Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today introduced a hybrid file and block storage offering that it will make available on-premises with as-a-service pricing, and also announced new disaster and backup recovery data services with uptime guarantees.

The new file and block offerings are based on the HPE Alletra Storage platform the company introduced two years ago with the aim of delivering on-premises storage with cloud-like management. The new Alletra Storage MP is a modular storage offering that supports both block and file stores on the same hardware with the ability to scale independently. A single cloud platform is used to deploy, manage and orchestrate data and storage services regardless of the workload and storage protocol, the company said.

The new platform consists of standardized, composable building blocks made up of compute nodes, commodity storage and switches that can be configured for different software-defined storage needs. The hardware will be provided through HPE’s GreenLake portfolio of as-a-service offerings, which enable customers to manage on-premises equipment as if it were cloud service.

“HPE has declared 2023 the year of storage,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon. “This is a positive in that a focus on storage could bring about a mix of higher gross-margin business.”

High-speed file storage

GreenLake for File Storage is a scale-out service for data-intensive workloads with a throughput of hundreds of gigabytes per second. Based on a disaggregated, shared-everything, modular architecture that’s designed for exabyte scale, the service combines GreenLake cloud management and Vast Data Inc.’s flash storage to create a resilient file service designed for exabyte scale, HPE said.

CEO Antonio Neri at HPE’s launch event

The new GreenLake for Block Storage is said to be the first disaggregated, scale-out block storage that comes with a 100% data availability guarantee. HPE said it delivers better price/performance than previous storage platforms and is optimized for mixed workloads.

For example, a user of HPE’s 3PAR 7000/8000 storage array can move to GreenLake for Block Storage and get twice the performance, 66% better price/performance and a 100% availability guarantee with cloudlike management for an equivalent price, wrote Simon Watkins, senior manager of worldwide product marketing for HPE storage and cloud data services.

Cloud experience on-premises

The new offering “brings the speed and agility of the cloud experience to your on-prem storage,” Watkins wrote. “HPE GreenLake for Block Storage simplifies operations across the lifecycle — from rapid deployment to automated provisioning to invisible upgrades.”

Alletra Storage MP will be sold on a capital expenditure basis with GreenLake for Block Storage carrying a subscription fee.

Alletra Storage MP

GreenLake now also supports a unified approach to disaster recovery and backup and recovery. GreenLake for Disaster Recovery provides continuous data protection using HPE’s global cloud platform with a unified, automated experience across multiple virtual machines.

GreenLake for Backup and Recovery protects on-premises and cloud workloads through unified management and a single data catalog across private and public cloud workloads. It also provides policy-based orchestration and consumption-based billing delivered entirely as a service.

HPE still lacks an on-premises corollary to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 object storage, but there have been reports that such an offering is imminent.

Vellante said HPE has historically squeezed storage research and development and has had to catch up through acquisitions, but these announcements are a positive sign the company is bringing homegrown and outside technologies together. “While many of those acquisitions have paid off, Antonio Neri is setting a course better balancing organic investments, partnering and acquisition,” he said. “This announcement contains all three, with HPE storage OS intellectual property, the VAST file system and Infosight AIOps from Nimble.”

Images: HPE; Dave Vellante/SiliconANGLE