Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today announced an expansion of its private cloud portfolio, introducing new software and services aimed at reducing costs and simplifying hybrid information technology operations.

HPE said its new Private Cloud Business Edition with Morpheus Software is designed to help enterprises modernize their IT infrastructure to achieve greater flexibility, efficiency and manageability. The company also debuted new cyber resiliency and data availability enhancements for its Alletra MP software-defined, scale-out storage.

The announcement highlights two new software packages — HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software — that target different segments of the enterprise market. HPE also introduced services to support virtualization modernization.

Private clouds are a critical component of enterprise IT strategies, particularly for organizations that require greater control over data for compliance or performance reasons. However, HPE said the high cost and complexity of managing private cloud environments have created demand for ways to simplify operations and reduce expenses.

The latest offerings are aimed at addressing those demands by providing flexible, cost-effective alternatives to legacy virtualization platforms, while also supporting hybrid and multicloud deployments. “While our competitors are just starting to talk about disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure, HPE is more than five years in and we’re pulling even further forward,” said Cheri Williams, general manager of private cloud and flex solutions.

Lower-cost VMs

Morpheus VM Essentials supports multi-hypervisor environments and aims to cut virtual machine licensing costs 10-fold, HPE said. Combined with disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure, it’s positioned as a cost-effective alternative to traditional virtualization platforms, with up to 2.5 times lower total cost of ownership.

Disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure separates storage and compute resources, allowing them to scale independently and for resources to be added as needed without overprovisioning. That’s in contrast to traditional hyperconverged infrastructure, in which computing, storage and networking resources are tightly integrated into a single appliance for simpler management. HCI can limit flexibility and scalability because the entire appliance must be upgraded to add storage or computing power.

HPE claimed the integration of Morpheus VM Essentials with its infrastructure enables organizations to manage both HPE and third-party VMs via a single interface. Artificial intelligence-driven automation streamlines setup and lifecycle management, with predictive analytics to preemptively address most operational issues.

The company said the combination of VM Essentials with HPE Aruba CX 10000 networking equipment lowers TCO total cost of ownership by 48%, improves performance up to 10-fold and enhances security through microsegmentation and data processing unit acceleration.

“This delivers micro segmentation capability inside the switch versus the hypervisor and the benefits are better performance, lower cost and many other capabilities,” including the ability to provision virtual private networks using the IPsec protocol suite, network address translation and consistent security across VMs, said Rajeev Bhardwaj, chief product officer for private cloud and flex solutions.

Unified cloud management

For larger enterprises and service providers, HPE introduced Morpheus Enterprise Software, a cloud management platform that consolidates the management of virtualized, containerized and bare-metal workloads across private and public clouds. Features include centralized governance, cost analytics and automation, which combine to make application deployment into hypervisors 150 times faster while reducing cloud costs by 30% through rightsizing, based on before and after interviews with Morpheus Software users.

“We’re giving customers the flexibility to manage any workload — VMs, containers, bare metal — on any cloud, whether it’s on-premises, at the edge, or in public clouds,” Bhardwaj said. “It’s about delivering a self-service public cloud-like experience with centralized governance and cost controls.”

Morpheus’s software was originally developed to simplify hybrid cloud operations, providing DevOps teams with tools for self-service provisioning. HPE acquired Morpheus Data LLC last summer and is positioning the technology to address the growing demand for unified cloud management platforms that can handle multicloud and hybrid deployments.

The Morpheus Enterprise Software expands these capabilities to span bare-metal, virtual and containerized workloads. HPE said the software can be used to automate application provisioning, optimize cloud costs through rightsizing analytics and provide tools to maintain compliance.

HPE said Morpheus runs on its ProLiant Gen11 and Gen12 servers as well as third-party hardware. Running on ProLiant, it offers up to 27% savings on virtualization software, a 65% reduction in power consumption and a data center footprint reduction of over 80%.

Both software offerings are licensed per-socket, a move that HPE said provides predictable pricing and scalability. The software will run on HPE infrastructure and third-party hardware.

Commvault Systems Inc. will be the first partner to integrate image-based VM backup and recovery with VM Essentials. Availability is expected later this month.

Less time managing infrastructure

The new Private Cloud Business Edition can be deployed on both dHCI and traditional hyperconverged infrastructure, an option that HPE said allows customers to optimize architectures for virtualized workloads at the edge or in the data center.

“Once we fully migrated to HPE Private Cloud Business Edition, we saw a 30% reduction in the time my team spent managing infrastructure,” said Chris Macken, vice president of IT operations and security at Cambrian Credit Union. “We also realized a 20% to 30% performance boost in our banking system operations.”

HPE also announced new cloud platform services tailored for virtualization transformation. They include assessments, infrastructure modernization, workload migration and operational management to simplify the transition to modern architectures.

Alletra enhancements provide expanded backup options for small and midsized businesses. Updates include new service-level agreements for the Alletra Storage MP B10000, a zero data loss and downtime guarantee via active peer persistence, a cyber resiliency guarantee of rapid recovery within 30 minutes of a ransomware incident, and an energy consumption guarantee to optimize power efficiency.

The company also introduced entry-level HPE StoreOnce 3720 and 3760 backup appliances aimed at remote offices and SMBs. They scale from 18 terabytes to 216 terabytes locally and up to 648 terabytes with cloud storage, offer up to 20:1 data reduction and backup speeds of 25 terabytes per hour. Designed for edge environments, they deliver two-thirds higher density, 30% lower power usage and integration with popular backup software.

Photo: Sundry Photography/Adobe Stock