HPE GreenLake For Data Protection, Backup/Recovery For VMware: Seven Things You Need To Know

HPE this week formally launched a new HPE GreenLake For Data Protection which includes a ransomware disaster recovery capability and a new backup and recovery service for VMware.

A New Era Of HPE GreenLake SaaS-Based Ransomware Protection

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is upping the ante in the intensely competitive disaster recovery market with a new GreenLake Data Protection Service with ransomware SaaS-based protection based in part on its $374 million acquisition of Zerto earlier this year.

The breakthrough Zerto platform - combined with HPE technology under the HPE GreenLake pay per use platform - brings instant data recovery to both the edge and the cloud with what HPE claims is five times faster recovery than competitive offerings.

“We have years of very advanced technology in the area of snapshot and deduplication,etc.,”’ said Tom Black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s $1.2 billion storage business, in webcast on the new data protection services. “Based on some of our own internal measurements we have somewhere in the range of a 5x advantage in terms of the amount of network bandwidth used or time to both backup and restore.”

The Zerto continuous data protection/disaster recovery “Ransomware protection” is being combined with HPE’s snapshot-based backup recovery that is built as a full SaaS offering, said Black.

Black said the Zerto platform-combined with proven HPE technology- is faster and more efficient than a typical recovery for a Ransomware event. “I am very, very proud of the team for taking some hardened technology starting with a clean sheet and the simplicity (of the Zerto offering), and marrying them together to bring this new service out,” he said.

The GreenLake edge to cloud platform provides the ability to provide data services both on premise and in the public cloud, said Black. “Clearly Zerto is exceptional at that,” he said. “We have the ability with a few clicks to protect hundreds or thousands of edge sites either from an instantaneous DR (disaster recovery failover) or to an hourly snapshot or nightly backup,” he said.

HPE has touted Zerto – which has more than 9,000 customers including 350 MSPs- as a key in HPE GreenLake cloud data services protection from Ransomware.

The new HPE GreenLake for Data Protection and HPE Backup and Recovery Service For VMware as two “best in class” storage cloud data service options for customers, said Omer Asad, senior vice president and general manager of the HPE Data Infrastructure and SaaS Platforms business.

HPE Enters “Lucrative” SaaS Data Protection Cloud Services Market

The new HPE GreenLake For Data Protection and HPE Backup and Recovery Service For VMware has thrust HPE into a “very lucrative data management and data protection as a service business,” said Asad.

“This is one of the fastest growing CAGRs (Compound Annual Growth Rates) when it comes to persistent storage and protection,” said Asad.

The new SaaS services are “extremely simple” to deploy and operate, said Asad.

The GreenLake For Data Protection service provides Ransomware protection that allows customers to provide almost instant rollback to a pre-Ransomware state, said HPE.

In fact, Asad said, the new service provides the ability to recover in just a couple of seconds from an attack in an “extremely simple” fashion.

For 55 percent of organizations data recovery and protection is the number one initiative within IT organizations, said Asad.

HPE Backup And Recovery Service For VMware

The new HPE Backup And Recovery Service for VMware- which is available in November – provides for the first time an HPE backup/recovery for VMware environment in a SaaS cloud service through either GreenLake or the HPE Data Services Cloud Console.

The hybrid cloud SaaS services provides both on premises and public cloud VMware backup capabilities.

HPE Vice President of Storage Marketing Sandeep Singh said the new service provides a “common cloud operational experience across on premises for rapid recovery” and the ability to leverage public cloud for “retaining cost effective backups for long term retention,”

HPE focused first and foremost on “end to end simplicity,” said Singh. “There are no backup targets to manage, no appliances to manage, no public cloud infrastructure to manage and scale, all of that is automatically built in as part of the service.”

The new SaaS service provides quick protection of VMware virtual machines through VMware’s Vcenter server management platform, said Asad.

HPE has engineered the SaaS service to be seamless with VMware Vcenter, said Asad. “It is a simple SaaS service where you go online and sign up,” he said. “You say I want to protect a bunch of VMs, here is the address of my Vcenter.That is it! After that you have to do literally nothing…You click and after that we discover your VMs, we put in the protection policies. There is no backup target to install or manage...There is no catalogue server to install or manage. Everything is just automated and taken care of in a complete touchless model.”

The SaaS based backup service is “encrypted in flight” ensuring secure backup, said Asad.“It is completely effortless to install, there is nothing to install, you just sign up at the portal and activate,” said Asad.

The VMware based backup and recovery service – which is based in part on HPE Recovery Manager Central Software and HPE Storeonce APis- will be expanded to other applications in the future, said Asad.

HPE InfoSight App Insights- Application Intelligence Front And Center

HPE is bringing new “data driven intelligence” to its SaaS based cloud storage data protection services with its HPE InfoSight App Insights product.

The new InfoSight capabilities brings application centric data intelligence to the new cloud data storage offerings, said Singh.

“Now InfoSight is able to see across the full stack with the addition of application or App insights” starting with SQL Server initially and expansion planned for other applications in the future, he said.

“Customers now have the benefit of full stack analytics, examples being application anomalies or performance metrics that are completely delivered from the application viewpoint” Singh said. “That means customers are able to keep the application workloads that are running on HPE GreenLake to be end to end optimized.”

The new application layer intelligence will provide quicker resolution of potential storage issues, said Singh. “You can see latency and overall performance patterns, and automatically identify anomalies,” he said. “The application topology becomes visible so one can see the application dependency across infrastructure. That brings tremendous insights to IT.”

Ultimately, InfoSight App Insights will enable partners to keep customer “application workloads optimized” with the ability to more quickly troubleshoot and resolve any potential IT issues, said Singh.

“Ultimately InfoSight continues to make infrastructure invisible and shift operations to be application centric rather than infrastructure centric, that is critical to delivering cloud operational experience,” he said.

InfoSight App Insights- which is available under the InfoSight licensing and support agreement- will be available at the end of September, said Singh.

HPE CloudPhysics – An AI Based Hybrid Cloud Assessment Tool

The new HPE cloud data protection services also include the breakthrough CloudPhysics AI-based hybrid cloud assessment tool to partners, which HPE acquired in February.

“With the introduction of HPE CloudPhysics we are helping customers make smarter IT decisions, optimize their application workloads edge to cloud and be able to save money at the same time transforming that overall IT procurement process,” said Singh.

For partners, HPE CloudPhysics empowers a “strategic conversation” with customers based on assessments of a customer’s specific IT environment, said Singh. “That means they are able to accelerate sales cycles and increase the close rates.”

HPE CloudPhysics provides a “powerful advisory services” capability for partners, said Singh. That opens the door for partners to create “automated, customized” proposals aimed at improving business outcomes for customers, he said. “This then becomes a discussion point using that proposal between the channel partner and the customer and the HPE architect to discuss a better outcome for our customer which is completely data driven,” he said.

It brings over 200 metrics from the underlying customer infrastructure from servers to network or storage as well as real time cloud simulators, said Singh. HPE CloudPhysics provides AI based recommendations based on existing performance and server capacity consumptions.

“Through that breadth of insights that are available customers can have strategic conversations (with their partners)” based on the cost and performance of a workload in public cloud or on HPE GreenLake, said Singh.

“All in all what customers are able to do is optimize workloads and working jointly with partners they are able to transform their IT systems,” he said.

HPE CloudPhysics analyzes application dependencies, network traffic, virtual machine traffic, storage traffic and “correlates them together” to provide AI based recommendations, said Singh.

Data Services Cloud Console Puts Partners In Driver’s Seat

HPE’s new Data Services Cloud Console will be key as partners bring the new HPE GreenLake For Data Protection and HPE Backup and Recovery for VMware to their customers.

The new HPE Backup and Recovery service will be available from the Data Services Cloud Console immediately along with HPE CloudPhysics.

With the Data Services Cloud Console, partners now have the ability to “have role-based access to manage the underlying infrastructure on behalf of their customers,” said Singh.

HPE partners can also add their own managed services to the Data Services Cloud Console, said Singh. What’s more, he said, partners that want to build their own front end and integrate to the Data Services Cloud Console on the back end there are APIs that partners can access to drive their own managed services business, said Singh.

The HPE GreenLake For Data Protection SaaS service will be integrated into the Cloud Console in the first half of HPE fiscal year 2022 which begins Nov. 1.

“We got the engineering group into one group and really hammered out the time line,” said Black. “Initial indications are that it will be very durable up on our GreenLake platform very soon. The rallying point is the common GreenLake edge to cloud platform. That is where you will continue to see us really rally around.”

HPE is planning to make all of the GreenLake cloud services available at GreenLake.HPE.com. with the ability for partners to add their own cloud services through the GreenLake APIs.

HPE GreenLake Disaster Recovery Ransomware Protection

The new HPE GreenLake disaster recovery service is a major strike against the growing ransomware cyber-threats that are wreaking havoc.

Stopping the ransomware threat is a “strategic priority” of every IT leader, said Singh. “Along the spectrum of detecting and also protecting and being able to recover, what becomes really important in terms of if and when literally a ransomware attack takes place is being able to have the ability to have down to the second recovery to a state that is just seconds prior to that attack to mitigate that,” said Singh. “With Zerto we are now actively adding that to HPE GreenLake support for Zerto.”

That Zerto SaaS GreenLake capability provides partners and customers the ability in a “matter of minutes” to recover all the way down to “five seconds prior to a Ransomware attack,” said Singh.

HPE is aiming ultimately for a “best in class operational experience” for customers, said Singh. That means customers will be able to simply “configure their recovery point objective and their recovery time objective with the right blend of the underlying technologies across disaster recovery, backup and archive” – all of them auto-configured and auto-managed to deliver the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) demanded by customers, said Singh.

With GreenLake, HPE is powering disaster recovery and backup in a hybrid and multicloud IT environment, said Singh.

HPE GreenLake for data protection is designed across hybrid cloud, to be able to protect data on premise for rapid recovery or cost effectively backups long term in the public cloud itself, said Singh.

A Partner Game Changer – New Managed Services Opportunities For Partners

The new cloud data protection SaaS charge by HPE opens the door to a new era of storage managed services for partners, said Singh.

“What we are doing is giving partners the data driven intelligence to help customers make smarter IT decisions and to be more strategic in addressing core challenges,” said Singh. “It gives them the opportunity to make even more money and be even stickier with customers with the ability to offer managed services with the role-based access through Data Services Cloud Console.”

Singh called the HPE storage data services offensive as a “game changer” for partners that are combining HPE CloudPhysics with the HPE cloud data services offerings.

“The selling motion transforms with HPE CloudPhysics from gut-feel and heuristics to intelligence based on the customer’s real world IT environment,” said Singh. “Think of it like personalized medicine. Now partners have actual personalized customer data center insights. Now partners can tailor the solutions exactly to a customer’s IT environment.”

The CloudPhysics capabilities is opening the door to more “strategic” conversations with customers, driving increased sales conversion rates, said Singh.

“This is also going to allow partners to sell more services and become stickier to customers across the board, while offloading IT with additional managed services on behalf of the customer,” he said.

“We live in an age of data insight and as customers are recognizing that they need to shift from a cloud first to a cloud everywhere strategy it is incredibly important they are able to get the cloud ownership and cloud operational experience across their edge to core to cloud environments,” said Singh. “That is the experience and end to end delivery of cloud services that we are enabling with HPE GreenLake

Ultimately, the new cloud storage data services SaaS offerings mark the beginning of an “exciting transformation” for HPE Storage and its partners and customers, said Singh.“We’re super excited about it and looking forward to delivering more and more cloud services,” he said.