Recap of the HPE and BlueData news

[CalvinZito]

A couple of weeks ago, I had a blog article I titled, Learn about BlueData along with me. In that article, I pointed you to a CrowdChat we had on May 7th that focused on Enterprise AI. If you missed the CrowdChat, the video and chat are available on demand so check it out.  

On May 7th, we had a BlueData announcement. Since what were were announcing wasn't really storage per se, we posted the announcement on our Infrastructure Insights blog. But since the storage organization in HPE is "HPE Storage and Big Data Analytics", I wanted to give you a recap of the news last week around Blue Data. 

From the VP and GM of Big Data and Analytics 

The first blog article I'll recap is from Patrick Osborne. Patrick is the VP and GM of the Big Data and Analytics business in HPE Storage and BlueData is part of his organization. His article was titled HPE and BlueData: Accelerating time-to-value with AI and Analytics. Here are a few of the highlights from his article though I recommend you click on the link and read the details. I've italicized direct quotes from Pat's article. 

• (The announcement) marks the next milestone in HPE’s journey to provide our customers with the world’s best platform for deploying their AI, Machine Learning (ML), and Big Data Analytics workloads.We started the journey in late November when we announced the acquisition of BlueData and today we are pleased to announce the general availability and integration of BlueData as part of HPE.
• This acquisition started with three important pillars: people, platform, and customers:. People: The market is starved for AI / ML, analytics, and data science expertise. HPE now has a great set of people from BlueData joining our organization. Platform: BlueData EPIC platform is ideal to help customers accelerate their AI and Analytics deployments. Customers: BlueData has had incredible success in customer adoption. 
• The BlueData EPIC platform can be deployed on our customers’ infrastructure of choice – any vendor, any server, any storage, any public cloud service. And now that BlueData is part of HPE, we will preserve the ability for BlueData customers to deploy on any infrastructure. That having been said, HPE will be providing solutions and reference architectures that combine BlueData with our HPE Apollo-based infrastructure building blocks and predictable deployment recipes.
• The combination of HPE and BlueData represents a unique and powerful hybrid cloud solution for AI/ML and Big Data Analytics workloads. Our mission is to make our customers successful with their most challenging of digital transformation projects and accelerate their time-to-value with the ever-changing ecosystem of AI and Analytics applications. Here at HPE, we’re committed to helping driving innovation and adoption in this area and we’re looking for the next generation of builders to get on board. 

The product view

Anant Chintamaneni is the VP of products at BlueData. He also had a blog article on the announcement day last week, his focusing on the BlueData product vision. His post, on bluedata.com, was titled A New Hybrid IT Vision for AI / ML and Analytics in the Enterprise. As with Pat's article, I'll provide a high-level summary of Anant's article but I highly recommend you read his article. 

• We’ve spent a lot of time over the past several months listening to our customers and partners on a wide range of topics including AI / ML, Big Data Analytics, Edge Computing, Cloud, and Kubernetes. In those conversations, three common themes emerged: the importance of choice; the need for speed; and the imperative of innovation. 
• Choice: BlueData will retain the ability to run on any infrastructure. The BlueData EPIC software platform is built on container technology, enabling infrastructure portability across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. With the BlueData software platform, our customers and partners can also continue to onboard commercial or open source distributed data platforms of their choice. BlueData already provides pre-tested application images of popular distributed platforms and AI / ML tools such as Cloudera, Spark, Kafka, H2O, and TensorFlow through our App Store. With HPE, our vision is to build partnerships with the broad ecosystem of AI / ML and Big Data / Fast Data applications so that our customers can get faster, streamlined access to best-of-breed tools for their deployments. (Anant had a lot more to say here to be sure to read is article).
• Speed: BlueData pioneered the “as-a-service” delivery model for on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments of AI / ML and Big Data Analytics. Fortune 500 and Global 2000 financial institutions, healthcare organizations, retailers, manufacturers, and other industry leaders leverage BlueData as their platform to deliver self-service and on-demand environments for AI and Analytics. Data science teams can build and iterate on their models more quickly and deliver greater business value and faster time-to-market for new innovations. Enterprise IT organizations can’t keep up with the fast-paced innovations in the open source and commercial ecosystem of AI / ML, Data Science, and Big Data Analytics tools. Going forward, HPE will be providing pre-integrated and ready-to-run solutions for different use cases and configurations – combining our software with HPE Apollo Systems to accelerate deployments, reduce management complexity, lower cost, ensure greater efficiency, and future proof their investments.
• Innovation: Through the lens of our customers and partners, we see a convergence of trends in AI / ML, Big Data / Fast Data, and Containerization / Kubernetes to deliver next generation AI-injected applications that span from the edge to the core to the cloud.  To this end, we’ve embarked on a differentiated Hybrid IT product strategy and vision to help HPE BlueData customers accelerate their innovation using AI / ML and Analytics. The key aspects fo the strategy and vision are: AI / ML Pipeline Operationalization; AI-Ready, Invisible Kubernetes; Consumption-based IT models. 

Summing it up

I want to welcome the BlueData team to HPE and HPE Storage. We have lots to learn together! Here are a few other links to fine more information. 

• Kick AI and Analytics into High Gear with HPE Pointnext and BlueData blog post.
• New BlueData page on hpe.com at hpe.com/info/BlueData. 
• Press release with today's HPE BlueData news. 

About HPE Storage Guy (aka The Storage Godfather)

I'm Calvin Zito and November 16, 2018 marks 35 years with HP/HPE. I've worked in HPE Storage since 1990. I was just recognized as a 9 time VMware vExpert. As an early adopter of social media and active in communities, I've blogged for 10 years. You can find me on Twitter as @CalvinZito. If you don't follow me on Twitter, do it now! You can also contact me via email. 

Calvin Zito
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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