HPE announced yesterday that it's acquiring Plexxi in a bid to boost its software-defined portfolio for hybrid cloud infrastructure.
HPE's plan is to integrate Plexxi's technology, which is based on applications instead of infrastructure, with its software-defined compute and storage capabilities. Plexxi, which was founded in 2010, is a provider of software-defined data fabric networking technology.
The first step is integrating Plexxi into HPE's hyperconverged solutions, which includes building on last year's $650 million deal to buy SimpliVity.
"Plexxi will enable us to deliver the industry’s only hyperconverged offering that incorporates compute, storage and data fabric networking into a single solution, with a single management interface and support," according to a blog post by HPE's Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager of HPE software-defined and cloud group. "The combined HPE SimpliVity plus Plexxi solution will provide customers with a highly dynamic workload-based model to better align IT resources to business priorities."
Lewis said Plexxi's HCN technology would also be merged into the HPE Synergy portfolio for the creation of "composable infrastructure" that can deliver "fluid pools of storage and compute resources that can be composed and recomposed as business needs dictate." With Plexxi onboard, HPE also plans on offering a composable rack solution for the data center in the near future.
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Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in HPE's fiscal third quarter at the end of July, were not disclosed. HPE plans on offering jobs to all of Plexxi's full-time employees.
Plexxi, which is headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, has raised $83.4 million in funding, with the last round in 2016.
HPE bows artificial intelligence, machine learning-based platform
In other HPE news, the company announced earlier this week the launch of an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning based platform, which is called HPE Intelligent Assurance, at the Digital Transformation show in Nice, France.
Networks are becoming increasingly more complex and dynamic as service providers transition their architectures from hardware-based to software-based. HPE Intelligent Assurance was designed to give communications service providers the ability to enable zero-touch operations and self-driven networks. It combines machine learning-based intelligence with artificial intelligence-driven automation to predict problems and proactively fix them before they become big issues.
The platform works with network events generated by physical, virtual and hybrid networks.
In addition to networks becoming complex through cloudification and virtualization, carriers are also offering more services to their customers. In order for the new services and hybrid platforms to be successful, automation is key across the telecom industry.
"Automation in OSS assurance is important to increase network operations efficiency, to manage the increasing number of events and the complexity added by new network domains," Domenico Convertino, WW OSS Domain Lead at HPE, wrote in an email to FierceTelecom. "We are introducing machine learning now to automatically discover patterns in vast amounts of data in network events. AI-based automation factors in once these patterns are discovered using our first-generation AI capabilities for correlation and automation."
HPE has been working on the assurance platform for more than two years, according to Convertino. It's currently in trials in the EMEA, AMS and APJ regions.