The buzz around digital transformation has only grown louder as advancements in cloud, artificial intelligence, internet of things and edge technologies enable a constant stream of data from which enterprises can extract value, making them eager to store and protect that data.

As a market need for more agile orchestration tools grows, information technology support companies are leveraging partnerships and modernizing existing infrastructure offerings to provide the cloud experience wherever data lives — and helping organizations reallocate management resources to the work that will move them forward.

“We want to drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that will enable their digital transformation,” said Patrick Osborne (pictured), vice president and general manager of big data and secondary storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. “Everyone’s going to have multiple clouds. We want to give customers an intelligent experience around that.”

Osborne sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the new releases in HPE’s secondary storage for hybrid cloud, as well as how the company is innovating to protect the data being driven by digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Transforming data protection

Data’s volume and value are precipitating a massive shift in enterprise storage requirements. In order to leverage its utility, business data must be constantly available while also remaining protected in a range of locations. Further complicating the task, the processes ensuring this balance of access and security must continue to deliver all the simplicity benefits promised by the cloud.

“You’re moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams focusing resources on cloud [operations], [development operations], application development. They want data protection to be automated and invisible,” Osborne said.

As an era of idle secondary storage gives way to the extraction of rich insights from all collected data, storage requirements must change to grant the necessary availability and agility. “They want to be able to use that data, generate copies of it, gain insight from it, [and] be able to move it to the cloud,” he said.

In order to create a streamlined, secure experience across the data life cycle, HPE is providing customers the ability to move data between siloed platforms, including primary all-flash, secondary systems, and cloud targets, through application performance interfaces and seamless integration into their existing frameworks.

With multicloud as an increasing inevitability for the modern enterprise, HPE aims to offer a solution that provides transparency and security at every level.

“We don’t necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, but we need to facilitate visibility of where that data’s gonna land, and over time, do that predictably [to] provide expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads,” Osborne said.

An expanded solution

HPE is addressing these scaling market needs with an expansion of its full data recovery portfolio. The company recently announced a modernization of its fourth-generation backup hardware system StoreOnce, including improvements in its integration with existing environments.

“It’s available in a rote form factor at different capacities, [and] as a software-defined version you can run on-premise [or] off-premise. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version,” Osborne said.

The platform will provide a complete vertically oriented solution through Recovery Manager Central 6.0, enabling application integrated screenshots, custom application performance interfaces, full clones, data recovery, primary to secondary migration, and cloud archival with full visibility. RMC will also extend copy data management to from 3PAR to Nimble Storage Inc. hybrid storage area networks.

“For Nimble customers that want to use all-flash [or] hybrid flash arrays, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the cloud,” Osborne said.

The company also advanced the integration of its StoreOnce Catalyst catalog within Commvault Systems Inc. Backup and Recovery, enabling Commvault users to deploy StoreOnce in cloud backup.

“They’re going to be integrating with our deduplication and compression framework, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then be able to go out to the cloud,” Osborne said.

Developing multicloud economics

The throughline of HPE’s latest portfolio upgrade is improving integrations for more seamless, secure data transfer, as well as allowing customers greater agility in their unique digital needs.

To that end, HPE is offering the new release to customers as either component-level integrations or a complete re-architecture, depending on their specific storage needs. That implementation flexibility is enabled by the company’s GreenLake cloud pricing model.

“The primary storage, secondary storage, cloud capacity, even some of the [independent software vendor] partner software we provide, you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service through GreenLake from HPE,” Osborne said.

The partnerships and acquisitions HPE has made over the past few years enable it to package solutions and bill customers at a granular level. The company leverages the cloud consulting background of Cloud Technology Partners, acquired in 2017, to advise customers on how to best implement hybrid cloud backup as a service. Its same year Cloud Cruiser acquisition allows for flexible billing and monitoring on a per-metric usage format.

“The combination of our Pointnext services, advisory, [and] financial services really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a good customer experience around elasticity,” Osborne said.

The latitude supported by HPE’s focus on integration and customization means greater cost efficiency for customers now able to use the cloud as a low-cost, scalable, and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. “We want to bring the compute to the data, and that’s another use case that we’re enabling for our customers,” Osborne stated.

By giving customers a solution consumed as a service to mine and utilize secondary data, HPE’s solution aims to lower the cost of overall storage and foster greater value across the cloud ecosystem.

“Providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to cloud and making that automatic helps customers save, then they can take those resources and move them on to higher-impact projects. That’s a big impact from a customer perspective,” Osborne concluded.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE