Podcast #156: HPE’s Patrick Osborne on AI-Ready Storage, Block’s Second Life, and Cyber Resilience in the Array

Brian hosted Patrick Osborne, Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Technology Acceleration at HPE, for a live podcast on LinkedIn on October 26. The subject was whether enterprise storage is ready for AI, and the answer ran through the Alletra Storage MP architecture decision HPE made five years ago, block storage's second life under Oracle AI Database 26ai and vector search, the power and density math behind 245TB SSDs and a record year for LTO tape, Morpheus VM Essentials as the runtime under HPE's private cloud systems, and cyber resilience built into the array.

We have covered most of that ground in the lab: the B10000 cyber resilience architecture and its ransomware lab, the X10000 with the Data Protection Accelerator Node, and a race weekend with Mercedes F1 and HPE at COTA the week before this recording.

Patrick has spent more than 16 years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise on storage, cloud infrastructure, and big data, running the Big Data, Analytics, and Scale-out Platforms business and then the Storage Business Unit before taking the cloud data infrastructure role that covers the Alletra Storage MP line today. He was last on the podcast for episode 119, recorded at HPE GreenLake Day for Storage in Houston in 2023.

HPE storage has been a regular in the lab: we reviewed the B10000 when it launched, measured backup and restore throughput through the Data Protection Accelerator Node in Raleigh, worked through the NIST CSF 2.0 cyber resilience architecture with HPE's UK ransomware lab, and covered X10000 Release 4 and its move to 16 nodes and native NFS. The SimpliVity and VM Essentials stack came through last year as well.

The episode runs about 58 minutes. The numbers that stuck with us: Alletra Storage MP is going on five or six years old and scales from entry systems to tens of petabytes on one architecture, the "is my data AI-ready" question has led HPE's customer conversations for 18 months, VM Essentials shipped monthly releases in its first year while GreenLake console updates land in weeks, LTO tape shipped more capacity last year than ever, and Mercedes F1 runs trackside with an IT team of about 18. If you don't have time to listen end-to-end, we have broken it into segments so you can choose what matters most to you.

[00:00] Storage Is Interesting Again

Two storage veterans open on why the category went from commodity to center stage.

Patrick describes a period of commoditization in storage and data management that p