HPE expands hybrid cloud stack with unified private cloud and AI-ready storage updates

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today is expanding its hybrid cloud and data platform portfolio with new private cloud, storage and cyber resilience offerings designed to simplify infrastructure modernization and prepare enterprise data environments for artificial intelligence workloads.

The announcements focus on integrating virtualization, the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers, storage and data protection into what executives described as a unified operating model spanning core, edge and cloud environments.

They include the fourth generation of HPE Private Cloud, expanded file and object storage support in the HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 platform, new agentic AI management capabilities and additional cyber resilience features in HPE Zerto Software.

The new and enhanced products are meant to address enterprises’ struggles with rising virtualization costs, operational complexity and fragmented AI deployments, said Angel Penilla, vice president of private cloud product and engineering at HPE.

“AI is not just running in one place,” he said. “Most organizations have AI sprawl, and so every single business unit is talking about how to adopt it. Even within small organizations, there’s a lot of fragmentation.”

Penilla said HPE’s strategy is to provide “one operating model, control plane and one dedicated stack for AI that can flow from the core to the edge.”

The company said its updated HPE Private Cloud platform now supports unified management of virtual machines and Kubernetes containers through a single interface powered by HPE Morpheus Software. The offering also adds support for the latest HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers and expanded migration and backup integrations with Veeam Software Corp.’s backup and recovery software and HPE’s Zerto disaster recovery platform.

Flexibility plus convenience

Penilla said customers “are looking for the flexibility of that disaggregated build-your-own, but also all the benefits of an appliance.”

HPE is also positioning the platform as an alternative for the growing number of organizations reassessing public cloud strategies because of AI inference requirements and concerns about sensitive data exfiltration. “Hybrid is becoming more hybrid than ever,” Penilla said. “A lot of the AI workloads are moving on-prem or to the edge.”

Enterprises increasingly want to keep AI-related data on premises even when using cloud infrastructure for model training, said Gokul Sathiacama, vice president of products for HPE Storage.

“Model builders want very low latency,” he said. “They want to use the cloud because they don’t have infinite resources on premises. However, the reason they’re bringing the models back on premises for inferencing and [retrieval-augmented generation] is because some of the data that they want to compare is very sensitive.”

As part of the storage updates, HPE added native file support to the Alletra Storage MP X10000 platform, which was previously focused on object storage for AI and analytics workloads. The system now supports both file and object access simultaneously. “We have a key-value store, and we built an object and file namespace on of it that we can run all at the same time for different workloads,” Sathiacama said.

The company also expanded the system’s scale to 16 nodes and 23 petabytes of raw capacity and introduced support for remote direct memory access-enabled file storage to accelerate AI pipelines.

HPE further announced enhancements to its HPE Data Fabric Software, including conversational AI interfaces, policy-based data movement and expanded governance features intended to help customers manage data across edge, core and cloud environments. “This allows us to bring multiple sources of data, whether the data lives at the edge, in the core or in the cloud, and provide a single federated namespace to our customers,” Sathiacama said.

Resilience imperative

Cyber resilience was another major focus of the announcements. Stephen Bacon, vice president of cyber resilience and data protection solutions at HPE, said organizations increasingly view resilience as a business imperative rather than simply an information technology function.

“Resilience has really become a defining organizational capability,” Bacon said. “It’s no longer just an IT concern or a security conversation.”

HPE Zerto Software 10.9 introduces AI-driven protection capabilities, recovery automation and expanded support for HPE’s VM hypervisor environment. The company also added support for the Model Context Protocol to enable AI tools to interact directly with Zerto in what Bacon described as “a structured, governed and auditable way.

“Cyberthreats are constant and increasingly sophisticated,” Bacon said. “What really matters is resilience — the ability to absorb an event, recover as fast as the business requires and continue operating.”

HPE said most of the newly announced capabilities are available immediately, with additional unified VM and container management features and expanded storage scale-out capabilities scheduled for release later this year.

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