Virtual and hidden service partition and dynamic enhanced third party data store

An article of manufacture comprising a non-transitory machine readable storage medium having content stored thereon, which when accessed, provides instructions to cause a machine to perform operations including:

• receiving a request to reserve a portion of storage on a computing device for a hidden partition, the request being received from a remote console over a secure out-of-band (OOB) communication channel, the secure OOB communication channel being hidden from a host operating system,
• wherein the request is received at a hardware platform controller, the hardware platform controller part of a peripheral interface platform to provide connections for peripherals to a host processor of the computing device;
• wherein the request is received by a hardware platform controller on hardware logic of a computing device separate from hardware logic that executes the host operating system (OS), the hardware platform controller part of a peripheral interface hardware platform separate from host processor hardware that executes the host OS, the platform to provide connections for peripherals to the host processor of the computing device;
• reserving the portion of storage on the computing device for the hidden partition including:
• provisioning a first portion of a first nonvolatile storage device of the computing device and a second portion of a second nonvolatile storage device of the computer device to reserve the requested portion of storage for the hidden partition by setting one or more configuration parameters of the hardware platform controller to hide the first portion of the first nonvolatile storage device and the second portion of the second nonvolatile memory from the host OS, including changing an amount of storage space available to the host OS, wherein the first nonvolatile storage device is a hard drive and the second nonvolatile storage device is a flash storage device;
• synchronizing data for the hidden partition including synchronizing data stored in the first portion of the first nonvolatile memory device with data stored in the second portion of the second nonvolatile memory device;
• providing the remote console with secure remote access to the hidden partition via the secure OOB communication channel, including providing remote access to the hidden partition via the secure OOB communication channel in a low power state of the computing device;
• receiving a request for storage device details from a host system executing on the host processor hardware;
• and
• reporting to the host system executing on the host processor hardware, in response to the request for storage device details, storage space of the nonvolatile storage excluding the portion of the nonvolatile storage reserved for the hidden partition, the reported storage space being different from an amount reported prior to the provisioning.

A computing device comprising:

• nonvolatile storage including a first nonvolatile memory device and a second nonvolatile memory device, the first nonvolatile memory device being a hard drive and the second nonvolatile memory device being a flash storage device;
• a processing unit to execute a host operating system (OS);
• and
• a hardware platform separate from the processing unit that executes the host OS that interfaces peripheral devices with the processing unit, the hardware platform including a hardware platform controller that manages interfacing with the peripheral devices, the hardware platform controller to:
• reserve a portion of storage on the computing device for the hidden partition in response to receiving a request from a remote console over a secure out-of-band (OOB) communication channel, the secure OOB communication channel being hidden from a host operating system, including the platform controller to:
• provision a first portion of the first nonvolatile storage device and a second portion of the second nonvolatile storage device to reserve the requested portion of nonvolatile storage for the hidden partition by setting one or more configuration parameters of the hardware platform controller to make the first portion of the first nonvolatile storage device and the second portion of the second nonvolatile device inaccessible to the host OS, including changing an amount of storage space available to the host OS, wherein the first nonvolatile storage device is a hard drive and the second nonvolatile storage device is a flash storage device;
• synchronize data for the hidden partition including synchronizing data stored in the first portion of the first nonvolatile memory device with data stored in the second portion of the second nonvolatile memory device;
• provide the remote console with secure remote access to the hidden partition via the secure OOB communication channel, including providing remote access including providing remote access to the hidden partition via the secure OOB communication channel in a low power state of the computing device;
• receive a request for storage device details from a host system executing on the host processor hardware;
• and
• report to the host system, in response to the request for storage device details, storage space of the nonvolatile storage excluding the portion of the nonvolatile storage reserved for the hidden partition, the reported storage space being different from an amount reported prior to the provisioning.