“Data is your most important asset.” – Antonio Neri

Talk about making an entrance! Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, kicked off this year’s HPE Discover show with a dramatic, first-ever corporate keynote at Sphere Las Vegas. Sphere was an amazing venue to hear Antonio highlight groundbreaking technology innovation and, with guest NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, discuss AI-led transformation and announce a new NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio. Very exciting! 

Digital Resilience a Key Topic with HPE Connect User Community

While AI was the event’s overarching theme, digital resilience was another key aspect, and the Connect HPE User Community booth hosted several well-attended presentations on the subject. Since digital resilience is a broad topic, the HPE NonStop Digital Resiliency Framework was often referenced as a useful approach to the complex issue. This Framework has five major areas: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.

Of course, prevention is always a logical first step, and Steve Tcherchian, Chief Product Officer of XYPRO, presented “Cybersecurity Strategies for Ransomware Protection,” which outlined the importance of identifying critical assets, protecting those assets, and detecting cyberattacks. It is no coincidence that those are the first three areas of the Framework.

However, even with the best protection, security breaches can happen (as we see too frequently in the news), and companies must ensure they can recover their most important asset—their data! And that was the focus of the Gravic team’s session: “Recover Critical Data After a Ransomware Attack.”

The Gravic presentation discussed how protecting and recovering from cyberattacks, including ransomware, requires new Business Continuity (BC) strategies and architectures. Traditional BC strategies are designed for data center or geographic resilience, not for digital resilience protection from ransomware or cyber threats. Furthermore, the traditional BC objectives of tight interconnection, low latency, and fast replication may actually enable cyberattackers, which often target backup processes before launching an attack on the production environment (to increase pressure on companies to pay ransom to recover data).

We also highlighted how HPE Shadowbase software provides new high-availability capabilities specifically designed to address cybersecurity threats. It has advanced functionality and supports the emerging digital resilience requirements for immutable storage, air-gapped isolation, data validation, data quarantining, and database roll-forward and rollback. As Antonio Neri said in his keynote address, “Data is your most important asset,” and we wholeheartedly agree. Gravic is working closely with HPE to deliver new HPE Shadowbase software functionality to meet the data resilience requirements of our NonStop customers.

Exciting Dead and Company Performance

HPE Discover was in Las Vegas, so, of course, we expected some terrific entertainment—and there absolutely was! In the evening, Dead and Company played in Sphere, offering incredible visuals and the classic set list of songs we all know and love. The visuals zoomed in on the house in San Francisco where the band started, then slowly zoomed out and focused on outer space, giving beautiful views of the stars. By the end of the show, it zoomed back on the house and a beautiful illustration focusing on the band.

With over 15,000 delegates, exciting technology announcements, and great breakout sessions, HPE Discover 2024 was a huge success. The Gravic team very much enjoyed the show and engaging with our HPE partners and customers. Thank you to HPE, the Connect Community team, and everyone else that made it possible. And did we mention that Sphere is AMAZING? We’re already looking forward to next year’s show!