Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is enhancing its GreenLake platform with a host of new and expanded features that aim to simplify how users manage and optimize data, storage and workloads across their on-premises and cloud-based information technology environments.

The new offerings include HPE GreenLake Block Storage capabilities for the Amazon Web Services cloud, a new release of HPE GreenLake for Block Storage that comes with some significant performance improvements, and a HPE Timeless Program that provides greater protections to customers using the HPE Alletra MP block storage service.

Today’s updates build on last year’s launch of what HPE says is the industry’s first modular scale-out block storage system on a single operating system. That system is based on the HPE Alletra Storage platform that the company introduced three years ago with the aim of delivering on-premises storage with cloudlike management.

With HPE GreenLake Block Storage for AWS, set to launch later this month, the company says, it’s trying to simplify data management and workload placement on the AWS cloud through the use of software-defined storage. The new offering is said to provide a seamless, unified storage management experience for hybrid cloud environments, with enterprises free to manage, protect and move data, workloads and backups across their on-premises and AWS servers, together with more cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery services.

The underlying HPE Alletra MP platform is also being updated, with new cross-stack analytics capabilities that are said to streamline storage management and help customers to avoid latency issues that might impact workload performance. The new offering combines full-stack correlation of resources with the HPE AIOps engine for workload management and observability to help users observe, predict and mitigate possible disruptions across their virtual machines, compute, cloud, storage and network infrastructure. It also enables customers to keep tabs on energy consumption and carbon emissions.

In terms of performance, HPE Alletra MP can now scale to up to 5.6 petabytes with support for up to 16 JBOF expansion shelves, double the previously available capacity. New advanced built-in global protection supports three-site replication for enhanced data protection. In addition, the platform is now integrated with the Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault, giving customers a way to create secure, immutable copies of their data and perform air-gapped recovery in the event of a cyberattack or other kind of disaster.

Steve McDowell of NAND Research Inc. said the two things that stand out in HPE’s updated Alletra MP offering are the performance and capacity upgrades, with the former resulting from a recent hardware switch that saw the company embrace the latest generation EPYC processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. By becoming the first mainstream storage company to ship a product that’s built around an AMD processor, HPE gets to take advantage of the PCIe Gen5 technology integrated with that chip.

“The industry has seen a flurry of performance-focused upgrades resulting from PCIe Gen5, because the boost is substantial, especially for high-performance workloads such as AI,” McDowell said. “HPE is delivering the platform upgrade right on time and staying competitive with the rest of the market.”

The improved density offered by Alletra is also extremely timely, the analyst said, as enterprises are demanding higher capacity systems. “HPE delivers this with high-capacity SSDs and support for additional expansion shelves,” McDowell explained. “These new capacities are really nice, giving headroom to enterprises that want to build a data lakehouse that coalesces data into a single storage solution. It gives users a nice set of scalability options, supporting both scale-up and scale-out.”

The HPE Timeless Program, set to launch in the third quarter, is meant to transform the storage ownership experience for companies by adding “investment protection” and a more streamlined infrastructure lifecycle path, the company said. Customers that use HPE Alletra MP’s block storage will qualify for an upgrade to a next-generation controller whenever they renew their subscriptions, according to HPE. In addition, the program is said to deliver significant savings of approximately 30% on the total cost of ownership for storage, which is achieved by avoiding major major “forklift” upgrades.

Finally, HPE said it’s adding new private cloud solutions with the availability of HPE Alletra Storage MP and HPE SimpliVity Gen11 within the HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, which is an agile, self-service private cloud offering that’s said to simplify VM management across environments. The company said support for HPE Alletra MP will enable mission-critical VM workloads with midrange economics and a 100% data availability guarantee. HPE SimpliVity Gen11 provides access to HPE ProLiant Gen11 nodes to support VMs at the network edge. Both offerings are set to launch in July.

McDowell said today’s announcements help HPE to stay current, or perhaps even a little ahead of its main rivals in the storage industry. “This is a welcome return to form for HPE, as its momentum in the storage world seemed to slow down ahead of launching the Alletra portfolio last spring,” he said. “Now HPE is back and the competition should start taking it seriously.”

HPE Storage Senior Vice President and General Manager Jim O’Dorisio said today’s update provide enterprises with a transformative platform-based approach to hybrid IT management and data storage. “With our innovations across HPE Alletra and HPE GreenLake, we continue to set the standard for simpler, more cost-effective IT and storage management,” he said.

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