10 New HPE GreenLake Breakthroughs: What You Need To Know

The new architecture brings cloud services from all of the major HPE infrastructure groups from storage to networking to compute onto a single platform that can be consumed as a unified experience for partners and customers.

Bringing The “Amazon Experience” To HPE GreenLake

The groundbreaking new release of the HPE GreenLake platform bring an Amazon Web Services experience to the edge to cloud services platform with a single sign on, security and the ability to self service provision cloud services through GreenLake.HPE.com, said HPE Chief Technology Officer Fidelma Russo.

The new release represents a dramatic step forward in the architecture of the platform with compute, storage and networking services all available in a unified platform, said Russo.

“At the base of this platform architecture is the GreenLake cloud platform, think of that as like your Amazon experience where you go in, you have a single sign on, you have a single way to consume, you look at your subscriptions, you get your support and you can get all of those different pieces in GreenLake,” said Russo. “So once you enter into GreenLake you have the single experience with single identity that you bring with you no matter whether you are consuming compute, no matter whether you are consuming storage, ML (Machine Learning) Ops offerings or workload orchestration offerings.”

The new architecture brings cloud services from all of the major HPE infrastructure groups from storage to networking to compute onto a single platform that can be consumed as a unified experience for partners and customers, said Russo. “Basically this will make everything much, much easier to consume in as a service mode,” said Russo.

HPE is providing “security and compliance” for both the underlying GreenLake platform and the cloud services that sit on top of it, said Russo.

GreenLake, HPE.com also provides seamless integration to manage the complete hybrid estate from HPE GreenLake to all the three major public clouds: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

HPE’s advisory, managed services and financial services will be more tightly integrated into the platform over time, said Russo.

“With this announcement, we continue to expand our leadership in the hybrid, multicloud world with a winning combination and a winning proposal for our customers and our partners with GreenLake,” said Russo. “We have the broadest portfolio across the industry. We have one unified platform.”

A New Unified Experience Through GreenLake.HPE.com

GreenLake.HPE.com marks the emergence of a new “unified experience” where customers and partners have access to a single account view of their core cloud services with the ability to operate and use those services through a self serve commerce platform via GreenLake.HPE.com, said HPE CTO Russo.

“This wasn’t possible before,” said Russo. “It was a decentralized experience. Now all of our networking, storage, and compute workloads including HPC (high performance compute) are all available within the (unified) GreenLake cloud platform.”

The new single sign on GreenLake.HPE.com support different roles and personas from channel partners including MSPs, resellers and distributors to developers to system operators and admins.

The core cloud services platform through GreenLake.HPE.com provides the ability to manage all of your HPE GreenLake subscriptions. “It sounds very simple but going to single place called GreenLake.HPE.com to get all of your cloud services and manage all of your services is fundamental,” said Russo.

An Operate and Use platform opens the door for MSPs, systems administrators and IT managers to provision devices and manage subscriptions, said Russo.

With GreenLake.HPE.com, HPE is bringing commerce to the edge to cloud platform for the first time. “It’s an easy subscription, you can easily subscribe, you can easily expand and you can easily renew in a self service manner,” said Russo.

HPE GreenLake For Networking

The new HPE GreenLake release marks a new front in the networking battle with HPE rival Cisco with standardized HPE GreenLake Network as a Service (NaaS) offers now available with flex up and down options.

Up until now, Aruba has been offering bespoke NaaS offers rather than standardized NaaS offers, said said HPE Intelligent Edge Business Executive Vice President Phil Mottram. The HPE standardized offers provide subscriptions by metrics such as number of users or square footage of a campus or facility.

“The bigger opportunity here - and we are very partner led as an organization – is to generate some offers that are more kind of standardized and repeatable but more importantly can be sold through the partner channel,” he said.

Mottram said as far as he knows there is no other vendor that is offering a similar NaaS opportunity for partners. “I am not familiar with any other networking company similar to us with a partner friendly offer in the market today,” he said. “So I think we’ll probably be the first.”

The eight new HPE GreenLake enterprise NaaS offerings from Aruba are: Indoor Wireless as a Service; Outdoor wireless as a Service; Remote Wireless as a Service; Wired Access as a Service; Wired Aggregation as a Service; Wired Core as a Service; SD-Branch as a Service; and Aruba UXI (User Experience Insight which provides network application and performance management).

“What we have got here is an acceleration and a breakdown of a number of new services that allow a modularity and a speed for our customers and our channel partners to sell and get access to these services,” said HPE GreenLake Vice President of Marketing Flynn Maloy.

Cisco, for its part, is looking at putting its Cisco Plus networking as a service offering into the market in the second half of the year with large scale adoption expected in 2023.

Aruba is offering partners four primary channel models: a partner assessment and design model with standardized and modular service packs that can be configured by partners in three to five year subscription models; a fulfillment model that gives the partner the ability to sell the service but have Aruba fulfill it; a model for the customer to contract service levels with a partner and finally and a model where partners and Aruba team together with partners providing monthly billing and day one services for the customer.

The GreenLake NaaS integration with the rest of the GreenLake offers comes with HPE now leveraging Aruba Central as the foundation of the single unified GreenLake.HPE.com edge to cloud platform.

Adding Aruba Central to the GreenLake platform adds more than 120,000 customers to GreenLake, which previously had 1,350 customers. “That is a real testimony to the work the engineers have been doing within HPE,” said Russo.

HPE GreenLake For Block Storage

HPE has added what it is calling the industry’s first block storage as a service offering with a 100 percent data availability guaranteed on a cloud operational model.

The new GreenLake for Block Storage offering include self service provisioning that opens the door for partners, storage administrators or line of business executives to instantly self provision storage.

HPE calls the block storage service a storage game changer with instant quoting and ordering by selecting key workload SLA attributes such as business critical or mission critical, storage capacity and IOPs (I/O Operations Per Second).

The new block storage service provider five times better TCO (total cost of ownership) than any and all block storage offerings, said HPE GreenLake Vice President and General Manager of the Cloud Data Services Business Omer Asad. In fact, with data reduction capabilities, HPE is providing lower cost block storage than any public cloud provider, he said.

“We are the only vendor offering 100 percent availability guaranteed in a true cloud operational and management model,” said Asad.

Once a partner or customer places an order via GreenLake.HPE.com, a storage appliance is configured and shipped to customers who activate it via GreenLake.HPE.com as a SaaS (Software as a Service).

“The operational model, the procurement model, the management model is exactly the experience you would get from a hyperscalar (public cloud provider),” said Asad. “From that perspective it is the only offering in the market that is truly unique mission critical 100 percent availability guaranteed service which is attribute, rate-card based available to our customers through our partners now.”

The GreenLake block storage service provides customers the ability to afford an HPE Alletra mission critical block storage environment in a pay per use model with 100 percent availability guarantee that previously would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a capital expenditure model.

“Any customer can afford this now,” said Asad. “Any customer – whether they are in the midmarket, entry level enterprise or a big bank or financial institution can afford this. It is a mission critical block storage service for everyone.”

HPE Backup And Recovery Service For Hybrid Cloud

With its new HPE Backup and Recovery Service, HPE becomes the only storage vendor that has converted and an on premise offering and converted it to a 100 percent cloud based SaaS (software as a service) model, said Asad.

The new backup and recovery service allows partners or customers to order the service via GreenLake.HPE.com with three simple clicks, said Asad. “With three clicks you are into production, your backup administrator can go celebrate a birthday, go off to a party,” said Asad.

The backup and recovery service is available for VMware workloads on any storage that a customer is using, said Asad. “We out innovate everybody else when it comes to VMware technology from an ownership experience for the customer and a selling experience for our partners,” he said

The backup and recovery service combines rapid recovery on premises with cost effective long term retention via“immutable data copies” on AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud.

“Now customers can modernize, backup and protect their VMware workloads effortlessly and cost effectively across the hybrid cloud with just a few clicks,” said Maloy.

HPE GreenLake for High Performance Compute

HPE said it is adding enhancements to HPE GreenLake for High Performance Compute that includes lower entry level price points and a smaller configuration starting at 10 nodes to test workloads.

“That HPC offer is coming down market,” said HPE Worldwide Channel Chief George Hope. “ It is a huge opportunity for partners. We need the partners that get that space to come forward. We already have a very robust partner business there but we are trying to make it even easier.”

The GreenLake pay per use model puts high performance compute capabilities into the hands of enterprise accounts and high end commercial accounts for the first time, said Hope.

Additionally, HPE is integrating GPU capabilities with the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 System to accelerate data intensive projects using NVIDIA Tensor Core A100, A40 and A30 GPUs in increments of two,four or eight accelerators.

“It is not just about selling Crays to laboratories,” said Hope. “It is about Apollo 6500s with NVIDIA. It is about mapping out purpose built capabilities within HPC as a service so we can help customers speed time to insight.

HPE has also added HPE Slingshot, which it refers to as the world’s only high performance Ethernet fabric for HPC and AI solutions, and HPE Parallel File System Storage, a scalable high performance storage solution.

The new HPC GreenLake offering ultimately provides a “low entry point capability for more customers to take advantage of HPC to get their simulations, AI, data analytics in a hybrid way,” said Maloy. “We are really excited. We believe this is going to significantly accelerate the number of customers who can take advantage of high performance computing in the market.”

HPE GreenLake For Compute Ops Manager

HPE is officially releasing HPE Compute Ops Manager to access, monitor and manage servers via the HPE GreenLake.

“Compute Ops Manager allows customers to manage their entire compute environment,” said Maloy. “What this means is across edge, data center, and hybrid cloud all of the compute you can manage via a single console with an as a service experience.”

HPE is releasing HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Manager as a free trial for 90 days effective immediately with availability for purchase in June 2022.

Compute Ops Manager ensures partners no longer have to do updates “server by server, cage by cage, location by location,” said Maloy.”They no longer need disbursed teams managing their infrastructure. It is all centralized and unified across compute.”

The Compute Ops Manager opens the door for partners to update hundreds of servers across the complete hybrid estate with just a few clicks or even do firmware and software updates on servers with automatically applied policies, said Maloy.

The Compute Ops Manager provides instant availability to new services, features, fixes and even learnings from the installed base of HPE compute customers, said Maloy.

“As we go forward in time this will be start to ubiquitous across all our compute offerings and customers,” he said.

HPE GreenLake For Microsoft Azure Stack

With the release of GreenLake, HPE is now offering HPE GreenLake for Azure Stack HCI- a hyperconverged software defined system that supports the Azure stack.

“Azure Stack and Azure Portal lands on top of (GreenLake),” said Maloy. “This is consumed as you go in a GreenLake model with a single bill. As soon as you stand it up if you have chosen Azure as your public cloud provider with this offering it is all pay as you go, managed for you.”

HPE GreenLake For Microsoft Azure Stack HCI is not immediately available for channel partners. HPE said “channel enablement” is planned for a later date.

HPE Executive Vice President GreenLake Cloud Services Commercial Keith White said the Azure Stack HCI offering is a testament to the multicloud, hybrid prowess of HPE GreenLake.

“The world is hybrid, the world is multi-cloud,” said White. “Ensuring Azure and Azure Stack and GreenLake work really well together for our joint customers with Microsoft is so critical because they are all implementing hybrid solutions. That integrated system makes it super simple for our customers to implement and to take full advantage of the value that provides.”

HPE API Integration For MSPs And Distributors

The new GreenLake release provides tight API (application programming interface) integration for both MSP service offerings and cloud distributor marketplaces.

The tight API integration with the cloud marketplaces of the top four global distributors – TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, Arrow Electronics and ALSO Group- opens the GreenLake platform to more than 100,000 partners, said Hope. The cloud marketplace charge comes with a blockbuster new release of the GreenLake edge to cloud platform.

“We are expanding into those marketplaces with API (Applications Programming Interface) support so partners can config, quote, buy and invoice in those marketplaces,” said HPE Worldwide Channel Chief George Hope (pictured). “We are on the path to making that a better experience. That creates an opportunity for partners of all sizes and shapes to get that simplified experience. This is a great entry point for partners to GreenLake. You’ll see some enhancements to the GreenLake Quick Quote process with a couple hundred SKUs that will be available in the cloud marketplaces through distribution.”

Besides the cloud marketplace API integration, HPE is working hand in hand with partners to integrate their own services into GreenLake via APIs. That is another big differentiator between HPE, legacy infrastructure providers and even public cloud providers.

“This is all about the ability for partners to wrap their services around GreenLake,” said Hope. “They can build their services around GreenLake using APIs and building out their own services’ capabilities to drive GreenLake.”

An Expanded GreenLake Ecosystem Portfolio With 50 Plus Cloud Services

With the new release of HPE GreenLake, HPE is continuing to expand its broad ecosystem of cloud services and partnerships with ISVs like SAP.

“Almost 100 percent of these solutions have some sort of an ISV component,” said HPE Executive Vice President GreenLake Cloud Services Commercial Keith White. “The SAP implementation or the virtual desktop implementation or even a mainframe migration or analytics and machine learning all of those have partners. Our whole focus with them has been let’s get into a business model that provides a subscription or pay per use type scenario so our partners can provide these solutions with that holistic monthly payment charge versus those bigger pieces.”

White said HPE is working hard to ensure HPE partners are “incented to sell a whole solution” rather than a piece meal offer for customers.

“We want partners to be incented appropriately and to help them integrate those solutions together,” he said. “Everything has a partner component. So we are full steam ahead prioritizing the ISVs. We have a core set that has just been fantastic. And we are going to continue to move that forward. Some of those include what people might think of as competitors: Red Hat- Is that a competitor? No way. Veeam- Is that a competitor? No way. This is what the customer has chosen to implement for their solution.”

The new release of HPE for GreenLake comes with 900 partners now selling the edge to cloud platform with 115 percent channel sales growth in the most recent quarter. “The channel is seeing this as an opportunity to drive new business and new opportunities,” said White.