Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced an expansion of its flagship cloud computing platform, GreenLake, rolling out a variety of new services and consolidating existing ones. The company’s stated goal is to modernize the developer experience by simplifying and democratizing service management.
The new GreenLake umbrella will offer 50 services, including a variety of lower-level foundations such as network optimization mixed with higher-level options including AI and machine learning tools. The offering also provides focused, product-centric options to empower users of platforms such as SAP HANA.
In the announcement, the company also emphasized its commitment to multicloud environments, so users can control on-premises servers, as well as those hosted in other colocation facilities or in competitor clouds such as Azure and AWS.
“In the hybrid cloud market, HPE GreenLake is unique in its simplicity, unification, depth of cloud services and partner network,” said Antonio Neri, HPE’s president and CEO “Today, we are furthering our differentiation, boldly setting HPE GreenLake even further apart as the ideal platform for customers to drive data-first modernization.”
Better, faster, more agile networks
Networking is a big focus of the GreenLake rollout. Eight of the new services handle networking chores to help customers build out better, faster and more agile networks. HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking, for example, enables companies to quickly scale up and knock down network bandwidth in response to shifts in demand. These network-as-a-service options can be managed directly or resold by channel partners.
Adding these Aruba users boosts the number of people in the GreenLake realm. HPE estimates that this convergence will bring in 120,000 Aruba users and more than two million devices generating more than two million API calls a day.
HPE GreenLake’s compute service option is newly-enhanced by HPE Slingshot, a networking fabric that the company states is the world’s only high-performance ethernet solution. Higher speeds enable more complex coordination between different machines working in parallel, an approach that is increasingly needed by some of the most complex AI applications.
The new services also include many increasingly commoditized tasks. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage, for instance, will compete with AWS’s S3 and lower-cost options like Backblaze or Wasabi. HPE wants to make inroads by encouraging self-service provisioning with a “100% data availability guarantee.” This level of assurance will be available to customers who want to pay for the “mission critical” tier. Those who opt for “business critical” will get “six nines availability” in the service-level agreement.
HPE is also adding more storage options. The backup and recovery service will store machine images and other data in case of any loss. Some of the backups are immutable, whichcan help businesses resist ransomware attacks.
“We have introduced faster ransomware recovery capabilities with Zerto, socustomers are able to recover in minutes at scale and to a state that is seconds prior to an attack.” explained Sandeep Singh, ice president of storage marketing.
High-performance computing aims a little lower
Compute services options will both broaden and expand. HPE GreenLake for High-Performance Computing will offer smaller minimum purchases, with 10 nodes as the entry point. There will also be new options for bigger, faster machine learning with GPUs including NVIDIA’s A100, A40 and A30 Tensor Core.
Another theme in HPE’s announcement is around self-service and democratization. HPE wants their streamlined interface to open up opportunities for users and offer them a simpler, more powerful collection of tools to controltheir cloud infrastructure. Database owners and other users, for instance, will be able to self-provision storage. The services are knitted together in a fabric of APIs that work together to simplify management chores.
“We work with many different colocation providers all around the world,” said Flynn Malloy, vice president of HPE GreenLake cloud services marketing. “ In order to land GreenLake deals in Asia, Europe and North America, whatt we’re trying to make it much more seamless, withone bill, one invoice and one system management process.”
This same theme reappears throughout the stack. The service for managing the configuration of various compute nodes brings automation options to simplify chores such as upgrading or revving software. HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management first appeared in 2021 and now offersa 90-day free trial.
Simplification is now a theme heard often throughout the cloud world. While cloud leader AWS offers a mind-boggling collection of services for computation and data storage through an interface with seemingly uncountable options, DigitalOcean, an independent cloud operator, touts its smaller operation with the tagline, “Simpler Cloud. Happier Devs. Better Results.”
The new vision for GreenLake is following the same path to product differentiation and customer satisfaction through harmonization and democratization, said Fidelma Russo, HPE’s chief technology officer.
“Going to a single place called GreenLake at hpe.com to get all of your cloud services and manage all of your services is fundamental.” she said. “You go into Greenlake, you have a single sign on, a single way to consume, you look at your subscriptions, you get your support and you can get all of those different pieces.” GreenLake, she added, offers a single experience and identity, no matter whether the user is consuming compute, storage, ML ops, or workload orchestration offerings.
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