Who’s behind ‘astronomical’ virtualization costs? HPE isn’t saying, but claims it has a fix
Goes public on private cloud overhaul
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HPE has pitched its six month old VM Essentials product as the answer to “astronomical” virtualization costs, while diplomatically not mentioning VMware or its parent, Broadcom.
The renewed push behind VM Essentials came as part of a broader review of its “private cloud portfolio”, emphasising the Morpheus platform it acquired last year, as well as new commitments and SLAs around its storage portfolio.
Kicking off the announcement, HPE’s SVP and GM for private cloud and Flex solutions, Cheri Williams said “Enterprises are under tremendous pressure from all sides, cloud sprawl, technical debt and astronomical virtualization costs, all hindering their ability to invest in and adopt AI.”
Williams did not expand on those “astronomical” costs, except to say that in 2024, “virtualization costs literally soared double even triple digits.”
At the same time, tech leaders are dealing with operation complexity, with “managing storage here, compute there, and networking VMs in different silos.”
That’s a lot of pain points, but the company appeared to be targeting one in particular, with Williams emphasis it was “bringing together HPE VM essentials and HPE Morpheus software, and extending it across our entire private cloud.”
Morpheus is HPE’s hybrid cloud management engine - at least it has been since it was acquired by the giant in August last year. VM Essentials was first announced at the back end of last year.
Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP and CPO for private cloud and Flex solutions, said it was now announcing HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software, which would give “The flexibility to run any workload on any cloud… it could be a VM workload, it could be a containerized workload, it could be a bare metal workload.”
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At the same time, he said, it was “taking our HP Morpheus VM essentials and Morpheus Enterprise, and integrating that into our private cloud portfolio for the datacentre and the edge.”
The unified private cloud approach would lead to 90 percent lower licensing costs thanks to VM Essentials, while the vendor’s dHCI approach would lead to a “2.5 times lower TCO.”
The vendor didn’t specify what licenses that 90 percent saving applied to. In fact, Bhardwaj barely mentioned any other virtualization options at all, except to say:
“Customers have the flexibility to deploy VMware, and also they have the flexibility now to deploy our hypervisor, and they can deploy them in parallel, managed by our HP Morpheus Cloud Management Platform.”
This would give “the flexibility to pick the right platform based on the needs of the workloads.”
Or, perhaps, the depth of their pockets, given the eyewatering price hikes VMware customers have been faced with since the vendor’s takeover by Broadcom at the back end of 2023.
That said, Broadcom has claimed its bigger customers are sucking up its price rises and product changes, with almost three quarters signing up.
HPE didn’t entirely focus on virtualization costs. It also introduced additional “guarantees” for its Alletra Storage MP B10000 storage platform. These include a zero data loss and downtime guarantee, which Sanjay Jagad, VP of structured data for HP storage said meant “RTO and RPO of zero.”
It has also offered an energy consumption guarantee, which the firm said “ensures storage operates to an optimal power level for peak performance and that energy consumption stays below a set threshold.” As with all guarantees customers will need to check the small print to see precisely what they’ll get if their installations do, indeed, have a wobble.
Meanwhile, it debuted a brace of backup devices – the HPE StoreOnce 3720 and 3760 – aimed at remote or edge deployments, which can scale from 18TB to 216TB, and can offer 20:1 data reduction, with backups speeds of 25TB an hour.