How are the demands from enterprise IT evolving and where does composable
infrastructure fit in?
We have maintained leadership in blade category for over a decade. Then we have smaller and periodic investments in things like converged systems -- the likes of Moonshot. The next big thing for us is HPE composable infrastructure, as we move to the next level of datacenter experience with our innovation on synergy systems. Today every customer is faced with an IT environment that has traditional forms of IT which
Today every customer is faced with an IT environment that has traditional forms of IT which is largely siloed. Composable infrastructure delivers on a promise of enabling you to be able to accelerate delivery of just not the apps and services for the enterprise. It also helps customers tie together all three relevant areas --traditional IT, private and the public cloud.
Traditional forms of IT have largely dwelled on things like database, apps, ERP, specific functions, core banking, collaboration, automation, exchange, etc. Such forms of IT is largely driven by the fact that it needs to be highly operations-driven and cost-focused. As it runs for years, the number of deployments per year is very few and the main operative parameter is stability and focus on cost.
If you take the new idea based economy, everything is predicated around the extent of quality of ideas you have and the apps that are cloud-native and are able to be run at the speed with which you deploy it. Hence, the new idea based economy is more apps driven and agility focused.
From the competitive environment perspective, people are developing infra tools and technology separately for traditional IT and for cloud. We are bridging this gap with bi-model IT, as some analysts call it, which provisions for a single infrastructure for both environments.
So, against the 2/3 apps that get deployed in the traditional sense, you would have a few deployments in a month or a quarter. If you look at some of the large image hosting companies, they have upwards of eight deployments in a day which make it about 240 deployments in a month. You can imagine the extent, speed, agility and ability to boot workloads that the infrastructure needs to have and that is the promise composable infrastructure delivers on by bridging and supporting both environments.
This infrastructure has a lot of composable attributes. It boots to workload and it has work pools as resources (work pools are combined pools of compute, storage and network).
Large organizations which plan to leverage DevOps and that has to do more with mobility or cloud-native apps, fit in to the kind of customers we would tap into.
How is composable architecture different than the traditional data centre setup?
This is an entirely new concept and is an open approach to datacentre which enables you to provision the datacentre and infrastructure as a service. It is not just a unified API, it is a unified pool of resources. It’s a template driven workload optimization. From a configuration management perspective, we do work with Chef, Ansible, Docker and the likes and all of that do a variety of provisioning, application delivery, and service delivery on the fly.
It is entirely software defined – software that does configuration management, automation, and more. You have a Single API or single line of code which speaks to several levels.
What are the challenges involved in deploying composable Infrastructure and how can organizations tackle them?
HPE composable infrastructure deployment offers an integrated installation experience. HPE Synergy increases productivity and control across the data centre by integrating and automating infrastructure operations and applications through a unified API. The unified API provides a single interface to discover, search, inventory, configure, provision, update, and diagnose the composable infrastructure. Resources like compute, storage, and fabric are auto-discovered. Wizard driven setup guides through the setup process. A single line of code fully describes and can provision the infrastructure required for an application, eliminating time-consuming scripting of more than 500 calls to low-level tools and interfaces.
Where does composable infrastructure fit into the digital transformation journey being embraced by organizations?
Digitization fundamentally means going for more deployments. When you have more deployments, you move to a new dimension which is the new idea economy, DevOps, etc. A significant portion of all ideation or design principle that have gone into composable is to manage the enterprise being more digital.
What are HPEs priorities for 2016 and beyond?
We will continue to build on innovation which is the reason why we have been maintaining the leadership in Blades category for over a decade. We are moving to the next level of data center experience with innovation on synergy.
According to the recent IDC Enterprise Server Tracker, HPE continues to be the revenue market leader in the India x86 Server Revenue Market for the fifth consecutive quarter. We plan to build on that platform by helping organizations transition to the next level.
