HPE to launch Cloud Volumes in UK and Ireland

HPE will launch its enterprise-grade cloud storage product, HPE Cloud Volumes, in the UK and Ireland at the end of May.

The cloud storage service allows customers to replicate to the cloud for backup and disaster recovery or to make use of block storage hosted in the cloud, all with enterprise levels of resilience and availability.

HPE Cloud Volumes was acquired as part of the company’s purchase of Nimble Storage in 2017.

Cloud Volumes provides two key services: a replication store, which can be used for backup, disaster recovery, and so on, and which allows customers to replicate data back and forth between on-premise and the HPE cloud; and a block store service, which provides block storage for use with compute instances running in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure clouds.

Ashish Prakash, HPE vice-president and general manager of cloud data services, said: “Many customers operate on-premise infrastructure and would like to take advantage of the elasticity of cloud. But they are worried about lock-in with the public cloud providers.”

Prakash said Cloud Volumes is aimed at customers ranging from large and mid-sized organisations down to smaller firms and in the public sector.

“There are people that don’t want to manage a second datacentre, or maybe even want to shrink the ones they have,” he said.

Cloud Volumes’ block store service aims to provide customers with a greater level of resilience and availability than it claims they can get from the big public cloud providers.

That argument from HPE is based on the idea that the public clouds are divided into availability zones and that your data will go into only one of these with resiliency rates that are, consequently, in the order of three-nines. That can be overcome with applications that are cloud native, or built for the cloud, but not for applications that are not.

HPE Cloud Volumes aims to address that by providing natively enterprise-grade cloud storage that can be presented to compute instances that run in AWS and Azure clouds.

Customers will sign up for an annual subscription based on projections of capacity required. From there, they can request more capacity and pay more accordingly, but scaling down is not possible until they renew their subscription.

“If you’ve paid for 100TB, for example, and you don’t use it, you don’t get your money back,” said Prakash. “But we have all sorts of sizing tools to help customers get it right.”