While every CTO’s job varies, some stand out more than others, and being CTO of one of the USA’s national laboratories is one such case.

In eastern Tennessee, south of the city of Oak Ridge and close to the Clinch River, sits the aptly named Oak Ridge National Laboratory – or ORNL for brevity – and its CTO, Scott Atchley.

ORNL is one of two facilities – the other being Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois – that make up the Leadership Computing Facilities. These two locations, both of which are funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE), are home to some of the fastest and most powerful supercomputers not just in the US but in the world: Aurora at Argonne and, at ORNL, Frontier.

Atchley, a 16-year veteran of ORNL, tells ITPro that there have only been two weeks in his tenure as CTO that he’s regretted taking the job.

“That’s when we had deployed Frontier,” he says.

Full power failure?

Yes, even in one of the most advanced computing facilities in the world, it’s still entirely possible to have a relatively small fault cause chaos.

“[Frontier is] our current supercomputer, it's an HPE Cray EX system and one of the benchmarks – not the goal, but one of the benchmarks – for the system is that it would reach exascale, or 10 to the 18 flops,” says Atchley.

Supercomputers’ power is only announced twice a year – at ISC in Germany, which takes place in June, and SC Conference in the USA, which takes place in November. It’s from the announcements at these conferences that the Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers is drawn.

With the deadline for ISC 2022 fast approaching, Frontier was failing to perform.

“We were only about halfway [to 10¹⁸ flows], and we could not figure out why,” says Atchley. “We were having daily calls with HPE and AMD, and the deadline was coming.

“We were in a full panic, and this was the first time I thought, ‘my gosh, we might have bought the wrong machine’.”

Fortunately for Atchley and everyone else involved, he was wrong, and once the problem was identified, it was a “simple fix”.

“It was a one-line software change, and all of a sudden the performance shot up to right at just under an exaflop,” he says. “When they're new, [supercomputers] are very fragile. So, we rebuilt the machine during the day, and the next night we did the runs, and we finished it at about six in the morning.

“There were probably 50 people in line watching … and when the job looked like it was going to finish, all the chatter went quiet, nobody wanted to jinx it – we had been trying all night long, and it was really exciting when we saw the result that we actually exceeded an exaflop.”

Putting power to use

Top500 does have its limitations – only companies that run the LINPACK benchmark and submit the outcomes are measured, for example. There are also claims that it’s not particularly scientific, and Jack Dongarra, one of the creators of LINPACK, has himself admitted that its usefulness is limited.

“This benchmark reports the performance of this one application with its floating point operations and message passing. So there is one application and one number that represents the performance for the computer system. The weakness is that this is just one application and one number,” he told HPCWire in 2002.

Limitations and weaknesses don’t mean useless, however, and Atchley pushes back at the idea that Top500 is entirely meaningless.

“A lot of people will knock the Top500 … but we've actually had jobs on the system doing real science exceed an exaflop in performance, which is really cool, and so we're glad,” Atchley tells ITPro. “Our users love the machine, it's doing some incredible science.”

From aerospace to outer space – and back

Speaking of users, who is making use of Frontier? One case study Atchley gives is from the engineering firm GE. In partnership with French firm Safran, they have been developing a new type of jet engine.

“If you look at engines when commercial airliners came out in the 60s and early 70s, the engines were really narrow, really long,” says Atchley. “If you flew[today] and looked out the window, the engines now are really short, but really wide.

“Making them wider makes them more energy fuel efficient, but they're to the point now that if they make them any bigger, the gains they get in the efficiency they lose because of the drag on the nacelle.”

One option is to get rid of the nacelle – the housing around the engine – altogether. This isn’t a new idea, Atchley explains: “NASA has known about this for 50 years.”

The only issue is that using them on a commercial aircraft would deafen the passengers and crew, because they are – or would be – so loud.

It was only once Frontier came online with its exascale capabilities that GE and Safran were able to measure in high resolution the swirls of turbulence coming from the engine.

“Now they're tweaking the design to minimize those, and so that is the huge breakthrough, is understanding turbulence at a really fine scale. They can't do that in a wind tunnel. This engine is so big, there's no wind tunnel on earth that would fit it, so the only way they can do it is in a computer,” says Atchley.

As powerful as Frontier is, however, it can only model a 14-blade engine. In 2028, though, Frontier is expected to be superseded by the Discovery supercomputer, which may open up new opportunities for the likes of GE.

Once it’s online, ORNL will be home to three supercomputers: Frontier, Lux (which is expected to come online in 2026), and Discovery. At least for a time. Frontier will, ultimately, be decommissioned just as its predecessor, Summit, was.

“The challenge you get on these machines is even if the hardware doesn't run out or doesn't fail, the software, the vendors don't want to support something that's now 6,7,8 years old,” says Atchley.

“You think you want to have the latest software, you want to have the latest security patches, and so eventually you have to turn the machine off, but we had universities [and] industrial partners asking us, ‘can you run Summit longer?’ – we'd love to, but we can't.”

Sometimes there is a second life for these apparently beloved behemoths that isn’t just the recycling route.

“IBM was able to sell a portion of it to an oil and gas company, and so it is still doing work for them somewhere else.”

What is HPE? For just over a decade, since its split with what's now HP Inc, the answer has been clear: HPE is an enterprise hardware company specializing in servers and storage.

The additions of Cray and SGI to its portfolio bolstered this position: While they primarily opened the door to HPC and supercomputing for HPE, fundamentally there's a lot of crossover between typical data centers and these behemoths.

Even the name – Hewlett Packard Enterprise – invokes a sense of a company with a long history of making specialist kit for organizations' data centers or server rooms.

At HPE Discover 2026, though, you would be forgiven for thinking HPE's primary competitor wasn't Dell or IBM but Cisco.

Both of the first day keynotes were chock full of networking. I'm not just talking about announcements, of which there were some, I'm talking about the overall vibe as well. Both CEO Antonio Neri and head of networks, Rami Rahim, spoke about the importance of networking as a foundation for modern enterprise architecture, particularly for AI workloads.

Rahim offered a cautionary tale about the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, a residential high-rise that began sinking into the ground and listing to one side shortly after its completion due to problems with its foundations. His argument: if businesses don't lay solid foundations based on networking technology, then they're setting themselves up for failure. Their agentic AI ambitions, in particular, will become weak and start to wobble.

Such was the emphasis on networking all week, you would be forgiven for thinking that the company had moved away from its traditional business areas. In fact my first question to Antonio Neri when I spoke to him was: "Is HPE a networking company now, then?"

"Yes, it is," came the answer. He expounded on how this plays into HPE's expectation that it will grow into an $11 billion company, adding that "in my mind, together with our competitor, Cisco, [HPE has] the most complete networking portfolio".

"Our competitor Cisco" – what a phrase, and one that would have seemed slightly crazy just a few years ago.

It's not that HPE has had no networking business before this – Aruba Networks has been a core part of what HPE has to offer for years – but I don't think anyone would have openly declared Cisco a competitor in 2015.

Undeniably the Juniper acquisition does strengthen HPE's position in the data center – it can now offer the whole package, from scale up to scale out. Neri was keen to point out the AMD Helios, which should be coming this autumn, uses HPE Juniper Networks for scale up. Possibly more to come on that in July when we get to hear from AMD's CEO Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI summit, though we shall see.

The question that I've been asking myself throughout the conference and I've voiced already on the 19 June edition of the ITPro Podcast and reaction video, is this: is the focus on networking a perpetual state of affairs, or is HPE just burnishing its latest acquisition?

My expectation is that for the next 6 months minimum Juniper's star will very much be in the ascendence at HPE. After that? Well, maybe the foundations will have settled and networking will have equal importance to the rest of what the company does. HPE Discover Barcelona, the company's European conference that takes place 2-3 December this year, may offer some more insight into the direction of travel.

Until then, you can catch up on all my coverage from Las Vegas here and if you want to know more about the tower and its ongoing issues – including attempts to remediate that made it worse – I recommend this blog, and also the Wikipedia page. It makes for quite a read.

If an organization is surprised to see IT costs explode when it starts running agents at scale, the problem might not be in the IT budget – it might be a category error. At least in the opinion of HPE CEO Antonio Neri.

“I don’t think of [AI agents] as an IT cost,” Neri tells ITPro at HPE Discover 2026. “I think about the cost of the workforce because, to me, an agent is no different than any other employee I have to hire.”

“So if I hire [a person], there is a cost to onboard him and make sure that he's productive by giving him the tools and everything else,” he says. “When I train an agent, it's going to cost me a number of tokens to train it to drive the best productivity. If I'm going to spend a million dollars to train an agent, it has to be way more productive than [the person]. Otherwise, why am I doing that?”

This turns on its head much of the conversation around agents, tokenmaxxing, and costs as agentic AI starts to eclipse generative in organizational use.

AI sticker shock

ITPro wrote in May about “tokenomics” and so-called sticker-shock when the AI bill finally came due for many businesses. Famously, Uber used up its entire annual AI budget in four months and has now capped the amount each employee can spend on agents per month.

One answer that’s been given to the problem is a shift to on-premises IT rather than ‘cloud-based’ AI like Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, and moving agent costs from OpEx back to CapEx. For an enterprise hardware company like HPE, surely this should be an opportunity to increase hardware sales?

“Sure,” says Neri. “But we think about it as a total cost of [the] workforce, not as an IT expense.”

And is this something that he’s educating his customers about, or do they see it another way?

“Yes, I am,” he says. “I’m spending more than 50% of my time with our customers, and when I bring that concept to life for them, they say ‘ok, ok!’”

“I’d rather give a little bit more budget to IT to reduce my entire cost of the workforce, which is – depending on what you do – probably one of the biggest cost levers,” he continues. “I have only two large cost drivers: people and materials. The materials, in networking, we have a lot of that under control because we have the IP, but a lot of servers, obviously, CPUs, and GPUs I don’t control.

“[The people] I have 65,000 employees. It’s not about reducing employees, which in some cases will happen, but it’s about making those 65,000 employees way more productive with the aid of AI by freeing up capacity for the humans to do more value-added [work] while the agentic models do more work at much bigger scale. I think about that, the total cost of [the] workforce”.

Human / AI interaction

This is an idea that’s been seeded here and there throughout the conference. In Rami Rahim’s keynote, which took place just a couple of hours after Neri’s, one of the demonstrations floated the idea of taking humans out of the loop once a process has been approved.

Katrina Pickett, senior product manager, Juniper Networks, showed how HPE Marvis might help detect and remediate a problem with a sluggish network. The conversation between person and machine was in natural language, but the fixing was agentic. At the point that the fix was applied, Marvis asked if Pickett wanted to have an agent apply the same fix automatically in the future, without human intervention, which would present a time saving.

Human-in-the-loop (HTL), however, has been a key mantra of not just AI but automation more generally. Is it time to take another look at this attitude?

“Well, once you’re confident about [what’s happening], then you can remove the human from the loop and just put on the loop,” says Neri. “I think there needs to be some sort of oversight, but not doing the actual work.”

“In the case of networking, a lot of things were done manually through [the] command line interface, by logging in the console, and putting hands on a keyboard,” Neri continues.

“The scale is now so big that humans cannot possibly manage that scale. Therefore, there is no other choice than to automate things and use artificial intelligence to manage massive amounts of data.”

Naturally, there are caveats. The story of the company that had its entire codebase and all backups erased by a rogue agent is quickly passing from fact into legend; a cautionary tale for any business thinking of letting agents roam free in their network.

“I always say, you don’t get what you expect, only what you inspect [so] I think there needs to be some sort of oversight,” Neri says. “Human beings make mistakes, agents may make the same mistake, right? But as you’re doing it at a bigger scale, it may have a huge impact.”

Mistakes happening are “inevitable”, says Neri. Ultimately, though, there has to be an element of trust that the technology will work as intended. Guardrails can help with this, and, from Neri’s perspective, what HPE is doing with GreenLake Intelligence and Marvis Actions means customers can deploy agents with greater confidence to whatever extent they wish.

HPE still makes everything it always did – it has storage appliances, and it has servers a-plenty, and they’re popular too. According to the company’s most recent earnings call, traditional server orders are booming, growing triple digits year-on-year, while Alletra Storage MP orders also increased triple digits.

The conversation, however, will always revert to networking when it comes to visions of and for the future.

“There was a question in a previous session [that was posed] to Rami (Rahim), which said how far are we to really being fully autonomous, and we believe it’s within the next 12 months,” says Neri.

“It’ s not going to be everywhere across the network, but there are many aspects of the network just running itself.”

“Our opportunities are in the three domains: networking, cloud, and AI. Networking is a huge opportunity; we see it is. And it’s driven both at the edge to the campus and branch, the on ramp into the AI. You need that connectivity.”

Hello again from HPE Discover 2026, this is managing editor Jane McCallion. It's the second (and final) day of HPE Discover, with CTO Fidelma Russo presenting the final keynote of the event at 9am PT.

We can expect more on the technical side of the announcements that came from CEO Antonio Neri and president and GM of networking Rami Rahim. Follow along here for everything that happens, as it happens.

I've made it to the auditorium. Despite it being the second day, and the third keynote of three, it still looks pretty well attended.

Everything from the staging to the lighting is very on brand, which is to say very green!

Russo is on stage talking about how fast things are changing in the business worls. "The question now is not whether AI will change an enterprise" she says, it's about how it can be done safely and securely.

She's now talking about how AI systems – and agents in particular – need a structure to work properly. This means having the right data, the right infrastructure, and the right operating model, all underpinned by the right platform.

Announcement: The release of HPE Data Fabric 8.2. This offers agentic workload integration, global data catalog, and turnkey deployment.

Oh! I think we're going to do some tokenomics:

Russo points out that if you're working in the cloud, token costs can rack up quickly as agents make repeated requests back and forward, not just in one direction – this, is the classic tokenomics conversation.

HPE has its own experience of this, she says. It's not quite the $3,400 cost in 24 hours that we heard from Dell Technologies in May, but Russo says: "We saw this firsthand ... our storage systems and our support systems process billions of operational signals coming in from our customers, and as those environments became more autonomous, and as we looked at those systems, our token consumption scaled with the amount of signals"

She continues: "So our engineers, really smart people, built an AI source support platform, we built it on-prem with Greenlake Intelligence and Private Cloud AI, and running AI in our own infrastructure gave us control over the economics and allowed us to govern that really important customer data, and it gave us better performance, and it also helped us significantly minimize the token spend associated with operating AI at scale.

"We stopped being consumers of AI, and we became producers of intelligence. So, let's look at the results. We have more than 30x lower cost. We have nearly $100,000 saved per month, and that gave us the capacity to scale even further, faster. So, that is an example of how we took all of our infrastructure, all of our intellectual property, and put it to work within HPE for the goodness of our teams and also to react to customers faster."

We're moving on from data to infrastructure. There's a myth that AI reduces infrastructure, Russo says, but it's the opposite. "AI doesn't shrink your infrastructure, it expands it," she says.

Naturally, HPE has an answer to this: a single control plane consisting of HPE SimpLivity PC1000, HPE Private Cloud PC3000, HPE Private Cloud PC7000, and HPE Private Cloud AI. These last three are all now available air-gapped.

Announcement: The release of HPE Morpheus 9. "[The] most advanced platform for operating modern and traditional infrastructure, as well as AI," says Russo.

"Morpheus 9 introduces several major innovations and advances our vision of a more complete enterprise platform," Russo says. "Morpheus Central provides a single operational view from the GreenLake platform across sites and regions, integrated software-defined networking based on ... Juniper technology brings policy security and micro segmentation directly into the cloud.

"Stretched clustering extends resilience across sites, helping organizations maintain availability of critical workloads together," she adds.

We're talking HPE VM essentials. apparently there are over 2,000 customers using it with HVM, Kubernetes, VMware and more.

Announcement: This is an interesting one – the company's expanding its relationship with Citrix.

Citrix Desktop as a service and Citrix Virtual Apps are coming to HPE VM Essentials, "enabling customers to deliver modern digital workspaces with cloud-like operations in the environment of their choice", she says.

Right, next up: OpsRamp. This is one of HPE's newer acquisition (though not as new as Juniper).

"There is literally a lot more stuff running in your environment," says Russo. This makes management more difficult. "You need to understand exactly what is happening, which agents are running, which models are consuming resources, where are you spending the token," she says.

From an HPE perspective, that is HPE OpsRamp observability for AI.

We're now talking about HPE Zerto. "OpsRamp helps you understand the impact of AI across your environment. What happens when something goes really wrong?"

Russo alludes to the start up that got wrecked by a rogue agent earlier in the year.

"We're already seeing stories about agents who modify code they weren't supposed to have access to, deleting information and creating unintended consequences, and that's why we are extending HPE Circle to support NemoClaw and OpenClaw agentic AI environments," she says.

"It helps organizations recover from unintended agent consequences and return to a trusted state. Critically, critically important as you move forward into the era of AI," she says.

I thought Russo was about to sum up, but we have (I think) one more thing to talk about: GreenLake Intelligence

Announcement: HPE Copilots and Agents on GreenLake Intelligence.

Announcemnet: HPE is partnering with ServiceNow.

"GreenLake Intelligence helps you understand what's happening across your AI factories, your infrastructure, your agents, and your workloads and ServiceNow helps you operationalize that understanding through autonomous service delivery," says Russo.

"Together they connect infrastructure intelligence with operational execution," she says.

WORLD CUP MENTIONED! What you see on the score board, says Russo, is just the tip of the iceberg.

"Every great result is powered by much larger efforts behind the scenes," she says. "It takes extraordinary technical teams, go to market teams, and partners and customers all working together to bring these innovations to life."

And that's a wrap for this live blog! Keep an eye out for our podcast episode from the event, which will be published on Friday, and bookmark this link for even more from the event.

HPE and Nvidia have announced new features for HPE AI Factory, aimed at improving customers' experience with AI agents.

Announced at HPE Discover 2026, HPE AI Factory, which is part of Nvidia AI Computing by HPE, will now offer the Nvidia Agent Toolkit software, which includes Nvidia Nemotron open models, Nvidia NemoClaw (the chip maker's answer to OpenClaw), and Nvidia OpenShell secure runtime.

The new capabilities will, the companies say, help customers deploy enterprise-ready AI with greater observability, efficiency, and control.

There are also new hardware additions to HPE Private Cloud AI, which now has HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 servers with Nvidia Vera CPU for, in the words of the company, "a compute-optimized foundation for agentic AI and high-performance data processing, including security and management features".

On the security side, the update also includes new Zerto Software capabilities – HPE acquired Zerto in 2021 – which the company says will help customers identify when a "rogue agent" starts carrying out actions that it shouldn't. If this happens, the Zerto capabilities can "use continuous data protection to rewind to a clean state".

In addition, HPE Private Cloud AI also now has support for secure local agent registration, which the company says will allow customers to approve AI models, skills, and tools while following centralized governance and security policies.

Finally, HPE Private Cloud AI also has HPE Alletra Storage MP X1000, which enables customers to apply metadata and governance policies that prepare data for AI applications. According to HPE, this allows businesses to boost token throughput by up to 20% and improve prompt processing efficiency.

Of the announcement, HPE president and CEO, Antonio Neri, said: "Across networking, servers, storage, and software, HPE is delivering full-stack AI solutions with NVIDIA that build the foundation for agentic enterprises, helping customers move from experimentation to production with control and confidence."

ITPro's managing editor Jane McCallion is at HPE Discover 2026, and you can follow all the latest announcements and analysis from the event here.

It's Day One of HPE Discover 2026 – I'm Jane McCallion and I'm running this live blog on site at the Venetian Conference Center, Las Vegas.

Today, we'll be hearing from CEO Antonio Neri and networking chief Rami Rahim. Expect some AI and (obviously) networking announcements, perhaps some hardware too. You can read my preview here.

There's about 40 minutes to go until Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, kicks off Discover 2026 with his opening keynote. I've already seen massive crowds heading in the direction of the auditorium, so I'm expecting a pretty packed audience.

Even busier than I thought!

The tannoy is promising that the program will begin "shortly". In the meantime we're being treated to some dramatic music...

And we're off. "What does it mean to be an architect?" asks the VO. Apparently, now that we're in a new AI era anyone can be an architect. I think the dictionary and architects in general might have something to say about this...

Apparently networks are the foundation of all this, which I predicted would be one of the big messages for the event. Expect to hear even more about this over the next 48 hours, not just in this first keynote.

Today, he says, we're in a new, shifting technology landscape, where bu=oth humans and AI are creating inputs.

You don't architect a building round one room, he says. For creating AI and agentic AI systems it's the same, you need a solid foundation. For AI, that's networking but also other HPE elements like Private Cloud.

For years, Neri says, Aruba (which has been part of HPE for over a decade) the company has provided networking in terms of wireless access etc. Witht he acquisition of Juniper, that has now come into the data center.

Neri has just mentioned "self driving" networks. We're being shown a recent ad for HPE featuring F1 drivers for Mercedes Petronas who are confused that this is about their vehicles not the network. And relieved that it's not – HPE, of course, is one of the sponsors of MErcedes F1.

The agentic AI era doesn't just need network, though, it needs compute as well. As AI moves from creating content to agents, there's greater pressure on compute.

HPE is ansering this with the release of Proliant DL394 Gen12, which features Nvidia chips.

The most advanced systems are only as good as the data that they can access, though, he says. Naturally, HPE has an answer for that, too, which is the new Alletra Storage MP X10000.

Next up: rising virtualization costs. HPE has had a virtualization play for about a year now, maybe two (excuse the fuzzy memory). HPE Morpheus VM Essentials was introduced at HPE Discover Barcelona either 2025 or 2024 (I will clarify this later) as a competitor to VMware, even if it hasn't been outright pitched as such.

I have missed a segment that I believe was about security – HPE acquired Zerto in 2021 – but Neri is now talking about how all of this is brought together in GreenLake, the company's private cloud "platform".

GreenLake intelligence, which is already part of Aruba Central acocridng to the new VO, and helps manage and operate agentic AI. Greenlake intelligence combines context and AI, turing "observation into understanding" and recommending or carryign out a remediation.

It's never a surprise to hear about GreenLake at HPE Discover, though it's shifted guises over the years. While it was originally pitched as a private cloud offering, it's now effectively both a management platform. I believe that at least some of the "consumption based IT" idea from the original iteration of GreenLake has been offloaded to HPE Financial Services.

Right: Neri is going to elaborate on two parts of the company's strategy, networking and "managing transformation into an agentic enterprise".

We're now watching a short Video about the company's partnership with Vultr, with a person on screen who I am 99% sure is generative AI. I suppose this is on topic for the theme of this morning.

Right, new announcement. HPE Juniper NEtworking now has the QFX5252 scale-up switch for AMD Helios. It's 100% liquid cooled, has open standards, and SONIC with AI-native operations.

In terms of specs, it has 1024 Tbps total capacity and comes with Juno operating system.

Neri is now talking about how AI data centers are now often not a single data center, they are several sites working together. This is where HPE edge offerings come in, he says.

The Juniper Networking MX301 can help with this. There's also a new switch, the QFX5140 switch for inference clusters. 16 Tbps total capacits un 1RU, optimized for inference and AI-native optimized with HPE Marvis, says Neri and the specs list next to him

New networking announcement: Aruba CX Switch is coming to Mist and Marvis actions is coming to Aruba Central. This is part of the company's "cross-pollination" efforts.

You can read more about that announcement here.

Another annoucnement, this is about agentic AI and updates to HPE AI Factory.

This includes: secure agentic operations, which mean agents only run in their own secure environments with guard rails. There's also Nvidia NemoClaw, which is an open framework. Also, Zerto is being included that includes data recovery if something does go wrong.

For a more coherent write up and more information, read more here.

Also coming to HPE AI Factory is HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000, which allows agents better access to data and metadata.

But wait, there's more: New inference capabilities, with multi-node inference, unified gateway, and enhanced conference, and shared KV cache.

HPE Unleash AI partner ecosystem, which has over 60 partners like CrowdStrike and Fortinix, and Protopia, also continues to grow says Neri, though there's no rate or previous partner figures for comparison.

apparently the Ryder Cup is using HPE kit for digital twins. No real information on that, but everyone loves a digital twin these days.

We're getting encouragement to come along to the Day 2 keynote, with Fidelma Russo tomorrow – it will be the third keynote of the event. Naturally, your intrepid reporter will be there.

Ok, another announcement: Confidential computing now comes as standard across HPE AI Factory with Nvidia

Ok., we're wrapping up. His three big messages to delegates, after thanking sponsors, are: Architect deliberately, start with the network and choose the right partner, which is to say HPE.

And it's over. Thank you for following along. Rami Rahim's keynote is in a couple of hours, so I will be back for that. But until then, goodbye!

We are back! It's 1pm in Las Vegas, the delegates are fed and the auditorium is once again full (though not heaving) with people ready to hear more about HPE's networking business. Rami Rahim, formerly CEO of Juniper Networks, should be taking to the stage any time now.

We are starting off with a video about self-driving networks, which can self optimize, self protect, and self heal.

Rahim is on stage and receives an extremely warm welcome. He's telling us a cautionary tale of the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, which ended up slowly collapsing under its own weight because its foundations weren't strong enough. Readers who were following this morning probably knows where this story is going...

Organizations are building AI applications and workloads, but if they don't have a strong foundation built on networking then their projects will go the way of San Francisco's Millennium Tower.

The network is front and center again, says Rahim. It's not just sitting in a corner somewhere, it's fundamental and as important as any other part of the data center and IT infrastructure.

An "old fashioned" network that's static isn't good enough though. It's not just about building a network for AI, it's about building AI for the network. He hasn't said the phrase yet, but this is the idea of the self-driving network.

This is all lovely, but the network has to be protected as well, he says. And it has to do it without impacting user experience or increasing the burden on IT teams.

" The networks of the future must be able to sense, to learn, to optimize, to protect, and heal themselves in real time," says Rahim.

HPE, he says, has made more progress than anyone in this technology.

Here comes the first guest: CIO of Ohio State University Rob Lowden.

Apparently OSU has 22,000 wireless access points across its campus, both indoors and outdoors.

They're updating their network at 'The Horseshoe', its stadium, where thousands of people can descend on a match day. There's also a nearby cancer hospital run by the university that also has connectivity needs. So it's now working with HPE to overhaul their whole network to support that.

Lowden's off, Rahim is back to talking about how if the self driving network can support a scenario as complex as OSU, it can support pretty much any need. A bold claim.

Sunalini Sankhavaram from HPE Campus and Branch is now on stage to talk about delivering a consistent self-driving experience on both Aruba Central and Juniper Mist. Thanks to microservices, HPE can build once and deploy twice – like developing an app and deploying it on both iOS and Android.

"We have an API first approach," she says, which makes HPE's MCP servers and tools "extremely powerful, delivering objective automation at scale".

Rahim says "most vendors talk about AI systems and agents and AI ops, but still rely on reactive human-driven troubleshooting, but if you can still have to fix the problem, where exactly is the self-driving in that?" He asks her for an example of how real self-driving networks work and why they matter.

"We all know that today's networks need to cater to high density requirements while also meeting the performance expectations of every user and application, but most networks are not designed to meet intermittent surges in the traffic," says Sankhavaram.

Showing an example scenario, she continues: "If we look at Marvis, we see that all the users in this public building automatically have (good connectivity), but was this the case all of last week? No, it wasn't. So, what happened? How did unhappy users become happy? Let's take a look.

"Last week, Marvis detected that over 6% of user minutes were bad, which may not sound like a lot, but it impacted hundreds of people. Marvis has a self-driving action for dynamically fixing the path solution. This action was enabled and was able to autonomously fix the problem by enabling fuel bands like river. This reduced the peak utilization from 90% to 54% enabling a better experience for users that are lacking."

All without a human or any tickets raised.

We're now going over HPE Marvis Actions in HPE Aruba Central. It's not about just more visibility, it's about better experience she says. There's also the opportunity to automate many actions, such as noticing there is a problem with a CCTV camera feed, analysing what the process is and remediating it automatically.

We're retreading some of the same ground as this morning about the CX switches.

According to Rahim, it only took a few moths to get Aruba and Juniper integrated and innovating, which gets a big round of applause from the audience.

Rahim welcomes a new guest, this is the head of engineering and networks at the Royal Bank of Canada.

Okey dokey, we're now onto Zero Trust netowrks. There are 5 elements of security, visibility, policy driven, enforcement, detection and response, explains Madani Adjlali, VP of product management (SASE and Security), at HPE. HPE's security portfolio includes firewall, NAC, SSE and SD-WAN.

It also has a unified SASE and everything's been combined into a single SASE orchestrator.

Oh dear, it's live demo time. Fingers crossed...

Ok, it's going well so far with no hiccups. SASE Orchestrator will be available to all customers later in the year, we've just been told

live demo of the AI Firewall now.

Rami says goodbye to Adjali, concluding the segment by saying: "At HPE, AI, networking, and security are no longer separate domains. They are converging into a single intelligent self-driving system".

Now on stage, Katrina Pickett to talk about the role and importance of routers.

We're being taken through an example demo of how Marvis might help detect and remediate a network problem involving an increase in latency.

Marvis fixed the issue, which was convenient. In future, the network manager – or whoever is in charge of it – can give Marvis permissions to carry out the same fix automatically if the issue occurs again in the network.

We've had a brief customer appearance and now we're onto another product demo – Data Center Operations, which is also part of Mist.

"Today you heard a consistent message from every customer, every demo ... the old way of operating networks has reached its limits" says Rahim, closing out the keynote. "the future belongs to networks that can think, that can adapt, that can optimize, and that can protect themselves in real time.

"Self-driving networks, not a futuristic idea, not a lab experiment, but as a practical necessity for operating modern infrastructure at scale."

HPE has kicked off its Partner Growth Summit in Las Vegas by announcing it's moving more of its products to a channel-only route to market on the back of success with HMP Morpheus VM Essentials.

From 1 July, HPE SimpliVity PC1000, HPE Private Cloud PC3000, and HPE Zerto Software will all only be available from partners. This builds not he announcement last year that HPE Morpheus VM Essentials would only be available through channel partners.

Since taking that decision, the company has seen "tremendous impact and momentum across the partner ecosystem", according to Kristian Kerr, hybrid channel lead at HPE.

"We've got 700 more partners that have sold VME software in the last 12 months, and over 1300 partners have taken up the certifications since November when we launched them," Kerr told press and analysts.

Making SimpliVity PC1000, Private Cloud 3000, and Zerto software available exclusively through partners means "more of the private cloud and disaster recoverable disaster recovery portfolio as channel only," Kerr said, "so a huge step forward and further commitment to our partners and extending what we announced last year in the VM essentials."

HPE Morpheus VM Essentials channel update

HPE Morpheus VM Essentials isn't being left as simply the first step in this process. HPE Morpheus VM Essentials for Partner IT Program, or VM Essentials for Partner IT for brevity, allows partners to deploy VM Essentials into their IT environment free of charge for the first three years, with a "nominal" support fee.

According to Kerr, this means they will have the chance to not only "benefit from the significant virtualization savings" but also build their own competencies.

"We're going to be making this available to around 600 partners who will gain the private cloud with virtualization competency by the end of the year, so a huge step forward, just in terms of channel only," he added.

New support for cloud service providers

Another announcement coming out of HPE Partner Growth Summit is a new product aimed at cloud service providers.

HPE CloudOps Software for cloud service providers allows these businesses to build, operate, and monetize different kinds of private cloud service with the support of HPE Partner Ready Vantage, the company claimed.

"This HPE Cloud Permit model further enhances the value with preferential pricing for these service providers, and it's going to be tied to committed spend," Kerr said.

In addition to all of this, HPE has also announced it's wrapping up Juniper's partner program, Partner Advantage, into HPE Partner Ready Vantage. Partner Ready Vantage was announced in November 2025.

Juniper specialisations will be incorporated into HPE competencies, and memberships will be mapped from Partner Advantage to Partner Ready Vantage over the course of the year. For example, Elite Plus Juniper partners will become Platinum members in the networking centre of HPE Partner Ready Vantage.

Following HPE Partner Growth Summit, the main HPE Discover 2026 conference will kick off on Tuesday 16 June. You can follow all the latest announcements and analysis from the event here.

It's HPE Discover 2026 this week, but before the main conference kicks off the company welcomes its channel partners to the Partner Growth Summit.

As you can see from the main image, the theme for this year's Partner Growth Summit is "The Power of One". Follow along with this live blog for all the announcements from Simon Ewington's keynote, channel and partner ecosystem leader at HPE and keep an eye on our main HPE Discover page for all the announcements from the conference throughout the week.

Hello, and welcome to our live blog from HPE Partner Growth Summit 2026, I'm managing editor Jane McCallion.

This is the first Partner Growth Summit since HPE acquired Juniper Networks in July 2026. In December, at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, the company talked about "cross-pollination" between Juniper and its existing networking business, Aruba, in terms of technology. Based on this week's strapline "the power of one", we may have more to hear about how that's working from a channel point of view.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Antonio Neri will also be on stage at some point during this keynote, but we're kicking off with Simon Ewington who is talking up "the power of One". He starts with a thank you to the HPE channel partners, saying 64% of all business is done through the channel. This rises to 90% in networking.

Ewington is talking about the changes that have happened over the course of 2026. The "Power of One portfolio" is a three part thing, he says.

"First, we want to help others unlock greater relevance by delivering one portfolio built on innovation that keeps you ahead in the customer market. Second, to help partners [build] expertise, so that you can position that portfolio by providing the right tools, right training, and the right knowledge, and last to help partners as well higher knowledge when you sell and you win."

The announcements are coming thick and fast! First is some new channel-only offerings – we will have a write up of this available shortly – which include HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and a VM Essentials offering for partners themselves, which will be available 'free' for three years (there is a "nominal" support fee).

Ewington also talks up HPE's networking prowess and associated security.

"We're enabling you to meet strictest data residency and regulated requirements with air gaps and solvent ready private cloud solutions, which then can be combined with partner delivery, and then most obvious opportunity we create in one portfolio is through our worldwide HPE networking business," he says

"To take advantage of our merging networking portfolio, refine existing networking competencies into one, and adding a new rounding competency, which we've adopted to capture that opportunity," he adds. This means integrating the Juniper and HPE channel programs into a single one – which means moving everyone to Platinum, Gold, and Silver levels.

Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, is now on stage with Ewington.

"First and foremost, thank you for all the support you provide to us as enjoying customers, and for the spectacular tools we deliver," says Neri.

He also talks about what has happened in the five months between the acquisition of Juniper in July 2025 and January 2026.

"Consider the large scale companies coming together, and we continue to deliver profitable growth for our shareholders ... so I'm very proud, because, as you said, we are building investment in business in the industry," he adds

There's a lot of hinting, nods and winks about what's going to be announced tomorrow. Big netowrking announcements (no surprise there) and the importance of AI. More on that tomorrow, where I'll be running a live blog on ITPro.

Back to Ewington, he's asking what HPE needs from partners in FY 2027. Neri starts off with a thank you to the partner community, adding that the role of HPE is to make partners "relevant", which grows business for everyone and increases innovation.

"Our role is to grow with you," he says, but it's not just abotu 2027. He's summing up by saying that the technological challenges and disruption that's happening now "we're all experiencing" but there's business opportunity there. And with a big round of applause he has left the stage

Now Phil Mottram is on stage for a "tight session" as it's sort of a "three in one".

"We're going to hear about the big trends we're seeing in the market, and where our customers are coming to us for answers"

Joining Mottram for the first segment are Maeve Culloty and Neil MacDonald.

MacDonald is addressing one of the biggest issues for partners (I've heard this not at HPE but elsewhere too) is supply challenges.

"We know that the supply environment is difficult and that it's added a lot of work, too much work for you and your teams, you're dealing with supply availability challenges, you're dealing with higher prices, pricing changes, and you're dealing with customers who all have serious budget challenges because of the dynamics in the industry, and what we don't expect this place situation to resolve any time soon," he says.

MacDonald reflects on changes the company has made recently to help partners, including faster delivery starts and smart choice SKUs.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: The company is moving away from a 14 day period to finalise a sale/quote validity. That's now 30 days.

"Starting tomorrow we are moving our standard full mobility out to 30 days for new servers, storage, and relay pricing," says MacDonald.

"Thank you, everyone, for working with us through a pretty rocky time over the last few months," he adds. "During the first half of the year, commodity costs were changing in an extremely dynamic way, which is why we have to shorten our core validities, and our goal right now is to be able to stand behind and extend that ... validity."

Another announcement, this time from Culloty, is a change to how credit works. She says that partners are asking for more credit capacity.

"We're working in a very dynamic environment right now, and ... I'm proud to announce ... an increase to approve to credit items 150% making it easier for you to sell and upsell to your customers," she says.

Fidelma Russo, CTO at HPE, joins Mottram on stage now along with the company's CTO of worldwide technology.

Russo talks about how AI is changing things across the board and – another familiar refrain from infrastructure vendors in general – that businesses are discovering that private cloud can be overly expensive for some workloads. This presents an opportunity in private cloud for everyone.

We'll be hearing more about this in Russo's keynote on Wednesday it seems.

"We are seeing a lot of demand for on-prem infrastructure, especially around AI, and so that's where we see a lot of adoption around private cloud AI for customers who are seeing that from a cost perspective, from a compliance perspective, from a sovereignty perspective, and from control perspective, that this is the best way to deploy their AI workloads. So I think that's a huge opportunity for partners, especially with services," Russo says.

Mottram wasn't joking when he said this would be speedy, we're now onto Rami Rahim, former CTO of Juniper and now in charge of networking at HPE. This is obviously one of the most interesting things for partners this week, as it's been a significant transition especially for Juniper partners.

Asked how it's going, Rahim says: "It's a lot of work, I'm not going to lie, but I would say that we are ahead of schedule at this point. I think any successful integration is going to start with culture and cultural alignment. Now, [I've been] really very positively surprised to see just how aligned from a cultural standpoint Juniper and HPE were right from the get-go, which allowed us to focus on what's important right from the very beginning."

"We want to get the integration right. We could not let the integration de-focus us for what is really critical, and that is our customers, our partners, ensuring that there's no disruption to any of our customer deployments, and very importantly, innovation," he adds.

Rahim is also talking about AI as an opportunity for partners, that embracing AI and getting it right it's a new route to increase profitability for partners.

A spokesperson from Myriad360 is syaing that an opportunity for partners is that "network is becoming strategic again".

"Network... is foundational in any AI competition," he says, "but the interesting thing is it's not alone: so is infrastructure, so is data security ... and many, many more."

That's it from Mottram, Ewington is back on stage to wrap-up (I think)

Ok, so an announcement: for the rest of this FY the Juniper and HPE networking partner programs will continue to operate as two separate programs, but from 1 November 2026 they will be unified into a single stream under HPE Partner Ready Vantage.

Juniper partners will be onboarded at the level they're currently on, which gets a round of applause from the audience – sure there are probably some relieved delegates to hear that officially confirmed.

That's it for the Partner Growth Summit keynote, but stay with our sister site ITPro for all the announcements from this week. Judging by all the hints dropped to channel partners there are going to be a lot!

HPE Discover 2026 is the 15th annual get-together for HPE partners, collaborators, and customers held at the Venetian Conference Center in Las Vegas. This year, the conference takes place from 15-18 June.

I will be on site, reporting on all the latest news and delivering insight on the main topics and themes of the week. We won’t be hearing any official announcements until after CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote on Tuesday, which starts at 9.00 am PST, but that doesn’t mean the content is a complete mystery.

Here are three things I expect to see at HPE Discover 2026 – and one person I don’t.

Agent-powered autonomous networking

It’s just under a year since HPE acquired Juniper Networks. How its technology would be integrated into HPE – especially when it comes to Aruba, the existing HPE networking play – was a big focus of HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 in December.

At HPE Discover 2026, I’m expecting to hear more on how the cross-pollination between Juniper and Aruba is going, as well as how much progress has been made towards “self-driving networks”. This idea was debuted at Discover Barcelona six months ago and was described at the time as an AI-agent powered method of increasing the speed of rollout, creating the fewest tickets, and producing "better business outcomes".

The company was then a little quiet on this front for the first half of 2026, but in May, the company announced it was moving “from vision to reality”, with the launch of fully-autonomous, agent-powered AIOps networking.

At the time of the announcement, Rami Rahim, who was CEO of Juniper at the time of its acquisition and is now EVP, president, and GM of networking at HPE, said: “The network HPE now delivers represents a pivotal shift for our customers, and marks a breakaway moment for them to capture the benefits of the next frontier of autonomous actions.”

“This fundamentally changes the role of networking from a system that informs to one that takes action on behalf of the business, freeing customer networking teams to focus on innovation instead of operations,” he added.

I think that we can expect a recap of this, at the very least, during Rahim’s keynote on Tuesday, 16th, and perhaps some more information on customers, such as the UK’s Ministry of Justice.

Supercomputers past and present

It would be unlikely for a new supercomputer to be unveiled at HPE Discover – that kind of thing is normally reserved for ad-hoc announcements or the SC conference, which is happening the week after HPE Discover.

Nevertheless, supercomputers are, at this point, a big part of HPE’s business and bragging rights – of the 10 most powerful supercomputers in the November 2025 Top500 list, six use HPE Cray hardware. That, in my opinion, is enough to open up a conversation about supercomputers at the event

Speaking of Cray, it’s also 75 years since the first Cray supercomputer came online, which is surely worth at least a passing mention.

My final piece of evidence is that Scott Atchley, CTO at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – home of the Frontier supercomputer – is one of the speakers listed for Tuesday afternoon.

AI agents and private cloud

Let’s face it, we can barely move for talk of AI agents these days, and there’s no way HPE will pass up the opportunity to talk about what they can offer organizations in this department. I’ve already mentioned the role of agents in HPE’s networking play, but I think we can expect even more – perhaps pinned to GreenLake, the company’s “edge-to-cloud” platform, or cloud more generally.

One thing I’m genuinely unsure about is whether we’ll hear more about tokenomics – something that came up at Dell Technologies World 2026 – and the increasing pressure AI agents are putting on businesses’ IT budgets. It’s the topic of the moment, but HPE would need some new hardware if it wants to join in the conversation and present a solution.

Private cloud has also been a big part of HPE’s offering for nearly 10 years, with CEO Antonio Neri declaring it was the “edge-to-cloud” company when he took the role in 2018. Two years ago, this was modified to the “edge-to-cloud-to-AI” company, and in 2025, built on this proclamation with a new AMD Helios rack aimed at cloud service providers and neoclouds.

No Jensen Huang this time

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is a busy man who seems to make an appearance at multiple conferences throughout the year, not just the company’s own GTC event.

While he made an in-person appearance in 2024, he’s absent from this year’s list of speakers. So while we may get a pre-recorded video (which we saw at Dell Technologies World 2025), I doubt there will be an on-stage appearance from technology’s most energetic CEO in 2026.

I’m at HPE Discover 2026 for the duration of the conference – including the Partner Growth Summit, which takes place on Monday. You can keep up with all the announcements, analysis, and insight from the event as it happens here, as well as on the ITPro Podcast and our social media channels.

HPE has announced an expansion to its ProLiant edge portfolio, with a particular focus placed on supporting organizations operating in “harsh environments”.

The new HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis, which supports up to two HPE ProLiant Compute EL220 Gen12 servers or one EL240 Gen12 server, is designed specifically for applications in manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and national security.

According to HPE, the new servers boast a range of performance improvements compared to prior generations, and can scale from eight up to 144 Intel Xeon 6 cores.

The EL240 Gen12 server is also available with Nvidia RTX Pro 4500 or Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell server edition GPUs.

Durability is a key focus here, according to HPE. The new server range can operate in extreme temperatures ranging from -40 degrees Celsius to 55 degrees Celsius, as well as environments with up to 95% humidity.

They’re also designed to compensate for heavy vibration from aircraft or ground vehicles, as well as electromagnetic interference (EMI) and environmental contaminants.

During a press briefing ahead of the announcement, Krista Satterthwaite, senior vice president and GM of HPE’s compute group, said the focus on durability and ruggedness comes in direct response to changing edge requirements.

“Every edge is different, and edge is hard,” she said. “Servers at the edge need to be tough across industries like retail, manufacturing, [and] telecommunications.”

“Workloads are running at edge locations that are understaffed, constrained by space power, connectivity, and security becomes even more critical because these environments are much more exposed, which means protection has to be built in from the start.”

HPE touts telecoms, defense potential

HPE revealed that each platform is now available with an “Environmental Ruggedization” kit, enabling organizations operating in harsh conditions to compensate for “extreme stressors”.

“We're introducing an environmental ruggedized kit that enables these servers to handle extreme stressors,” Satterthwaite told assembled media.

“These new offerings satisfy customer needs for purpose built systems that deliver highly reliable performance in harsh and highly distributed locations that are designed to operate remotely with end to end visibility and control.

According to HPE, the ruggedization features adhere to a range of standards, including US national security standards, which require validated server survivability capabilities in extreme temperatures or high or low altitudes.

Satterthwaite noted that growing demands for edge capabilities in the defense industry and the public sector have played a key role in the durability focus.

“That is one of the main focus areas, which is why we have so many things that we’ve pursued in terms of certifications for more ruggedized environments,” she commented.

“So big, big demand coming from the defense space, in particular in the public sector.”

John Carter, VP for mainstream compute at HPE, echoed Satterthwaite’s comments, noting that the systems will “go anywhere” and “withstand any environment”.

“We’ve seen demand and had customer conversations from everything from space stations to battleships, to Jeeps, to anything else you can think of,” he said.

Elsewhere, the new range also adheres to telecoms network equipment standards that support 5G and radio access network (RAN) availability in unattended environments.

On the telecommunications front, Carter told assembled media this is an industry where the company is seeing surging demand for edge capabilities.

“Telcos have really been embracing the edge for quite a while,” he said. “They’ve been expanding the 5G roll-outs, now they’re starting to look at 6G in the future, and that is requiring a new level of performance and compute.”

“But we have seen numerous different environments from different customers. It just depends on the provider. And we do work with those telco providers from everything from the extreme edge all the way back to the packet core,” Carter added.

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HPE has announced a major expansion of its Private Cloud AI portfolio, with a particular focus on data sovereignty capabilities.

Unveiled at Nvidia GTC in San Jose, California, updates to the service will include an air-gapped configuration for HPE Private Cloud AI. This will allow enterprises to ensure data isn’t exposed to external networks and kept in a secure, isolated location.

In a press briefing ahead of the annual conference, Dale Brown, head of growth for AI solution at HPE, said the move comes in direct response to the growing enterprise focus on sovereignty and security, as well as evolving regulatory compliance requirements.

“We’re meeting customers where they are,” he said, adding that there are three overarching considerations at play for organisations with regard to sovereignty.

“The interesting thing about sovereignty, if you notice, sovereignty always has to be put in context of customer need and use-cases,” he told assembled media.

“So security might mean completely disconnected from the internet, but also sovereignty might mean that the data can’t leave a particular country and/or a particular principality.”

Brown added that the solution “provides even extra security” through a private cloud model, “bringing AI to the data” but also offering enterprises a higher degree of control of how data is processed, and where.

HPE Private Cloud AI capacity boost

HPE also announced new capacity scaling capabilities for Private Cloud AI customers at Nvidia GTC. This includes the ability to scale network racks up to 128 GPUs, marking an increase from the previous limit of 64.

The company said this is aimed primarily at allowing customers to accommodate “larger, more demanding AI workloads” while still maintaining a “consistent operational experience”.

Again with a focus on sovereignty, HPE confirmed that the Private Cloud AI service, as well as HPE ProLiant servers and HPE AI Factories, will support the latest Nvidia Nemotron open models.

These form part of Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, which helps streamline the deployment of agents in on-prem and sovereign infrastructure environments for enterprises operating in critical or regulated industries.

Brown told journalists that HPE is also adding a raft of new “additional configurations and deployment modalities” for Private Cloud AI customers.

The service includes access to an array of Nvidia AI Enterprise software and blueprints, for example, including Nvidia’s updated AI-Q blueprint for AI agents.

New Nvidia Omniverse blueprints for digital twins are also available, the company revealed.

“Ultimately, our partnership with Nvidia has been all about removing friction, repeatable patterns, speeding time to value with proven best tools and techniques between our companies,” he said.

“We’re super proud of how we’ve co-engineered these solutions consistently.”

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled a series of new solutions aimed at streamlining AI infrastructure networking at the edge.

Announced ahead of MWC 2026, the new networking products mark the latest milestone in the company’s efforts to integrate Juniper Networks products across its infrastructure portfolio.

“This integration builds on the combined strengths in large-scale service provider infrastructure of both HPE and Juniper Networks, along with deep expertise across networking, compute, security, and cloud,” the company said in a statement.

Part of the update will include three new additions to the Juniper PTX router range, which HPE said will deliver a 49% improvement in power efficiency compared to previous generations.

Rami Rahim, executive vice president, president, and general manager for networking at HPE, said the new PTX routers will enable customers to meet surging data traffic demands as a result of AI workloads.

“AI infrastructure is a critical growth driver for service providers. More than ever, HPE is committed to helping these customers lead in the AI era by building intelligent, next-generation networks that can support complex operations, rising data traffic, and the transformative capabilities of AI,” he said in a statement.

Here’s what customers can expect with the new updates

Under the hood of Juniper PTX

The first of the new product launches includes the Juniper PTX12000, a line of modular routers which HPE said will allow network operators to “scale AI and cloud traffic without repeated infrastructure redesigns”.

The new router features an “ultra-dense” 800G port density - on 1.6T-ready platforms, according to HPE. The firm noted this will allow users to sustain “predictable” low-latency performance that can scale based on growing demands.

“The platform scales to 345.6T with the 8-slot PTX12008 and 518.4T with the 12-slot PTX12012, enabling seamless capacity expansion while preserving architectural consistency and reducing latency, power consumption, and costs,” the company said in an announcement.

Meanwhile, new Juniper PTX10002 fixed form routers also aim to match growing traffic demands. This line offers high-density routing designed specifically for AI network fabrics, HPE noted.

The PTX10002 offers 28.8T or 14.4T of throughput in addition to flexible multi-rate port options beginning at 100G through to 800G.

“The expanded portfolio enables efficient scaling of AI clusters and WAN connectivity, while giving customers the flexibility to optimize space, power, and port density as AI and cloud traffic grows,” HPE noted.

HPE teases an “agentic-ready” Routing Director

Juniper Routing Director, a tool used to automate network traffic, is also set for a big “agentic” update as of HPE’s upgrade plans.

This will allow enterprises to connect their own AI assistants, or “copilots”, to the service in a bid to automate WAN routing issues, for example.

HPE said the update will give customers the “flexibility to use agentic AI to automate workflows, optimize WAN routing performance, and simplify AI-native, post-deployment operations”.

Elsewhere, HPE announced plans to integrate the Juniper Cloud Native Router (JCNR), the networking giant’s container orchestration software.

This is now available on 1U HPE ProLiant DL110 servers, as well as the new 2U HPE ProLiant EL140 Gen12 server range.

“This enables service provider operators [to] eliminate routing hardware at cell site locations, reducing hardware purchase expenses and ongoing energy costs,” the company said.

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HPE has announced the appointment of Neil Dover as its new Country Sales Leader for Ireland, effective immediately.

Dover arrives with more than 18 years of commercial and channel experience and joins the business from HP, where he spent 15 years in various leadership roles. Most recently, he served as country manager for the firm’s go-to-market business in Ireland.

In his new role, he will lead HPE’s sales teams in Ireland, overseeing strategic planning, business development, and customer engagement as the company continues its AI and hybrid cloud solutions push.

In an announcement, HPE highlighted Dover’s expertise in building high-performing teams and transitioning businesses to a solutions-led approach.

“We are delighted to welcome Neil to HPE,” said Pauline Yau, senior director of Global & Strategic Sales and Ireland Country Sales at HPE. “His proven track record across commercial, channel and solutions-led transformation will be invaluable as we accelerate customer adoption of AI, cloud and networking solutions in Ireland.

“Under his leadership the Ireland team will deepen partner engagement, scale our digital sales capability, and realise meaningful outcomes for our customers.”

Go-to-market leadership

Dover will also lead HPE’s newly unified Ireland Go-To-Market organisation, which now includes a national Ireland Channel Sales team, a recently established Digital Sales hub in Leixlip, as well as dedicated in-country presales sources.

His team will focus on driving solution adoption and business growth across Ireland, HPE said.

“I am excited to join HPE at this crucial time and look forward to helping customers realize new opportunities and achieve outcomes that matter most to their businesses,” Dover commented.

“I’m inspired by the enthusiasm and deep knowhow of the team and by HPE’s AI proposition for the Irish market.”

Galway expansion

Alongside the appointment, HPE has also strengthened its presence in Ireland through a fresh investment into its Galway office. A new Galway Experience Center (GEC) will act as a collaborative hub to help customers and partners tackle challenges, co-create solutions, and collaborate with HPE engineers.

The center’s aim is to drive two-way communications to improve problem-solving, boost confidence in HPE solutions, and shorten solution development cycles.

Ray McGann, HPE managing director for Ireland, said both Dover’s appointment and the new Galway hub reinforce the company’s long-term commitment to Irish customers in the era of AI.

“By bringing engineering and business teams together for in-depth strategic discussions, we’re making it simpler for Irish organisations and partners to realise the opportunities AI presents,” he explained.

These investments deepen our local presence and allow us to better support Ireland’s digital and economic growth.”

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We were mightily impressed with HPE's ProLiant DL345 Gen11 rack server when we reviewed it a couple of years ago. And its successor, the ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12, builds on its successes. Support for one of AMD's core-heavy Gen5 EPYC 9005 series CPUs keeps the focus firmly on virtualization duties, but it goes further with a doubling of DDR5 memory to 6TB, making it a fine candidate for memory-intensive applications.

HPE is offering an appealing alternative for businesses unhappy with VMware's revamped licensing plans, as the DL345 Gen12 is available with its Morpheus VM Essentials software. Designed to simplify virtualization, its unified management plane can handle its own HVM KVM-based hypervisor clusters along with existing VMware vSphere deployments.

HPE boldly claims its per-socket licensing model can reduce the cost of ownership by up to 90%. You can try it out too, as HPE offers a free non-commercial community edition with a one-year licence for three sockets.

The server's 2U chassis also provides an extensive range of storage features. As you'll see, it can't match the enormous capacities of the DL345 Gen11, but it still has plenty of potential for storage-centric workloads.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 review: Storage features

There are two specific reasons why storage capacities for the DL345 Gen12 aren't as high as those offered by its predecessor. The DL345 Gen11 has internal midtray and rear drive options, allowing it to support a total of 20 LFF or 32 SSF drives, but these are not available for the DL345 Gen12 – presumably due to the thermal restrictions imposed by the higher TDP Gen5 EPYC CPU.

The good news is the triple-box design at the front of the DL345 Gen12 offers plenty of storage choices with a sharp focus on EDSFF SSDs. Each box supports up to twelve E3.S NVMe SSDs for a total of 36, but the flexible design means you can partner them with standard SFF boxes or a universal media box with two stacked SFF bays and an optical drive.

There are other choices as our system came with one 8-bay SFF box with direct-attached U.3 NVMe SSDs, while its central box sports HPE's NS204i-u V2 boot optimised storage device equipped with a pair of mirrored hot-plug M.2 NVMe SSDs. This multi-purpose box can partner the boot device with two blocks of four EDSFF drives, or you can use one block to present two front-mounted PCIe Gen5 OCP cards.

If it's capacity you're after, the server offers up to twelve SATA/SAS LFF drive bays, or you can sacrifice the top four and replace them with HPE's universal media bay. As with all AMD servers, there is no embedded software RAID, although you can direct-attach SATA devices, which will operate in AHCI mode, and HPE offers plenty of PCIe and OCP 'MR' RAID controllers.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 review: Remote management

All the latest ProLiant servers come with HPE's iLO7 remote management controller, which is implemented in the DL345 Gen12 as an OCP-compliant DC-SCM (data center secure control module) board. Platform security and supply chain integrity are at the top of its agenda, along with silicon root of trust (RoT) digital firmware fingerprinting, the iLO7 provides protection against next-generation quantum computing threats and HPE's Secure Enclave – a physically tamper-resistant security processor for storing sensitive data.

The iLO7 presents a smart web interface that's been designed around workflows with the customisable home page dashboard presenting up to six cards for at-a-glance status views of key areas such as host health and security issues. Each card has colour-coded icons for each component so you can easily see if anything needs your attention and hot links are provided for drilling down for more information.

We run HPE's OneView in the lab on a Hyper-V host and had no problems importing the DL345 Gen12 for on-premises management and monitoring. The iLO7 also connects directly to HPE's GreenLake Compute Ops Management (COM) cloud service, which provides a complete overview of your server estate plus tools for server deployment and management, automated system lifecycle compliance, and AI-powered insights.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 review: Build, cooling and expansion

Cracking the lid reveals a very tidy internal design and, unlike the Xeon-powered DL340 Gen12 we recently reviewed, all the cabling is neatly arranged and secured out of harm's way. The 64-core 3.3GHz AMD EPYC 9575F CPU in our air-cooled system is looked after by a high-performance heatsink with radiator extension bars.

Lower specified systems can use HPE's standard cooling fans with our system, including a full house of six hot-plug high-performance fan modules. HPE offers its DLC (direct liquid cooling) kit for this server, but not its nifty closed-loop liquid cooling system, which is currently only available for the DL320, DL325, DL36,0 and DL560.

Expansion potential is excellent as there's room at the rear for two three-slot risers that support full-height, half-length PCIe Gen5 cards. Lurking beneath are two OCP 3 PCIe Gen5 slots, which support HPE's 'o' RAID cards and a good selection of network adapters, with our system kitted out with HPE's quad-port Gigabit and dual-port 25GbE modules.

The DL345 Gen12 expands GPU support further over the Gen11 model as it can take six 75W single-width (SW) or four 400W double-width (DW) cards. HPE's front enablement kit provides four or two full-height, full-length PCIe 5 slots for DW GPUs and there's space in between them for a central box for EDSFF or SFF storage devices.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen12 review: Is it worth it?

The core-dense Gen5 EPYC CPU and huge memory capacity makes the ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 a very affordable solution for virtualization hosting and many other demanding enterprise workloads. It won't beat the previous Gen11 model for storage capacity, but it does deliver a highly flexible range of options, brings HPE's smart iLO7 management into play and has a remarkable expansion potential with a high GPU support.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen12 specifications

Chassis 2U rack

CPU 64-core 3.3GHz AMD EPYC 9575F

Memory 768GB 6,400MT/s ECC DDR5 Smart Memory (max 6TB)

Storage bays 8 x hot-swap SFF (max 24 with three boxes)

RAID None included

Storage included 4 x 3.2TB direct-attach U.3 NVMe SSDs

Cooling 6 x high performance hot-plug fans

Network 4 x Gigabit OCP, 2 x 25GbE OCP

Expansion Up to 6 x PCIe Gen5 slots, 2 x OCP 3 slots

Power 2 x 2,400W Titanium hot-plug PSUs

Management HPE iLO7, OneView, GreenLake COM

Warranty 3Yrs On-Site NBD

It isn't often we get to see a completely new rack server from HPE, but the Compute DL340 Gen12 is its first ProLiant model to deliver a single socket (1P) Intel Xeon-powered solution in a 2U rack chassis. This market space has traditionally been held by HPE's DL345 rack servers, as their AMD EPYC CPUs have the core densities to make them good alternatives to more costly two-socket (2P) servers.

The DL340 Gen12 targets a wide range of data centre and service provider duties, and the high core counts of Intel's Xeon 6 CPUs allow it to offer a balanced mix of performance, storage capacities, energy efficiency. And, of course, costs. It supports plenty of Xeon 6 models, so you can choose from P-Core CPUs up to 86 cores and E-Core CPUs up to 144 cores, or pick from all six P-Core 'Rich I/O' models with up to 80 cores that are specifically optimised for 1P deployments.

Memory capacity is good, as regardless of the CPU model chosen, the server can present up to 4TB of HPE's DDR5 Smart Memory – only its speed is determined by the CPU. That extra 1U of chassis height brings a lot of storage permutations into play too, as it can handle a diverse range of LFF, SFF, and EDSFF storage devices.

HPE simplifies the acquisition process as it offers three CTO (configure to order) options where you take the base model, add a CPU and memory, and select a drive backplane. The third CTO option has AI workloads firmly on its radar as it supports up to four front-mounted double-width (DW) or single-width (SW) GPUs.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL340 Gen12 review: Build quality and cooling

As we've come to expect from HPE, chassis build quality is excellent, and good internal design offers easy access for upgrade and maintenance tasks. Our only complaint is that the two M-XIO cables, along with the power and signal connector cables for the NS204i-u boot device, are excessively long and look untidy.

The CPU socket sits towards the front and is flanked on each side by banks of eight DIMM slots. HPE supplied our system with a 32-core 2.5GHz Xeon 6730P CPU topped off with an impressively large high-performance heatsink complete with two large radiator bars that extend forward and sit close to the front cooling fans.

A key feature of the DL340 Gen12 is air cooling is supported for all specifications, so you don't need to worry about the extra expense of liquid cooling. You have two fan choices, and the 512GB of memory in our system dictates that we need the six hot-plug high-performance fans.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL340 Gen12 review: Storage choices

The DL340 Gen12 scores highly in the storage department as it employs a three-box design at the front with each one supporting a variety of configurations. For LFF hard disks, the three, quad-drive boxes are arranged horizontally with the top one also supporting two SFF devices and an optical drive.

SFF configurations use different boxes with vertically mounted devices and you can have up to 24 hot-plug HDDs and SSDs or use the first one for two stacked drive bays and an optical drive. It gets even more interesting for EDSFF drives as each box supports up to twelve E3.S NVMe SSDs, and you can mix and match these with the standard SFF boxes.

The DL340 Gen12 scores over AMD servers which don't have embedded RAID controllers. Its motherboard sports Intel's Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) for HPE ProLiant Servers embedded, which is specifically for up to 32 NVMe SSDs with direct to CPU connections and supports software-managed stripes, mirrors, and RAID5 arrays.

For other storage devices, there are HPE's 'MR' hardware RAID controllers and choices abound as HPE offers three OCP and two PCIe versions. Our system was fitted with the rear-mounted MR408i-o OCP 3.0 card with 4GB of energy pack protected cache, plus support for SATA, SAS4, and NVMe device,s and all the usual RAID array suspects.

There are plenty of placement options for HPE's NS204i-u V2 boot optimised storage device, which can be fitted at the front or at the rear above the PSU bays or next to them. It comes with two hot-plug 480GB or 960GB M.2 NVMe SSDs preconfigured in a mirror for running an OS or hypervisor.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL340 Gen12 review: iLO7 management

Remote management features are outstanding with HPE's new iLO7 controller implemented as an OCP-compliant DC-SCM (data center secure control module) board. Platform security and supply chain integrity are assured as the iLO7 silicon root of trust (RoT) digital firmware fingerprinting is future-proofed against next-generation quantum computing threats, and it is endowed with HPE's patented Secure Enclave - a physically tamper-resistant security processor for storing sensitive data such as encryption keys, passwords, and security configurations.

The slick new iLO7 web console is designed around workflows and presents a customisable home page dashboard with up to six cards. Colour-coded icons show details such as host health and security issues, and each one provides hot links so you can quickly drill down for more information

We run HPE's OneView on a Hyper-V host for on-premises monitoring of our HPE systems and had no problems importing the server's iLO7 into its console. Next up is HPE's GreenLake Compute Ops Management (COM) cloud service, which connects directly to the server's iLO7 controller and provides a portal for viewing your entire infrastructure, managing server deployments, automating system lifecycle compliance policies, and loading AI-powered insights.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL340 Gen12 review: Is it worth it?

The ProLiant Compute DL340 Gen12 is a versatile rack server that will appeal to businesses seeking a more cost-effective and energy-efficient alternative to expensive dual-socket Xeon 6 servers. It offers a high CPU core density and big memory capacity, the 2U chassis presents impressive storage options and expansion potential, while HPE's iLO7 controller delivers outstanding platform security and remote server management services.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL340 Gen12 specifications

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a warning over a maximum-severity HPE OneView vulnerability which is being actively exploited in the wild.

Tracked as CVE-2025-37164, this is a code injection vulnerability within an unsecured REST API endpoint, the security agency noted, allowing a remote unauthenticated user to perform remote code execution.

HPE OneView is a centralized infrastructure management platform designed to streamline IT operations. It's widely used to deploy, monitor, and manage HPE data center hardware and software from a single global dashboard.

CVE-2025-37164 was first discovered last year by security researcher Nguyen Quoc Khanh, with HPE releasing hotfixes on December 16, 2025.

However, soon after, Rapid7 researchers released a proof-of-concept exploit that would be relatively easy for less-skilled attackers to exploit, and that would potentially grant full control of affected environments.

“OneView sits at a privileged control plane for enterprise infrastructure, so successful exploitation isn’t just about establishing remote code execution, it’s about gaining centralized control over servers, firmware, and lifecycle management at scale,” Rapid7 researchers explained.

“Management platforms are often deployed deep inside the network with broad privileges and minimal monitoring because they’re ‘supposed’ to be trusted."

What to do about the HPE OneView vulnerability

Conor Agnew, head of compliance operations at Closed Door Security, described the CVE as a “very serious vulnerability given the access that OneView has into systems”.

"When attackers exploit this vulnerability, it essentially hands them the keys to the kingdom, where they look trusted, but can have unfiltered access deep into corporate environments to steal data or execute further attacks,” he noted.

CISA advises that when an unauthenticated RCE is detected, defenders should treat it as an assumed-breach scenario, patch immediately, and review access paths and segmentation.

They should prioritize upgrading to version 11.0 or applying the emergency hotfixes - HPE OneView virtual appliance hotfix and HPE Synergy hotfix - as soon as possible, the security agency added.

As feared, the vulnerability has now been exploited in the wild, with CISA adding it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list.

Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies have been given three weeks to secure their systems.

"Any organizations using the platform should take steps to mitigate the vulnerability as a priority. According to HPE, there are no workaround or mitigations for the vulnerability, so upgrading to the last version of OneView is required to protect against the CVE," Agnew said.

“Organizations are advised to action this as quickly as possible."

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Integrating partner programs is always a difficult part of an acquisition. When they go well, efforts are made to be as open as possible, smooth the transition, and build relationships. When they go badly, there’s an inevitable build-up of bad feelings.

When one of the entities involved is specialist and the other generalist – as is the case with HPE and Juniper Networks – this can be even more of a challenge. According to HPE, however, there have been minimal issues.

At HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, Gordon Mackintosh, formerly SVP of Juniper’s partner organization and now VP of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales, said in a press Q&A: “Being here with partners … about five months into the integration, it's clear that we're probably moving at a speed that was greater than what they were anticipating and they are generally really satisfied with how things are going.”

Mackintosh added that he believes the disruption to the industry brought about by HPE’s acquisition of Juniper was something that partners had been looking for and needed.

“The early feedback … is very, very positive,” said Mackintosh “So we're extremely excited about that because, at the end of the day, this is an opportunity to not [only] participate in market disruption, but to really define the next generation of networking together with partners.”

Aruba strengths make integration easier

Mackintosh also claimed the integration of Juniper’s partner program has been made easier by the existing Aruba Networks business within HPE.

“One thing that has definitely struck me being new in this role is the similarity between Aruba networking and Juniper networking [and] this partner first mindset,” he said, adding that 90% of the combined networking business is done through the channel.

“We feel that that's a tremendous opportunity, because … we have this tremendously comprehensive portfolio all the way from the hybrid cloud through to Wi-Fi edge,” McKintosh continued. “And it's not just a portfolio and having the full stack, it's a portfolio that's really rich in innovation.”

A single partner program

HPE debuted a new, unified partner program at HPE Discover Las Vegas in June, which it rolled out on 1 November. This brings together not just HPE and Juniper’s partner programs, but HPE’s own manifold plans – 11 in total – into just one.

“In previous thinking, the reason that we had the different programs is that we had specialization built in,” explained Jesse Chavez, vice president of worldwide partner strategy, programs and operations at HPE.

“So if you wanted to sell our compute … you’d have to participate in one program. If you wanted to sell networking, you would participate in another program. If you wanted to sell services, you would participate in another program.”

The new program, which Chavez said has been “well received” in the 30 days it's been operating, brings all that together. This makes life simpler for partners who want to sell multiple HPE product lines, the company claims.

As Chavez explained, the new partner program features three tracks: build, sell, and services – with specialized sub tracks within them.

“Now a partner … (enters) the sell track and they can specialize either in compute, hybrid cloud, or networking, or do all three, or do two of them,” said Chavez, “and a lot of them will get access to all the innovation we’ve talked about.”

“Typically in the industry you build volume programs and that’s what we normally do,” he continued.

The company has, however, realized this isn’t for everyone and acknowledged “there are partners that want to sell our entire portfolio – and they make margin doing that – and there are partners that just want to specialize and we recognize those partners through competencies”.

When pressed on this approach, particularly in relation to former Juniper partners who have been brought into the HPE fold, Ewington said: “One thing I’ve learned about networking in the last year that I’ve been leading the Aruba channel is that we have a very specialized channel in networking. We have a lot of networking and security-only partners and I know the fear of some of them was that they would be forced to sell storage and service. [That’s] not the intent at all.”

“Their business model is ‘we’re specialists in network and security, we would love to continue to be specialists’,” he added, “so there was no intent to force a portfolio where it’s not a natural fit.”

“Having said that, there are many partners we work with who are working with our competitors and we would like them to sell more of our complete portfolio,” Ewington continued, “so we’re not confused”.

“That’s the whole purpose of building out competencies,” Chavez chimed in, “to identify those partners that have the and then we’ll know that they want to specialize and that’s all they want to do.”

MORE FROM CHANNELPRO

• Veeam and HPE eye simplified data resilience with expanded alliance
• Partners have been ‘critical from day one’ at AWS, and the company’s agentic AI drive means they’re more important than ever
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Veeam and HPE have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership in a bid to streamline hybrid cloud operations and minimise risk across the enterprise.

Building on the pair’s initial partnership from earlier this year, the freshly expanded alliance will focus on new integrated solutions to help organizations better protect, recover, and leverage their data.

Additions include protection for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials software, as well as various integrations between HPE products and Veeam’s Data Platform.

“Trust, resilience, and availability are the new currency of business,” commented John Jester, Veeam’s chief revenue officer, in an announcement.

“Our strengthened partnership with HPE gives customers the agility and confidence to protect, recover, and leverage their data, wherever it resides.”

HPE Morpheus plugin

Among the fruits of the partnership is a new Veeam native integration plugin for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, which will offer hypervisor-based image-level backup for virtual machines (VMs) running on the HPE platform.

Currently in beta with expected general availability scheduled for early 2026, the pair said the addition will provide more robust protection for hybrid workloads.

HPE has also validated HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software container services as a Veeam-ready solution to improve protection for containerized workloads.

Veeam Data Platform integrations

The companies have also announced expanded integration between HPE solutions and the Veeam Data Platform.

Businesses will soon be able to deploy HPE Private Cloud Business Edition together with Veeam as a unified alternative to fragmented, do-it-yourself data protection.

Veeam will provide improved data portability and resilience between VMware and VM Essentials, the pair said, as well as accelerated deployment, streamlined support, and a “dramatically simplified experience.”

By leveraging the latest version of HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, Veeam’s Data Platform can also now achieve up to 60:1 data reduction, while reducing incremental backup limits and boosting restore speeds to help drive down cost of ownership.

Additional highlights

Elsewhere, Veeam has introduced NVMe support for HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 with new snapshot integrations for speedier backups and near-instant recovery for critical workloads.

New reference architectures designed to deliver end-to-end immutability across the wider Alletra portfolio are “expected soon.”

HPE and Veeam are also partnering on two new joint services: a Data Resilience and Security Posture workshop and a Disaster Recovery Capability Maturity Analysis offering.

The new additions leverage Veeam’s Data Resiliency Maturity Model (DRMM) to help organizations assess and strengthen their cyber resilience strategies.

“Today’s announcement demonstrates the continuous, deep alignment between HPE and Veeam in removing friction and risk from hybrid cloud and modern application environments,” said Patrick Osborne, senior vice president of hybrid cloud technology acceleration at HPE.

“Together, we’re delivering unmatched resiliency, operational simplicity, and innovation for our customers.”

MORE FROM CHANNELPRO

• HPE and Nvidia launch first EU AI factory lab in France
• HPE promises “cross pollinated" future for Aruba and Juniper
• Veeam snaps up DSPM specialist Securiti AI for $1.73 billion

HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 was in full swing this past week, with thousands of attendees descending on the Fira Barcelona to hear the latest news on the networking, servers, storage, supercomputing – and, of course, AI.

It’s a pivotal time for the firm, as it consolidates its hardware partnerships and heralds a recent acquisition, while laying out its strategy to help customers not only meet demand, but expand their networks and adopt new technologies.

What are some of the biggest things HPE announced – and what does the firm have lined up for 2026 and beyond?

In this episode, Rory interviews Jane live on the ground at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, to unpack all things HPE.

Highlights

"Yes, the integration is rapid, and that's something that both [Rami] Rahim and [Antonio] Neri have been pointing to, that they're not going to take years and years to do this, that, you know, they're starting it now."

"So what's happening? I mean, calling it a 'cross pollination' is perhaps, in my opinion, not quite the right word, because what's actually going on is sort of moving bits from each company across to effectively the other company. So while HPE is talking about that eventually they'll just be unified, and it's going to be one networking business, as things are there is an understanding of the fact that Juniper and Aruba, their backgrounds and specialties are quite different."

"So on the Monday, Nvidia and HPE announced that the first AI factory lab in the European Union – important caveat – is going to be installed in the city of Grenoble in the south of France. It is focused on the sovereign AI element of this. Now, sovereign AI is something that frequently – sovereign cloud as well – frequently comes up at the European conferences, because realistically, it's Europeans and the Middle East who really care about this stuff."

"HPE has launched a Helios project with AMD. So Helios was announced at advancing AI in June, it is a double wide rack scale AI solution. It's being positioned that HPE is the first to do this and it was kind of hinted at that this joint announcement from them, it's Q1 announcement, which is largely what AMD CEO Lisa Su was like hinting at back in June."

Footnotes

• HPE Discover Barcelona 2025: All the news, updates, and announcements live from Barcelona
• HPE promises “cross pollinated" future for Aruba and Juniper
• HPE and Nvidia launch first EU AI factory lab in France
• HPE and AMD reveal first Helios offering for cloud service providers and neoclouds

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The question of how HPE will integrate Juniper Networks’ technology into its existing networking portfolio has moved a step closer to resolution at HPE Discover Europe 2025.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the event, Rami Rahim – formerly CEO of Juniper Networks, now EVP and GM of HPE Networking – said the business’ goal is to “unify the experience of these two platforms by leveraging the microservices architecture for both and cross pollinating capabilities from one onto another”.

What this means in practice, for now at least, is that both Juniper and Aruba Central will co-exist within HPE. Some of the technologies, however, will be migrated to where the company believes they fit best.

Marvis, a virtual assistant previously described by Juniper as a “key part of the Juniper AI native networking platform”, and Large Experience Models (LEM) will be moving over to Aruba Central. The rationale behind this, Rahim said, is that both these capabilities are AIOps, which is where Aruba Central is strongest.

Meanwhile, client profiling and organizational insights from Aruba Central will move over to Juniper Mist.

Rahim was keen to emphasize that integration “over time” didn’t mean at some point in the distant future, adding that these initial changes will be happening “in the first quarter of next year (2026)”.

“This is just the beginning,” added Rahim. “We're going to continue to do this cross pollination, and as we do this, we're going to bring the best of both platforms to all users. Nobody gets left behind.”

At the hardware level, there’s also a unification strategy underway, with the announcement of a dual platform Wi-Fi 7 access point (AP), which works across both Aruba Networking Central and Aruba Networking Mist.

Describing this as the “first of many” of this type of hardware, Rahim said: “This is a huge breakthrough [with] massive advantages for our customers, starting with flexibility. Dual platform design lets our customers choose their preferred control point, whether it's Mist or Aruba Central, and switch seamlessly between the two platforms as their needs evolve, with no new hardware involved in that decision.”

New Juniper products hit the market

HPE also took the wraps off two new Juniper Networking products at the conference: a new switch – the QFX5250 – and a new multiservice edge router – the MX301.

The QFX5250 switch connects GPUs within data centers. It’s built on Broadcom Tomahawk 6 chips, offers 102.Tbps bandwidth and, according to HPE, is “the world’s highest performance Ultra Ethernet Transport ready switch”.

The MX301 router, meanwhile, delivers speeds of 1.6 Tbps and offers 400G connectivity across diverse environments and use cases, the company said, such as AI inference, mobile backhaul, enterprise routing, and multiservice.

HPE Aruba Networking Central On-Premises 3 also gets a lick of paint with a redesigned user interface. Additionally, the software now also incorporates both “advanced generative [AI]” and traditional AIOps capabilities, as well as proactive remediation, simplified documentation search and what HPE described as “actionable AI alerts”.

Juniper technology has also taken center stage in other announcements from HPE Discover 2025, including in the company’s Helios partnership with AMD and the soon-to-open HPE AI Factory Lab in Grenoble, France.

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• HPE and Nvidia launch first EU AI factory lab in France
• Three things I expect to see at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 (and two I don’t)

Welcome to ITPro's live coverage of HPE Discover 2025. We're on the ground at the Fira Grand Via in Barcelona this week to bring your rolling coverage of all the big news and announcements from Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s annual European conference.

While we're waiting for the day two keynote to begin, you can find all our coverage from the show so far here.

The show floor is already getting busy, both with people and tiny football playing robots.

Here's one of the bots in action – getting a bit overwhelmed by the attention at the end it seems. According to our tour guide they're not just on the floor to look cute and entertain – they demonstrate technology and connectivity that can be used in manufacturing.

The auditorium is starting to fill up as CEO Antonio Neri is expected on stage imminently

And here's the man himself. He's addressing the delegates, acknowledging that there's a mix of technologists and business leaders here. He's also – as expected – talking about the future of AI including 'physical AI', AKA robots. Anecdotally, this is a trend that I'm hearing more and more, which feels very "back to the future" – it was a topic of conversation pre-pandemic, as was digital twinning...

Networking, cloud, and AI are the watch words here – a bit of a shift from the edge to cloud to AI mantra of Discover Las Vegas 2024, but an understandable one. The Juniper Networks acquisition (which he's discussing now) has perhaps obviously made networking an important story for HPE. Realistically, it's also one of the main enablers of edge computing anyway.

Neri adds that he's excited to share some news about how Juniper Networks (now HPE Juniper Networking) will integrate with the company's existing Aruba Networking portfolio.

Joining Neri on stage now is Rami Rahim, formerly CEO of Juniper Networks, now VP and GM of networking at HPE. He's talking up the importance of networking in the future of enterprise infrastructure, including AI infrastructure connecting thousands of GPUs together for massive processing power.

Rahim is also talking about the idea of "self driving" networks. Expect to hear more about this both here at Discover and from HPE in the future. It seems to be a key marketing point, USP, and concept for how AI networks will work in the future.

Rahim is now talking about the differences between Juniper Mist and HPE Aruba Networking Central, how Mist was built for the cloud while Aruba was more of an on-premises play.

"We have two industry leading network AI platforms, Aruba Central and Juniper Mist, Aruba Central and Juniper Mist, both delivering real and valuable results to our customer each," says Rahim. "Every day by adopting our platforms, our customers have seen up to a 90% reduction in travel tickets and on site service calls. They've also seen a drastic decrease in the amount of time they have to spend in hands on network operations."

"Each of these solutions is unique and compelling in different ways," he says.

The two platforms are being "cross pollinated", says Rahim. Some elements of Mist are moving to Aruba Central and vice versa. Eventually, says Rahim, there will be no difference between the two.

HPE is also launching a joint WiFi-7 access point that unifies Juniper and Aruba technology. This will be launching in Q3 next year, around the time of HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026.

You can read more on these announcements in my full write-up here.

We're now onto GreenLake, the ever shifting backbone of HPE offerings. For those who have been familiar with HPE for a while, you'll know that GreenLake was originally pitched as something akin to a cloud service, with on-demand and consumption-based pricing at its core. It's now morphed into something like a managed service.

"We make deploying and managing AI data centers simpler and much more efficient, but we don't stop there; with GreenLake only HPE can provide end to end data center solutions across compute, storage and networking, along with expertise and services," Rahim explains.

Some more product announcements: the QFX5250 switch with HPE tomahawk 6 technology and MX301 edge router. Once again you can read more here.

Rahim is also talking up the AMD Helios and Nvidia AI Factory announcements from earlier in the week.

"I could not be more proud of our partnership with Nvidia, and I believe these joint solutions will give customers the assurance they need to deploy our routing technology with Nvidia's cutting edge products with confidence," he says of the continuing Nvidia partnership.

On AMD, he adds: " Iam stoked to announce the HPE will be offering AMD Helios AI rack worldwide starting next year. The Helios rack scale architecture is an open platform for large scale AI workloads, putting industry standards at the forefront of the design. So recall I said earlier that scale up networking has been uncharted territory. Well, that's about to change. I'm very excited to announce an HPE Juniper network and scale up youth nets, which designed specifically for Helios AI rack. This is an industry first scale up solution using open standard Ethernet, in other words, no proprietary vendor login."

Wrapping up, Rahim says: "It's been, what, less than six months since we closed this acquisition, and I hope you agree with me that we have already made massive progress in our integration efforts, the fact that we are here today announcing new products and solutions and not just announcing the intent, but showing them the help on the Discover show floor should tell you that we are committed not only to our vision, but to truly bring it into life."

"Now as we look forward, one thing is clear, it's time for a new generation of networks – HPE networks – to be a new leader," he continues. "We have the tech. We have the track record of innovation. We have the worldwide go to market scale, including a fantastic partner community.

"We have a bold vision, and we have the team that can execute on that bold vision and bring it all to life. So a very big thank you for believing in us and for supporting us. We could not do it without you. Thank you for joining us on this journey."

Neri is now back on stage, continuing Rahim's thoughts saying: "Personally could not be prouder of what a new combined network HPE has already accomplished and what they will do next. Rami and I had the same vision from the very beginning, which was to create a new network together, and I truly believe we are on the path to do so."

We're now moving onto hybrid cloud and, inevitably, GreenLake.

"Hybrid Cloud gives you resilience, flexibility and speed with more control and lower cost, and that's why customers are choosing GreenLake," claims Neri. "When we first mentioned GreenLake, our goal was not to build another cloud. It was to deliver a better cloud experience, one that ... [offered] a consistent cloud operating model across your entire IT estate."

A few connectivity issues have meant I've not been able to post some updates on GreenLake, Alletra Storage, and security. There will be some standalone articles on these announcements from me later!

A few bullet points on what was announced in the meantime

• New capabilities for HPE Morpheus Software, including software-defined networking for VMs hosted on HVM hypervisor in VM Essentials and Morpheus Enterprise Software
• Apstra Data Center Director from Juniper, which will be integrated into Morpheus
• Stretched cluster capabilities for Morpheus
• Zerto cybersecurity software is being integrated into Morpheus
• HPE VM Essentials backup on Veeam Data Platform 1.3
• HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 Data Intelligence Nodes with Nvidia AI Data Platform reference design

Neri is now going over some of the supercomputing announcements that were recently made just before and at SC conference in October. You can read more about the new Cray GX5000 and K3000 systems here, and the DoE supercomputer announcements here.

Welcome to Day Two of HPE Discover Barcelona 2025. No fainting robots or other foibles on the way to the main theatre this morning, sadly, but we're expecting the networking general session (aka keynote) to kick off any moment.

Networking has been one of the big topics so far this week, with former Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim taking up almost the same amount of time on stage during Antonio Neri's keynote yesterday as Neri himself.

Roll VT, it's time to start the general session.

Rami Rahim is on stage now. "It has been quite a year for us at networking inside of HPE," he says, which feels like a bit of an understatement.

The networking side of HPE's business is now 20,000 strong, says Rahim. "It's absolutely remarkable how quickly Aruba and Juniper have come together and started working side by side on a common vision, with a common objective, to create a new industry leader in network," he adds.

"Networking has never been more important in our industry, and networking has never been more important for HPE," says Rahim. This has been the theme of the whole event – HPE is a server, storage, AND networking company. Aruba has, of course, been in place for 10 years but this emphasis on networking is stronger than ever, in my experience.

We have a customer on stage now for a chat with Rahim from Lanes Group, a water treatment provider, to explain how important networking is for their business. What this means, in practice, is connecting CCTV cameras, sensors, and other operational data. They're also implementing AI for predictive maintenance, so anticipating a problem before it becomes an issue, as well as agents.

There's about an hour left of the general session and apparently we're going to be getting some live demos of the technology. Always a brave choice...

Another exec has taken to the stage to talk about uptime and the importance of the "self driving" network enabled by Marvis (a technology that came over from Juniper but is now with Aruba via the 'cross pollination' policy) and Aruba Central (still part of Aruba).

A network being "up" is not the same as being "good", he says, and really UX needs to be part of the networking conversation.

After a short VT based on two real life scenarios, we're now into what a self-driving network means. There are three elements: speed of rollout, fewest tickets and the perhaps more subjective idea of "better business outcomes".

The self driving network is dependent on AI agents and microservices, he says, highlighting the existing reputation of HPE Aruba Central and Juniper Mist.

HPE are leaning hard on the example of autonomous vehicles to explain this – how we've gone from cars with at best an oil warning light to parking assistants, blindspot cameras etc

We're having a demo of Marvis, which is a natural language trouble-shooting bot within Mist, to be perhaps a little reductive. It's a previously created demo, which is probably for the best for all involved.

The announcements are coming thick and fast. An inevitable focus for a European conference is digital sovereignty and we've just had the announcement that microservices through Aruba Networking Central will be available 'on prem' – inverted commas because some of the data processing is still done in the cloud, but inferencing is done on premises.

Ok some more innovation announcements. First "The power of agentic AI" – Apstra Data Center Director can identify if one device "catches a cold ... who will start sneezing next". Marvis can then be used to identify the issues and help fix them via natural language interactions. Worth noting that while these are novel to HPE, Marvis and Apstra have been imported through the Juniper acquisition.

Next innovation: This is about the importance of open systems, which the presenter says is "important for cloud and neocloud providers". Consequently the QFX5240 and QFX5250 switches are available immediately with support for SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud).

Innovation three: Data center networking operations are now integrated with Opsramp.

This means a "seamless solution that locates your application and network issues", he says.

Innovation four appears to be... Rami Rahim??

Oh no, innovation four the QFX5250 data center switch. This is apparently the frist switch using Broadcom Tomahawk 6 chips and also features direct liquid cooling, which is a specialism for HPE on its server infrastructure. You can read a bit more about the QFX5250 here.

AE Natarajan is next on stage talking about networking for the post-internet, AI era

"When we first started the internet, it was built and architected for downloads," he says. This could lead to buffering issues for large files (e.g. from Netflix), which led to caching to overcome this issue.

AI doesn't work this way, in his words AI "never sleeps". Cached data is instantly obsolete in the world of AI, and upload/download is symmetrical. Constantly, the network architecture needs to be completely different.

Ok, we're onto network security. "While AI is making our life and we can speed up things. Guess what? AI is also doing the same things to the bad actors in the world. It's the same tools that is available that these guys become more sophisticated," he says.

David Hughes, SVP and GM of SASE and security, is now on stage talking about the overlap of networking and security.

"Traditionally, the networks team is tasked with ensuring that there's great performance and reliable connectivity for people, for devices, for workloads, he says. "[For] decades now, networking has at its foundation ... the ability to connect any endpoint to any other endpoint."

"Meanwhile, the security team is tasked with protecting users data and workloads, and historically, this is being done by restricting, often with solutions that are altered on or overlaid on top of the template," he explains, adding that users are often "caught in the middle", which causes a bad experience for them.

"obody wants to choose between performance and protection. We need both, and what we believe is that a network with physical security is genius," Hughes says, before rattling through some of Aruba's pedigree in security despite being a networking company.

The addition of Juniper to HPE has enhanced this, Hughes says, highlighting the SRX appliance as a particularly stand-out example.

The answer to some of these issues is zero trust everywhere – stopping lateral movement, isolating compromised endpoints such as laptops etc.

Additionally, HPE has some product ranges that can help sitting in the categories of unified SASE, full-stack AIOps, universal zero trust networking access (ZTNA), and hybrid mesh firewall.

"Delivering with integral security, there's no need to choose between performance and protection," Hughes concludes. "We are innovating with the goal of providing solutions that align the working and security teams behind a common zero trust mission."

Rahim is back on stage to wrap up for the day. "Networking has never been more important," he says, "and this is why it is for technology. We have the track record of innovation. And most importantly, as I think you have seen by now, we have the team to deliver on everything you are seeing here at discovers. HPE networking was created to be you leader with a whole vision and the ability to execute on that vision and to bring it to light."

With that he thanks the audience and it's lights up in the auditorium. This is the end of the live blog, but not the end of our coverage, so stay tuned for more throughout this week.

The southern French city of Grenoble has been chosen by HPE and Nvidia to host the first AI factory lab in the European Union (EU).

The announcement comes just ahead of HPE’s annual Discover Barcelona conference, which kicks off on Wednesday 3 December, and is the latest in a number of joint AI factory projects from the two companies.

The AI factory lab in Grenoble will allow customers to test and refine workloads on a sovereign AI factory environment on hardware located and running in the EU, the companies said.

The lab features Nvidia AI Enterprise government-grade software and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, HPE servers and Alletra storage, and PTX and MX Series routers from Juniper Networking (now part of HPE).

Private AI in the UK

Not to be left out, HPE is also launching a similar lab in the UK, in partnership with Carbon3.ai. The Private AI Lab, which will be located in Manchester, is built on HPE Private Cloud AI with Nvidia AI Enterprise Suite software and is intended, HPE said, to "accelerate UK enterprise AI adoption".

Tom Humphreys, CEO of Carbon3.ai, said: "UK enterprises want secure, sovereign, and sustainable AI infrastructure they can trust – and they want real outcomes fast. By removing cost and risk, and by grounding everything in sovereign, sustainable UK infrastructure, we're accelerating enterprise adoption and helping the UK convert its AI potential into economic impact."

The sovereign aspect of this hinges on Carbon3.ai's Private AI Lab offering UK compute and Nvidia infrastructure "in a secure, compliant, and scalable environment that aligns with existing cloud and governance standards and regulatory obligations", powered by 100% off-grid renewable power.

Matt Harris, SVP and MD for UK, Ireland, Middle East, and Africa at HPE, added: "UK organisations face unique AI infrastructure challenges – from strict data residency and regulatory requirements to the need for scalable, energy efficient AI infrastructure and a clear path from pilot to production.

“The Private AI Lab addresses these needs directly. It provides a fast, low-risk route to production-grade AI that preserves sovereignty, reduces operational complexity and supports more energy-efficient deployment at scale.”

Carbon3.ai Private AI Lab is available immediately to qualified UK businesses. The AI Factory Lab in Grenoble will be available in Q2, 2026.

HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s annual European conference – is fast approaching. CEO Antonio Neri is set to take to the stage at 10am CET on 3 December to deliver his opening keynote, where delegates can expect to hear the latest news and updates from the company.

In anticipation of the start of the show, here are three things I expect to see at the Fira Barcelona – and two I don’t.

Juniper Networks joins HPE

Confidence: high

There’s little doubt in my mind that HPE had hoped to finally celebrate the completion of its acquisition of Juniper Networks at HPE Discover Las Vegas in June. Unfortunately for the companies, the deal was only finally sealed on 2 July.

For this reason, I am as certain as I can be that the acquisition of Juniper and how it’s being integrated into HPE’s existing stable of products will be on the agenda. I also expect to hear more about how Juniper’s channel program and partners are being integrated into HPE Partner Ready.

What we may not hear too much more about is the future of Aruba – recently repackaged as Aruba Central – and Mist. There has been speculation among customers that the acquisition of Juniper will spell the end of Aruba, but it’s a little early in the process for something as dramatic as that to be announced, in my opinion.

HPE’s latest AI play

Confidence: high

There’s no getting away from AI in business (or anywhere else) and I don’t expect HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 to be any different. In fact, when the acquisition of Juniper Networks finally closed, AI was all over HPE’s accompanying statement.

If that’s not enough, consider that at Discover Las Vegas 2024, Neri declared HPE to be the “edge-to-cloud-to-AI” company. He also had Nvidia’s Jensen Huang join him on stage for the announcement of their joint AI initiative, starting with Nvidia AI computing by HPE.

I expect to hear more on how initiatives like AI factories and other partnerships are coming along, but probably no big AI product or strategy announcements this time.

New products from HPE

Confidence: medium

While major product announcements are normally made at HPE Discover Las Vegas in summer, that doesn’t mean there will be nothing of note for delegates at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025. Unlike some US tech companies (naming no names), HPE doesn’t normally just rehash what was announced six months ago, so I expect at least one or two product reveals this coming week.

Last year, CEO Antonio Neri announced HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected and HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected. If I were a betting woman, my money would be on iterations of products announced in June, particularly agentic AI and hybrid cloud.

Guest star appearances and new flagship projects

Confidence: very low

Never say never, but the likelihood of appearances from high-profile guests such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang or the launch of a new mega-project like a national supercomputer are close to zero.

It’s been mere weeks since the most recent – and extensive – announcements from HPE of their new HPC plans in the USA. While the frequency of supercomputer announcements is definitely increasing, to have more than three in the space of two months would seem excessive.

For guest stars, in person appearances are, in my experience, simply less common at European events than US ones. I wouldn’t rule out a pre-recorded video, however.

I will be on site reporting live from HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 from 3-4 December, so stay tuned for all the latest news and exclusive insights throughout the week.

HPE has launched the first phase of its unified Partner Ready Vantage Program in a move the IT giant said will help partners better navigate the rapidly changing tech landscape.

The new streamlined channel initiative replaces the firm’s legacy programs and brings together Compute, Hybrid Cloud, and Networking into a single framework.

Partners now benefit from fully-integrated enrolment alongside expanded products and services resale, accessible through a single program.

The launch also includes the debut of HPE’s Triple Platinum Plus initiative for those with cross-portfolio expertise.

“HPE’s Partner Ready Vantage Program represents a forward-looking approach to channel collaboration, offering unified access, streamlined processes, and expanded opportunities for growth and specialization,” said Simon Ewington, HPE’s SVP of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, in a blog post.

HPE eyes a streamlined partner experience

As part of its new channel framework, HPE has introduced three new centers – Compute, Hybrid Cloud, and Networking – and retired the As-a-service center, integrating those competencies into its new Sell Track.

Designed to drive profitability, HPE said the Sell Track supports diverse business models with modular training and certifications aligned to each technology center, helping partners to build specialized expertise.

Ultimately, partners can resell the entire HPE portfolio through a single program membership, either through OpEx as-a-service models such as HPE GreenLake Flex, or via traditional CapEx offerings.

Additionally, the Service Track has also been streamlined, unifying managed services, professional services, support services, and customer success into two practice areas: Data Center & Private Cloud, and Networking.

HPE said the Service Track “integrates seamlessly” with the new Sell Track and offers standardized partner capability assessments, thresholds, streamlined tracking, as well as a host of tools and training geared towards improving the partner experience.

Triple Platinum Plus

Additionally, HPE’s channel rollout includes its new Triple Platinum Plus initiative, an exclusive recognition for partners that demonstrate pan-HPE expertise across Compute, Hybrid Cloud, and Networking.

The program is designed for partners that excel across multiple technology areas, HPE said, offering enhanced incentives and rewards to help drive further growth opportunities and differentiation.

“The program is intended to accelerate partner success by supporting both generalists and specialists, offering incentives for competency and facilitating rapid advancement within the HPE ecosystem,” Ewington explained.

New commitments

Looking ahead, HPE plans to continue to shape its new-look Partner Ready Vantage initiative over the coming years, with additional programs.

This includes the Juniper Networks Partner Advantage initiative, which is set to be integrated throughout 2026 and 2027.

The firm said it will also announce more details around its Build Track towards the back-end of its 2026 financial year.

“We’re committed to continuously enhance the program, including integration of HPE Juniper Networking into HPE Partner Ready Vantage in FY27,” Ewington added.

“The path ahead for HPE and our partners is unified, empowered, and primed for growth, and we’re excited to shape it together.”

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HPE's ProLiant Compute DL325 Gen12 offers businesses a great alternative to more costly dual-socket (2P) rack servers. Supporting most of AMD's Gen5 EPYC CPUs, this single-socket (1P) server can squeeze up to 192 cores into only 1U of rack space.

Targeting a wide range of enterprise workloads, including hybrid cloud, containerized environments, and virtualization, it takes everything we liked from its predecessor, the ProLiant DL325 Gen11, and makes it even better. For starters, DDR5 memory capacity has been doubled to an impressive 6TB, and the DL325 Gen12 sports HPE's new iLO7 remote management controller.

Storage capacities remain the same as the DL325 Gen12 also supports up to four LFF, ten SFF, or 20 E3.S EDSFF NVMe SSDs, but the server is available with HPE's new multi-purpose drive bays, allowing you to mix and match different storage devices. HPE's NS204i-u V2 hot-pluggable boot-optimized storage device can now be mounted at the front or the rear, as can the OCP expansion slots.

HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen12 review: Build quality and cooling

Chassis built quality is excellent, and the server presents a tidy internal design offering easy access for upgrade and maintenance tasks. Our system was supplied with a 32-core 3.55GHz EPYC 9355P CPU mounted centrally, topped off with a large passive heat sink and flanked on each side by banks of 12 DIMM slots.

The server currently supports 23 different EPYC models ranging from 8 up to 192 cores, but choose your CPU carefully as there are significant cooling requirements. Those with TDPs up to 240W can use the standard heatsink and cooling fans, while models between 260W and 300W (which includes our CPU) need the performance versions, with all configurations requiring a full house of seven fans.

For CPUs with TDPs of 320W and upwards, you must specify liquid cooling, and the good news is the server supports HPE's nifty closed-loop liquid cooling system. We've seen this in action when we reviewed the DL325 Gen11 and found the kit takes up very little room as the CPU cold plate with integral pump has two coolant pipes routed directly to a full-width radiator mounted between the cooling fans and the drive backplane.

HPE recommends replacing the liquid cooling kit every five years, which is now field replaceable. The new iLO7 management controller also introduces a coolant leak detection feature, which wasn't available in the iLO6.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL325 Gen12 review: Storage and expansion

The chassis may only measure a shade under 67cms deep, but HPE has packed it full of storage and expansion goodness. Our review system was supplied with eight SFF drive bays, a single tri-mode backplane that supports SATA, SAS4 plus NVMe SSD devices, and a blanking plate to the right that can be replaced with an extra dual-drive SFF cage or a DisplayPort/USB/optical drive enablement kit.

Other storage configurations are a four LFF drive backplane or the hybrid storage solution, which comprises up to five drive boxes, with each one supporting two SFF drives or four EDSFF E3.S NVMe SSDs. The GPU-optimized chassis supports up to four 75W single-width or two 400W double-width GPUs, leaving room at the front for two drive boxes with either four SFF drives or eight EDSFF E3.S SSDs.

AMD's chipset doesn't offer any integral RAID features, so you'll need to specify one of HPE's Smart Array Gen11 (there are currently no Gen12 models) controller cards, which are available in PCIe or OCP versions. We didn't need a RAID card in our system as it had four 3.84TB NVMe SSDs with the backplane direct-attached to the motherboard's M-XIO connectors.

The multi-purpose drive bays also support front-mounted OCP NIC cards and HPE's NS204i-u V2 boot-optimized storage device. We had the latter installed at the rear and fitted with two hot-plug 480GB M.2 NVMe SSDs to provide mirrored redundant storage for running an OS or hypervisor.

There's plenty of room to grow as the server has two rear risers, each offering PCIe Gen5 x16 expansion slots. Underneath lurk two OCP 3 PCIe 5 slots, which support HPE's 'o' RAID cards and a good range of network adapters.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL325 Gen12 review: iLO7 management

Remote management sees big changes as HPE's new iLO7 controller delivers tougher platform security and supply chain integrity. Furthermore, unlike the DL360 Gen12 we recently reviewed, the iLO7 is implemented in this server as an OCP-compliant DC-SCM (data center secure control module) board.

The iLO7 silicon root of trust (RoT) digital firmware fingerprinting is future-proofed to protect against next-generation quantum computing threats, and it introduces HPE's patented Secure Enclave. This is a physically tamper-resistant security processor that stores sensitive data such as encryption keys, passwords, and security configurations.

The new iLO7 web console is designed around workflows and offers a customizable home page dashboard that can present up to six cards. These have color-coded icons showing details such as security issues and server health, and each one provides hot links so you can quickly drill down to see more information

We run HPE's OneView 10.2 in the lab on a Hyper-V host and had no problems importing the DL325 Gen12 for on-premises management and monitoring. The iLO7 also connects directly to HPE's GreenLake Compute Ops Management (COM) cloud service which provides a complete overview of your server estate plus tools for server deployment and management, automated system lifecycle compliance and AI-powered insights.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL325 Gen12 review: Is it worth it?

Businesses balking at the cost and power demands of dual-socket rack servers will find HPE's ProLiant Compute DL325 Gen12 offers a very cost-effective alternative. The top TDP EPYCs will require liquid cooling, but this single-socket server combines a high core density with an impressive memory capacity, teams them up with a versatile range of storage features, adds HPE's highly secure iLO7 controller, and delivers it all in a surprisingly small package.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL325 Gen12 specifications (as reviewed)

It’s been a little over five years since Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquired Cray Computing, a stalwart of the supercomputing world since the 1970s.

In that time, the company has grown its pedigree in high-performance computing (HPC) and in June 2025 occupied six of the top 10 spots in the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.

As the company approaches the tenth anniversary of its split from HP, it unveiled several new developments in its HPC portfolio, all with an eye on the growing demand for enterprise AI infrastructure and data center efficiency.

HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 and K3000

The Cray Supercomputing GX5000 is the latest supercomputing infrastructure released by HPE and is a pocket powerhouse, taking up 25% less data center space than its predecessor while delivering 127% more power per compute slot, according to HPE.

The GX5000 is liquid cooled, but can use much warmer water – 40ºC rather than the 32ºC required by EX4000, the previous Cray Supercomputing model.

In addition to the GX5000, HPE also unveiled the HPE Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems K3000, one of the storage options for the new supercomputing system.

According to the company, using K3000 with GX5000 offers 39% higher IOPS per rack compared to the Cray E2000 storage system. K3000 is also, HPE noted, the industry’s first factory-built storage system with Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) open source software for software-defined storage.

Trish Damkroger, SVP and GM of high performance computing and AI at HPE, said developing hardware that could run with warmer inlet water temperature was a result of the company being “really focused on [its] European customers and their need for sustainability”.

The modules on the GX5000 contain both the pump and VFD and are hot swappable. The setup is left/right agnostic and, as there’s no side access required, it’s more easily serviceable. It also has high point air bleed for improved air venting.

Speaking to journalists, Damkroger described the GX5000 as having “been in the works for years”, adding that there have been some “pivots over the last year and a half as we’ve seen the growth of TDPs (thermal design points), the growth of different silicon coming out from all the vendors and the need to be able to support all of these different workloads”.

Indeed, it’s the workloads that are at the center of HPE’s pitch for GX5000, with the company describing it as “next-generation infrastructure for supercomputing in the converged AI and HPC era”.

Discovery supercomputer and Lux AI cluster

One of the first organizations to be able to put the new infrastructure through its paces is the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Alongside the announcement of the Cray GX5000, K3000 storage system, and liquid cooling pump innovations, HPE also revealed it’s building a new, second-generation exascale supercomputer named Discovery to succeed the lab’s current supercomputer, Frontier.

Like Frontier, Discovery will feature AMD chip sets including the next generation “Venice” EPYC CPU, which was revealed by AMD in April 2025, and Instinct MI430X GPUs, which have been developed for AI workloads.

In terms of storage, it will have both the new K3000 storage system and Lustre file system-based E2000 storage, as well as next-generation HPE Slingshot interconnects for high-bandwidth, low-latency data transfer.

In addition to Discovery, HPE and ORNL also announced the creation of a new AI cluster called Lux.

Described as a sovereign AI factory for training and inferencing that offers researchers “cloud-like” access to compute resources, Lux will run not on Cray hardware, but on HPE’s ProLiant Compute XD685 direct liquid-cooled servers.

It will also feature AMD technology, namely MI355X GPUs, EPYC CPUs, and Pensando networking.

It’s not been announced when Discovery or Lux will come online, but Damkroger told journalists delivery of systems based on Cray Supercomputing GX5000 will start in 2027.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the appointment of Phil Mottram as its executive vice president and chief sales officer, effective from November 1.

Mottram will lead the company’s global sales teams across its Servers and Hybrid Cloud solutions segment, as well as head up its channel and partner ecosystem.

A seasoned industry veteran, Mottram brings more than 30 years’ tech sector experience to the role, with specific expertise in sales leadership. He first joined HPE back in 2019 and has served in various executive management roles, most recently as executive vice president of growth markets.

Prior to that, he spent four years as EVP and general manager of HPE Aruba Networking, where he achieved record revenue growth and profitability.

“Phil is an exceptional fit for this role with his deep understanding of and focus on customer needs, collaborative leadership style, global perspective, and track record of driving growth,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE.

“His experience leading HPE Aruba Networking will facilitate strong connections across the entirety of HPE’s portfolio.”

Additionally, Mottram arrives with a strong reputation for driving global business transformation for Fortune 500 companies in the telecom and IT industries.

Having began his career in sales at AT&T, he later went on to serve in leadership roles at Sprint, BT, and Telstra. before transitioning to business leadership roles at CSL, Vodafone, and Zayo.

Mottram succeeds HPE veteran Heiko Meyer who has announced his retirement after 38 years with the company. CEO Neri highlighted Meyer’s monumental impact on the firm’s sales organization.

“As the leader of Global Sales, Heiko led the largest sales transformation in HPE’s history, spearheading shifts in the go-to-market model that more seamlessly connected customers with relevant HPE solutions, while contributing to targeted market share gains,” Neri said.

Reflecting on his decision, Meyer commented: “Leading our Global Sales organization has been the highlight of my career, as I’ve had the opportunity to meet with customers, partners and team members from around the world. I retire from HPE feeling proud of the team and fortunate to have spent my career in service of our customers and partners."

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HPE has announced an expansion to its Nvidia Computing by HPE portfolio, including the latest Nvidia hardware designed for AI.

Two new HPE ProLiant Compute servers will be made available, the company confirmed. The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen11 server will support up to two Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell chips within a slim 2U RTX Pro Server configuration.

Meanwhile, the HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a Gen12 server will support up to eight of the RTX PRO 6000, in a 4U form factor. This offering will be made available in September.

The RTX PRO 6000 was previously only available in the 4U form factor, but is now available in 2U form factor. This, HPE said, can be more easily deployed by customers in their existing server racks and is capable of being run with air cooling.

HPE highlighted the intended workloads for the HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12, including inference for generative and agentic AI models, visual computing, 3D modeling, and digital twins.

HPE Private Cloud will feature Nvidia's latest models

The newest version of Private Cloud AI will include support for this hardware, as well as for Nvidia’s latest AI models.

This will include Nemotron, a set of open source reasoning models based on Meta’s Llama, as well as the Cosmos Reason vision language model intended for robotics and physical AI devices and Nvidia Blueprint for Video Search and Summarization, used to help AI agents extract information from video data.

“Our collaboration with Nvidia continues to push the boundaries of innovation, delivering solutions that unlock the value of generative, agentic and physical AI while addressing the unique demands of enterprise workloads,” said Cheri Williams SVP and general manager for private cloud and flex solutions at HPE.

HPE has doubled down on its partnership with Nvidia in recent months, with commitments to ensuring its customers have access to the latest hardware from the chip giant.

Private Cloud AI was co-developed with Nvidia from the ground up, combining HPE’s private cloud offerings and GreenLake architecture with Nvidia’s AI computing stack including its NIM microservices.

Together, the firms have stated they aim to enable enterprises to make the most of enterprise AI deployment, with baked-in investment protection designed to provide organizations with the latest Nvidia GPUs as they become available.

Customers can also choose to air gap Private Cloud AI services, if their data privacy rules demand strict controls.

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Just outside Bristol, in a controlled site surrounded by razor wire and the hum of giant cooling machines, sits the UK’s new fastest supercomputer. Newly-inaugurated, as of 17 July 2025, this is a machine intended to supercharge UK innovation, with the raw power to crack some of the most complex problems in science.

Isambard-AI, named after the 19th century engineering pioneer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is more powerful than the rest of the UK’s supercomputers combined. With 21 exaflops of AI performance and 216 petaflops of linpack performance, it ranks 11th globally and is intended to push the UK’s sovereign compute capacity into competitive territory.

ITPro was among the first media outlets in the world to get an inside look at Isambard-AI at its official inauguration ceremony inside the National Composites Centre (NCC).

The first thing you notice about Isambard-AI when you step inside its hall is how quiet the machine actually is. The 12 cabinets that make up the machine are packed to the brim with ‘blades’, each containing eight Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips.

In all, Isambard-AI contains 5,448 of these GPUs, with an HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 providing 25 petabytes of data storage and HPE Slingshot 11 interconnect allowing data to be shared at 200Gbits/sec.

“Isambard-AI places Bristol at the centre of the AI revolution, spearheading AI innovation and scientific discovery in important areas such as drug discovery and climate research,” said Simon McIntosh-Smith, professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Bristol and director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing.

“I’m incredibly proud of our team and how we’ve worked so closely with partners to develop this national facility which will establish Bristol and the UK as an international hub for AI research.”

Record-breaking efficiency

Keeping Isambard-AI cool is no small feat: step back outside the data hall and you’re met with loud hybrid cooling towers, which use fans to cool down water that regulates the temperature inside via direct-to-chip cooling.

The site draws 5MW from its grid supply at the NCC, all of which is zero-carbon. This is partly what makes it one of the greenest supercomputers globally, ranked fourth on the Green500 list. But the cooling systems also feed directly into this, as they run 90% dry, reducing the overall water required for cooling.

This is something of a green coup in an industry that is increasingly battling immense data center water use, with Isambard-AI achieving a near-perfect power usage effectiveness (PUE) score of 1.1.

In the near future it could improve on this, with McIntosh-Smith revealing the NCC will soon be heated using waste heat from Isambard-AI, and that his team are working with South Gloucestershire Council to further distribute this heat to local businesses and homes.

Throughout the event, the team behind the project also stressed the importance of speed when it came to assembling Isambard-AI. If you delay too long, new hardware comes online that renders your expensive computing project less cutting-edge.

“We're thrilled to work very closely with our friends at Nvidia on some of the core accelerator technologies in these systems. But it's about how you put the whole system together,” said Neil MacDonald, EVP & GM, HPE Server Business.

“How you connect those technologies, how you power them, how you cool them, how you enable the team here at Bristol to deploy that technology so rapidly. Because if the technology is moving so quickly, the time to value, the time to science, the time to capability is critical.”

Isambard-AI has been years in the making, having been first announced in 2023.

The supercomputer was assembled offsite in six modules, with each cabinet built at the HPE factory in Czechia which were then moved into its data hall at the NCC in just 48 hours. From ideation to first computation, Isambard-AI took just two years to put together, far quicker than the four to five years a project of this scale would normally take.

MacDonald praised the “decisiveness” of the University of Bristol team and the UK government, adding that the HPE Cray EX supercomputer platform underpinning the system, as well as Slingshot 11, is the same technology underpinning the world’s three exascale supercomputers: El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora.

He said this allows systems to be as scalable as possible, with potential for further build-out in the UK.

Building future supercomputers at this speed will require reliable access to chips such as Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GB200 chips, or future chips such as the upcoming Vera Rubin.

David Hogan, VP Enterprise EMEA at Nvidia, added that his team is in conversation with governments over access to chips and how to establish the right strategy for operationalizing compute infrastructure.

“This is about, ‘I need access to platforms’, how do you operationalize them? How do you then get access to the enablement of that, of those people, individuals, and organizations to take advantage of that, how they start to leverage software, how do you train people?”

A new scale of research and innovation

Allocation for Isambard-AI will be decided by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Researchers are awarded time on the machine for free and McIntosh-Smith stated that private businesses could bid for time at competitive rates, subject to DSIT approval.

ITPro was given an opportunity to see the work of select research teams who have secured time with Isambard-AI for their projects, including those working on the discovery of new materials for clean energy and for detecting prostate cancer using MRI scans.

The Rosalind Franklin Institute is using Isambard-AI to conduct analysis of placenta, both human and animal, to better understand how the structure of placenta impacts pregnancy health and why some diseases are found in specific animal groups but not others.

McIntosh-Smith added that Isambard-AI could train trillion-parameter LLMs in a matter of weeks and acknowledged that some models are already being trained on the machine.

These include Nightingale AI, a multimodal health model trained on NHS data by a team at Imperial College London, and BritLLM, a model developed by University College London intended to improve public services in all British languages including Welsh.

Isambard-AI was built to be as accessible to researchers as possible, without requiring extensive prior supercomputer experience.

“We actually designed the system so that people who are already maybe using public cloud can pretty much take their code, drop it straight onto Isambard-AI, and just run straight away,” explained McIntosh-Smith.

The UK’s AI ambition

Isambard-AI is the cornerstone of the AI Research Resource (AIRR), a growing cluster of supercomputers for UK innovators and researchers. The other supercomputer in the cluster is Dawn, a 19 petaflop supercomputer based at the University of Cambridge, which was built with Dell and Intel technologies.

The cluster could expand further in the near future, with the government having recently announced £750 million for a new supercomputer at Edinburgh University which is expected to be an exascale system.

This is part of a recent about-turn on supercomputing, with the government having initially scrapped £1.3 billion in funding earmarked for the Edinburgh project and expansion of the AIRR in the immediate aftermath of the general election.

Along with its AI Action Plan, the government has now made UK sovereign compute a major focus. Earlier this year, prime minister Keir Starmer announced a goal of increasing the UK’s compute capacity twentyfold by 2030.

McIntosh-Smith told ITPro that this figure was set with Isambard-AI already in mind as the ‘current capacity’, meaning the supercomputer is just the starting point. He further suggested that Isambard-AI could expand in the coming years, with 30MW of power capacity available at the NCC and the National Grid checking to see if more can be secured.

Hogan echoes comments by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, made at London Tech Week, that the UK’s immense AI skill needs to be backed with more sovereign compute.

“You should see Isambard as, almost, an incubator for AI in terms of platform. People should come here and build their business and AI prove that out and then take that and take it into the world and build on other infrastructure and start to scale.”

In its lifespan, which is contracted for five years but could run to six or seven, the University of Bristol hopes that Isambard-AI will live up to these expectations and directly enable researchers to make major breakthroughs.

“The sovereign AI issue is real,” McIntosh-Smith told ITPro.

“As the geopolitical situation becomes more complicated it’s more and more real. Isambard is big enough [that] we could train ChatGPT, the latest versions, from scratch in the UK. We could not do that before.

“So if somebody wanted to say ‘You cannot access the latest AI large language models’, we could have been cut off. Now if that happened, we could train one from scratch in the UK, we know exactly what was run, what data went into it, and do it all here – the data would never have to leave the UK.”

The US Justice Department (DOJ) has settled a lawsuit contesting HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.

As part of the settlement, HPE will be required to make concessions to push the deal through. This includes divesting its ‘Instant On’ wireless networking division within 180 days, court filings show.

That means the company will be required to offload all assets, IP, and customers related with this particular area of the business.

Elsewhere, HPE is also required to hold an auction to license source code for Juniper’s AI Ops for Mist platform.

“The license will be perpetual, non-exclusive, and include optional transitional support and personnel transfers to facilitate competition,” the DOJ said in a statement on Friday.

While the settlement requires approval by a judge, this does pave the way for the acquisition, according to HPE chief executive Antonio Neri.

In a statement issued last week, Neri welcomed the move and said the settlement “preserves the intended benefits of this deal” and will create “greater competition in the global networking market”.

“For the first time, customers will now have a modern network architecture alternative that can best support the demands of AI workloads,” he said.

“The combination of HPE Aruba Networking and Juniper Networks will provide customers with a comprehensive portfolio of secure, AI-native networking solutions, and accelerate HPE’s ability to grow in the AI data center, service provider and cloud segments.”

HPE has had to battle for the Juniper deal

HPE first announced plans to acquire Juniper Networks in 2024, but the deal quickly sparked competition concerns. The company noted that the acquisition would create a new contender in the global networking market and enable it to double the scale of its networking business.

However, the DOJ announced legal action in January in a bid to block the deal, arguing that it would stifle competition in the space. If approved, the acquisition would mean Cisco and HPE would control more than 70% of the US networking market combined.

The DOJ specifically highlighted competition in the WLAN supply market as a key concern, suggesting that cutting competition in the space would harm innovation and impact customers.

HPE and Juniper were the second and third largest suppliers of WLAN equipment in the US, ranked behind Cisco.

A back and forth between the DOJ and HPE quickly unfolded in the wake of the legal action, with the latter suggesting the department was “divorced from reality” and that any block would benefit competitors.

The DOJ’s attempt to contest the deal also came after European and UK regulators approved the deal in August of last year.

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HPE has unveiled a suite of new AI agents and related tools for its GreenLake hybrid cloud at its annual conference in Las Vegas..

GreenLake is HPE's hybrid cloud, offering the utility of a public cloud using on-premise infrastructure. First announced in 2018, GreenLake has been expanded with new features in the intervening years, with support for large language models and generative AI added in 2023.

Now, with the release of GreenLake Intelligence, these systems will transform into an "agentic AI powered hybrid cloud capable of learning, acting and optimizing IT in real time," the company says.

GreenLake Intelligence is an AIOps framework to enable agents in hybrid cloud operations. With agentic AI used across almost all infrastructure layers, this aims to help bolster management of networking, observability, cloud costs, sustainability, and workload optimization.

The system will be accessed through a dashboard called ‘GreenLake Copilot’ which allows users to deploy custom AI agents based on specific individual tasks. In a briefing with assembled media ahead of the conference, journalists were told how agents could be assigned to provision infrastructure, for example.

Others, meanwhile, can be tasked with optimizing workload efficiency to improve performance and reduce costs.

HPE says the AI framework will enable companies to make better use of their infrastructure by overcoming complexity, breaking down silos, and easing the burden of overworked staff — as well as dealing with the challenge of legacy infrastructure.

"HPE is reimagining hybrid IT as only we can do, catapulting organizations from the era of hybrid complexity to the era of agentic-AI-powered cloud operations,” said HPE chief executive Antonio Neri.

"HPE’s new vision for hybrid IT is fueled by agentic intelligence at every layer of infrastructure, so enterprises can realize their boldest ambitions and achieve previously impossible levels of IT operations performance and efficiency."

Agentic AI tools for the cloud

Agentic AI is being rolled across the breadth of the HPE solutions portfolio, with Aruba Networking also set for a major boost. As part of the move, the platform will now have an in-built conversational copilot assistant to help drive security, the company says.

"Accessed through the new multi-modal, conversational networking copilot, HPE Aruba Networking Central can provide precise root-cause analysis and guided or automated remediation for complex network and security issues," the company says.

Next up on the agentic AI treatment is HPE OpsRamp Software. This first received an operations copilot last year, but the company is now expanding agentic capabilities to tackle root-cause analysis, capacity planning, and more.

Using AI agents, enterprises can monitor and streamline compute, networking, storage, and virtualization, the company notes.

"While maintaining human in the loop oversight, OpsRamp will enable key agentic capabilities including conversational product help and agentic command center that enables AI/ML based alerts, incident management and root-cause assistance," HPE explains.

Elsewhere, HPE confirmed GreenLake cloud services for financial operations and sustainability will get integrated GreenLake Intelligence features. This includes new workload capacity and optimizer capabilities, as well as new agentic tools aimed at monitoring consumption analytics and sustainability metrics.

GreenLake Intelligence won't all be available immediately, but "delivered through ongoing continuous innovation across the HPE portfolio," the company says.

The GreenLake Copilot beta will be available in the third quarter of this year, as will the agentic mesh for HPE Aruba Networking Central.

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HPE has announced an expansion of its AI factory portfolio with a spate of new 'composable' solutions designed to supercharge the creation, adoption, and management of AI factories for businesses of all sizes.

The new features are integrated end-to-end solutions and services for AI factories that aim to remove the complexity of customers building a full AI tech stack on their own, which the company says has become a key hurdle to adoption rates over the last two years.

In an announcement at the company's annual HPE Discover conference, the company said that generative, agentic, and physical AI have the potential to transform global productivity and create lasting societal change – but it warned that AI is only as good as the infrastructure and data behind it.

"Organizations need the data, intelligence, and vision to capture the AI opportunity, and this makes getting the right IT foundation essential," said Antonio Neri, president and CEO at HPE.

"HPE is delivering the most comprehensive approach, joining industry-leading AI infrastructure and services to enable organizations to realize their ambitions and deliver sustainable business value."

HPE doubles down on Nvidia ties

HPE's new AI factory services leverage its partnership with Nvidia. The company's Private Cloud AI is part of the Nvidia AI Computing by HPE portfolio, for example, and boasts an Nvidia Enterprise AI Factory-validated design.

Within this the company launched new HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers that rank number one in over 23 AI tests, HPE claims.

As well as the ability to provide a secure enclave to prevent tampering, this also supports post-quantum cryptography and trusted supply chain capabilities at rack and server level.

HPE revealed these servers will support the latest from Nvidia Blackwell computing.

Elsewhere, the offering also includes investment protection and scalability from one GPU generation to the next – this includes upgrading to Nvidia H200 NVL and Nvidia RTX Pro accelerators.

Organizations with strict data privacy requirements will also be entitled to air-gapped management and multi-tenancy that enables enterprises to collaborate and partition resources across their teams.

What's more, the expansion will also include Nvidia blueprints for fraud detection, digital human, and the Nvidia AI-Q blueprints for AI agent creation and workflows.

As well as a new "try and buy" program that lets customers test Private Cloud AI at Equinix's global data centers before making a purchase.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has extended its Morpheus Software and VM Essentials offering in a move that it claims can significantly reduce costs for businesses across their IT estate.

The first of the updates from the company is the availability of HPE Morpheus VM Essentials on Private Cloud Business Edition.

According to the company, this can significantly reduce VM license costs versus the market average at a time when VMware’s pricing continues to come under scrutiny.

Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP and chief product officer for private cloud and flex solutions at HPE, said: “Take a server, single server with one socket, with 48 cores. Today, if you price it on a per core basis on one side, and you look at our pricing, which is on a per socket basis, you will see a 90% saving on licensing costs just on a server.

“And now you can extend that server across your entire cloud, and you can see these benefits, kind of multiply.”

Bhardwaj also claimed that the orchestration platform the company provides, Morpheus Software, is offered at 5% lower cost than comparable products in the market. He added that through lower licensing costs and centralized management, customers could expect savings of around 45%.

In addition to making Morpheus VM Essentials available on Private Cloud Business Edition, the company is also now offering HPE Morpheus Enterprise and VM Essentials as standalone software that can run on competitor hardware.

“When we look at our virtualization platform, we recognize, you know, it sits in heterogeneous environments,” said Bhardwaj.

“With that in mind … looking at the hardware today, the underlying infrastructure, we support the HPE servers and storage, and we've added Dell servers and NetApp storage to the portfolio.”

Specifically, these are Dell PowerEdge servers and NetApp AFF arrays, as well as HPE ProLiant Compute Gen 11 and Gen 12 servers.

All of the above is available immediately, as is Morpheus Software integration for Alletra Storage MP. New Private Cloud Business Edition systems with SimpliVity will be available in the third quarter of 2025, after the company’s annual HPE Discover conference.

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HPE has announced a sweeping expansion of its Aruba Networking Central platform, offering users a raft of new features focused on driving security and data sovereignty.

As part of the move, users of the network management solution will be granted access to a virtual private cloud (VPC) environment aimed at shoring up data security and meeting regulatory requirements, the company said.

This will be complemented by an on-premises option capable of operating while disconnected from the cloud.

Phil Mottram, EVP and general manager for HPE Aruba Networking, said the expansion comes in direct response to evolving enterprise needs with regard to data sovereignty.

Enterprises operating on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the European Union (EU), face strict rules governing the use, storage, and sharing of customer data.

“Organizations are increasingly prioritizing data sovereignty, requiring regional and local presence for mission-critical IT solutions,” he said.

“With these innovations, HPE now uniquely addresses the most pressing enterprise challenges for corporate, nonprofit, and government entities with unprecedented network management deployment flexibility.”

HPE Aruba Networking Central changes

As part of the expansion, HPE Aruba Networking Central will gain four new deployment options. This means the solution can now be deployed in a cloud-delivered SaaS, VPC, on-prem, or NaaS format.

Similarly, integration of FIPS 140-2 certified hardware aims to help enterprises meet government security requirements and adhere to regulations including GDPR.

Described as a “comprehensive networking management solution”, HPE said this will boost efficiency for use-cases such as AI data capture, training, and inferencing - all of which typically require greater levels of control through air-gapped on-prem and cloud-based VPC options.

Underpinning this is the company’s GreenLake platform, which will provide enterprise users with local cloud options across a range of locations.

The firm is also keen to highlight gains made with regard to global points of presence (PoP), with dedicated instances now hosted in the US, Canada, EU, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and China.

AIOps tools look to drive network productivity

Elsewhere, other new features unveiled by HPE include the launch of automated network AIOps capabilities.

This will enable enterprises to continuously monitor critical wires and wireless network operations, optimize processes, and detect performance issues.

“A fabric of AI assistants acts as network architects, monitoring and gathering data, providing diagnostics and recommendations to extend existing capacity and performance, close security gaps, and identify configuration errors before they impact network operations,” the company said in an announcement.

“Combined with our continued innovation across AI, security and connectivity, HPE Aruba Networking Central continues to offer the most powerful and versatile network management application on the market, helping organizations meet their security, privacy and control requirements,” Mottram said.

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HPE's GreenLake hybrid cloud platform is unquestionably a success. First launched in 2018 as a pay-per-use cloud service, since the arrival of CTO Fidelma Russo GreenLake has expanded to become central to HPE's offering and posted massive growth in revenue.

No wonder the company named Russo to lead the new hybrid cloud unit, alongside her other work as company CTO.

As Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, said at the time: "Fidelma brings deep expertise in cloud services, software, and infrastructure built on an extensive career in technology. Her diverse experience makes her distinctively suited to drive innovation as we accelerate our transformation and bring differentiated solutions to the market."

Long rise to CTO

Born in 1963, Russo studied electrical engineering at University College Cork before completing a masters in computer science at Boston University. From then on, the next thirty years of her CV became a checklist of top tech infrastructure firms: DEC, Dell, Iron Mountain, VMware, and since 2021 HPE, where she now holds the joint roles of EVP & GM for hybrid cloud as well as chief technology officer.

"I think I've been kind of an accidental engineer. If someone said to me: 'You became a CTO — is that what you always wanted?' I would tell you that this is nothing like I ever imagined," she said in an HPE video interview, saying a mentor told her two decades ago she'd make a good CTO, but she was wary of leading strategy. "I've kind of resisted it for a number of years, and then when HPE called, I thought about it and said well I have a lot of experience, maybe it's time for me to be uncomfortable."

Luckily for HPE she said yes — not least as she was the fourth CTO at the company in five years.

Since then, she's led a transformation of the company's hybrid cloud offering, notably the GreenLake product lineup, which offers a public-cloud platform for on-premises infrastructure, offering performance, efficiency, and security benefits.

GreenLake wins

Russo is widely credited with developing the modern version of GreenLake, expanding to focus on hybrid cloud environments, widening its utility to more customers, adding support for edge computing, AI workloads, and more.

In 2023, she said: "Customers should not have to choose between the agility of the public cloud and the performance and control of their private infrastructure. Second, customers want choice and freedom from lock-in. And third, they operate multi-generational, multi-vendor IT estates that need to coexist with the public cloud."

By the end of that year, just two years after Russo joined HPE, GreenLake had topped $1.3 billion in annualized revenue run-rate (ARR), up 48% year-on-year. And the growth has continued: as of 2024, GreenLake boasted an ARR of more than $1.7 billion, with 39,000 unique customers. In March 2025, she noted that GreenLake had grown to 41,000 customers.

No wonder then that Russo was named one of 100 Women In Tech to watch in 2025.

Russo on AI

Russo said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that now is a perfect time to be working in this field, thanks to the explosion of data and the use of it to train AI models, responsibly and sustainably. "It’s a very exciting time, but you have to balance the excitement with maturity to ensure you’re managing this huge transition," she said.

Of AI, she warned we're still in a hype cycle, so predicted disillusionment is still to come. "In the early days of AI, lots of people spent a lot of money but didn’t get a lot of benefit," she said. "It’s essential to pick the right use cases to show success and think about what is important to you when training a model. There’s a whole slew of new questions, but it’s exciting times. This is the next evolution in how technology can help."

Recent research carried out by ITPro showed investment in AI is a key priority for businesses globally, however, following through on that ambition is a question that looms large for many organizations.

At Nvidia’s GTC conference, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) unveiled Mod Pod, a product intended to answer at least some elements of this conundrum.

Mod Pod is a liquid-cooled modular data center that’s optimized for AI and HPC workloads. It’s built into a container and can, the company says, be easily deployed on a business’ premises without needing to completely overhaul its existing data center.

“A lot of data center space that does exist, does not have the capabilities for liquid cooling, which means you don't have the density in your racks, and you also don't have the PUE (power usage effectiveness),” said HPE CTO Fidelma Russo. “ So [Mod Pod] gives you a lower total cost of ownership.”

“We have examples of our customers, siting these in parking lots where they used to have employees, but with the work from home from COVID, they have the space,” she added. “So again it's easy, [you’ve] just got to level some space and you can have a data center in your backyard up and running in months.”

Mod Pod comes in 6m and 12m configurations, and supports up to 1.5MW per unit with a PUE of under 1.1. While HPE is keen to highlight its liquid-cooling credentials, the Adaptive Cascade Cooling technology can be adapted to use either air or liquid cooling depending on customer need and preference.

HPE expands Private Cloud capabilities

In addition to Mod Pod, HPE also announced several new features in Private Cloud AI, the flagship – and, thus far, only – product from its partnership with the chipmaker, Nvidia AI Computing by HPE.

The first is support for the newly announced Nvidia AI Data Platform, which allows Nvidia-Certified Storage providers, of which HPE is one, to build AI query agents into their hardware using Nvidia AI Enterprise software, such as NIM and Llama Nemotron models, as well as AI-Q Blueprint.

It also revealed a new developer system that adds an “instant AI development environment”, powered by Nvidia accelerated computing, HPE Data Fabric, and support for rapid deployment of Nvidia blueprints.

There were also a number of storage announcements, including HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a Gen12 and HPE ProLiant Compute DL384b Gen12, which feature Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell chips and NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell NVL4 Superchips respectively.

HPE ProLiant Compute XD servers, meanwhile, will support the NVIDIA HGX B300 platform, launched at GTC. The company says this technology will allow customers to “train, fine-tune and run large AI models for the most complex workloads, including agentic AI and test-time reasoning inference”.

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HPE has hit out at the US Department of Justice (DOJ) over its attempt to block the acquisition of Juniper Networks, suggesting the move is “divorced from reality” and will benefit competitors in the space.

HPE bid $14 billion for Juniper Networks in January 2024, with the deal seen as a play by the networking giant to take advantage of the AI boom. With an eye to market consolidation, European and UK regulators examined the deal, but the acquisition was approved in August.

Despite gaining clearance in European markets, the DOJ lodged a legal challenge to block the acquisition, specifically highlighting the WLAN supply market and arguing that cutting competition will harm innovation.

The legal challenge claimed that by cutting three major players to two - these being HPE, Juniper, and Cisco - the deal will limit options for customers and ultimately lead to higher prices.

At the time, HPE and Juniper released statements disputing the DoJ claims, suggesting the WLAN market was more robust than the lawsuit argued.

Now, in a document filed in response to the DoJ lawsuit, HPE said its tie up with Juniper would give customers a "credible alternative to Cisco", the networking giant that dominates the sector.

Beyond Cisco, HPE points out that Chinese networking giant Huawei is considered a security risk by the US government, so it's in need of other options for infrastructure to resist the use of Chinese technology globally.

The filing says the suit from the DoJ will "will hobble competition with Huawei — which has been repeatedly identified as a national security risk by the U.S. government — and thus damage the US’ stated aim of reducing the use of Chinese technology in critical infrastructure globally."

Why WLAN?

The HPE filing noted that HPE and Juniper are two of ten companies that battle it out in the WLAN space, saying the DOJ description of HPE's dominance in the space is "divorced from reality".

“This is a deal that enhances competition and creates a real challenger to Cisco's dominance,” HPE added.

Indeed, it accuses the original complaint of cherry picking data by describing HPE, Juniper, and Cisco as having 70% share of that market. However, HPE said the DOJ is "conspicuously silent" about the respective market shares, as Cisco holds more than half of the WLAN market and has done so for more than a decade.

HPE added that the regulator is mistaken in its focus on WLAN, explaining that the real motivation behind the acquisition of Juniper is combining its data center routing tools with HPE's storage and compute.

"While WLAN is a component of the overall transaction, it is misleading to suggest that HPE is spending roughly $14 billion to acquire Juniper for the purpose of insulating itself from WLAN competition in the United States, particularly when the WLAN solutions that are the focus of the Complaint comprise only 11% of Juniper’s revenue," the filing noted.

"There are simpler — and significantly cheaper — alternatives for HPE to acquire a single digit market share in the United States in WLAN if that was its primary goal."

In its own defense, HPE's filing quoted a LinkedIn post by industry analyst Shamus McGillicuddy of Enterprise Management Associates.

"The DOJ complaint ignores all other aspects of this deal, including data center switching, routing, firewalls, SD-WAN, network automation. It doesn’t even mention Junos, which execs from both companies call ‘the crown jewel’ of Juniper. The press release calls Juniper a ‘wireless LAN vendor.’ Hilarious."

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is notifying staff whose personal data was accessed by Russian state-sponsored hackers back in May 2023.

According to filings with the attorney general offices in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the company has written to at least 16 people, notifying them that their driver's licenses, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers may have been stolen in the attack.

"HPE’s forensic investigation determined that certain individuals’ personal information may have been subject to unauthorized access. With the assistance of e-discovery specialists, HPE conducted a thorough review of the data at issue to identify the types of information that may have been subject to unauthorized access and determine to whom this information relates," the filing reads.

"On January 29, 2025, HPE began providing notice of this event to impacted individuals, in accordance with applicable law."

Since the attack, HPE said it has taken a series of remediation actions, such as strengthening network security by rotating passwords, tokens and keys, expanding its monitoring and logging measures, and adding extra controls and requirements for privileged account logins.

The firm has also expanded internal communication on security measures.

In the wake of the incident, HPE is offering affected staff free memberships for Equifax Complete Premier, which provides information on changes to victims’ credit reports, as well as WebScan notifications when financial details are found on fraudulent trading platforms.

The package also includes identity restoration services and up to $1,000,000 of identity theft insurance coverage for out of pocket expenses.

"In addition to enrolling in credit monitoring, we recommend that you remain vigilant against incidents of identity theft and fraud by reviewing your account statements and monitoring your free credit reports for suspicious activity and to detect errors,” the firm said.

What happened in the HPE attack?

The HPE breach was first disclosed in January 2024 after Microsoft issued a warning that the Midnight Blizzard hacking group had breached its Office 365 email environment.

The attackers targeted several email accounts within HPE’s cybersecurity, marketing, and business teams, using a compromised account to gain access to email mailboxes and steal sensitive data.

Midnight Blizzard is believed to have ties to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and are best-known for the infamous SolarWinds attack in 2019, which impacted several US governmental bodies, including the department of commerce and the treasury.

HPE has also said it believed that the hack was related to another attack in May 2023, in which Midnight Blizzard gained unauthorized access to several SharePoint files on the HPE system.

However, the firm said this attack had not materially impacted the company.

ITPro has approached HPE for comment.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said it plans to "vigorously defend" a legal challenge by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) that seeks to block the tech giant's acquisition of Juniper Networks.

HPE bid $14 billion to acquire the networking company in January 2024 in a move that would double HPE's networking business and potentially make it a major player in that segment.

Regulators in the UK and EU examined the deal, both signaling their approval in August, making the first such suit by the new US administration a surprise to industry watchers.

The suit filed against HPE suggests that by ending competition between two of the top three networking firms, this could reduce innovation for businesses and limit options.

The complaint specifically centers on wireless local area networks (WLAN), of which HPE and Juniper are the second and third largest suppliers in the US behind Cisco, which the suit suggested holds about a third of the market.

"HPE and Juniper are successful companies. But rather than continue to compete as rivals in the WLAN marketplace, they seek to consolidate — increasing concentration in an already concentrated market," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Omeed A. Assefi of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.

"The threat this merger poses is not theoretical," Assefi added.

"Vital industries in our country — including American hospitals and small businesses — rely on wireless networks to complete their missions. This proposed merger would significantly reduce competition and weaken innovation, resulting in large segments of the American economy paying more for less from wireless technology providers."

The DoJ statement stressed that part of the concern is the fact Juniper has been a "disruptive force" in the WLAN supply market with its Mist product, helping to spark innovation and drive down costs.

"The competitive pressure has forced HPE to discount its offerings and invest in its own innovation," the statement said, pointing to evidence that HPE staff were alarmed about the "threat" of Juniper on their own Aruba business.

HPE and Juniper disagree with DoJ concerns

HPE and Juniper disagree with the DoJ’s assessment, saying in a joint statement that the deal should increase competition, and that the WLAN market was much more robust than just the three major suppliers.

The statement also claimed that one company holds half the market, above the third noted by the DoJ suit, suggesting Cisco is the real dominant player.

HPE also stressed that other regulators — notably the UK and EU, but also in 12 other regions — had examined the deal and found it free of such issues, though Israel has made similar objections to the US.

"Consistent with the conclusions reached by all other major antitrust regulators who have reviewed the deal, this transaction brings together two complementary networking offerings and will create a networking player with the scope and scale to more effectively compete with global incumbents," the company said in a statement.

HPE said it would "vigorously defend" the deal in court rather than settle, with CEO Antonio Neri telling Bloomberg that the DoJ hasn't yet suggested remedies such as divesting Juniper's Mist business — and that might not even be possible.

"We believe the Department of Justice’s analysis of this acquisition is fundamentally flawed and we are disappointed in its decision to file a suit attempting to prohibit the closing of the transaction," the statement said.

"We will vigorously defend against the Department of Justice’s overreaching interpretation of antitrust laws and will demonstrate how this transaction will provide customers with greater innovation and choice, positively change the dynamics in the networking market by enhancing competition, and strengthen the backbone of US networking infrastructure."

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has confirmed it is investigating data breach claims made by the IntelBroker threat group.

Last week, IntelBroker published a statement on a data breach forum saying it had successfully breached HPE's network and nabbed information, offering it for sale on the dark web.

According to reports, the hackers claimed to have successfully snuck into parts of HPE's network for two days, accessing HPE's private GitHub repositories, APIs, and WePay service while managing to steal certificates, source code for Zerto and iLO, Docker builds, and personal data relating to deliveries.

HPE said the apparent hack was still being investigated, but stressed there was no customer data lost and the company was operating as normal.

"HPE became aware on January 16 of claims being made by a group called IntelBroker that it was in possession of information belonging to HPE," a company spokesperson said in a statement to ITPro.

"HPE immediately activated our cyber response protocols, disabled related credentials, and launched an investigation to evaluate the validity of the claims.

"There is no operational impact to our business at this time, nor evidence that customer information is involved."

HPE isn't the only big tech firm targeted by IntelBroker

Other attacks have been attributed to IntelBroker — believed to be led by a Serbian operating out of Russia — including breaches that leaked internal Apple tools and data from Europol, as well a health care provider used by American politicians.

Indeed, HPE was hit by similar data leak claims by IntelBroker this time last year; as with this latest incident, HPE said it hadn't found any evidence of a security breach.

That is a common pattern with IntelBroker claims. Companies find out via a statement on a hacking forum, investigate the incident, and then claim the intrusion wasn't serious and the data taken wasn't of any importance.

Companies targeted by IntelBroker have repeatedly disputed claims about the seriousness of the incident, saying any access was limited to small amounts of unimportant data, suggesting the hacks listed on dark-web forums were exaggerated.

Indeed, the hacker breached Cisco's systems in October, listing 2.9 terabytes of information on the dark web. But while Cisco admitted the incident, the company has stressed that the data wasn't confidential or sensitive in nature.

That was echoed in a subsequent breach at Nokia. IntelBroker released a cache of data stolen from the telco in November, but Nokia downplayed the incident, stressing that no company or customer data was actually leaked.

IntelBroker responded to such claims by releasing more data from the Cisco breach at the end of last year, and earlier this month said: "I promise you all some HQ leaks soon."

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) impressed markets last week with its latest quarterly earnings report in a major seal of approval for the firm’s AI services portfolio.

In Q4, the company generated $8.5 billion (£6.7 billion) in revenue, marking an increase of 15% year-on-year.

During the earnings call on 5 December 2024, CEO Antonio Neri pointed to “the continued adoption of GreenLake and the acceleration of our revenue growth in AI”, according to a transcript provided by Seeking Alpha.

Neri said the company is “positioned to lead the next wave of innovation” and pointed to its launch of HPE Private Cloud AI, a partnership with Deloitte for private AI deployment, and Unleash AI Partner Program as evidence.

It’s no secret that HPE has been pushing the idea of private AI for the past couple of years, and private cloud for several years before that. Yet these most recent results seem to suggest the company could be onto something.

As Citi analyst Asiya Merchant wrote in a note to clients, also published by Seeking Alpha: "While AI orders/revenues can be lumpy, we see the potential for stronger contribution from enterprise AI and sovereigns, which bodes positively for revenue momentum and margins ahead."

Cutting through the jargon, this means that there is definite and growing interest in AI solutions from enterprises that deviate from the public cloud-based offerings we see from OpenAI, which resides entirely on Microsoft Azure infrastructure.

It’s not just enterprises that are interested in moving AI – and more traditional cloud workloads – into a private cloud infrastructure. The “sovereigns” mentioned above are what most people would call countries or territories and is a segment HPE is addressing with its sovereign cloud products.

It’s far from the only traditional enterprise hardware provider to do so, either. For example, Oracle announced a sovereign cloud region for Europe in 2023 and Rackspace did the same for the UK in 2024.

Public cloud experience leads to public AI hesitancy

One of the factors that may be playing into this apparent interest in – and growth – of private AI products is large enterprises’ experience with cloud computing.

At the beginning of the cloud computing revolution, public cloud was touted as the way forward across software delivery (SaaS), as well as platform and infrastructure provisioning (PaaS and IaaS, respectively). While the SaaS argument has been won in multiple areas – particularly CRM and HR – IaaS in particular is more nuanced.

Some enterprises, particularly but not exclusively those in regulated industries, quickly ran into problems with data sovereignty and data protection. This boils down to whether the assurances and guarantees provided by public cloud providers were enough to meet their compliance obligations or generally give them a sense of security around their data.

An issue for large businesses more broadly was the total cost of ownership (TCO) of using a public cloud service versus on-premises or private cloud. While public cloud can be more economical at the beginning of a project or deployment, as time goes on and deployments scale up, those returns diminish.

As laid out by Spiceworks, “although public cloud is inexpensive, the ownership cost can rise sharply if the public cloud is scaled for extensive usage. Mid-sized to large enterprises are more susceptible to this challenge as their operations can increase rapidly as per demand”.

These two issues may be making the same organizations think twice before diving into public AI offerings – which are, after all, based on the public cloud.

With private AI offerings promising greater data protection and security, as well as results that are more attuned to an organization’s needs, having been trained on its data, it’s easy to see why it’s an enticing prospect.

Ultimately, it will take a few years for the reality of the trend to shake out as the hype around and novelty of generative AI wears off. It’s also worth bearing in mind that some of HPE’s buoyant AI results are coming from supercomputing.

While these facilities are currently popping up like mushrooms, they are normally multi-year projects that are expected to last much longer than any traditional IT deployment.

But for now, business is booming in AI, and enterprises that were burned by the cloud are fueling it.

European legs of tech conferences are always a somewhat strange experience. If you’re lucky, as a journalist, there will be a few announcements, but you attend in the full knowledge that the big news already dropped some time before.

For customers and partners, however, it’s a chance to discuss what was announced some six months ago in a local setting and perhaps get some local news as well – and so it was for HPE Discover Barcelona 2024.

The biggest news of the event was the arrival of two new air-gapped products: HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected and HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected.

While it’s very possible the technology was in place and ready to go in June at the main Discover conference, or any time since then, there’s a reason that the company held on until Barcelona to make the announcement: sovereign clouds.

I covered what these actually are in greater depth here, but in short it’s a way of keeping data within a certain jurisdiction in a determined location in a colocation facility or similar.

In CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote, as well as in press briefings when it was raised, Europe’s regulatory framework and strict data-regulation practices were highlighted as a reason for creating it. This is why it’s rolling out in Europe first and – by extension – why it was announced during a European conference.

Fewer announcements can mean more time for reflection and learning, though. There was certainly some of that on offer in the press area when CTO Fidelma Russo spoke about how HPE GreenLake had moved from a financial structure when it started to a “platform” for management and orchestration of services. Having written about HPE since before it split from HP Inc, this brought something of a wry smile to my lips, given how it was discussed back in 2019.

Overall, while it may have been a “steady as she goes” European event, there are a couple of things that I feel are worth keeping a mental bookmark of for the future.

The first is VM Essentials. The idea of HPE making its own virtual machines (VMs) was first floated at Discover 2024 in Las Vegas, but in VME it has a fully-fledged product. Leaving aside whether it’s a competitor to VMware products or merely ‘an alternative’, it will be interesting to see how much interest it receives from customers and whether it will get a nod at Discover Las Vegas 2025.

The second is Juniper Networks. It has been nearly 12 months since HPE announced its intention to buy Juniper and the company’s CEO Rami Rahim joined HPE CEO Antonio Neri on stage for the final third of the latter’s keynote address.

The two talked warmly about the future of the two companies, but there are suggestions that the deal is taking longer than expected to process. According to Bloomberg, which cited “people familiar with the matter”, the two companies may delay closing until after Trump takes office “in the hopes of a more favorable view of the transaction”.

In a press conference, however, Neri said he’s not worried about regulatory probes and is confident the deal will close either before the end of this year or at the beginning of 2025. Of course, with the inauguration taking place in January, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Whatever the case, once the acquisition is completed, there will be a significant amount of integration between the companies happening, not to mention between their channel and direct sales programs and onboarding Juniper customers that have no existing relationship with HPE.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled Virtual Machine Essentials (VME) this week at its annual European conference, HPE Discover Barcelona 2024.

The company’s virtual machine plans were teased in June at its flagship conference but are now finally starting to be made available to customers outside of just its private cloud offering.

VME is available both as an embedded software in Private Cloud and as a standalone piece of software that can be used both on HPE ProLiant and Alletra servers and on third-party hardware.

It’s built on the back technology created by Morpheus, which the company made in August 2024, and as CEO Antonio Neri said during his keynote: “[It] provides a unified VM management experience, which means you can manage existing VMware workloads or the new HP VM Essentials hypervisor with a simplified experience across both stacks.”

HPE executives walked a tight line between mentioning the controversial pricing changes that have happened with VMware software since its acquisition by Broadcom, without pitching VME as a direct competitor.

Hang Tan, COO for hybrid cloud at HPE, told a press conference: “This notion that you can get, you can streamline IT operations and achieve efficiencies by embracing a single ecosystem … is obsolete now. That no longer flies. CIOs are finally rethinking their IT strategies and because embracing a single ecosystem, the cost associated with that is no longer sustainable.”

“They're looking for flexibility and this is where virtualization comes in. This is where HPE, VM essentials, our virtualization software comes in,” he continued. “What's great about it is it's very self-contained, so customers can really take advantage of this capability, lower their virtualization costs and not have to pay for services that they don't need.”

This was the core argument from all members of the HPE leadership team who spoke to ITPro. VME doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that VMware’s products do, but that’s because not everyone needs them all the time.

As Ulrich Seibold, VP global of HPE GreenLake partner and service provider sales, told the channel press in attendance: “VM Essentials we do not position as a competitive tool or software to Broadcom. In all of our products, Broadcom services are included, and we have a strong partnership with them. But there might be areas or environments where partners or customers have a budget constraint or they do not want to get the full speed – for them, a virtual machine is good enough.”

Nevertheless, the undertone of the message was clear: If VMware’s new pricing strategy – which Neri said in his keynote had caused some customers’ costs to increase 300%-500% – was too expensive, here is an alternative.

HPE’s annual European conference took place this week in Barcelona and the company’s focus is still firmly on AI. This is bolstered by its supercomputing credentials – El Capitan, the latest supercomputer to come online in the US, was awarded the title of fastest supercomputer just a day before the conference kicked off.

This episode, Jane sits down with Gerald Kleyn, vice president of customer solutions for HPC and AI at Hewlett Packard Enterprise at HPE Discover Barcelona 2024 to discuss what the real-world impact of these high-performance machines is and whether they hold any benefits for the average IT department.

Highlights

“It's going to be important for countries to maintain and develop their supercomputing capabilities to ensure that their researchers have access to the latest technologies so that they can make discoveries even faster. If you think about the speed of innovation and how it's accelerated … those that don't invest, they're going to be left behind.”

“[HPC techniques are] becoming more and more relevant to more and more enterprises, especially as the generative AI workload has started to come to bear … those systems [are] very different than a traditional IT approach, where you're deploying microservices across an entire fleet of systems or virtual machines, trying to get the most out of your operation from an efficiency perspective.”

“We're doing a lot of work to optimize that (water) usage and reduce it as much as we can … we know that there's a future where we've got a responsibility to be as sustainable as possible, and we continue to invest in that.”

Footnotes

• What is HPC really for?
• AI’s thirsty secret
• Inside Lumi, one of the world’s greenest supercomputers
• HPE’s AI and supercomputing journey continues with new Cray and Slingshot hardware
• El Capitan powers up, becomes fastest supercomputer in the world
• HPE Discover Barcelona 2024: All the news and updates live
• Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful and sustainable supercomputer, is now up and running

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HPE has taken aim at data sovereignty concerns with two new products that look to help businesses make use of cloud-style services in an air-gapped environment.

HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected and HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected were announced at HPE Discover Barcelona 2024 during CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote address. They are intended to address the needs of regulated industries and other organizations that deal with highly sensitive data.

While both of these ‘Disconnected’ products are available to buy direct or through partners, the channel has a special role to play when it comes to sovereign clouds. Organizations wanting to roll out this kind of project will need to go via authorized HPE Partner Ready Vantage partners.

“Data sovereignty is no longer just a regulatory requirement. It is a business imperative for regulated industries such as government, healthcare providers and defense entities,” said Neri during his keynote.

Starting in Europe, Neri said, “partners can create sovereign cloud capabilities that address local, regional and industry specific regulations. These partners can earn the HPE sovereignty competency, which demonstrates expertise using HPE GreenLake cloud to provide secure private clouds within hosted environments or customer data centers”.

Partners wishing to offer sovereign clouds based on HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected and HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected must earn the HPE Sovereignty competency. Both it and the solution will be available through the Managed Services Center of Expertise of the HPE Partner Ready Vantage program.

HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected and sovereign cloud services based on it is expected to be made available in spring 2025, while HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected is expected to be available within the first half of 2025.

HPE Discover Barcelona 2024 is taking place from 20-21 November. For all the latest information from the event, as well as an archive of previous HPE Discover events, check out our HPE Discover hub.

Related content

• HPE upgrades GreenLake with eight cloud services alongside private cloud platform
• Finally, an HPE AI solution that offers something for the channel
• HPE Discover Barcelona 2024: All the news and updates live

Good morning from Barcelona on the east coast of Spain where HPE CEO Antonio Neri will be delivering his HPE Discover Europe keynote from the Fira exhibition center.

Neri's keynote will kick off at 1.30pm CET, but ahead of that you can read our predictions of what we can expect to hear about this afternoon.

It's a very breezy day in Barcelona with a few branches coming off trees immediately in front of the Fira north entrance. Inside it's bustling with people picking up coffee and finding their way around the conference center as the main conference day starts to get underway.

There's just over an hour until Antonio Neri's keynote starts. In the meantime, why not check out one of the company's other announcements from this week – El Capitan. The supercomputer, which was built by HPE using AMD chips, has come online and immediately been crowned the world's fastest by Top500.

The wait is almost over. Antonio Neri will shortly be on the stage and the keynote theatre is filling up with delegates. But first, we have some FC Barcelona fans (or performers playing Barcelona fans) coming through the crowd and on stage.

FC Barcelona is one of the headline customers at this year's European Discover – the opening VT is talking up the company's pedigree in data analysis in sport (this also includes other sports like motor racing).

Neri is now on stage and talking up again the relationship with FC Barcelona – HPE is now the club's official technology partner.

The Miriam Ferrando, CIO of FC Barcelona, has joined Neri on stage and is explaining the partnership. "Our vision is to fully immerse fans during their entire visit and deliver fast, stable and secure, customized experience," she says.

The football segment (or soccer, depending on where you are) is over and we're now onto HPE itself. Neri compares HPE to FC Barcelona: "An organization with a storied history, engineering roots and deep technical expertise and with the inspiration to transform our capabilities."

The company is not looking back, however, but instead is focused on "where the world is going".

In line with the company's own branding and strategy of late, as well as the way the technology hype winds are blowing, this is of course AI.

Neri points out that while it took the telephone 75 years to reach 50 million users and mobile phones 12 years to do the same, for generative AI it took less than a year.

"This is not just rapid growth, it's a major paradigm shift, profound transformation unlike anything we have ever seen," he says. "AI is not just enhancing technology, it is enabling new worlds of interaction capabilities, redefining what is possible in our lifetimes. It's transforming every sector, every line of business, and creating opportunities we couldn't even imagine 18 months ago."

He touches on another key HPE talking point – one we may hear an increasing amount about over the coming years – which is "responsible" AI. This includes elements like privacy (more on that shortly...), as well as sustainable technology development, and "human focused".

Now we're onto HPE's involvement in high performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing. El Capitan gets a mention, but Neri also points out that the company has built the top three fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Top500.

"In football terms, I call that a hat trick," he says.

Time for some announcements. First up, HPE VM Essentials.

HPE announced it was developing its own virtual machines at Las Vegas, and this is an evolution of that. It incorporates technology from the company's most recent acquisition, Morpheus.

Neri makes a not-so-oblique reference to the controversy around VMware licensing changes since it was acquired by Broadcomm.

" I speak to customers, a lot – more than 50% of my time I spend with customers and partner –, and what they tell me is that the virtualization landscape is shifting due to recent changes in various contracts and licensing terms. Many customers tell me their costs have increased three to five times," he says.

"For that reason, many customers are re evaluating their options and looking to create the right mix of run times across the hybrid cloud operating model."

In response, the company is releasing HPE VM Essintials

"HPE VM Essentials provides a unified VM management experience, which means you can manage existing VMware war notes or the new HP VM essentials hypervisor with a simplified experience across both stacks," says Neri.

Feedback from the beta test has been very positive, says Neri, and it will be generally available as a standalone solution from next month.

Some new AI announcements as well. The company has taken the opportunity of being in Europe, where privacy and data security regulations tend to be stricter, to announce some new air-gapped versions of its products.

First up, HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected.

"Many of you have asked us for the same HPE Green Lake cloud native experience, but not connected to the Internet or outside the cloud," says Neri. "In response to that, today, we are introducing the option for disconnected management for HPE private cloud solutions for a fully air gaps management option for you, for the building or our disconnected management capability."

The second air-gapped product is HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected. This is an on-premises, fully disconnected block storage option.

"This new solution provides customers in highly regulated environments the ability to manage with stringent privacy and security requirements for the most efficient mission critical databases," said Neri.

There's a new member of the Alletra storage family as well, the X10,000 all-flash object storage device that has been optimized, Neri says, for high speed data lakes and rapid store for backup and recovery.

"It will offer up to six times faster object storage performance compared to our competitors," Neri claims

Neri is joined by two guests, HPE CTO Fidelma Russo and Neil MacDonald, EVP and GM of compute, HPC and AI.

This is a wide ranging conversation, starting off with the fact that AI isn't new – it's what MacDonald studied at university some years ago. However, newer forms of AI – even preceding generative AI – are quite different from the AI of old.

"In traditional terms, artificial intelligence didn't rely on massive amounts of data and computation. It was about hand crafted rules and expert knowledge being encoded," he says. "Since then, we saw a more modern subset of AI emerge with machine learning, and then later deep learning, which allowed computers to make predictions without being explicitly programmed with that knowledge."

MacDonald says that despite these differences, ML and deep learning are both about learning patterns, which is what classical AI has always been about.

"Generative AI is a key shift, because ... it's no longer about labeling things, but it's generating things," MacDonald says. "It's radically different."

Generative AI, he says, has "enormous potential to fundamentally transform human productivity".

While the three are very much talking up the technology, they do address one of the key problems with increased AI adoption – energy consumption.

This is something that was touched on in June at Discover Las Vegas, and which we've discussed in the ITPro Podcast as well.

Neri is now joined on stage by Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks.

HPE announced its intention to acquire Juniper Networks earlier this year and, for now, it's still a pending acquisition. In that respect there's not an awful lot of news to report, but the conversation did illuminate a bit more how Juniper's technologies will be used.

According to Rahim: "It's about more than just combining (our) strengths to create the best networking business on the planet.

"I think it's about transforming what networks can do for those that use them, from delivering better experienced with traditional applications to meeting the growing demands of AI workloads."

Rahim and Neri talk up Juniper Networks' heritage in AI, which goes back almost 10 years, Rahim says.

In short, Juniper's technology will build on what HPE has in place already with Aruba and help bolster the company's AI strategy, the CEOs say.

And with that the keynote is over, as is this live blog.

For more from HPE Discover Barcelona 2024 as it happens, and our archive content from June, catch up on all our HPE Discover coverage, click here.

There’s a new name on the Top500 list of supercomputers. El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, has finally been brought online and immediately became the fastest supercomputer in the world with a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 1.742 exaflops.

El Capitan, which features technology from HPE and AMD, including Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transfer and AMD Instinct MI300A APUs, is somewhat different from many of the other supercomputers on the Top500 list. While many are used for applications such as climate research, biomedical engineering or material science, El Capitan will be used for nuclear weapon science.

Nuclear testing without the fallout

Although El Capitan is housed at LLNL, it’s a resource shared by all three parts of US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which constitutes Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos, as well as LLNL.

Almost 80 years after the Trinity nuclear test at Los Alamos, which saw the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, El Capitan coming online means – in theory at least – further physical nuclear tests won’t be necessary.

According to Jill Hruby, Department of Energy (DOE) under secretary for nuclear security and NNSA administrator: “El Capitan’s introduction continues the capability advancement needed to sustain our stockpile without returning to explosive nuclear testing. This computational capability … is the heart of science-based stockpile stewardship.”

El Capitan is, LLNL says, the culmination of decades of work to enable the modeling of weapons performance and safety in a virtual environment. This includes ten years spent developing code optimized to work on exascale infrastructure, even before such a thing existed.

While nuclear testing and stockpile management may be the primary purpose of El Capitan, it’s not all virtual mushroom clouds. According to LLNL: “It also will be used to model advanced high-energy-density physics experiments, such as inertial confinement fusion … and detailed understanding of material behavior under extreme conditions.”

It will achieve this using tools such as the creation of digital twins and AI assistants trained on classified data.

Cool running

El Capitan has not only taken first place on the Top500 the moment it was turned on but also made the Green500 list of energy-efficient supercomputers, albeit in 18th place.

Top500 described this achievement as “quite impressive” in view of its top-scoring HPL benchmark of 1.742 EFlop/sec.

This is enabled largely by the energy efficiency of the HPE infrastructure used. The company has made a name for itself in fanless, direct liquid cooling – one of the most efficient ways of removing heat from a data center – with its Cray Supercomputing EX systems.

El Capitan runs on one of these direct liquid-cooled systems, HPE Cray EX255a. It also features 11,039,616 cores based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores, AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators – which are also highly energy efficient – and uses the Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

This is the third exascale computer that HPE has rolled out in partnership with the DOE, the other two being Frontier and Aurora, and the second it has created in partnership with AMD.

The Fira exhibition center in Barcelona is once again getting ready to host the European leg of a tech company’s annual conference circuit, with HPE Discover Barcelona taking over the venue for two days next week.

It’s been five months since CEO Antonio Neri took to the stage of the Las Vegas Sphere at the company’s main conference. While there’s generally less razzle dazzle (and fewer announcements) in European conferences than in the US, there will still be some morsels on offer for customers and partners alike.

Here are my top four predictions for what delegates will hear about at HPE Discover Barcelona 2024.

HPE AI strategy

While HPE is still nominally “the edge to cloud to AI company”, it’s been putting a lot more effort into promoting its cloud and AI initiatives than it has edge. This was most visible at HPE Discover 2024 in Las Vegas, when Neri was joined on stage by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for the announcement of Nvidia AI Computing by HPE.

I think we can rule out Huang making an appearance again this time, but I would expect Neri to reference the project and perhaps talk about how many customers are using the HPE Private Cloud AI component.

HPE Supercomputing hardware

There may also be some discussion of HPE’s supercomputing products – an area that it’s been talking about a lot in the past year or so. I would expect some mention of its recently launched, AI-focused supercomputing hardware under its Cray brand, but new product announcements at the event seem unlikely.

Specific hardware aside, HPE does like to name-drop some of the big supercomputing projects it’s involved in; at the main conference in June there was even a model of part of Venado on show in the expo hall.

With El Capitan at the Livermore National Laboratory expected to come online before the end of 2024 – which is to say six weeks from the time of writing – we may get an update on that, or at least a reminder that it’s in the works.

HPE cloud services

HPE GreenLake has been at the center of the company’s cloud services proposition. What GreenLake is has evolved over time, but for the past several years has been a cloud-like consumption-based usage model with the hardware being located either on-premises or in a colocation facility. It also incorporates software elements, including security software and analytics, a great deal of which has come via acquisitions.

HPE Private Cloud, which is part of the GreenLake offering, got an update in June with a new virtualization capability (scroll to 19 June 2024 at 20:11 time stamp for full details).

It would make sense for the company to build on this and, realistically, it would be the lightest lift in terms of a product launch.

HPE 2024 acquisitions

Ok, hands up – I got it wrong in June’s predictions. I expected there to be more around HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks, which at the time of writing is still pending. I apparently never learn, however, so am once again going to place my bet on the deal getting a mention, not least as it is expected to close either late in 2024 or early in 2025.

I also have my eye on a smaller acquisition, Morpheus Data, which was announced and closed in August. In a statement issued at the time, Brian Gruttadauria, CTO of hybrid cloud at HPE, said: “This acquisition is all about expanding what HPE GreenLake cloud can do to simplify IT complexity.

“This software platform unifies management of multicloud and hybrid IT while empowering DevOps teams with self-service provisioning.”

As Gruttadauria noted, Morpheus Data was already available on HPE GreenLake, so, as with HPE Virtualization, it feels like an announcement on this would be both obvious and a light lift.

I will be at the 2024 edition of HPE Discover Barcelona, which runs from 20-21 November, to find out whether my predictions are on the money. Click here to follow all my coverage, as well as read up on what happened in Las Vegas in June.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is once again flexing its high performance computing muscles with three new pieces of Cray Supercomputing hardware and a new Slingshot interconnect.

The launch is being tipped as an end-to-end portfolio for high performance computing setups and includes a compute blade, accelerator blade, storage system, and interconnect.

All of this is supplemented by new software that the company says will “[improve] the user experience of running compute-intensive workloads”.

AMD vs Nvidia – why not both?

The HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4252 Gen 2 Compute Blade is, according to the company, capable of delivering over 98,000 cores in a single cabinet. This, HPE claims, makes it the most powerful one-rack unit system in supercomputing.

It also contains eight 5th Gen AMD Epyc processors, offering a high density of CPUs. HPE says this allows customers to benefit from higher-performing compute without needing more space.

While the compute blade may be AMD-powered, the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX154n Accelerator Blade is all Nvidia. It features the chipmaker’s GB200 Grace Blackwell NVL4 Superchip, with each blade holding four NVIDIA NVLink-connected Blackwell GPUs connected with two NVIDIA Grace CPUs over NVIDIA NVLink-C2C.

Storage and slingshots

On top of this, the company has lifted the lid on a new piece of networking infrastructure for the supercomputing industry, the Slingshot interconnect 400.

According to HPE, this interconnect offers twice the line speed of its predecessor, with cables, network interface controllers, and switches offering speeds of 400gb/sec.

It also boasts ultra-low latency thanks to automated congestion management and adaptive routing, the company claimed, adding that this will allow customers “to run large workloads with significantly less network infrastructure”.

The final piece of supercomputing hardware in this release is the HPE Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems E2000, which the company claims offers more than double the I/O performance of the Cray ClusterStor E1000 that came before it.

According to HPE’s own metrics, the E2000 is capable of 190 GB/sec read performance and 140 GB/sec write performance. The E1000, by contrast, is capable of 85 GB/sec read and 65 GB/sec write performance.

New AI-focused on-prem servers

In addition to new supercomputing products, HPE has also announced two new AI-focused ProLiant Compute servers, the XD680 and XD685. Both of these servers are aimed at managed service providers and large enterprises that want to train their own AI models rather than use publicly available resources – a key element of HPE’s recent business strategy.

While they may have the target audience, their specifications are quite different.

The XD680 brings a third big-name chipmaker onto the stage, featuring eight Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators in one compact node. HPE has pitched this server as being “optimized with price-for-performance in mind”.

It is air cooled, rather than liquid cooled like the XD685, and is designed for intense training, tuning, and inferencing workloads, the company said.

The new XD685 is designed for high-performance and energy efficiency, and features a choice of either eight NVIDIA H200 SXM Tensor Core GPUs or NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in a five rack-unit chassis.

If the name “HPE ProLiant Compute XD685” sounds familiar, this is because the company already announced a server under the same name in October 2024. That XD685, however, uses AMD accelerators and CPUs, but this is not a swift replacement and both pieces of hardware will be available to purchase depending on what a buyer needs.

Marching to a familiar beat

This latest slew of announcements, as well as the XD685 announcement from October, are all very much in line with the company’s most recent talking points. It has been playing up its prowess in HPC for the past couple of years, pointing to the number of supercomputers in the Top500 that use its hardware.

It was no slouch in capitalizing on the AI trend, either. The firm recognized that some companies will want to train their own large language models (LLMs) and generative AI and that most off-the-shelf hardware available at the AI boom started wouldn’t be capable of handling that.

HPE has also given a nod to its fanless direct water cooling technology, which is more energy efficient than air cooling. This in theory also makes it greener, although water use by supercomputers and cloud data centers is an increasing ecological concern.

HPE has had a sharp focus on the network edge for longer than most and it now aims to deliver even more processing power to harsh environments such as retail, manufacturing, and logistics. The ProLiant DL145 Gen11 certainly looks up to the task as this single socket (1P) server puts an AMD EPYC 8004 'Siena' CPU with up to 64 cores into a surprisingly small footprint.

This 2U system supports CPUs with a maximum 200W TDP so it supports all twelve of the 8004 family including the six 'PN' NEBS-friendly models. These CPUs are edge-optimized as they offer improved energy efficiency, lower operating costs, and reduced cooling demands.

Measuring only 381mm wide and 507mm deep with the filter bezel fitted, it's around 50% smaller than HPE's DL385 Gen11. The server is resistant to extreme shock and vibration and rated for continuous operations in temperatures between -5 and +55 degrees C.

Its high CPU core potential makes it a good choice for virtualization at the edge and it's ready for AI and ML workloads too, as it has room for up to three Nvidia L4 Tensor Core GPUs. The server supports up to 768GB of DDR5 memory and although storage capacity isn't high, it offers a choice of SFF SATA/NVMe or EDSFF E3.S SSDs.

HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 review: System design

For edge duties, the DL145 Gen11 employs the standard reverse system design with all expansion slots, drive bays, network ports, and PSUs accessible from the front. System cooling is handled by four standard or high-performance hot-plug fans at the rear which draw air from the front and through the filter bezel.

The plastic filter bezel slots onto the front and has apertures with dust brushes on each side for cable connections. The dust filter is easily removed with HPE recommending it be replaced every three to six months.

There's plenty going on under the lockable lid but good design means all key components are easy to access. The 48-core 2.5GHz AMD EPYC 8434P CPU in our system is topped off with an impressively chunky passive heatsink and flanked on each side by three DIMM slots which support up to 768GB using HPE's 128GB DDR5 SmartMemory modules. For power, you can choose from single and dual redundant reverse-flow 700W or 1,000W Flex-Slot PSUs.

HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 review: Storage and expansion

Due to their reduced size, edge servers don't have a lot of room for storage but the DL145 Gen11 manages to squeeze a good range of options in. We have the two-bay SFF drive cage which supports SATA or NVMe U.3 SSDs but you can opt for up to six EDSFF E3.S SSDs with HPE offering a four-bay cage and an additional two-bay cage that slots in above it.

You can directly attach any of the storage bays to the motherboard's SATA or MCIO connectors but AMD's chipset doesn't do integrated RAID so you'll need to source one of HPE's controller cards if you want this. HPE offers three MegaRAID-powered adapters including the MR408i-o Gen11 OCP card with all supporting SATA, SAS, and NVMe devices.

The small bay next to the drive cage is dedicated to HPE's NS204i-u Gen11 boot-optimized storage device. It's great for keeping the standard bays free for data as it presents two hot-plug M.2 NVMe SSDs and provides mirrored redundant storage for an OS or hypervisor.

The expansion bay in the center of the front panel comes as standard with one PCIe Gen5 full-height, half-length slot which was occupied in our system by an Nvidia L4 GPU. You can add two more Gen5 x16 slots with optional risers and lurking underneath the cage is the OCP 3 slot.

The server doesn't have any embedded network ports so you'll need to factor these in. Our server included a dual-port 10GbE OCP 3 card and HPE offers plenty of Gigabit, 10GbE plus 25GbE PCIe and OCP 3 cards.

HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 review: Remote management

The DL145 Gen11 comes with HPE's embedded iLO6 chip and a dedicated Gigabit port. The USB iLO service port is used for downloading the active health system log to a flash drive or connecting a laptop with a USB to an Ethernet adapter and directly accessing the iLO's web console.

The web interface is packed with status information on all critical components. The base price includes an iLO6 Standard license which must be upgraded to an Advanced version to enable features such as full OS remote control, virtual media services, and power management.

Security out at the edge needs to be good and the iLO6 provides plenty of valuable features such as Secure Start, 'silicon root of trust' firmware fingerprinting and SPDM (Security Protocol and Data Module) hardware component, and PCIe expansion card authentication. Physical security is in abundance too, as the chassis has intrusion detector switches, lockable panels all around, and holes for Kensington locks.

Deployment to remote sites is aided by HPE's zero-touch provisioning so businesses can deliver preconfigured servers which just need a secure network connection for swift onboarding. For ongoing remote management, the server can be integrated into HPE's GreenLake Compute Ops Management cloud service which provides a single portal for centrally managing server deployments and automating system lifecycle management and firmware compliance policies.

HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 review: Is it worth it?

We received an early review sample so pricing has yet to be firmed up but the base CTO chassis (SKU: P71964-B21) without CPU, memory, or storage comes in at around $2,100. Support for the entire range of EPYC 8004 CPUs means you can spec the server up to suit your budget and it supports plenty of other options.

Build quality is excellent, it's small enough to go where normal servers can't and HPE's acoustics design works well as even with a 48-core EPYC CPU and Nvidia GPU in residence, our review system was pleasingly quiet. The DL145 Gen11 is clearly capable of delivering plenty of processing power out to the edge and deployment options are extensive as HPE offers a range of desk, rack, and wall-mount kits.

HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 specifications