HPE Synergy is the first platform architected as a composable infrastructure: Vikram K, HPE India

As enterprise technology observes a prominent shift from the world of the traditional data center towards a future built of composable infrastructure, the need for sophisticated management systems to shift work loads and get the best value out of systems is on a rise. Bearing its roots in server virtualization, shifting to composable is so far regarded as an incremental process by many businesses. Vikram K, Director, Data Center & Hybrid Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) India in an exclusive interview with Techseen, explains the benefits of composable infrastructure and how HPE Synergy is making hybrid IT simple for businesses.

Techseen: What trends do you observe in the adoption of hybrid cloud infrastructure in India?

Vikram: Over time, we have seen that most businesses are finding value in sourcing services differently based on their technology capabilities and business requirements. As a result, they are looking to use traditional infrastructures, private clouds, and/or public clouds by adopting a hybrid sourcing model. Regardless of their traditional infrastructure, organizations are modernizing and supporting hybrid delivery to take advantage of the latest architectural and operational options, such as software-defined infrastructure, DevOps automation, and flexible capacity. However, businesses going beyond implementing internal private cloud solutions will need to speed up and develop their hybrid delivery strategy and planning process.

Moreover, as all services are not created equal and each organization has its own needs around performance, security, control, and availability, it is vital to have an understanding of where and how a hybrid infrastructure strategy can most effectively be applied to the organization’s portfolio of services.

Techseen: What are the potential benefits of deploying composable infrastructure? How can HPE Synergy ease business operations?

Vikram: Composable infrastructure is designed to enable IT to operate like a cloud provider by maximizing the speed, agility, and efficiency of core infrastructure and operations. It also provides the predictable performance needed to support core workloads. HPE Synergy is the first platform architected from the ground up as a composable infrastructure. It is a single infrastructure that is designed to reduce operational complexity for traditional workloads and increase operational velocity for the new breed of applications and services. Through a single user interface, this platform enables IT to deliver a new experience by maximizing the speed, agility, and efficiency of operations. It is designed to precisely adjust fluid pools of resources, and reduce the cost of over provisioning with a single infrastructure that can run any application.

Techseen: HPE launched Synergy in London back in 2015. How have industries responded to it so far?

Vikram: Since we announced HPE Synergy, the first instantiation of a composable infrastructure, HPE has implemented an early access release program, and has been busy testing and validating this solution in about a 100 different customer environments globally.

The early access customers we have been working with touch verticals such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and the automotive industry. Additionally, HPE has been building an ecosystem encompassing a growing list of both traditional and new integration partners that customers are asking for today.

Techseen: Companies like Cisco Systems and Intel have also disclosed their own composable infrastructure solutions to market. How is HPE Synergy placed against its peers?

Vikram: While some other vendors are addressing some of the aspects of a composable infrastructure, their offerings fall short. HPE Synergy is the first and only platform designed to leverage fluid resource pools, software defined intelligence and a unified API to help organizations continually optimize the right mix of traditional and private cloud resources. HPE is the only vendor that provides a fully composable infrastructure solution instantiated by HPE Synergy, which is powered by OneView 3.0, HPE’s infrastructure automation management software, providing the ability to discover, manage and designate infrastructure resources using a single, unified interface. This enables more efficient infrastructure utilization by empowering IT to target the right infrastructure for the right workloads, accelerating development cycles while maintaining control and compliance.

Techseen: Composable infrastructure offers new possibilities in terms of automation and efficiency, but does that mean a company should abandon its present operational model to implement it?

Vikram: It is imperative for businesses to balance their IT resources and investments so they keep core legacy systems up and running and simultaneously create value by integrating the new technologies needed to keep the business competitive and growing.

Composable infrastructure enables businesses to power innovation and value creation for the new breed of applications while continuing to run traditional workloads more efficiently.

Techseen: How can companies find the best security solution to suit their data network needs? What are the security solutions adopted by HPE to secure their data centres?

Vikram: The proliferation of apps, new consumption models and the shift to mobile and cloud have made it imperative for businesses to manage the resultant emerging risks. HPE helps protect organizations by building security and resiliency into the fabric of their enterprise, proactively detecting and responding to threats, and safeguarding continuity and compliance to effectively mitigate risk. In addition to services, we also provide market-leading security products that enable operational security, application security, data protection, and network-level protection. Our selection of products includes HPE ArcSight Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions, HPE Fortify for application security, and HPE Voltage as well as HPE Atalla for data protection.

Techseen: Would you suggest an amalgamation of public and private clouds for those as yet uncertain about possible data security breaches in the cloud, where they have sensitive data in the private cloud?

Vikram: Many businesses view cloud services as a key component of their ability to access the right mix of services, from the right place, and at the right time and cost. This trend points to hybrid infrastructure, which is designed to seamlessly combine public cloud, private cloud and traditional IT, while maximizing the performance, cost and agility of the services it delivers.

The right hybrid delivery strategy is based on standards, built on a common architecture with unified management and security, and enables service portability across deployment models.

Techseen: Do you feel IoT would be responsible for an overflow of undesirable data in the future?

Vikram: IoT is the defining technology trend of the next decade. The breadth of intelligent devices and services connected in the market has increased exponentially, and there have never been as many things connected to the Internet as there are today. However, with all of the connected cars, houses, watches, health monitoring devices, trackers, etc., there will be an unfathomable amount of data. We have seen that problems which were unsurmountable in the past can now easily be handled with a click of a button, and that’s how we think about the quantum of data being generated – and we are confident that technology will surely overcome this challenge too, and enable organizations to turn it into an advantage.

Techseen: Can you explain how growing network traffic in a data center can affect the performance and protection of the network?

Vikram: The growth in network traffic, along with explosion of IoT, can affect the performance and protection needs of the network. Data centers architected using a traditional three-layer hierarchical structure are not well suited for cloud environments. In spite of the evidence of the inherent limitations of this architecture related to scalability, cost, and complexity, businesses reluctantly continue to employ this approach.

While the three-layer architecture may have been sufficient with past computing models, it can no longer effectively or efficiently support emerging public and private cloud computing models without creating operational, performance, security and scaling challenges.

This has resulted in an emerging shift in data center design, where the data centres are simpler, flatter, and based on the meshed architecture model.

Techseen: Do you have any planned investments in systems or product development of the HPE Synergy infrastructure?

Vikram: Since its launch, we have continuously made various enhancements to Synergy. Last year, we announced Synergy with HPE Helion CloudSystem 10, which gives organizations the ability to operate a single IT environment on-premise that supports both traditional applications and private clouds on shared infrastructure.

Moreover, when compared to BladeSystem, Synergy is optimized at scale thereby offering a 7% TCO advantage. It also saves time by completing tasks that traditionally took a full work day in an hour.

As of January 1, Synergy is being shipped with positive early sales numbers and these numbers are on top of the beta program, which had 100 early access customers in 2016. As the product continues to help customers across several key verticals including healthcare, automotive and financial institutions, we expect the sales number to further increase. Additionally, Synergy is experiencing a strong demand through our channel partners with 71% of our early Synergy orders coming through them.