In early October, I was approached by Calvin Zito (@CalvinZito on Twitter) about attending a HPE Tech Day in mid-October.  He mentioned that this one was going to have a storage focus (which anyone who reads any of my blogs or follows me on social media knows storage isn’t my forte).  I mentioned this to Calvin, but he felt that maybe I could provide some insight from a different perspective than those just coming at this from the in’s and outs of storage specifics.  Also, even though storage isn’t my forte, I do believe that gaining knowledge in different technical disciplines is a good thing.

During the event, maybe different HPE personnel went through many parts of the HPE storage portfolio and left themselves open to many questions (along with providing many answers) during the event.  Highlight below will be my first attempt at giving a classic “Three Up/Three Down” spin to this event.  The idea being that there are three things that I got excited about (three up) and three things that did not excite me or gave me cause for concern (three down).  Without further ado…

Three Up

First, we’ll start off with one of the major impressions I got from this event. Multiple times, it was referenced about how well the acquisitions of both Nimble and SimpliVity were going within HPE.  Following HPE’s history, there had been a pattern of acquisitions that never really panned out.  While no one ever expects every acquisition to be perfectly integrated into existing product portfolios, there had been some pretty illustrious failures on HPE’s part.  What was starting to show was that things were starting to get better with integration of new parts into the HPE ecosystem.  Along with Nimble and SimpliVity, it was stated by multiple HPE personnel how things seemed to take a turn towards the positive with the way that HPE treated the 3PAR acquisition.  With the roadmaps that were being given during the Tech Day event, it did certainly show that HPE has learned a lesson, overall, and have done a pretty good job of working Nimble and SimpliVity into their family of products

Secondly, let us discuss what HPE is doing with their newest analytics toy from the Nimble acquisition, InfoSight. Personally, I believe Nimble’s best IP asset wasn’t its storage array, but InfoSight.  Whatever HPE paid for Nimble, I felt InfoSight was worth the price alone.  For those unaware, InfoSight was/is Nimble’s analytics engine.  This fact-finding tool has some pretty illustrious stats behind it, in regard to diagnosing and responding to issues before they become major problems to administrators.  However, as HPE now has this tool to its disposal, the arduous task of other HPE product integration begins.  We will begin to see exactly how modular Nimble made the framework as HPE attempts to add other products to this engine.  The first product being ran through this gauntlet is the 3PAR system.

Lastly, another Nimble technology, Cloud Volumes, appears to be gaining a lot of steam for HPE in the cloud storage realm. While not necessarily being in some of the major cloud provider data centers, HPE promises a low amount of latency between cloud providers like AWS and Azure to help augment some of the storage needs of workloads that native cloud storage platforms like Azure Blob or AWS S3 will not be able to.  While we could go off onto many debates on whether block storage should be the storage type you want to use in cloud-native approaches, there are some nice things, like avoiding expensive data egress charges, by using Cloud Volumes.

Three Down

This is going to be a moment in time nitpick. During a few of the demos, we got to see many different HPE management endpoints (not all of them related to the storage portfolio).  There was a mention that the amount of GUI interactions between multiple products was going to reduce over time.  However, I have to slap the dreaded award of “Too Much Nerd Knobs” to the HPE management software suites.  As someone who has to spend much of their time making multiple endpoints work together into larger system workflows, the fact that so many endpoints were needed to make the entire package hum along felt exceedingly unnecessary.  I hope to see the amount of administration components drastically reduced in the next 12 months.

Another non-secret to any people who follow me regularly know that I’ve always been a “friend of the program” when it came to SimpliVity. I even got a semi-public acknowledgement for helping SimpliVity start to realize what they now had available when one of their major releases put forth a public REST API.  While the “community version” of the PowerShell module to show the power of their API never made it for public consumption, it seems many of the lessons learned by SimpliVity during this process have helped craft many of the interoperability messages since then.  Another slight HPE nitpick on this one is that it does feel that HPE is having a problem trying to apply what SimpliVity brings to the table to a more classic Venn diagram product portfolio.  There’s so many things that platform can do, that it does the platform a disservice to just discuss and shoehorn it into a single function platform.  As HPE starts to realize what they have in SimpliVity and are able to properly craft better integration into its product portfolio, I’m sure this nitpick just needs time to resolve.

Lastly, I was going to pick on HPE’s container messaging, however, I’m starting to realize that it’s not just a unique HPE message. At roughly the same time as this HPE Tech Day, DockerCon EU was happening.  I’ve heard from a few people that attended that there’s been an overall shift in messaging about containers and how to approach their usage, especially in the early stages of potential application refactoring towards cloud-native approaches.  What we are now hearing is that there’s a prevailing recommendation that we just now take applications, as is, and just wrap them into a container packaging.  I’ve had many discussions since then and while I see there might be some tangible benefits to this approach, I still feel that simple lifting an application from a virtual machine into a container isn’t exactly the intended proper use case for driving container adoption.  The application itself didn’t change and all that happened was the run time shifted from a hypervisor to a container runtime.  I’m going to completely disagree that this is a valid approach to container adoption, mostly because it just feels like a complete lapse in application architectural principles.  So many questions need to be answered about the viability of that application before changing its runtime.  Let’s actually make some sense in our technology choices, rather than trying to justify changing it for technology’s (and only technology’s) sake.

Final Thoughts

There you have it.  I think HPE is making some strides from some of their most recent history and are looking to rebound.  I believe the acquisitions of Nimble and SimpliVity are going to be a great benefit to HPE long term.  I hope to see even more positives in the upcoming calendar year.

For those interested, the HPE Tech Day event is available on YouTube at the following link:  YouTube – HPE Tech Day

Disclaimer:  I was invited, on behalf of HPE, to attend this event.  All my expenses, including transportation, food, and lodging were covered by HPE.  HPE never offered, nor did I expect to receive any compensation for writing this post, nor was I required in any fashion to write this post.  I wrote this because I was genuinely excited (and not so excited) about developments with the HPE storage portfolio.