DEVOPSdigest

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a new integrated offering that combines the HPE BlueData software platform with HPE Apollo systems and HPE Pointnext services, to provide customers with a powerful solution for AI and data-driven business innovation.

This announcement builds on HPE’s acquisition of BlueData in November 2018, and represents an important milestone in HPE’s ongoing strategy for the AI and analytics market. BlueData is now available as a standalone HPE software solution, and customers can continue to run BlueData software on any infrastructure. With BlueData, HPE offers customers an as-a-service experience for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and analytics running on multi-vendor infrastructure and public cloud services – leveraging the portability of containers across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. The result is dramatically faster deployments down from months, to minutes, with the agility and flexibility that data science teams need to deliver business value.

The container-based BlueData software platform provides customers with simple, one-click automated deployment for their AI and analytics tools of choice – and enables enterprise-grade security, scalability and performance. Data science teams and AI/ML developers can focus on what they do best, with greater productivity and efficiency. These teams can rapidly build models and develop data pipelines to drive business innovation – without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

“To stay a step ahead of the competition, enterprise organizations in every industry are embarking on AI-enabled and data-driven digital transformation initiatives,” said Milan Shetti, SVP and General Manager, HPE Storage. “Together, HPE and BlueData will make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective for these customers to deploy distributed AI, machine learning, and analytics – whether on-premises, in the public cloud, or in a hybrid architecture. It’s a game-changer.”

The combination of BlueData with HPE Pointnext services and HPE Apollo infrastructure is ideal for enterprises with large-scale initiatives underway for AI/ML and analytics, particularly for those with an on-premises or hybrid cloud deployment. This includes existing HPE customers in financial services, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and other industries. Example use cases range from fraud detection and credit risk analysis, to genomics research and precision medicine, to improved customer experience, and more.

Customers can leverage the following capabilities and services from HPE and BlueData to accelerate their AI initiatives:

- BlueData software subscriptions can be ordered together with HPE Apollo server and storage infrastructure. New bundled solutions with BlueData and HPE infrastructure will be made available in a variety of different configurations.

- New HPE Pointnext services offerings are now available for BlueData, building on the deep AI/ML and big data analytics expertise and use case deployments from HPE Pointnext. These services help to streamline the software implementation and ongoing support operations, enabling success and faster time-to-value for AI and data-driven initiatives.

- The BlueData team is developing new innovations for the use of Kubernetes in large-scale AI and analytics deployments, with ongoing contributions to the Kubernetes open source community.

- A new HPE reference configuration is now available, providing guidance and best practices for deploying BlueData software on the HPE Elastic Platform for Analytics (EPA), a modular infrastructure foundation for scalable multi-tenant deployments with building blocks from HPE for compute, storage and networking.

- HPE plans to deliver new BlueData-based reference architectures for a variety of different AI/ML and analytics use cases and ecosystem tools, including Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Cloudera, H2O, and TensorFlow. These reference architectures include in-depth testing and validation from HPE engineering to determine the workload-optimized configuration for high performance and greater efficiency.

Standalone software subscriptions and bundled offerings with HPE Apollo hardware, together with HPE Pointnext deployment services and customer support, are now available in the US, UK, Germany, France and Singapore.