Introducing HPE CloudPhysics: Data-driven insights for smarter IT decisions

[StorageExperts]

HPE is on a mission to delight our customers. It’s a multi-year effort to transform the end-to-end experience of IT. The journey began over a decade ago when we introduced the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, enabling companies to create a new kind of IT — one that’s pay-per-use, easily scaled up or down, and consumed as a service.

Building on the best-in-class cloud experience of HPE GreenLake cloud services, we’re adding new data-driven intelligence innovations to radically streamline the application infrastructure planning and procurement processes.

Today, I’m super excited to introduce HPE CloudPhysics, which enables smarter IT decisions from edge to cloud. With the data-driven analytics of HPE CloudPhysics, our partners and customers can leverage real-world data to help accelerate their IT goals in the most transparent, efficient, and cost-effective manner, while also reducing complexity and guesswork along the way.

The IT buying process is seriously outdated

Every organization undergoing digital transformation needs to optimize IT from edge to cloud in order to move faster and speed the time to innovation. But every IT infrastructure purchase forces decision-makers to confront several difficult questions: What’s the right infrastructure configuration to meet service level agreements (SLAs)? Where should we modernize – on-premises or in the cloud? And how do I demonstrate ROI in order to proceed?

There are no uniform answers. Each customer is at a different stage in their own transformation journey — and every one faces unique challenges. To sort out purchasing decisions, customers are typically stuck pouring through spreadsheets and applying heuristics to try to understand all the intricate dependencies of their workloads on their underlying infrastructure.

Meanwhile, partners and sellers are similarly challenged to provide a unique value proposition — based on very little or zero visibility — that’s tailored to the customer’s environment.

This has created an IT infrastructure planning and buying process that is randomly inaccurate, time-consuming, wasteful, and ultimately elevates risk in meeting SLAs.

At HPE, we know our customers and partners rely on us to deliver the right products and solutions to help them adjust to new and emerging needs. We’ve already put our infrastructure on autopilot through a predictive model of support and management that’s powered by the data-driven insights of HPE InfoSight. Now we’re extending data-driven insight to operations — helping customers and partners monitor, analyze, and optimize customer IT in new ways and deliver solutions that drive better business outcomes.

We can now expand data-driven collaboration across IT environments

With the introduction of HPE CloudPhysics, we’re enabling data-driven insights to power smarter IT decisions from edge to cloud. Our partners and customers will now be able to better collaborate on optimizing application workload placement, procuring right-sized infrastructure, lowering costs, and transforming the IT purchasing experience. 

HPE CloudPhysics is a simple solution delivered as a service – no hardware, no software, and no future maintenance (!) – that continuously monitors and analyzes IT infrastructures, estimates costs of cloud migrations, and models customers’ IT infrastructure as a virtual environment.

Installation takes just minutes, and customers can generate insights in as little as 15 minutes. The data capture of HPE CloudPhysics is one of the most granular in the industry, with over 200 metrics for VMs, hosts, data stores, and networks. When you add up all the data to date, HPE CloudPhysics has already collected more than 200 trillion data samples, along with data from 1 million VM instances worldwide. And, with well over 4500 completed assessments, HPE CloudPhysics has a proven record of significantly increasing the ROI on infrastructure investments. 

With support for HPE Alletra, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, and HPE SimpliVity, HPE CloudPhysics provides customers and partners a simple, data-driven approach to onboard onto HPE GreenLake.

Let’s look at how you might accelerate your transformation journey with HPE CloudPhysics.

Begin by right-sizing your infrastructure to lower costs

Before making any type of investment in new infrastructure, it’s critical to get a handle on your current workloads. After all, how do you know what you really need if you don’t already know exactly what you have?

With HPE CloudPhysics, you can right-size your existing environment, ensuring workloads live on the most cost-effective infrastructure possible. This is a proven way to lower costs, with customers saving up to 50% after right-sizing.

Here’s how it works. HPE CloudPhysics collects and analyzes fine-grained resource utilization data from each VM, and determines the precise resources that each VM needs to perform its job. For example, if a VM has been configured with 8 vCPUs, but HPE CloudPhysics detects that it never uses more than 2 vCPUs to run its applications, then there’s an opportunity to right-size that VM to a smaller instance.

That’s huge! Oftentimes, companies select from a menu of differently-sized VM templates when they provision a workload. Typically, they base the selection on a gut feeling. So, while choosing too small a template is quickly apparent in slowed or unreliable performance, provisioning an application in too large a template is often an invisible mistake that leads to oversubscribed VMs — and is a major money-waster.

Next, optimize workloads across clouds

How much will it really cost to run various applications in the public cloud, versus keeping them on-premises? Will you save money or could it actually cost more?

With HPE CloudPhysics, you can finally get the answers to these questions — and by doing so finally optimize workloads across clouds. Better still, HPE CloudPhysics will identify the ideal configuration for compute, memory, storage, and network when moving your data to the cloud.

Within minutes of activation, HPE CloudPhysics maps your entire VMware infrastructure against current pricing and configuration options from the leading cloud providers. Organizations can quickly and easily make data-supported decisions about the costs of running applications in the cloud — based on the actual resource needs of VMs.

Keep in mind that when this kind of mapping is combined with right-sizing, it eliminates the chance of moving idle resources to the cloud and paying for what you really don’t need.

Finally, transform the IT purchasing experience

HPE CloudPhysics helps our customers and partners engage and collaborate to form more productive partnerships. Whether the partnership’s goal is to improve a virtual data center, transform a private cloud, or look to transition certain workloads to the public cloud, HPE CloudPhysics helps optimize workloads and IT spend across your edge to cloud environment.

Through increased visibility and understanding, HPE CloudPhysics transforms the procurement process to be a win-win for both customers and partners. Our customers accomplish their IT goals with more efficient IT infrastructure planning and procurement. Meanwhile, our partners benefit from shorter sales cycles, an increase in assessed to qualified opportunities, and higher close rates. And, just as important, our partners become trusted advisors in accelerating the transformation agendas of our customers.

So now you know why I am so excited about HPE CloudPhysics! But – If you are still wondering about the best way to accomplish goals for your IT environment, you can learn more about the data-driven analytics that enable smarter IT decisions from edge to cloud here.

To learn more about other exciting news from HPE announced on September 28th, please check out:

• Press release: HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform powers data modernization with breakthrough analytics and data protection cloud services
• Newsroom Blog: New HPE GreenLake cloud services for data protection tackle cyberthreats and ransomware, Tom Black SVP & GM, HPE Storage 
• Chalk Talk: Announcing HPE GreenLake for data protection

Around the Storage Block blogs: 

• Introducing HPE InfoSight App Insights: AI-driven workload intelligence
• The next generation of data protection services: HPE Backup and Recovery Service
• Industry-leading AIOps for infrastructure extends edge with HPE InfoSight App Insights

Matt Morrissey has been in the storage industry for over 20 years, and has worked for HPE for the last 15. As a Senior Product Marketing Manager, he is passionate about showing the world how HPE is flipping the switch to a cloud everywhere experience. Connect with Matt on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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