Amazon Web Services (AWS) looks to extend beyond the public cloud to on-premises datacentre hardware with AWS Outposts-- an initiative in AWS-designed fully managed and configured compute and storage racks.

“Customers are telling us that they don’t want a hybrid experience that attempts to recreate a stunted version of a cloud on-premises, because it’s perpetually out of sync with the cloud version and requires a lot of heavy lifting, managing custom hardware, different control planes, different tooling, and manual software updates,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy says. “There just isn’t a lot of value in that type of on-premises offering and that’s why these solutions aren’t getting much traction.”

All-flash storage specialist Pure Storage sets to better bridge local and cloud-based storage with Pure Storage Cloud Data Services-- a suite of cloud offerings running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

According to Pure Storage, the suite unifies cloud while delivering a common set of data services across on-premises and coud, enabling consistent storage capabilities, APIs and resiliency for applications to be built and run everywhere. Pure Storage capabilities running on AWS include Cloud Block Store, an "industrial-strength block storage" designed to enable mission-critical applications to run seamlessly on the cloud.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announces an extension of the InfoSight predictive analytics tool-- previously available only on storage, it can now be found in ProLiant servers, Synergy compute modules and Apollo systems.

Made by April 2017 HPE acquisition Nimble Storage, InfoSight monitors infrastructure to identify potential problems and offer possible solutions. To do so it analyses millions of sensors across a connected global userbase, before using the data to offer trend insights, forecasting and recommendations.

According to HPE, InfoSight already brings storage customers a 79% decrease in operational costs, tickets resolved in 85% less time and the automatic prediction and resolving of 86% of issues before a problem is identified. As such, bringing InfoSight capabilities to servers provides a "single AI-driven framework to monitor, collect and analyze rich data telemetry from across the entire infrastructure, on- or off-premises."

Rackspace announces an ambitious EMEA expansion plan-- one involving "heavy" investment in growing footprint in Germany and N. Europe, allowing it to deliver better services to customers in the region, as well as handle growing demand.

According to the company, the investment not only reflects its success in EMEA, but also that of its alliance partners, namely Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. It is also proof of the growth and maturity of the cloud market in the region. Thus, Rackspace plans to open a new Germany office in Munich, as well as hire more people.