Getting Your Software App Delivered as-a-Service

The news in brief: New HPE GreenLake cloud services deliver an agile, lower cost, and consistent cloud experience everywhere.

We’re living in an as-a-service and edge-to-cloud world (to paraphrase the Material Girl). When Antonio Neri assumed leadership of the storied (at least part of the storied) Hewlett Packard, he grasped both that reality and that HPE had most of the tools to get there. A couple of acquisitions, a bolstered executive leadership team, and now the unveiling. There remain more work on the financial end for him, but I think HPE is positioned for growth in this arena.

Last year at Discover, HPE pushed the GreenLake idea on us. This year, it’s capabilities and possibilities are greatly expanded. And for my industrial / production readers–this applies as much to you as to Enterprise IT. It’s getting blurry at the Edge, apps like MES are moving to the cloud (actually, probably all have moved there), and the roles of Enterprise IT and Manufacturing IT are also blurring at the edges.

It’s a new world–and I don’t mean just post-Covid.

Following is from the release:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise today announced significant advancements to the company’s edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service strategy, through next-generation cloud services and an accelerated delivery experience for HPE GreenLake. The new HPE GreenLake cloud services, which span container management, machine learning operations, VMs, storage, compute, data protection, and networking, help customers transform and modernize their applications and data – the majority of which live on premises, in colocation facilities, and increasingly at the edge.

“Now more than ever, given current market conditions, organizations have an urgent need to connect and leverage all of their applications and data in order to transform their businesses, support their employees, and serve their customers,” said Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “As we enter the next phase of the cloud market, customers require an approach that enables them to innovate and modernize all of their applications and workloads, including those at the edge and on premises. By delivering a consistent cloud experience everywhere through HPE GreenLake cloud services, and software designed to accelerate transformation, HPE is uniquely positioned to help customers harness the full power of their information, wherever it resides.”

Today, organizations are at a crossroads in their digital transformation efforts. According to IDC, despite the growth and adoption of public clouds, 70 percent of applications remain outside of the public cloud. Due to several factors, including application entanglement, data gravity, security and compliance, and unpredictable costs, organizations have struggled to move the majority of the applications that run their businesses to public clouds. Forced to support two operating models, organizations face additional costs, complexity and inefficiency, limited agility and innovation, and the inability to capitalize on information everywhere.

HPE delivers a unique approach to solving this dilemma by providing HPE GreenLake cloud services to customers in the environment of their choice – from edge to cloud – with a consistent operating model and with visibility and governance across all enterprise applications and data.

HPE GreenLake cloud services also provides customers with a superior economic model. Unlike public cloud vendors, which charge customers to get data back on premises, HPE charges no data egress fees. HPE GreenLake’s flexible as-a-service model and robust cost and compliance analytics tools allow customers to preserve cash flow, control spend, and prioritize investments that are aligned to business priorities.

“HPE GreenLake gives us 100% uptime, and the predictable pricing model is already helping us cut costs,” said Ed Hildreth, Manager of IT Distributed Systems, Mohawk Valley Health System. “Thanks to the cloud-like experience, when we needed to quickly activate additional features and resources in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to easily roll this out with no time delay. We are extremely pleased with HPE GreenLake and plan to leverage this model once again for new hospitals within our health system.”

Introducing New HPE GreenLake Cloud Services for Distributed Environments

HPE now offers cloud services for containers, machine learning operations, virtual machines, storage, compute, data protection and networking. All cloud services are accessible via a self-service point-and-click catalogue on HPE GreenLake Central, a platform where customers can learn about, price, and request a trial on each cloud service; spin up instances and clusters in a few clicks; and manage their multi-cloud estate from one place. They can all be deployed and run in the customers’ environment.

Based on pre-integrated building blocks, the new HPE GreenLake cloud services are now available in small, medium, and large configurations, delivered to customers from order to run in as few as 14 days. Partners and customers benefit from pre-configured reference architectures and pricing to speed time to consuming cloud services.

HPE GreenLake is one of the fastest-growing businesses in HPE with over 4 billion USD in total contract value

  • Cloud services for Containers – These new HPE GreenLake cloud services, powered by HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, provide the flexibility to run containerized applications in data centers, colocation facilities, multiple public clouds, and at the edge.
  • Cloud services for Machine Learning Operations – Through HPE GreenLake, customers can subscribe to a workload-specific solution built on the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops for the entire ML lifecycle.
  • Cloud services for Virtual Machines, Storage, and Compute – For customers who want a private cloud experience, HPE is launching HPE GreenLake cloud services for virtual machines, storage and compute. With provisioning of instances in five clicks, these easy-to-deploy services also provide visibility into usage and spend, and active capacity planning with powerful consumption analytics in the HPE GreenLake Central management platform.
  • Cloud services for Data Protection – For customers looking to modernize data protection, HPE is making data backup and recovery effortless and automated for every SLA – from rapid recovery to long-term retention. These new cloud services through HPE GreenLake include secure and efficient on-premises backup and an enterprise cloud backup service, HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, which enables backup and recovery to/from the cloud without egress costs or lock-in, and with the agility to activate data for recovery, test/dev, and analytics.
  • Cloud services for the Intelligent Edge – Today, more than ever, customers are looking to reduce CapEx to simplify their budget process and better predict and manage network operational costs. Aruba’s new Managed Connectivity Services, now available as cloud services through HPE GreenLake, provide the industry’s first complete Network as a Service offering, and bring cloud agility to the edge with the recently introduced Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform).

HPE Emphasizing Software As Part of Pivot to As-a-Service Vision

HPE Discover Virtual Experience wrapped up last week, but I have much to think about and report. The HPE team did an excellent job pulling together a conference where we saw many different living rooms and home offices. Tough job; well done.

The release of a new software portfolio from HPE may sound more to the interest of enterprise architects, but I have already seen demos of where this also aids the coming together of OT and IT in order to bring the production side of an enterprise into more of a value to the enterprise. This is important toward the counteracting of recent enterprise history where production was a “black box” and corporate financial geniuses viewed it as something that could be moved around chasing low cost.

From the blog of Kumar Sreekanti, CTO and head of software at HPE, we learn about the coming together of Ezmeral—brand name for the software portfolio.

Digital transformation is being amplified by an order of magnitude. In fact, many business leaders that I’ve spoken with are now embracing a digital-first strategy—to compete and thrive in the midst of a global pandemic. And the enterprises that use data and artificial intelligence effectively are better equipped to evolve rapidly in this dynamic environment. Now these data-driven transformation initiatives are being accelerated to enable faster time-to-market, increased innovation, and greater responsiveness to the business and their customers.

As CTO and head of software at HPE, my focus is on delivering against our edge-to-cloud strategy and vision of providing everything as a service. Software is a very critical and important component of this strategy. It’s also essential to helping our customers succeed in their data-driven digital transformation journeys, now more than ever.

We’re committed to providing a differentiated portfolio of enterprise software to help modernize your applications, unlock insights from your data, and automate your operations—from edge to cloud. Today, we announced that we’ve unified our software portfolio with a new brand: HPE Ezmeral.

The HPE Ezmeral portfolio allows you to:

  • Run containers and Kubernetes at scale to modernize apps, from edge to cloud
  • Manage your apps, data, and ops – leveraging AI and analytics for faster time-to-insights
  • Ensure control for governance, compliance, and lower costs
  • Provide enterprise-grade security and authentication to reduce risk

Business innovation relies on applications and data. The apps and data running the enterprise now live everywhere—in data centers, in colocation centers, at the edge, and in the cloud. Most of the applications running businesses today are primarily non-cloud-native; and data is everywhere, with more and more data being generated at edge. Our customers are having real issues with non-cloud-native systems that will not or cannot move to the public cloud due to data gravity, latency, application dependency, and regulatory compliance reasons. Data has gravity, so our customers want to bring compute to the data not data to the compute. And because data is exploding, it’s driving the need for AI and machine learning at enterprise-scale—with the ability to harness and leverage petabytes of data.

Our customers want flexibility and openness; they want to eliminate lock-in. They want pay-per-use consumption in an as-a-service model. They want open solutions that give them the best of both worlds—with a modern cloud experience in any location, from edge to cloud. We address these needs by providing HPE GreenLake in the environment of your choice, with a consistent operating model, and with visibility and governance across all enterprise applications and data. Our software provides differentiated IP to deliver these cloud services through HPE GreenLake.

And in today’s news, we announced new cloud services from HPE GreenLake. This includes new HPE GreenLake cloud services for containers and machine learning operations—powered by our HPE Ezmeral Container Platform software to run containerized applications with open source Kubernetes, and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops software to operationalize the machine learning model lifecycle.

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