of the container value proposition is app mobility. This works great for stateless cloud-native apps that don’t need persistent storage. But legacy apps like your Oracle or SQL databases do. Our secret is making containers work seamlessly with our on-premises storage arrays and the cloud. So you can move your apps with persistent data, making it easy to migrate legacy applications to cloud while enabling the next generation of hybrid cloud workloads.
• Cloud-native and CI/CD app development—It’s a bit of a mouthful, but continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are best practices commonly used by DevOps to enable faster software development and testing for cloud-native apps and agile development. So what’s HPE doing that’s special here? The short answer is a lot. Let me summarize by saying that the combination of containers and HPE Cloud Volumes rapid cloning capabilities means you can spin-up dozens of code branches, test cases, and development environments in a matter of seconds (rather than hours or days). And this in turn means you can iterate code, fix bugs, and ultimately launch your app or software much faster.
• Consistent containers storage experience—Whether on-premises, or cloud and between different container implementations, you get the same consistent storage experience and a rich set of data services such as snapshots and cloning (mentioned above)—with the same container framework no matter where your data and apps are. Yes, we are truly making multicloud and hybrid cloud and a lot easier.

4. Full failover and failback—Seamlessly replicating data to and from the cloud without any extra hardware and software is already a huge feat. But we recently made further enhancements to HPE Cloud Volumes that allows you to failover your data volumes to cloud when you have an outage or maintenance window on-premises and then let you failback when you are back online. New data can be written and created at either side, enabling disaster recovery and business continuity scenarios.

5. VMware Cloud on AWS supporting external storage—This is super exciting as our customers have been asking for this for a long time. They wanted the VMware Cloud on AWS to work with external storage that you can connect on-premises or in cloud-adjacent colocation. What this means is HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Nimble Storage customers will soon be able to create hybrid clouds and set up cloud disaster recovery with their VMware environments. It also means VMware Cloud on AWS customers will have more cloud storage choices including using HPE Cloud Volumes with their VMware cloud instances. We also have many other ongoing developments with cloud that we didn’t quite have the space to cover in our press release, but are showcasing here at HPE Discover and AWS re:Invent:

6. Cloud Backup, DR, and Archiving—We have HPE Cloud Bank Storage running on our recently updated HPE StoreOnce Gen4 data protection systems. HPE Cloud Bank Storage fits into your existing data protection environment and delivers up to 20x savings on cloud storage and transfer costs when your backup or archive to the cloud. We have many new features being showcased including our virtual storage appliance (VSA) that runs on Amazon EC2 allowing to restore data to the cloud.

7. 3PAR Cloud Connect—This new solution enables you to connect HPE 3PAR arrays to the cloud of your choice (e.g. like VMware Cloud for AWS mentioned above) at a nearby colocation facility. It’s another way to secure your own data and keep it separate from others while still taking advantage of all the cloud compute and native services being offered.

So if you’ve read this far down the blog, you can see we have quite the list of new storage innovations built for today’s hybrid cloud reality. Whether you’re in a highly regulated industry with a conservative cloud adoption plan, or new startup developing a new app using the latest cloud-native tools and CI/CD best practices, we have cloud storage solutions that help you to move data where it needs to be—so you can get the most of out of your data.

For a complete look at our recent HPE Discover storage announcements, check out Calvin Zito’s blog here on ATSB: The world’s most intelligent storage with new AI, cloud data mobility and all-flash enhancements

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 Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Doug Ko, HPE Storage. Doug is responsible for cloud strategy and go-to-market at HPE. His expertise is in data storage and cloud computing and he is interested in the role of cloud in enabling digital transformation in enterprises and service providers.