COVID-19 has created massive uncertainty and amplified the need for businesses to advance their digital transformation efforts and innovate to survive. According to Deloitte, many organisations began innovating rapidly immediately after the World Health Organisation declared the global pandemic in 2020. In a recent study of digital business, Deloitte reports that digitally mature companies tend to be more successful at driving innovation.
There will always be uncertainty—to survive and thrive, businesses need to develop their capacity to respond to changes in the market and innovate swiftly. Accelerating innovation enables organisations to readily identify and adapt to change, improve productivity, reduce costs, drive growth and profitability, and create real value by connecting with their customers and quickly delivering new products and services to the market.
Technology to support rapid innovation
New technologies such as cloud computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can provide the speed, agility, and insights to drive rapid innovation and meet new business demands on the fly. To support a dynamic business model, today’s CIOs want to accelerate everything—they want the benefits of the public cloud in their on-premises data centre. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has combined the intelligence of its AI- and ML-driven HPE Primera storage platform with the composability of HPE Synergy, a bladed modular architecture, and HPE Composable Rack. This integration delivers the agility of the cloud on-premises and provides the flexibility that enables businesses to accelerate their innovation.
Composable infrastructure
HPE Synergy and HPE Composable Rack are software-defined, composable systems that serve as the foundation for private and hybrid-cloud solutions. HPE composable infrastructure gives CIOs access to a scalable, flexible pool of resources for bare-metal, virtualised, or container applications that can be configured and allocated in real-time to deploy any workload via a single API.
Compute, storage, and networking resources are disaggregated from their physical appliances and gathered, managed, and deployed to run any application via HPE’s OneView platform. HPE OneView is an integrated infrastructure management software that automates IT operations and simplifies infrastructure lifecycle management across compute, storage and networking through a single interface. It brings speed and efficiency by combining infrastructure management into a single management solution where infrastructure is software-defined and treated as code. This software-defined automation makes on-premises resources as readily available, scalable, and efficient as public cloud services while ensuring the best possible application performance. On-demand resource allocation allows organisations to use capacity as needed and release it when it is not. This reduces underutilisation and overprovisioning of infrastructure, which saves time, boosts agility and optimises costs.
Intelligent storage
HPE Primera is an all-flash enterprise storage array designed for mission-critical applications that demand optimal performance and extremely low latency. HPE Primera promises instant access to data with storage that sets up in minutes and upgrades transparently. It boasts a unique, simple, services-centric operating system with advanced data services and a multi-node, massively parallel, all-active design architected for high availability and transparent business continuity.
Preventing downtime, accelerating application performance and protecting and retaining data are essential for companies that are reliant on mission-critical applications and want to speed the pace of innovation. HPE Primera promises highly available storage and application uptime and backs this up with a 100% availability guarantee.
The power of composable and intelligence
HPE Primera integrates with HPE Synergy and HPE Composable Rack. This combination creates an intelligent cloud platform with all the benefits of composable infrastructure—agility, flexibility and the resilience to support any workload at scale.
Managing infrastructure as code enables CIOs to automate IT operations and streamline resource management, saving time and freeing up capacity so they can accelerate their time to market.
HPE Primera, HPE Synergy and HPE Composable Rack are powered by HPE InfoSight, a predictive intelligent data management tool that continuously collects and analyses data from trillions of HPE data points and provides analytics and global learning for autonomous storage. Through cloud-based ML, HPE InfoSight detects and prevents outages and disruptions in the storage, network, compute and application layers and provides immediate insights and automated recommendations. It enables CIOs to optimise performance, ensure resiliency and automate workload planning to consolidate mission-critical applications at scale without risk. Automation, together with software-defined control, significantly reduces the time spent on provisioning and maintenance.
Agility and speed as-a-Service
While organisations are shifting their business models, many are changing the way they purchase IT too. CIOs are considering moving from CapEx to OpEx models, where IT is viewed as an ongoing expense, which frees up capital and improves predictability and budgeting. There are no long-term investments to worry about—businesses pay for the capacity they need when they need it.
HPE’s combination of intelligence and composability provides an intelligent cloud foundation that unifies the IT environment with a common software-defined and AI-driven operating model that can be delivered as-a-Service through HPE GreenLake
a pay-per-use consumption-based model that delivers hardware, software, and expertise on-premises or in the cloud. An organisation’s current and projected capacity is assessed, and the infrastructure is installed in its datacentre or colocation. There are no upfront investments—companies only pay for what they use, which is determined by metering technology. Measuring consumption this way improves IT forecasting and streamlines the use of IT resources, reducing under- and over-provisioning. Businesses can scale up or down on-demand, enabling them to move faster. CIOs retain complete control of their applications and data with centralised operations from a single self-service platform, which reduces compliance and security risks.
HPE GreenLake enables businesses to combine the simplicity, flexibility and pay-per-use economics of the cloud with the security and control on-premises infrastructure offers.
iOCO and HPE
Digital transformation is a catalyst that can move organisations from resilience to success. Every business is different, though, and orchestrating a transformation can be challenging. Together, Aptronics and HPE have the skills, expertise and business acumen to help organisations develop their digital strategies and build solid IT environments that enable them to reimagine themselves.
To find out more or discuss how iOCO can assist you with your business transformation journey, please contact us.
By Richard Blewitt, Sales Director at iOCO