In this storage supplier profile, we look at Texas-headquartered HPE, which is not just a storage supplier but a full stack provider across the IT stack, from storage through servers to the software that can orchestrate complex information systems on-premise, in the cloud and across the two.
HPE has a clear vision as a cloud-era provider with everything available via its Greenlake consumption model, which offers a range of hybrid cloud subscription and as-a-service options. As we enter 2025, it has – like all equipment providers – oriented heavily towards artificial intelligence (AI) and this is reflected in its storage offer.
The company potentially faces challenges in terms of revenues and storage market share, particularly against rivals such as Huawei and Lenovo.
In this article, we look at HPE’s origins, its ranking compared to other storage players, its key storage products, and its approaches to as-a-service, the cloud and containerisation.
Where did HPE come from?
Hewlett-Packard dates back to the 1930s, when its two founders – Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard, of course – started an electrical engineering business from a garage and then profited well from wartime procurement. By the end of the 2000s, it had become the world’s largest supplier of PCs and had interests in storage, servers, network hardware, software, printers and services and consulting.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was born in 2015 after the division of Hewlett-Packard into the PC and printers-focused HP Inc, and HPE, which focuses on enterprise-class servers, storage, networking, containerisation and support and services.
Hewlett-Packard’s activities in enterprise storage go back to the acquisition of SAN pioneer Transoft Networks in 1999, with more acquisitions throughout the new millennium. Notable examples were high-end SAN hardware player 3PAR in 2010, flash pioneer Nimble and hyper-converged infrastructure maker Simplivity in 2017, then cloud and container-focused backup and disaster recovery player Zerto in 2021.
How does HPE rank against other storage players?
HPE is 147th in the 2023 Fortune 500 list of US companies by revenue.
IDC ranks HPE third among enterprise storage system suppliers, with market share of 8.3% and revenue of $2.613bn. It seems to be a in a period of decline in those terms, with IDC calculating 2022-2023 growth as -17.6%.
In 2023, HPE was ranked second but has been overhauled by Huawei which has 9.7% market share and just over $3bn in revenue. That’s all some way behind Dell, which has top spot and around a quarter of the market.
What are HPE’s key storage products?
HPE’s enterprise storage offer is based on the Alletra MP family, with SME storage offered under the MSA Gen7 family.
While HPE’s key storage array hardware is described here discretely, they are all available under the Greenlake consumption offer, including storage products delivered via Greenlake.
Core to HPE storage is the Alletra MP brand, launched in 2023. It comprises three series: the 5000, 6000 and a pair of 10000 branded arrays.
Alletra is based on a scale-out architecture with nodes in which compute and storage can be independently scaled and which go from a two-node entry level system to multiple nodes and PB of capacity
Alletra MP arrays cover file, block and object access. Array and backup and restore configuration come from a few clicks on a web console that takes care of all settings automatically.
Alletra 5000 provides hybrid – HDD bulk storage plus flash as cache – capacity and is at entry level, and with up to 294TB capacity per node that’s unchanged since our last HPE profile in 2023.
Meanwhile, the Alletra 6000 all-NVMe flash array reported on in 2023 seems to have disappeared. But what is new is a pair of Alletra 10000 arrays that are all-NVMe and scaling to multiple PB in a cluster.
The MP B10000 is a block storage array aimed at high-performance and mission-critical applications, with QLC flash storage options and Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity.
The MP X10000 is fast S3 API-compatible object storage that can take TLC flash drives aimed at high performance data lakes and as storage for data protection. You can start small – 15TB for the B10000, 35TB for the X10000 – but get up to PB scale with up to 16 JBOF shelves. Free non-disruptive controller hardware upgrades are offered by HPE’s Timeless Program for HPE’s Alletra Storage MP B10000 array.
Meanwhile, for SME use cases, HPE offers MSA Gen7 Storage that can start at 23TB or 46TB of raw capacity but which can scale to petabytes and offer support for Fibre Channel and iSCSI block storage.
The MSA Gen7 can bring up to 783,000 IOPS for random reads and 14.1 GBps sustained throughput with options that include HDDs and flash media-equipped models.
What consumption models of purchasing does HPE offer?
HPE’s consumption model offer is Greenlake, from which it plans to make its entire portfolio available as a service based on metered usage and service-level tiers. By mid-2024, the number of customers that use HPE GreenLake was claimed to have increased to 34,000, with some high-profile names that include Barclays Bank, for example.
So, while we listed storage arrays discretely above, Greenlake can actually wrap around everything HPE sells – for example, Alletra MP is deployed and managed via Greenlake, which uses customer profiles to provision, lifecycle and upgrade the service.
Some HPE storage offers appear more explicitly tied with Greenlake delivery methods, including:
- HPE GreenLake for File Storage, which is built on the HPE Alletra Storage MP architecture and is aimed at AI and other data-intensive workloads. It is Nvidia DGX and BasePOD certified, and Nvidia OVX validated. GreenLake for File Storage capacity goes from a few hundred TB to maximum effective capacity of more than 40PB.
- Greenlake for Block Storage, built on Alletra MP, can deploy capacity on-site, as part of a private cloud, but is also configurable and extendable to the public cloud.
- HPE Alletra Block Storage for AWS, which is a software-defined storage solution that extends the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 to AWS and is delivered and managed via HPE GreenLake cloud.
- Greenlake as-a-service offerings for backup and machine learning that work via the AWS marketplace.
- HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, which offers a modular infrastructure deployment of bare metal, virtual machines and container-based workloads for cloud-native and traditional applications.
- There are also Greenlake options to run apps across on-site and public cloud using a single console called OpsRamp. Acquired in 2023, OpsRamp brought the capability to monitor, automate and manage IT infrastructure, cloud resources, workloads and applications for hybrid and multicloud environments, including use of the leading hyperscalers.
What does HPE offer for specifically on-premise operations?
HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition offers a cloud-like experience for on-premise infrastructure that allows customers to build self-service clouds with simplified VM and infrastructure management.
Meanwhile, HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected delivers a cloud experience in regulated environments that are disconnected from the public internet.
How does the cloud fit HPE strategy?
HPE’s strategy fully embraces cloud approaches. This includes the ability to build private clouds and hybrid clouds, and in particular with the use of Greenlake as a delivery mechanism on-premise and in the cloud.
What data protection products does HPE offer?
Zerto provides data protection, disaster recovery and cyber resilience across on-premise, hybrid and multicloud environments. It was acquired in 2021 and offers backup and recovery capabilities as well as migration options for numerous virtualisation providers and clouds, including Red Hat, IBM, AWS and VMware.
Last year, HPE expanded Zerto services to include backup and migration support of kernel-based virtual machines, an open source virtualisation hypervisor, and cybervault capabilities on HPE storage hardware.
What is the HPE container strategy?
HPE builds its container storage offer around use of its Alletra storage – delivered via Greenlake – and using the HPE CSI Driver Architecture with Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms that include HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise, VMware Tanzu, RedHat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher and SUSE CaaSP.
