HPE Wants to Help You Map Your Ideal Path to Hybrid Cloud

By Wylie Wong -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise says its new hybrid cloud tool and service help companies figure out the best place for their applications to live, be it in the public cloud or on various types of on-premises infrastructure.

Announced today, the HPE Right Mix Advisor combines an automated tool with HPE consulting to analyze a company’s full application portfolio and make recommendations for each app’s optimal location, including specific public cloud providers, Erik Vogel, global VP of HPE Pointnext, the company’s IT services organization, told us.

It makes its recommendations based on each enterprise’s unique business requirements, such as budget, performance, security, and latency. The aim is to give customers an infrastructure strategy for their applications in weeks rather than months, the typical timeframe for companies using manual processes for this, he said.

“We are trying to help clients take advantage of the hybrid world and identify the right mix of hosting platforms for their set of applications,” Vogel said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. “We give them a targeted list that has the biggest impact for their business. For example, out of 10,000 applications, we recommend you work on these 100 first; these 50 should go to Amazon Web Services; and these 50 you should keep on-premises, in your private cloud, and here’s why.”

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HPE has focused on a hybrid IT strategy through its server and storage products and Pointnext services business. Its composable infrastructure technology makes it easy for customers to deploy and manage an on-premises or hybrid cloud environment, for example. With the new Right Mix Advisor offering, available immediately, the company hopes to further grow the Pointnext business and grab a bigger share of the growing hybrid IT consulting market.

The Right Mix Advisor tool uses algorithms and regularly updated data, such as public cloud vendor pricing, to produce its recommendations. As a result, analysts say, the new offering provides enterprises with an objective assessment of where their applications should reside, and that can help HPE Pointnext attract more business.

In the past, if an HPE consultant recommended that a business move its workloads to HPE servers, for example, that business would suspect the consultant of bias. Not so with Right Mix Advisor, said Jed Scaramella, program director of IDC’s storage and data management services.

“There is some real intelligence behind it, so you are getting a more verified or trusted outcome,” Scaramella said. “It provides customers confidence that HPE can maintain that objectivity when the company says, here’s where the workloads should run.”

How It Works

With Right Mix Advisor, HPE is targeting enterprises of all sizes, including non-HPE customers who need help optimizing their hybrid cloud strategy, Vogel said.

Many organizations organically developed a hybrid IT infrastructure over the years as individual business units or departments deployed applications across multiple public cloud providers or on-premises without a bigger-picture strategy, he said.

“We are targeting clients who have all this stuff running all over the place and want to think about their workloads strategically and get the business value out of hybrid IT,” he said.

The tool weighs the different variables that are important to clients, such as whether they value price over performance or put security ahead of latency, Vogel said. It also works across any platform, including virtualized or containerized environments.

HPE consultants use their expertise to review and refine the tool’s results based on their knowledge of the industry, Vogel said.

For example, the tool may recommend that an application should be moved to one public cloud provider based on how the application is architected. But HPE’s consultants may advise the client to use a different cloud provider because of  previous successes or because they know that specific cloud provider offers better performance. “The expertise is important, having people analyze the result and help provide that recommendation,” he said.

HPE is well-versed in both on-premises and cloud migrations because of its own internal experience and through its recent acquisitions of two cloud consulting firms: Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie, Vogel said. Right Mix Advisor tool was built by combining CTP’s AppVista tool with HPE’s own Aura tool.

Instead of producing a 500-page report that can overwhelm an enterprise’s IT staff, it comes up with an initial set of apps and where they should run. It’s a targeted list of 20 to 50 or however many apps the IT staff wants. And once the IT organization migrates those apps, Right Mix Advisor analyzes the full set of applications again and comes up with the next list of apps.

For example, if a customer has deployed Azure Stack and wants to put more applications on it, Right Mix Advisor can examine the customer’s thousands of apps to determine which apps should be moved into the Azure Stack environment.

“With Right Mix Advisor, we’re doing it in a way that’s consumable and digestible for our clients,” Vogel.