

The need for edge computing has increased through the proliferation of data-gathering devices now located in factories, oil rigs, airplanes, shipping containers, homes and even race cars.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. has recently enhanced its SimpliVity offering for the enterprise edge as part of its overall strategy for hyperconvergence, an IT framework that combines compute, storage and networking into a single system. For a major enterprise tech provider such as HPE, which ships four servers and 46 terabytes of storage every 60 seconds, a hyperconverged solution targeted for the edge makes perfect sense.
“A lot of our customers are generating a lot of data at the edge,” said Omer Asad (pictured), vice president and general manager of primary storage and data management services at HPE. “The right architecture, in my opinion, needs to be simple to deploy, with storage, compute and networking out towards the edge in a hyperconverged environment.”
Asad spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as part of a special presentation with Red Bull Racing Honda. They discussed the latest enhancements for HPE’s hyperconverged offering, Container Storage Interface driver for Kubernetes support, and a way that users can avoid paying egress fees for transferring data. (* Disclosure below.)
HPE SimpliVity is an intelligent hyperconverged infrastructure solution optimized for the enterprise with an all-in-one appliance form factor. HPE acquired SimpliVity in 2017 for $650 million in cash, and the business has grown to become a major contributor to the firm’s hyperconverged systems sales, which expanded 53% in one quarter last year.
In early March, HPE released its HPE SimpliVity 4.1.0 update, designed to integrate with other HPE solutions and increase options for data retention and compliance at remote sites. The enhancements include additional protection with native backup to the cloud and allows for automated policy-based replication from edge sites to an HPE StoreOnce System.
“Now, not only can you deploy applications from a standard datacenter interface, we have added the ability to backup to the cloud right from the edge,” Asad said. “You can also backup all the way back to your core datacenter. The backup policies are fully automated and implemented in the distributed file system that is the heart and soul of the HPE SimpliVity installation.”
In addition, the update included support for a Kubernetes container storage interface through a newly designed plug-in. Users can now run container and virtual machine-based workloads on a unified platform at the edge.
“We have a lot of customers who are deploying containers to process data out at remote sites,” Asad explained. “We’ve also added both stateful and stateless container orchestration, as well as data protection capabilities for containerized applications at the edge.”
The backup process announced as part of the HPE SimpliVity update contains a feature that may attract more attention in the future. The process of restoring backups to one or more edge sites can be performed without incurring egress fees. These fees are a touchy subject among some IT managers. Not only can the fees add up over time, but they can influence whether an enterprise moves data at all, a potential impediment to overall business operations.
“Not only can you backup into the cloud from your edge site, you can also restore back without any egress fees,” Asad said. “Because the infrastructure is so easy to deploy and centrally manage, it’s very mobile. If you want to deploy and recover to a different site, you can do that.”
Watch the complete video interview below, part of a special presentation with Red Bull Racing Honda, 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.)
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