10 HPE GreenLake Game Changers From HPE Discover 2021

HPE unleashed a blizzard of on-premises cloud native services innovation at HPE Discover including Silicon On Demand, the HPE GreenLake Lighthouse platform for delivering multiple cloud services and the Project Aurora zero trust architecture for GreenLake.

HPE GreenLake – Nothing ‘Comparable’

See the latest coverage: HPE Discover 2022: News, Announcements And Analysis

With Hewlett Packard Enterprise picking up the pace of on-premises cloud services innovation with breakthroughs like Silicon On Demand, GreenLake Lighthouse and Project Aurora there is simply nothing comparable on the market to match GreenLake’s on-premises cloud prowess, said HPE GreenLake General Manager Keith White.

“I have yet to find anything that is comparable,” said White speaking about the on-premises cloud competition. “We are taking the best of everything across HPE and we are optimizing that (for on-premises pay-per-use cloud services).”

White said HPE is stepping up its on-premises cloud services leadership with the new innovation being unveiled at HPE Discover. “We are accelerating the industry forward,” he said. “We welcome the competition because we want customers to have choice. But just know that we have got our foot on the gas and we are continuing to accelerate well past everyone else!”

Among the innovation being announced at HPE Discover is Silicon On Demand, which provides the ability in partnership with Intel to instantly turn on or off processor cores. That is expected to yield dramatic cost savings for customers purchasing enterprise software on a core processor pricing model. “This is going to drastically and dramatically save them dollars because they are only going to have pay for those licenses when those cores are turned on versus the system itself,” said White. “There is no other options out there like that.”

GreenLake Lighthouse, White said, is a cloud-native solution that enables partners and customers to “rapidly deploy and leverage multiple” cloud services.“It really helps the channel in the sense that they don’t have to go through all of the configuration and orchestration that they do today (with on-premise cloud services),” he said. “We are basically creating workload optimized configurations for our customers. What it allows partners to do is to really focus on that customer challenge.”

Finally, Project Aurora establishes a new zero trust architecture for on-premises cloud services, said White. “This gives us from the silicon on up to the application deep security so that people can be assured that their workloads, their data, their applications, are all handled in a very, very secure way,” said White. “That is so critical in today’s world where we are dealing with cyber-threats.’

Here are 10 HPE GreenLake innovation game changers being unveiled at HPE Discover Virtual 2021.

Silicon On Demand – Driving Software Licensing Savings With On Demand Processor Cores

HPE said the new Silicon On Demand capability – which is available immediately - is providing customers and partners with the ability to instantly add or decrease processor cores to reduce enterprise software licensing costs.

The new GreenLake Silicon On Demand capability – developed in partnership with chip behemoth Intel- extends HPE’s pay-per-use model right down to the silicon level by leveraging Intel’s Optane technology to add or take away processor cores for maximum efficiency and cost savings.

“For a customer that is purchasing software on a per core basis – an Oracle license or a SQL license, this is going to drastically and dramatically save them dollars because they are only going to have pay for those licenses when those cores are turned on versus the system itself,”” said White. “There is no other options out there like that.”

HPE CEO Antonio Neri, for his part, said the silicon on demand capability effectively tackles the long standing problem of unused server utilization cycles.

“Intel is doing that just with us at least for now because they know we are a unique vendor that has a huge advantage in as a service with software and metering capabilities nobody else has in the market that allows us to measure at the core level,” he said. “Therefore in a true pay-per-use we can turn on and off cores.”

HPE GreenLake Lighthouse – Providing Multiple Cloud Services On Demand

HPE said the new GreenLake Lighthouse platform provides the ability to instantly deploy workload optimized multiple cloud services across any platform from edge to data center to colocation provider.

“It really helps the channel in the sense that they don’t have to go through all of the configuration and orchestration that they do today,” said White. “We are basically creating workload optimized configurations for our customers. What it allows partners to do is to really focus on that customer (business) challenge.”

Neri, for his part, said GreenLake Lighthouse powers a “massive distributed enterprise cloud” that lives everywhere. “We have always talked about the fact that for us cloud is not a destination it is an experience for all your apps and data,” he said. “But more and more we live in a distributed enterprise so if I need a cloud capability to run multiple workloads now you can do it with HPE GreenLake Lighthouse which is a true cloud-native solution. So from a click of a button in HPE GreenLake you can deploy a cloud solution and run multiple workloads. You get standard configurations – small, medium and large- and workload optimization happens on top of it.”

GreenLake Lighthouse – which is generally available now- effectively “removes a tremendous amount of configuration complexity,” said Neri. “We give the customer the fully deployed configuration right up front with one single click.”

HPE Project Aurora- Zero Trust Security For GreenLake

With Project Aurora, HPE is bringing a “revolutionary” end-to-end cloud-native, zero trust security architecture that ultimately ensures the complete HPE GreenLake edge to cloud services platform from the end user to the application to the operating system and the firmware and hardware is secure, said HPE CEO Antonio Neri.

“I think is revolutionary because it fortifies all your investments,” he said. “Without changing anything we actually make it more secure in a modern, open way.”

Project Aurora will be embedded in GreenLake Lighthouse and HPE GreenLake by the end of the year, said Neri. “So it comes with a platform and it comes with the solution you are deploying,” he said.

White, for his part, said a key differentiator with Aurora is its ability to provide continuous attestation to detect advanced threats. “It automatically detects advanced threats from the silicon to the cloud in seconds compared to what takes days today,” he said. I have even seen averages of a month. We are doing this in seconds now!”

Microsoft GreenLake Cloud Services Support For Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, Microsoft SQL Server

HPE is now providing GreenLake pay-per-use on-premises cloud services support for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server with a full integrated system set for release later this year.

White, a 16 year Microsoft cloud sales veteran who helped propel big Azure sales growth, said the new offering is targeted at the fast growing hyperconverged market. “We are seeing dramatic growth in the HCI space,” said White. “In fact people are expecting double digit growth there over the course of the next few years. To be able to offer an integrated solution to our customers with the cloud experience and to be able to leverage Azure Stack HCI and Azure in that hybrid offering is exactly what customers are looking for.”

The GreenLake support for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server is a testament to the power of HPE’s hybrid cloud model, said White. “Our customers are looking for a hybrid offering,” he said. “Frankly you have seen significant momentum in the public cloud space with Azure. They are catching up to AWS and in fact you are seeing a lot of enterprise customers really embrace multiple clouds. We see it happen in a lot of our customers where they are running Azure, AWS, Google and GreenLake across the board.”

White said the new offering is another sign of the strong HPE partnership with Microsoft. “We have been working with them for 25 years,” he said.

HPE Compute Cloud Console

With the new Compute Cloud Console – which is available by invitation only to customers in the US already on HPE GreenLake- HPE is providing a unified compute operations cloud console.

“As you deploy compute resources in a true edge to cloud we can provision that from a single click from the cloud (compute) control (console) which is HPE GreenLake and lifecycle manage it,” said Neri. “Obviously we meter the consumption at the core level and provide that level of consumption and management – truly edge to cloud for every aspect of your stack.”

White said the compute cloud console breaks the old paradigm of managing and monitoring compute assets. “As we all know computing needs have really increased and scaled. Servers and systems now span outside the data center into colos and most importantly at the edge. That makes things upper complex and task intensive.”

Essentially HPE is providing unified compute operations as a service with automated and unified tools through the console, said White. “It automates compute operations across an organization’s entire fleet,” he said. “So based on HPE GreenLake cloud platform the Compute Cloud Console simplifies the infrastructure management experience with a seamless as a service experience no matter where workloads are running from the edge all the way up to the cloud.”

The Compute Cloud Console also automates manual tasks such as provisioning and lifecycle management. “That will really speed up time to market and really eliminate a lot of the inconsistencies that can happen,” said White.

HPE GreenLake Veeam As a Service

Veeam, an SMB channel stalwart, is offering its popular backup and recovery offering as a GreenLake service.

The Veeam GreenLake service puts HPE GreenLake into the heart of the SMB market, said White.

“Veeam has 400,000 customers and a lot of those end up being SMB type scenarios,”” he said. “The great thing about GreenLake is we are able to bring that experience and that capability down to that SMB market through our channel and through our partners.”

In fact, White said he expects the GreenLake Veeam service to start with enterprises and then be brought down to a “much broader set of customers over time,” said White.

At its VeeamOn conference last month, Veeam introduced a wide range of technologies to be released later this year for protecting and managing data across on-premises and cloud environments, including new versions of Veeam Backup for Office 365, Amazon Web Services, and Red Hat.

Veeam’s Kasten Kubernetes technology is aimed at giving the company the high ground when it comes to containerized storage across on-premises and cloud environments. Veeam has said it is taking an application-centric, not a storage-centric, approach to Kubernetes.

GreenLake 5G Core For Telco

HPE said its new 5G Core for Telco GreenLake service – which is comprised of HPE telco blueprints and HPE 5G core software- enables telecom providers to move to a pay-per-use model.

The 5G Core offensive comes with HPE stepping up its 5G march under for new HPE Intelligent Edge President Phil Mottram.

Mottram, a seasoned 30 year telecommunications veteran who has worked at Vodafone, AT&T, Sprint, British Telecom, and Telstra, stepped into the new job with the departure of Aruba founder Keerti Melkote effective June 1. Also departing with Melkote were: Aruba Chief Technology Officer Partha Narasimhan and Chief Architect Pradeep Iyer.

Mottram, who was heading up the HPE communications group with 5,000 employees and $3.5 billion in sales, has called 2021 the year telcos will start deploying 5G services for business.

“5G is about far more than faster downloads and the real revenue opportunity for telcos will come in deploying innovative new enterprise services,” said Mottram in a blog post.

Telecoms operators and cloud providers see the “opportunity and are moving quickly to offer cloud services at the edge via the 5G network,” said Mottram.

Neri, for his part, has said HPE’s decision to integrate 5G into the Aruba control plane opens the door for partners to create private LTE networks.

“Today, we have billions of apps and data,” Neri told BoB conference virtual attendees last Fall. “Tomorrow we’re going to have trillions of things. And let’s not forget, every day we add 14 million new devices to the network. So we live in a hyperconnected world. But 5G will create a new set of experiences and new use cases.”

HPE GreenLake For Splunk

HPE GreenLake for Splunk provides the ability to do complex risk analytics in an as a service model with what HPE calls “scalable risk analysis to track and analyze data in real time.”

White, for his part, said HPE is seeing a lot of customers anxious to adopt risk analytics especially in the financial services market. Those financial customers are grappling with “petabytes of data” that is difficult to gain insights from without a platform like HPE GreenLake.

“We have partnered with Splunk and Intel to deliver a risk analytics platform that provides them with the speed and requirements that they need to do all of the analytics on that front,” he said.

Last month, Splunk announced that its cloud-based “data-to-everything Splunk Observability Cloud for IT and DevOps teams, was generally available. That announcement moved closer to its goal of transitioning to cloud-based products and a subscription sales model with annual recurring revenue.

Splunk also last month hired Shawn Bice, who was managing Amazon Web Services’ lineup of database products, to the newly created position of president of products and technology.

HPE GreenLake Solutions For Healthcare And Financial Services

HPE stepped up its vertical computing on-premises cloud charge with HPE GreenLake for Electronic Medical Records in partnership with healthcare software provider Epic.

HPE said the Epic partnership ensures validated configurations, management services and optimized delivery of the medical records software for healthcare providers. HPE said GreenLake is currently used by hundreds of healthcare networks, hospital systems and insurance companies.

On the financial services front, HPE introduced HPE GreenLake for Core Payment Systems in partnership with Lusis systems, which provides high transaction payments systems to four of the ten biggest banks in the world.

Lusis said the deal opens the door for the company to offer the high transaction payment system as a service.

“There are a number of industry verticals that really do manifest themselves in much more of an on-premise scenario,” said White. “They require security. They require much more control. They are concerned with latency with respect to data…Look at the healthcare industry, financial services, government, automotive, and manufacturing seem to play pretty well.”

General Availability of HPE GreenLake For SAP, HPC, ML Ops, and VDI

The general availability of HPE GreenLake for SAP, HPC (high performance computing) ML (Machine Learning) Ops and VDI is a sign of the tremendous progress HPE has made in bringing workload optimized on-premise cloud services to the market, said White.

“We are so excited about what we get to deliver to our customers,” said White. “This is a huge Discover for us! Two years ago Antonio made his promise (to deliver the complete HPE portfolio as a service by 2022). Last year, we started to introduce a couple of cloud services. We talked about virtual machines and ML Ops and that we would be delivering those. But this year we have delivered (cloud services) and we are continuing to innovate and keep our foot on the gas with respect to that acceleration.”

The HPE GreenLake applications as a service blitz, said White, shows that HPE has made on-premise cloud services a force to be reckoned with in the intensely competitive cloud market. Cloud services on-prem was never discussed by customers until HPE made it a “reality” with GreenLake, said White.

“Now we have got these sets of workloads and industry solutions to really help customers move their digital transformation and their modernization efforts forward,” said White. “It is really exciting!”

White said key to HPE’s GreenLake success is a focus on the partner ecosystem. “It is really about the ecosystem,” he said. “This isn’t about one company delivering capabilities. This is about the power of that ecosystem. You have ISVs. You have Managed Service Providers. You have Colos. The Colos become very critical here. You have the systems integrators that are building these solutions for our customers. You have to embrace the ecosystem.”

Ultimately that ability to build a broad ecosystem is key to GreenLake success, said White. “It is we - not a me,” he said. “It is a cosell through and with the ecosystem. That is exciting because that is where it is fun because now you are getting all these smart brains and all these like superpowers from each of the components that are getting together and that is your Justice League. That is exciting to see!”