HPE Pledges Continued AI BlueData Support For Dell EMC Servers

‘We have a number of customers that had a relationship with Dell before the acquisition,’ says HPE Vice President of Big Data Patrick Osborne. ‘We continue to support those customers and expand them…We have to be agnostic.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Vice President and General Manager of Big Data Patrick Osborne says the hybrid IT powerhouse will continue to support its artificial intelligence based BlueData big data as a service offering on Dell EMC servers.

“Our Dell EMC Select contract is still in place and is still valid,” said Osborne in an interview with CRN. “We have a number of customers that had a relationship with Dell before the acquisition. We continue to support those customers and expand them... We have to be agnostic.”

Making the BlueData big data as a service offering available in multiple clouds and heterogeneous data center environments is a matter of “listening to customers” who are demanding hybrid cloud solutions and then supporting those customers in a “manner that is based in reality,” said Osborne. “Data centers are heterogeneous with a hybrid, private and public cloud strategy that we need to support,” he said.

That said, Osborne said he is confident that HPE has the best integrated BlueData stack with its Apollo high performance servers with services from HPE’s Pointnext services unit.

“We think we have a better overall stack when we combine the BlueData software with our Apollo based building blocks and everything that comes from Pointnext from a services perspective,” he said. “Our goal is to get to a GreenLake consumption model later on in the calendar year. It is on us to provide a better, full stack experience. But we will certainly support customers with multiple options for private and public cloud.”

Osborne’s comments came as HPE introduced its first integrated BlueData offering on HPE Apollo systems with HPE Pointnext services.

A number of HPE partners were skeptical that HPE would continue to support Dell EMC servers with the BlueData offering in the wake of the BlueData acquisition which was announced last November and closed in December.

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., solution provider, said he was pleased that HPE is still supporting BlueData on Dell EMC servers.

“It’s better to work together than keep software platforms like this exclusive to a single hardware platform or cloud,” said Goldstein. “With BlueData being delivered as a software service this makes perfect sense. HPE gets a big data, monthly recurring revenue stream with a tight connection to the pulse of the client. This is great. We need more collaboration across manufacturers.”

Goldstein said the BlueData machine learning model represents the future for both solution providers and their customers. “We need more big data intelligence with all of the data points we are tracking,” he said. “This speaks to HPE’s strategy to be a data intelligence/data management platform provider.”

Goldstein credited HPE CEO Antonio Neri with continuing to drive technology breakthroughs. “It takes someone like Antonio to really envision the kind of technology we are going to use in the future,” he said. “HPE is investing today for the future tomorrow.”