Private cloud. Public cloud. Both. That’s hybrid cloud reality—and with it comes a set of infrastructure challenges that intelligent servers like HPE ProLiant are ready to tackle. Learn how.
These days, where—and how—companies deploy and manage their compute infrastructure, applications and data is 
Within that new reality, you still want the best of both worlds. Although some of your applications may be within your own private domains, you still want many of the benefits associated with public clouds such as self-service, scalability and elasticity. In other words, you want a cloud approach for your private infrastructure.
Ultimately, you want the ability to holistically manage your public cloud assets and private cloud assets together, a hybrid cloud approach, which gives you the ability to expand as needed (sometimes called “cloud bursting”), by scaling computing services to the public cloud when demand increases, and scaling back when it decreases.
However, implementing and managing a hybrid cloud is complex. Many companies wrestle with costly over-provisioning and under-utilization, capital trapped in fixed assets, skills gaps, talent shortages, and unpredictable costs. All too often, determining a hybrid cloud strategy that will meet changing and expanding IT needs proves elusive.
Three hybrid cloud challenges
Challenge 1: Deploying and optimizing workloads
Trying to make sure applications and workloads are being deployed in the right place (public or private, or both) and then managing it—that’s extremely challenging. Businesses can no longer rely on tribal knowledge or a trial-and-error process to optimize workloads in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. And yet, optimized workload performance, placement, and efficiency accelerate positive business outcomes and time to value.
The server foundation of any hybrid cloud solution needs to come equipped with real-time performance tuning recommendations. This ensures maximized performance from moment to moment. In addition, data-driven guidance enables intelligent planning that speeds workload migrations while controlling its costs.
Challenge 2: Maintaining a secure infrastructure
Even with performance and flexibility requirements met, a significant IT hurdle remains: security. The threat of cyber assault is increasing exponentially, and hackers are getting more sophisticated with every wave of attack. Just protecting software and networks is no longer enough.
Security must take a 360-degree approach—with a holistic view that extends through the entire lifecycle of the server. The server must be equipped to detect threats, protect against attacks and recover with intelligent tools and options that accelerate the path back to normal operations.
Challenge 3: Anticipating demand and taking a proactive stance
With IT being stretched like never before, it must be proactive, anticipate demand, and be ready with the flexibility and capacity to meet business needs in moments, not days or weeks.
Server monitoring and management must be simplified, and deployment and provisioning automated, so people are free to focus on strategic initiatives that create real value.
This starts with a server intelligent enough to collect information on its own operations, then share it through a standards-based API to tools for higher-level management, optimization and orchestration.
How intelligent servers meet these challenges head on
Today’s hybrid reality and its associated challenges requires a fresh approach, a flexible software-defined approach, building on a foundation of intelligence that begins with the server.
HPE ProLiant is the intelligent compute foundation for hybrid cloud, delivering unmatched workload optimization, security and automation, all available as-a-Service.
Workload optimized
The foundational intelligence of HPE ProLiant transforms IT with insights that optimize workload performance, placement and efficiency, delivering better outcomes faster.
- The application of industry best practices is used to define workload optimized server resource settings to maximize performance.
- Real-time performance tuning recommendations optimize workload performance.
- Data-driven guidance drives the ideal hybrid cloud workload placement allowing for intelligent planning speeding migrations and controlling the cost of migration.
360-degree security
Already the world’s most secure industry-standard server, HPE ProLiant provides an enhanced holistic, 360-degree view to security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain and concludes with a safeguarded, end-of-life decommissioning.
- Holistic, 360-degree security begins with the corruption-free manufacture of the server, auditing the integrity of every component in the server, and locking the server configuration to ensure secure transit.
- Rapid detection of a security-compromised server, even to the point of not allowing it to boot, help endure malicious code is contained and healthy servers are protected.
- Automated recovery from a security event, including restoration of validated firmware, and facilitating recovery of operating system, application and data connections, providing the fastest path to bring a server back online and into normal operations.
- Simple, safeguarded removal of passwords, configuration settings and data from a server being repurposed or retired prevents inadvertent access to previously-secured information.
Intelligent automation
The intelligence built into HPE ProLiant simplifies and automates management tasks, establishing a solid foundation for an open, hybrid cloud platform enabled by composability.
- Detailed insights into server status and operations shared through a standard, open API enables a common operating model across bare-metal deployments, virtualized environments, containers and cloud stacks.
- A programmatic, software-defined approach to server composability delivers efficient, workload-aware deployment and workflow automation.
- Artificial intelligence learning from an installed-base optimizes server performance, predicting and preventing problems before IT operations are impacted.
Delivered as-a-Service
HPE provides customers choice in how they acquire and consume IT. Beyond traditional financing and leasing, HPE offers options that free trapped capital, accelerate infrastructure updates and provide for on-premises pay-per-use consumption.
- Freeing capital trapped in current infrastructure provides economic agility to invest for innovation.
- Utilizing a pay-per-use consumption model provides the agility of public cloud with the security and control of on-premises compute.
Are you ready for hybrid cloud infrastructure reality?
The challenges require a fresh approach with a flexible software-defined strategy that builds on a foundation of intelligence—and that begins with intelligent servers as the foundation for today’s hybrid cloud reality.
HPE ProLiant is the intelligent compute foundation for hybrid cloud, unlocking optimization, securing peace of mind, simplifying management, and delivering flexible consumption models to your business.
Stay informed
Check out this related article: Composability and intelligence are accelerating the self-driving data center
Interested in the future of technology? Sign up for weekly insights and resources
Gary Craze
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/HPE_Servers
linkedin.com/showcase/hpe-servers-and-systems/
hpe.com/servers
Gary_Craze
Meet blogger Gary Craze, a 30-year veteran of the technology industry. Gary has held marketing and product management roles with enterprise technology companies helping them to understand the needs of customers and creating compelling value propositions that meet their business needs. Currently, Gary is the Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for the HPE ProLiant Server team at HPE where he is responsible for evangelizing the world’s most secure industry-standard servers.
