HPE Storage Operational Resilience in the AI Era

As AI increases the value of data, expands operational dependencies, and accelerates cyber threats, organizations need resilience that goes beyond traditional backup. Delegates will learn how an operational resilience strategy can protect hybrid cloud workloads, detect threats earlier, recover applications and data in minutes, and validate readiness to keep the business running through disruption. David Paquette, a product marketing manager at HPE, presented this session for HPE Storage at Security Field Day 16. He described operational resilience as the umbrella over data, application, cyber, and storage resilience.

Paquette organized his talk around workload, cyber, and AI resilience. He noted that AI adds new infrastructure to protect, speeds up attacks, and raises expectations of constant availability. Corrupt or missing data can also lead AI to return wrong answers and waste tokens. HPE Zerto Software groups virtual machines into virtual protection groups with defined startup orders, and the recovery plans released this year allow runbook-style testing across multiple groups. Zerto can also create sandbox environments on designated test networks for validating patches and migrations. Delegates pressed on several points. Paquette explained that IP conflicts are avoided by recovering into an isolated network and that Active Directory must already exist in the recovery environment. He added that HPE dropped Zerto for Kubernetes because most containers are stateless, though it is still studying that space. Zerto supports APIs and MCP and runs on VMware, Hyper-V, HPE Morpheus, AWS, and Azure. Its real-time replication detects ransomware encryption within seconds and tags recovery points, and it can create immutable copies from its journal.

At the storage layer, the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 also checks for encryption anomalies at the block level, so attacks can be detected at two layers. It includes immutable snapshots and a 100% data availability guarantee. The X10000 handles file and object data, and HPE StoreOnce provides hardened backup storage. As a last line of defense, the HPE Cyber Resilience Vault combines Alletra, Aruba networking, ProLiant compute, and Zerto. The vault has no network paths in and includes an isolated recovery environment. Paquette argued that recovery now has to be measured in minutes rather than hours. He also noted that resilience must cover rogue AI agents as well as attacks and outages. HPE’s position is that it already covers the stack from the virtualization layer down to storage across both on-premises and cloud environments.