The event is the successor to SPET, last held in Colorado in 2017, and brings together a select group of European HPE partners for a week of in-depth technical sessions led by the product managers and engineers behind the HPE platforms. Below, Roel shares the five insights he's bringing back to his work with Xylos customers.

What really set this week apart was the format. Instead of polished slide decks and product launches, we sat down directly with the engineers and product managers who actually build these platforms. We discussed both what's available today and what's coming. The result: a clear picture of where HPE is heading, and what that means for organizations evaluating their infrastructure today.

Below are the five insights I'm bringing into our client conversations.

The HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 stood out to me. The platform combines performance, scalability and a cloud-like operational experience through HPE GreenLake. For customers currently struggling with outdated SAN environments or the complexity of traditional storage architectures, this is a serious step forward. The disaggregated architecture lets compute and capacity scale independently, which brings down the total cost of ownership in the long run.

For a long time, object storage was synonymous with cheap archiving. With the X10000, HPE completely flips that perception. Unstructured data finally becomes a first-class citizen, even for performance-critical applications like AI and large-scale data analytics. For our customers with growing AI ambitions, this is a platform to watch. It makes it possible to unlock datasets at scale, without the performance compromises we've historically associated with object storage.

This is where it really got interesting. HPE is building the next generation of storage to sit much closer to compute, with direct GPU access for AI workloads. The technical details matter less than the impact: faster data access, more efficient processing, fewer bottlenecks when training or running inference on models. Organizations planning their data platform for the next three to five years would do well to factor this evolution into their architecture choices.

Alongside storage, we spent time on Morpheus VM Essentials and Morpheus Enterprise. The goal is to simplify hybrid IT through a unified platform that manages virtual machines, containers and cloud resources. What appealed to me was the focus on flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in. In a market where many organizations are rethinking their virtualization strategy after recent price changes from established players, this offers a credible alternative to bring into the conversation.

Disaster recovery and cyber resilience got the attention they deserve, with Zerto central to the story. The combination of continuous replication to a secondary site and isolated clean-room environments, where workloads can be safely validated and restored after a ransomware attack, is a relatively young approach. It opens up a real opportunity to help our customers better protect their environments against modern threats, with near-zero data loss as an achievable design goal rather than a marketing promise.

The biggest value of the week wasn't in the slides, but in the open dialogue. As European partners, we had the room to share concrete feedback on how these solutions perform in practice, what features are still missing, and what challenges we run into during implementations. That kind of conversation doesn't come through product documentation.

Just as valuable was meeting fellow engineers from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Exchanging experiences on real customer situations sharpens our advice, and confirms that collaboration within the partner ecosystem is a genuine accelerator for innovation.

HPE is visibly building an integrated strategy where storage, compute, AI and resilience come together. For organizations rethinking their infrastructure in the years ahead, this offers interesting building blocks.

At Xylos, we translate these developments into what they concretely mean for your environment, your workloads and your business case. Want to talk through how these technologies fit into your hybrid cloud strategy or cyber resilience approach? Our experts are happy to think it through with you.