HPE Bolsters Hybrid Offering with Software-defined Driven Acquisition

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled plans to acquire Plexxi, a software-defined networking specialist capable of bolstering the vendor’s hybrid cloud capabilities.

Terms of the deal – which is expected to close before 31 July 2018 – will see the tech giant leverage data centre fabric technologies of the US-based start-up to bridge the gap between public and private cloud deployments.

Founded in 2010, Plexxi specialises in hyper-converged network solutions, spanning storage, enterprise cloud and applications.

“This expands our addressable market and strengthens our offerings for customers and partners.

“By seamlessly combining Plexxi’s next-generation data centre fabric with HPE’s existing software-defined infrastructure, HPE can deliver a true cloud-like experience in the data centre.”

Through this acquisition, Lewis said the vendor will deliver “hyper-converged and composable” solutions with a next-generation data network fabric capable of automatically creating or re-balancing bandwidth to workload needs.

“This will increase agility and efficiency, and accelerate how quickly companies deploy applications and draw business value from their data,” Lewis explained.

Specifically, Lewis said HPE will firstly integrate Plexxi technology into current hyper-converged solutions offerings, building on the vendor’s acquisition of SimpliVity in January 2017.

The move is designed to create a solution capable of incorporating compute, storage and data fabric networking into a single solution, backed up with a single management interface and support.

“The combined HPE SimpliVity plus Plexxi solution will provide customers with a highly dynamic workload-based model to better align IT resources to business priorities,” Lewis added.

Furthermore, Lewis said the acquisition will extend the vendor’s composable infrastructure portfolio, targeting 1,400 customers with the HPE Synergy division.

“Composable infrastructure, built on HPE OneView, is a new category of infrastructure that delivers fluid pools of storage and compute resources that can be composed and recomposed as business needs dictate,” Lewis said.

“In the near future with Plexxi, we will deliver a composable rack solution that will seamlessly extend our composable fabric to a broader set of use cases across the data centre.”

From a partner perspective, Plexxi – who also operates as an alliance partner of VMware – targets resellers through the Plexxi Partner Program, created to enable the channel to promote and sell hyper-converged solutions.

“Our customers live in a hybrid world, running a mix of workloads on traditional IT, as well as private, managed and public clouds,” Lewis added.

“They need to be able to move at cloud-like speed, regardless of where the data lives. HPE is focused on delivering a portfolio of products and services that simplify hybrid IT, helping customers to move faster and to drive business value.” – ARN