Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. made a series of product announcements in early May that marked a notable progression in the firm’s enterprise strategy. HPE is extending beyond data storage into data management and is giving enterprise customers what it strongly believes they want.

In announcing HPE’s new Alletra 6000 and 9000 storage arrays, company executives noted that customers still want speed, availability, capacity and performance from storage infrastructure. But, more than anything else, customers also want simplicity.

“Yes, storage has gotten faster, yes, flash has had a profound affect on performance, availability and latency access to the data, but infrastructure management and storage management as a whole have become a pain for customers,” said Omer Asad (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of primary storage and data management services at HPE. “Storage infrastructure management itself is extremely complex.”

Asad spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Sandeep Singh (pictured, left), vice president of storage marketing at HPE, and they discussed new features and functions as part of the latest storage announcement, the value of a cloudlike operational model on-premises, a focus on delivering edge-based solutions, and the importance of simplicity for achieving digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Here is the interview with Singh and Asad:

Plug and play

There is plenty to unpack with HPE’s recent moves in the storage space. First, the all-NVMe Alletra 6000 and 9000 storage arrays are designed to be installed with minimal effort.

“It’s extremely simple,” Asad said. “Plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and the datacenter operations manager just walks out.”

The second element as part of the HPE release is a new Data Services Cloud Console, which is designed to streamline data management across the hybrid ecosystem. The cloud software-based provisioning platform, available through HPE GreenLake, addresses customer frustration with complexity by centralizing data infrastructure management into a single interface.

“From the Data Services Cloud Console, customers are able to curate the data, maneuver the data, and pre-position the data into different hyperscalers,” Asad explained. “The entire view of the storage infrastructure and the data with its context that is stored on top of that, access control methodologies and management frameworks are operational from a single SaaS console.”

Leveraging the new console, users can provision storage based on recommendations from HPE InfoSight, the company’s AI-based predictive analytics engine. Other data services can be controlled on the console across multiple storage platforms.

“Anyone who wants to streamline operational manageability can use these APIs to program against a single API, which will then control the entire infrastructure on behalf of the customer,” Asad said. “It is bringing the cloud operational model that was so desired by each one of our customers into their datacenters.”

A standard for agility

Asad’s last point is indicative of where the storage industry is headed. In a separate interview with Vellante, Singh noted that if key factors such as cloud and AI are providing the rocket fuel for digital transformation, it would be only natural for the storage space to reflect this dynamic as well.

“Data, cloud and AI are really the disruptive forces that are propelling the digital transformation for customers,” Singh said. “Cloud has set the standard for agility, and AI-driven insights and intelligence are helping to make the underlying infrastructure invisible.”

A portion of HPE’s May reveal involved a description of its Unified DataOps strategy, a concerted focus on reducing complex deployment and management of storage infrastructure. This approach is geared to streamline data access not just in the cloud, but on the edge as well, which will be an increasingly important consideration.

“What we’re seeing is the enterprise edge is becoming the frontier for customer experiences and the opportunity to reimagine customer experiences,” Singh said. “With the data growth that’s happening and this edge becoming the strategic frontier for delivering customer experiences, how you power your application workloads there, how you deliver and protect data and seamlessly manage the overall infrastructure abstracted away at a higher level becomes incredibly important for customers.”

HPE has cited survey research from ESG that found 93% of IT decision makers viewed storage and data management complexity as impeding digital transformation. The company’s embrace of a simplification mantra for storage shows that it intends to reverse this metric.

“As more data just continues to explode from edge to core to cloud, and as the infrastructure has grown from being just on-prem to being at the edge or cloud, now that complexity is expanding to across multiple different clouds,” Singh said. “When you look across the data lifecycle, how do you store it, how do you secure and protect it, archive and analyze it? This notion of software and services that are delivering and unlocking a whole new experience for customers is really the game changer and that’s what we’re focused on.”

Watch the complete video interview with Singh 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