From HPE, Cloud Management Experience for File Storage Minus Security Risks or Trade-Offs

By David Yu, storage product marketing, HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduces a cloud service for file storage that delivers an intuitive cloud experience without the security risks or trade-offs that you worry about with public cloud services.

These days, you’ll hear much talk about going to the public cloud for IT infrastructure. Enterprises want the compelling benefits of the cloud experience like simplicity, agility, and as-a-service consumption. But actually migrating to public cloud involves some persistent concerns – particularly around performance at scale, data sovereignty and security, and cost control – that are giving IT managers pause. Into this mix, HPE has been delivering data services via the GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform for several years now. This includes the new HPE GreenLake for File Storage that brings together an intuitive cloud experience and the security, control, performance, and cost advantages of on-prem infrastructure.

To understand the groundbreaking benefits of GreenLake for File Storage, you need to understand the importance of public cloud trade-offs. First, a little storage history.

Move from centralized to distributed
Back in the early days of computing and storage, IT infrastructure was centralized, built on proprietary mainframe computers in the data center. Users used dumb monitors, and all data was stored in the data center. With the introduction of the personal computer and its 160KB floppy disks, Unix open systems servers, NAS, and the rapid growth of the Internet, we would eventually generate huge amounts of distributed data, in particular file data. At this point, modern storage looks very different from the old, centralized data center approach.

Today, handling all that distributed data has become a major challenge, as your questions mount: How do you manage it, keep track of it, and back it up? What strategies can you use to make storage more easily available to users and application owners? How do you make it shareable and eliminate data silos? What can be done to protect it and keep it secure? And now, with the proliferation of data-intensive workloads such as AI and ML, how can your data storage infrastructure deliver the required performance to extract insights and derive value from your data in aggregate?

Cloud trade-offs drive focus back to on-prem enterprise storage
In a world of distributed data, the challenge of storing, managing, and protecting all of your data is more daunting than ever. In response, organizations have focused on data-first transformation initiatives – many of which rely on a migration to the public cloud to simplify and re-centralize data management. Farming out IT data storage infrastructure can indeed simplify operations, reduce demand on IT staff, and trim hardware purchases, but storing data in the public cloud also involves unavoidable trade-offs. The drawbacks include security, performance and latency, cost at scale, data sovereignty and management, and flexibility. The weight of these trade-offs has pushed many businesses to keep data storage infrastructure on-premises, reversing the earlier focus on the public cloud and shifting it again toward the data center.

One major trade-off for the convenience of using public cloud for file data storage infrastructure is that you lose control of your own security protocols, including the critical ability to put physical security measures in place for hardware. Data security is an increasingly important consideration in the face of the proliferation of data breaches. Physical and software protection measures to control and restrict access to data are primary factors in formulating an IT strategy.

Now consider performance and latency. Public cloud storage places a premium on performance. There is a higher cost for meeting IO/s and throughput performance requirements that go beyond baseline levels. Therefore, we’re not only concerned about performance itself, but also about the cost at scale of public cloud storage as the volume of data increases. It turns out to be very difficult to achieve enterprise performance at scale for large volumes of data for your most demanding workloads while keeping costs down.

Data sovereignty, control, and management are also eroded when file data storage infrastructure is external to an organization. Data is your most important asset, it’s in fact the life force of your enterprise, so preserving your ownership of it is of paramount importance. When you use public cloud for your data storage infrastructure, you’re paying for your data to be stored. However, it’s much easier to put your data in the public cloud than to take it back. In reality, public cloud is designed to be a one-way street, as egress fees to take back your data can be painfully expensive. This kind of lock-in reduces your agility and cost control.

The last major trade-off has to do with flexibility. As technology companies are all shifting toward subscription-based models, they want subscribers to commit for the long run to generate a recurring revenue stream. For the business, that makes sense. Every company wants to secure ongoing income by being entrenched as part of a customer’s business infrastructure? The key question is whether you as the customer have options and flexibility in your subscription, as you ask: Can you choose between purchasing your hardware or going purely with a subscription? Most importantly, can your hardware live on-prem and can you handle the data management yourself? As we’ll see, HPE’s approach addresses this customer demand for flexibility – as well as for simplicity, security, performance, cost-effectiveness, and data sovereignty.

New paradigm in HPE GreenLake
We created the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to provide an intuitive hybrid cloud experience – and all the benefits of public cloud – without the drawbacks and trade-offs. With over 50 cloud services spanning storage, networking, compute, and workloads, GreenLake empowers you to flexibly accelerate your data-first modernization with a unified experience, full control, and broad visibility into your data, bringing the cloud to wherever your apps and data live.

Now, there’s HPE GreenLake for File Storage
HPE GreenLake for File Storage delivers an on-premises cloud management experience for file storage without the security risks and trade-offs of public cloud.

With an intuitive cloud experience, and simple file data management, GreenLake for File Storage reduces operational and management overhead for your IT staff. Powered by the GreenLake platform, you get streamlined deployment, easy file share creation, unified storage management with a single cloud console, and automated, nondisruptive upgrades. In addition, you can modernize your data management with a comprehensive suite of cloud data services and a unified operating experience on the GreenLake platform. This simple, end-to-end, self-service cloud experience across the file storage management lifecycle – accessible from anywhere, on any device – empowers your IT staff to work on strategic initiatives rather than be weighed down by day-to-day operations. Easily maintain your storage infrastructure and make non-disruptive upgrades. Enjoy investment protection and maximum ROI with data-in-place upgrades. Efficiently scale up and out by adding controller and storage nodes as needed. Keep all your data on a single tier of fast, scalable, affordable all-NVMe flash to eliminate silos, complex data movement workflows, or application wait times. When exabytes of data are available in real time, new insights become possible.

GreenLake for File Storage offers enterprise performance at scale to accelerate the most data-intensive applications, including AI, ML, DL, big data, HPC, life sciences, financial analytics, media and entertainment, large data lakes, and high-speed access to data archives. Built on VAST Data software and the HPE Alletra Storage MP modular hardware platform for both file and block storage, GreenLake for File Storage provides a differentiated file storage offering. By avoiding trade-offs, the solution makes storage simple while delivering scalable performance via a unique, modular hardware architecture that helps eliminate hardware silos and islands of data. Just consider how much greater flexibility you’ll have in deploying the storage resources you need with common hardware. End users will be able to quickly set up file storage, access and share data, and get their work done quickly while IT staff will no longer have to worry about trade-offs in security, performance and latency, cost at scale, data sovereignty and management, and flexibility.

Next, you can leverage GreenLake for File Storage to unlock more value from your aggregated data. Simple setup and fast job completion increase the productivity of your data scientists and line-of-business application owners. You’ll get results faster as your team is not burdened by cumbersome, legacy file systems that require technical expertise and intricate setup processes just to run. And your highly compensated subject-matter experts no longer need to expend valuable time and effort performing IT tasks but can instead focus on their actual work.

As organizations bring data back on premises, GreenLake for File Storage presents a compelling solution. You might even say that HPE has introduced a  file storage offering at just the right time and place to meet industry needs as enterprise storage requirements and the cloud operational model converge to establish an entirely new operating paradigm.

Watch for more blogs on this topic, as we explore in detail how this solution delivers the performance that AI/ML and data-intensive applications need and the productivity that enterprises want. 

Resources :
Video: Why HPE GreenLake for File Storage?   
Video: HPE GreenLake for File Storage Demo