Enterprises are hitting their stride in learning how to manage hybrid cloud environments. This week’s announcements from IBM and HPE kick off April on a good note for hybrid cloud. It is a clear sign that clients are continuing to push vendors to deliver the solutions they actually want, not just solutions that vendors want to deliver.

IBM And HPE/VAST Data Announcements 

IBM announced the new rackmount chassis for its z16 system on April 4, allowing customers to collocate mainframe workloads in existing data center buildouts. This also is a boon for the LinuxONE offering, Rockhopper 4, hosted on the same hardware platform. IBM hopes that customers will use this new form factor to help integrate their highly valuable but sensitive data that is hosted in mainframe applications with distributed application architectures in a more seamless way. For the LinuxONE, IBM hopes to spur consolidation of Linux servers and containerized platforms with promises of higher density and better performance per watt.

On the same day, HPE announced the evolution of the HPE Alettra Storage MP platform, which forms the basis for its HPE GreenLake for file and block storage offering, utilizing VAST Data for NFS (Network File System) and SMB (Server Message Block) file services. In the same announcement, the company also launched the HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery service, leveraging the capabilities from its Zerto acquisition in 2021. These announcements are a few of the services that HPE plans to bring into the GreenLake platform in what they have dubbed the “year of storage.”

The Bigger Picture And What It Means For You

These announcements from IBM and HPE signal a realization by the market that enterprises don’t operate in a world of 100% cloud or 100% on-premises technology stacks, as my colleague Tracy Woo has documented in The Forrester Guide To Hybrid Cloud. We are in a world where workloads should be resilient, API-driven, automatable, secure, observable, and sustainable. Both of these announcements are part of a long line of strategy shifts by infrastructure providers that formerly had been trying to protect on-premises workloads. Times are changing, and we are seeing all the major vendors start building the capabilities to interoperate with and build value using public and private cloud environments.

It should be a good year. I look forward to announcements from other infrastructure vendors on how they will improve resiliency, scalability, and cloud interoperability in order to create new opportunities for customers. To learn more about how announcements like these affect your business, please reach out via inquiry — I would love to hear your thoughts.