New innovations, including the only custom-designed secure silicon chip, enhanced agility solutions and flexible payment models
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the availability of the world’s most secure industry standard servers[i] with the introduction of its next-generation ProLiant portfolio. HPE is the first vendor to put silicon-based security into its industry standard servers, addressing firmware attacks, which are one of the biggest threats facing enterprises and governments today. Building on this new secure foundation, HPE also has announced advancements in software-defined infrastructure that deliver new levels of agility and economic flexibility.
Cyber-attacks have increased significantly as hackers become more sophisticated. Security breaches and vulnerability discoveries have been repeatedly attributed to firmware attacks. Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) research reveals[ii] more than 50 percent of cyber security professionals reported at least one incident of malware-infected firmware in 2016. HPE is the first company to respond by developing the “silicon root of trust” – a unique link between the custom HPE silicon and the HPE Integrated Lights Out (iLO) firmware to ensure servers do not execute compromised firmware code. Building this firmware security directly into the HPE silicon provides the ultimate protection against firmware attacks, as well as the ability to recover the essential server firmware automatically.
HPE’s silicon root of trust designs security directly into the iLO chip, creating an immutable fingerprint in the silicon, preventing servers from booting up unless the firmware matches the fingerprint. Because HPE has total control of its own custom-made silicon chip and the server-essential firmware, it is the only vendor in the industry that can offer this advantage. The new silicon root of trust protection includes state-of-the-art encryption and breach detection technologies and is complemented by HPE supply chain security and HPE Pointnext security assessment and protection services.
“A security breach in firmware is one of the most difficult to detect but can be one of the most damaging. Unfortunately, firmware is often overlooked in c-suite conversations about data centre security, and cyber criminals are targeting this as a new attack surface,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of technology analyst and advisory firm Moor Insights & Strategy. “While many servers have some level of hardware security already built-in, HPE is creating firmware security inextricably tied with its custom made silicon, to help customers protect against these malicious attacks.”
Creating a New Compute Experience
The world’s most secure industry standard servers is just one part of HPE’s new compute experience, which also includes enhancements to its software-defined infrastructure and flexible payment models. Through this new generation of capabilities powered by HPE ProLiant Gen 10, customers can accelerate business insights across a hybrid world of traditional IT, public and private cloud. With HPE’s pay-as-you-go options, customers can scale up or down based on their businesses’ need and only pay for what they actually use.
“Customers shouldn’t have to compromise when it comes to security, the agility of software-defined infrastructure and the flexibility of cloud economics,” said Paul Haverfield, Chief Technology Officer, Data Centre Hybrid Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Asia Pacific and Japan. “With our ProLiant Gen 10 portfolio, HPE is offering customers the best compute experience in the industry with unmatched security, new ways to accelerate insights and payment models that allow customers to choose options that work best for them.”
Agility: Software-Defined Infrastructure
The new compute experience offers customers the ability to accelerate applications and business insights through software-defined infrastructure. Today, HPE announced the following new updates, including:
A new experience in software-defined infrastructure advancements:
- HPE OneView 3.1 supports the end-to-end Gen 10 server platform and will transform compute, storage and network into software-defined infrastructure. The next generation, version 3.1, delivers composable storage capabilities, improved firmware management, extended support for a broad range of HPE compute platforms and support for new composable ecosystem partners including Mesosphere DC/OS. HPE and Mesosphere recently announced a strategic alliance that will help customers benefit from joint engineering, reference architecture and improved time to value.
- HPE Intelligent System Tuning offers a dynamic experience around applications in partnership with Intel on the Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable family. These unique functions include modulate frequency (jitter smoothing), increased performance (core boosting), and tuning of the server to match workload profiles.
A new experience in “time to insight” to enhance development and productivity:
- HPE Synergy for Gen10 including HPE Synergy 480 and HPE Synergy 660. These compute modules deliver increased performance across compute-and data-intensive workloads, such as financial modeling. In addition, they deliver breakthrough Ethernet 25/50 GB connectivity and a 2.8x increase in direct-attached storage (DAS) capacity.
A new experience in workload optimisation accelerating data-driven applications:
- HPE Scalable Persistent Memory, an integrated storage solution that runs at memory speeds with terabyte-scale capacity, unlocking new levels of compute performance with built-in persistence. With up to 27 times faster[iii] application checkpoint operations and 20 times faster[iv] database restores, HPE Scalable Persistent Memory delivers the fastest persistent memory in the market at scale[v].
Economic Control: Pay-as-you-go Options
Customers want the flexibility to choose whether they pay for their IT solution as a monthly operating expense or a capital expense. HPE offers consumption-based IT payment models that deliver the tangible business outcomes customers need – whether it’s cash flow improvement, accelerated deployment or cost effective capacity management. HPE Flexible Capacity changes the way customers consume IT to align with actual business needs. By paying only for what they use and leveraging an on-site buffer to scale up or down on demand, customers can save money by eliminating overprovisioning.
To help customers align IT to business needs, HPE is introducing two new offerings:
- HPE Capacity Care Service enabling mid-sized companies to control utilisation and capacity management in order to reduce overprovisioning and raise utilisation levels.
- IT Investment Strategy Workshops which are designed to help companies develop an IT investment strategy with funding models aligned to an IT investment roadmap.
As part of the new compute experience, storage offerings were announced on May 24, 2017.
Scale: High Peformance Computing Solution
As part of the upgrade across the HPE compute portfolio, HPE introduced a new generation of High Performance Computing (HPC) solution, the new HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10, which is workload-optimised to deliver faster, more efficient insights while reducing vulnerability to cyber-attacks and improving economic control.
HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 is the next generation of HPE’s large commercial, air-cooled, HPC platform, which was redesigned to deliver more than 300 teraflops per rack, higher rack-scale efficiency and exceptional price performance. The HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 is also the most secure HPC system in the world leveraging the unique “silicon root of trust” technology for security threat protection. Key new capabilities of this system include:
- Industry leading reliability, accessibility, serviceability and manageability
- Greater application licensing efficiency
- Reduced latency and higher IOPs performance
- Reduced power consumption and cooling requirements
Chemical company BASF, one of the first users of the HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 system, jointly developed a supercomputer for the digital transformation of chemical research with HPE. This is the largest supercomputer used for industrial chemical research and enables BASF to reduce computer simulation and modeling times from months to days, accelerating time to market and lowering costs.
Availability
The new generation of HPE ProLiant Servers, HPE Synergy Compute Modules, HPE Converged System and HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 System is now available in Australia.
Additional Information
- HPE Locks Down Server Security (Moor Insights Whitepaper)
- Hybrid IT Helps Businesses Navigate Through Digital Transformation (Moor Insights Whitepaper)
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry leading technology company that enables customers to go further, faster. With the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio, spanning the cloud to the data centre to workplace applications, our technology and services help customers around the world make IT more efficient, more productive and more secure.
[i] Based on new silicon root of trust technology and other comprehensive security features, verified by InfusionPoints.
[ii] ISACA Study on Firmware Security Risks and Mitigation: Enterprise Practices and Challenges, 2016.
[iii] 27 times faster checkpoint operations comparing doing application checkpoint with MySQL on HDDs compared to HPE Scalable Persistent Memory.
[iv] 20 times faster restores comparing restoring a Microsoft SQL Hekaton in-memory database with SSDs vs. restoring with HPE Scalable Persistent Memory.
[v] Fastest Persistent Memory in the market substantiation based on HPE’s solution using all DRAM – the fastest media on the memory bus.
