A look at HPE Synergy, the first platform designed to run both traditional and cloud native applications

When Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) launched its HPE Synergy solution in 2016, it introduced a new class of system to power the next era in hybrid IT infrastructure. The solution began shipping in volume in January 2017, and businesses are already seeing benefits from their deployments.

HPE Synergy is the first platform designed to run both traditional and cloud native applications for organisations that are looking to operate a hybrid IT infrastructure. Based on groundbreaking new architecture developed by HPE, Synergy leverages fluid resource pools, software-defined intelligence and a unified API to provide the foundation organisations need in order to continually optimise the right mix of traditional IT and private cloud resources.

The new architecture, called Composable Infrastructure, consists of three key design principles: fluid resource pools (compute, storage and fabric networking that can be composed and recomposed to the exact need of the application); software-defined intelligence (self-discovers and self-assembles the infrastructure needed); and a unified API (single line of code to abstract every element of infrastructure).

Since the launch of Synergy uptake has been strong, and particularly in industries such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and education. The solution is designed to help companies that are looking to simplify their infrastructure and at the same time reduce costs—all while they’re deploying new cloud applications and accelerating the process of delivering new products and services to the marketplace.

Companies in various industries are demonstrating the value of HPE Synergy for a number of use cases. For example, a large, private Swiss bank had a traditional technology infrastructure that was stable but the company needed to increase the efficiency of its administrative operations and also reduce IT complexity. The infrastructure it had in place was no longer meeting the needs of running core large banking applications.

The bank is aiming to become a more user friendly business for its customers, and also to more quickly bring new applications and services to market that make it easier for clients to connect with the bank. The company has been investing in application developers, and needed newer IT systems to help drive the process of getting those applications out.

That’s where HPE Synergy comes in. The bank deployed the solution and has since seen benefits such as increased flexibility and scalability with regard to storage and computing capacity, as well as a reduction of operating costs. The solution has allowed the IT staff more freedom to expand computing and storage as needed, which supports the application development that will ultimately benefit the bank’s customers.

Also benefiting from HPE Synergy is a European brewery that was facing the challenge of rapidly changing and unpredictable demand for computing and storage resources as the business grew. Given that the company has a small IT shop, this was no small issue.

The brewery needed a simplified IT infrastructure that would allow it to easily scale resources up and down as needed, and unify IT operations across compute, storage and fabric. Synergy provided exactly what the company needed, and it now has an automated end-to-end IT experience that allows it to effectively address the issue of rapid change in demand.

Another organisation using HPE Synergy is HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, a nonprofit genomics research, education and medical clinic in Alabama. The institute features a group of some of the world’s top thought leaders in genomics, forward-thinking entrepreneurs and inventive educators, who are engaged in bioscience and technology and committed to improving human health and quality of life.

HudsonAlpha is expanding staff, investing in infrastructure and new facilities, and at the same time is gathering huge volumes of data and dealing with how to manage and gain value from this information. The solution was to shift to a new way of operating an IT infrastructure, and the institute became the first beta customer for the HPE Synergy platform.

HudsonAlpha is using HPE Synergy to transform its infrastructure and make better use of its data to increase DNA sequencing capacity and expand its business.

Users can access on demand whatever resources they need, whether it’s memory, storage or computer power. With HPE Synergy, HudsonAlpha can bring together all the needs of its various companies and researchers and use data resources in the fastest and most efficient ways possible.

Companies that provide IT solutions to customers can also benefit from HPE Synergy. A case in point is Symmetry, a certified SAP hosting, cloud and SAP HANA Operations provider that has certified and deployed  HPE Synergy.

One of the first managed service providers to deploy HPE Synergy, Symmetry has increased its ability to provide comprehensive and highly compliant cloud solutions that support a range of IT workloads spanning SAP, SAP HANA, other critical third-party applications and traditional IT workloads from a single platform

HPE Synergy allows Symmetry to segment discreet resource pools for specific customer applications, such as giving an SAP HANA workload its own prescribed mix of performance and availability while at the same time giving a Hadoop deployment its own tier optimised for scale. This delivers the high reliability needed for systems such as SAP HANA while providing the flexibility to include traditional IT workloads on the same platform and the ability to price both accordingly.

These and other HPE customers and partners are seeing the economic benefits of Synergy. Organisations that are moving from traditional blade or rack-mounted server infrastructures can experience 15% to 18% reductions in total cost of ownership, driven by the ability to simplify and integrate technologies, and build intelligence into the IT environment that makes it more cost effective and efficient.

Beyond cost cutting, companies such as systems integrators gain the ability to change their business model, adding a tremendous amount of flexibility in their offerings and getting them to market much faster than in the past.

HPE Synergy is designed to be complementary with other HPE offerings, including the HPE 3PAR StoreServ family of all-flash and converged flash arrays, which enables the all-flash data center; and HPE Flexible Capacity, an infrastructure service offering on-demand capacity that leverages both the public cloud and on-premises IT. HPE also offers a host of advisory services to help customers with their data center transformations.