Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduces 'blockchain as a service'

Enterprise is announcing its first product in the HPE Mission Critical Blockchain family.

Mission Critical Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a solution that enables customers to run distributed ledger workloads on the highest availability enterprise platforms, according to HPE.

Mission Critical DLT is a distributed ledger technology that is used to record transactions across a decentralised network of computers and has a wide range of potential applications across industries. According to Gartner, blockchain will generate $176bn in business value by 2025.

Enterprises evaluating blockchain solutions are finding that generic infrastructure and public cloud environments cannot support the requirements they need in terms of performance, security, scalability and resiliency. HPE's Mission Critical DLT solution offers availability and fault protection for enterprise-grade applications. This solution includes Scalability and SQL integration that cannot be realised with workloads running in a public cloud environment or generic infrastructure.

The Mission Critical DLT solution is a part of HPE's overall approach to bring enterprise-grade capability to blockchain workloads. The solution is offered on HPE Integrity NonStop platforms, which process two out of every three credit card transactions in the world.

It was developed in partnership with enterprise software firm R3, integrating the company's distributed ledger technology with HPE's mission critical platform. This combination enables customers to execute distributed-ledger workloads in environments that demand 100 percent fault tolerance at mission critical levels and ensures massive scalability to grow with the business as well as SQL integration with legacy systems.

Raphael Davison, Worldwide Director for Blockchain, HPE, said: "Enterprises interested in blockchain are realising that public cloud alone does not always meet their non-functional requirements. As they look to scale, they recognise that, for mission-critical processes, on-premise infrastructure must be part of the mix of traditional IT, private and public cloud that's needed to meet the requirements of enterprise-grade blockchain workloads."

HPE Mission Critical DLT is expected to be commercially available in early 2018. Customers also will be able to purchase access to this solution in a "DLT as a Service" environment for serious trials and production use later in the year.