Blockchain-as-a-Service: HPE unveils first member of blockchain portfolio

According to Gartner, blockchain will generate $176 billion in business value by 2025.

HPE is setting out to capitalise on the rise of blockchain by releasing the first member of its HPE Mission Critical Blockchain family – a Blockchain-as-a-Service solution for enterprises.

HPE's Mission Critical Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) aims to make it easy and simple for customers deploying blockchain solutions.

Mission Critical DLT is used to record transactions across a decentralised network of computers and has a wide range of potential applications.

HPE claims that 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.

Aiming to solve the problem, HPE says its Mission Critical DLT solution offers availability and fault protection for enterprise-grade applications, and scalability and SQL integration that cannot be realised with workloads running in a public cloud environment.

The Mission Critical DLT solution is a part of HPE's overall strategy to bring enterprise-grade capability to blockchain workloads.

The solution is offered on HPE Integrity NonStop platforms, which HPE says is behind two out of every three credit card transactions in the world.

Developed in partnership with enterprise software firm R3, the solution integrates the company's distributed ledger technology with HPE's mission-critical platform.

"Enterprises interested in blockchain are realizing that public cloud alone does not always meet their non-functional requirements", comments Raphael Davison, HPE's Worldwide Director for Blockchain.

"As they look to scale, they recognize 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.