Since the launch of GreenLake in 2018 and the promise that its entire portfolio would be available as a service by next year, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has embarked on a sprint to strengthen the platform’s capabilities. This has only accelerated since Antonio Neri took over as CEO following the first announcements from GreenLake.
In May 2020, the company hired Keith White – a longtime Microsoft executive who had been instrumental in helping the company grow its Azure public cloud – to oversee the creation of a group of Cloud services based on GreenLake to give businesses a consistency similar to that of the cloud. experience regardless of their data location – in the cloud, in the data center or at the edge.
A month later, HPE unveiled a dozen new cloud services and launched Ezmeral, creating a home for its wide range of software in the GreenLake environment and a way to handle modern workloads such as orchestration and container management, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics and MLOps, which primarily uses machine learning for IT operations.
Since then, HPE has put its line of High Performance Computing (HPC) software and hardware into GreenLake’s orbit and quickly added an extended Storage-as-a-Service initiative that included technologies from its own portfolio as well as that of its network branch. , Aruba Networks. In June, Lighthouse, a cloud-native infrastructure platform to simplify the process for organizations to configure and run workload-optimized configurations, and Project Autora, a zero-trust architecture for the cloud.
“We actually made a pretty big and pretty big operating model change over the last couple of months where we took all the assets we had, which from GreenLake’s perspective were all software assets and all of these active services, which help us bring these clouds to our customers – whether in their data centers, whether [colocation facilities], whether it’s edge locations, all under one platform, ”said Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager of GreenLake Cloud Services at HPE, at a recent virtual press conference .
HPE has taken another step in this direction with the recent unveiling of yet another suite of services for GreenLake that includes the vendor’s expansion into the rapidly growing unified analytics and data protection software markets – and an edge-to-cloud adoption framework that includes automation tools and methodologies to make it easier for businesses to adopt a cloud experience across their environment, including the data center and edge.
The latest services help extend the services that organizations can get through GreenLake and help HP in what is becoming a highly competitive space as a service. Rivals like Dell Technologies (with Apex), Lenovo with TruScale, and Cisco Systems with Cisco Plus are all pushing to offer much if not all of their wallets as a service, as part of their longer transition from box vendors. to software vendors. And services.
That said, HPE is enjoying increasing success with GreenLake. Releasing its latest quarterly figures, the company said it had more than 1,200 customers and $ 5.2 billion in total contract value, and that its annualized revenue rate increased 33% year-on-year. . In addition, orders as a service increased 46%, with wins such as Woolworths Group – the largest retailer in Australia and New Zealand – and the US National Security Agency (NSA).
Unsurprisingly, data is at the heart of what HPE does with GreenLake.
“What we’re trying to do is provide customers with unmatched capabilities to power their digital transformation, modernization and increased monetization efforts for all of their applications and data, no matter where they live – in a data center, in a colo or on the outskirts, ”White, senior vice president and general manager of GreenLake, said at a virtual press conference. “They make a lot of decisions today and they have data strewn all over the place. To progress in their market, you really have to learn from their data. It requires modernizing their environments, running a modern data platform, and running analytics on top of that. For many of our customers, the data is actually outside the public cloud. Today, for many reasons, we hear about data latency, severity, and quite frankly, pretty expensive egress fees from public cloud providers. Helping our clients modernize and get the most out of their data – organize it, unify it, streamline it across all locations and then analyze it – is a huge opportunity.
The Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework is designed to help organizations accelerate their adoption of hybrid cloud strategies by moving to a more modern operating model. As shown below, the framework includes eight areas ranging from operations and innovation to DevOps, data and security. Each area has a number of sub-areas and the entire framework focuses on three key areas: organizational structure, business model, and data analysis.
Organizations can assess maturity levels in fields, benchmark themselves against their peers, and give businesses a common language to operate with. As part of this, HPE is adding new cloud-like services for the on-premises environment. This includes Ezmeral Unified Analytics, which includes a large-scale data lake platform optimized for Apache Spark that is deployed on-premises and reaches the cloud and the edge. HPE said the service will deliver 35% more profitability than the public cloud in long-running, data-intensive critical tasks.
The service provides businesses with a single platform to manage a range of data types, from files and tables to flows and objects.
Ezmeral Data Fabric object storage is a native Kubernetes object store for improving the performance of analytics workloads and providing access to data sets in the cloud and at the edge. It combines an S3 object store – it’s built with a native S3 API – files, streams, and databases into a single data platform and is available on bare metal infrastructure and Kubernetes deployments.
HPE is also embarking on a data protection as a service space that is expected to grow from $ 7.61 billion last year to nearly $ 19 billion by 2026, as the trend towards cloud services continues. intensify and the frequency and scale of cyber attacks, especially ransomware. – develop.
The backup and recovery service on GreenLake includes policy-based orchestration capabilities, backup automation, and virtual machine protection across the hybrid cloud. GreenLake for Disaster Recovery follows HPE’s $ 374 million acquisition of Zerto, a provider of cloud-based data protection and management technologies. The goal is to enable businesses to recover from a ransomware attack within minutes and without significantly impacting business operations.
HPE also ensures that Zerto’s software continues to be offered as a stand-alone service and available through GreenLake and Data Services Cloud Console.
The vendor also added its InfoSight AIOps software on GreenLake for Infrastructure with InfoSight App Insights, which is designed to detect anomalies in applications, recommend actions, and keep workloads running. CloudPhysics delivers insights from data to make smart IT decisions, from workload placement and infrastructure sizing to cost reduction.
