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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is making a concentrated push to be the infrastructure, analytics and security provider for enterprises’ Internet of things efforts.
At the company’s Discover 2016 show June 8 in Las Vegas, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) officials unveiled two new converged systems that the company said will not only bring the analytics and security capabilities that are needed for the Internet of things (IoT), but that also are rugged enough to be used in environments closer to the network’s edge and where the IoT devices live.
The tens of billions of devices, sensors and systems that make up the IoT are generating massive amounts of data that enterprises and service providers want to analyze as quickly as possible in order to make sound business decisions and spin out new services to their employees and customers. HPE and other tech vendors, such as Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC and VMware, are looking for ways to bring the analytics capabilities closer to these devices to speed up the time between when the data is generated and when decisions can be made based on that data.
“Organizations that take advantage of the vast amount of data and run deep analytics at the edge can become digital disrupters within their industries,” Tom Bradicich, vice president and general manager of servers and IoT systems at HPE, said in a statement. “HPE has built machine learning and real-time analytics into its IoT platforms, and provides services that help customers understand how data can best be leveraged, enabling them to optimize maintenance management, improve operations efficiency and, ultimately, drive significant cost savings.”
The new converged systems, the Edgeline EL1000 and EL4000, were among a number of IoT-focused announcements made by HPE officials at the show. The company also made moves to shore up security (a key concern when talking about the Internet of things), offer tools to help businesses plan their strategies and deployments, and form partnerships to develop joint offerings to bring to the market.
The IoT market is expected to grow rapidly. Forecasts on the number of devices that will make up the Internet vary, but officials with both Cisco and Intel put the figure at more than 50 billion by 2020. IDC analysts have said that spending on the IoT worldwide will jump from $698.6 billion last year to almost $1.3 trillion in 2019.
HPE, like most other companies in the industry, has been rapidly growing out its IoT portfolio, including the rollout last month of its Universal IoT Platform, which the company expects to build out into a management solution for all IoT systems and devices. The growing Edgeline lineup of products are the result of a partnership with Intel announced last year to jointly develop products that sit at the edge of the network.
The EL1000 and EL4000 systems integrate compute, storage and networking into a single system that also includes data capture and systems and device-management capabilities. They’re also built to run in difficult environments that include shock, vibration and extreme temperature issues. The EL4000 also can run HPE’s Vertica Analytics Platform, which brings machine learning capabilities to the network edge to more quickly provide real-time insights from the IoT data. At the same time, both systems support Aruba Networks’ Virtual Intranet Access VPN client, which delivers an automated, zero-touch virtual private network for both commercial and high-security government IoT workloads. Aruba is a subsidiary of HPE.
HPE and Intel also announced four IoT Innovation Labs worldwide, where customers can build and test IoT applications and have access to HPE and Intel expertise. The labs are in Houston, Texas; Grenoble, France; Bangalore, India; and Singapore.
The company also is enhancing Aruba’s ClearPass software to enable it to better profile new IoT devices on the network, enforce security policies and exchange policy status with other security systems. It’s a nod to the ongoing concerns of the increasing attack surface being created by having tens of billions of devices and systems connecting to the Internet. The ClearPass technology lets businesses automatically add, detect, profile and secure IoT devices.
In addition, HPE unveiled its IoT Transformation Workshop, an interactive session designed to help customers more easily define their IoT strategies through analytical and fact-based approaches.
HPE also is partnering with such companies as GE Digital, National Instruments and PTC to jointly develop industrial IoT offerings in industries, including aerospace, oil and gas, manufacturing, automotive and energy.