LAS VEGAS — A big chunk of the news Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced at its annual Discover conference this week involved pushing its hybrid cloud strategy by increasing automation and composability across its portfolio. This included announcing a hybrid cloud partnership with Google; integrating InfoSight, its cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) management tool with its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI); and extending its rack-scale composable cloud.

Composable infrastructure delivers fluid pools of networking, storage, and compute resources that can be composed and recomposed as needed. HPE started shipping its Synergy composable infrastructure product in 2017. Now the company says it has more than 3,000 customers and 78% year-over-year growth.

Last year the company reached a deal to buy SDN vendor Plexxi with the intent of integrating Plexxi’s SDN fabric into its hyperconverged and composable infrastructure products. And in November, HPE introduced its Composable Cloud product, built on its OneView IT infrastructure management and workflow automation software, and Plexxi’s SDN, which HPE now calls Composable Fabric. The idea behind Composable Cloud was to give enterprises the ability to compose any workload or service across any cloud. But its initial release was limited to two workloads: VMware’s vSAN software-defined storage and Red Hat OpenShift.

“Today with the composable cloud we’re enabling customers to transform their existing rack data centers into composable infrastructure,” said Paul Miller, vice president of global marketing for HPE’s Software-Defined and Cloud business group, at a press conference on Tuesday.

Specifically, HPE extended its Composable Cloud infrastructure across existing HPE ProLiant rack-based servers and it also increased the workloads it supports. In addition to HPE physical storage and vSAN, it now supports HPE Simplivity HCI and more than two dozen other partners including Microsoft, Docker, Puppet, Chef, and F5 whose software can connect to Composable Cloud via APIs.

The company also extended InfoSight to Simplivity, which continues its efforts to push AI into the data center.

HPE acquired the InfoSight technology from Nimble Storage, which it bought for $1 billion in 2017. A year later, it added an AI recommendation engine to the platform and expanded InfoSight across its 3PAR storage portfolio. At the time HPE executives said they planned to extend the machine learning capabilities beyond storage and across the company’s entire data center portfolio.

This push continued last November, when HPE announced that InfoSight now supports its Synergy composable infrastructure, ProLiant servers, and Apollo systems for high-performance computing and big data analytics workloads.

Now it has added its hyperconverged infrastructure to the list, which means customers will be able to monitor SimpliVity’s performance and capability utilization and get predictive data analytics and system recommendations.

“So customers now deploy SimpliVity, and very shortly we start to gather all the data analytics and add to that the 1.2 trillion data points that [InfoSight] collected, and customers are able to get recommendations such as where to optimize performance or find noisy or rouge [virtual machines],” Miller said. “And it’s all integrated into a global view.”

In other HCI news the vendor introduced a new system, Nimble Storage dHCI (the “d” stands for “disaggregated"). While SimpliVity scales compute and storage together, this disaggregated HCI system allows customers to scale those resources independently. It also has InfoSight built in.

The big storage news, however, was a new high-end, mission-critical storage platform called Primera. The vendor claims its simple to install and manage; fast (HPE says it has 122% faster Oracle performance); and reliable — it comes with a 100% availability guaranteed. “This is the first time someone is offering 100% availability,” HPE CEO Antonio Neri said during a keynote.

It also uses InfoSight to predict and prevent any disruptions in the networking, application, and server layers. IDC notes this is important because more than 90% of issues arise from above the storage layer. The operating system decouples data services so they can be deployed, upgraded, or restarted independently. And it comes with application-aware data protection with HPE StoreOnce for faster restores and HPE Cloud Bank Storage, which lets customers extend their storage to Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure public cloud for less expensive, longer-term retention compared to storing data on premises.

Primera will be available in August.

So how does storage fit into HPE’s hybrid cloud strategy?

“At the end of the day we want to provide our customers with the best-of-breed solutions that form the foundation for their on-premises, private clouds as well as give them that flexibility of embracing hybrid cloud with a choice of the options of the different stacks with the right economic so they can enjoy that as-a-service experience,” said Sandeep Singh, VP of HPE Storage Marketing.