HPE Unveils Synergy Platform to Drive Composable Infrastructure Era

5 Ways to Get Developers to Adopt Your APIs

At the Discover 2015 event in London, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise unveiled a new generation of “composable” systems that enable IT organizations to dynamically provision server, storage and networking resources within the system using a common application programming interface (API).

Gary Thome, vice president and chief engineer of converged data center infrastructure for HPE, says the HPE Synergy platform will for the first time give IT organizations managing IT infrastructure on premise the ability to programmatically manage the entire environment via a single high-level API.

Thome says that the HPE energy platform, scheduled to be available in the second half of 2016, is designed from the ground up to provide IT organizations the flexibility needed to address rapidly changing application workload requirements in a matter of minutes.

Thome says IT organizations can invoke the unified HPE API using HPE OneView management tools, but he expects that, over time, providers of other management frameworks will also invoke the HPE API. In the meantime, HPE will provide software-defined templates and bootable images, along with a library of operating environment images that make it possible for a single administrator to compose infrastructure. In effect, HPE has embedded all the frameworks needed to automate the management of HPE Synergy within the system itself.

The result, says Thome, is not only a major reduction in the total cost of operating a data center environment, but also much less over-provisioning of the IT infrastructure resources needed to service multiple application workloads.

In many instances, Thome notes that these days many IT organizations are now routinely deploying application workloads in the cloud because it’s simpler to provision those resources. With the rise of composable infrastructure, Thome says, internal IT organizations will be able to provide the same level of IT agility using systems running on premise.

The degree to which that capability will affect decisions relating to where an application workload actually winds up running remains to be seen. But the one thing that is clear is that the level of agility in the average IT organization is about to substantially increase.