The continued, significant expansion of GreenLake, first launched four years ago, underscores HPE’s vision for the platform, which CEO Antonio Neri laid out to reporters this week. It’s far more than a payment model, he said. “GreenLake is an experience,” Neri said, “which basically delivers the entire solution to you that you can consume as a service. It’s the full, optimized solution for whatever outcome you’re trying to achieve.” At the end of the day, he said, “GreenLake should be synonymous with HPE.” The new GreenLake innovations include:
Lighthouse, a cloud-native workload configuration platform designed for quickly launching multiple cloud services at once. Project Aurora, the start of a new zero-trust security architecture for GreenLake. Silicon on demand, a first-of-its-kind service developed in partnership with Intel that lets customers add processor core capacity as needed. A new Compute Cloud Console.New cloud services for 5G, electronic medical records, financial services and other areas.
The overarching goal is to enable customers to modernize their workloads with a cloud operating model while securing and optimizing applications – regardless of the location of their data. The value of the cloud, Neri said, is the speed and agility it offers. “In order to be relevant, you have to offer a cloud experience wherever that application lives,” he said. In its “natural habitat. We see more and more of that moving to the edge.” While cloud providers are also moving to the edge, the CEO contended that HPE is “already there” and “can provide the same experience and in many cases at a lower cost.” GreenLake now has more than 1,200 customers representing $4.8 billion in total contract value and a 95% customer renewal rate, HPE said. It’s actively sold by over 900 partners worldwide. In his HPE Discover keynote address on Tuesday, Neri said that we are moving from the information era – when businesses were data-rich but insight-poor – to the “age of insight.” In this era, it’s no longer a question of whether there’s value in one’s data. Instead, the question is how quickly one can extract that data. “Those who can act fastest can win,” he said. “Data is now our most valuable asset [that] will one day show up as an asset on your balance sheet.” More on the GreenLake innovations: Lighthouse allows customers to add services with a few clicks in HPE GreenLake Central and run them simultaneously in just minutes. Customers can use it to run a variety of cloud services in any location, including a data center, colo or at the edge. Built on HPE Ezmeral software, it autonomously optimizes services and workloads by composing resources to deliver the best performance, lowest cost or a balance of both, depending on business priorities. Lighthouse is generally available now within GreenLake cloud services globally and available through HPE’s channel partners. The new silicon on-demand service provides a pay-per-use, consumption-based pricing model for capacity at a processor core and persistent memory level using Intel Optane technology. Allowing customers to add more capacity this way eliminates the need to order or install new processors. Meanwhile, HPE plans on embedding zero-trust security into the GreenLake platform via Project Aurora. With Project Aurora, HPE can attest that everything in your environment is secure, including the user, application, operating system, firmware and hardware. It takes HPE’s silicon root of trust technology. It builds on that with integrations of two open source technologies, the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE). Last year, HPE acquired Scytale, a startup specializing in zero-trust networking and cloud-native security whose team included the founding contributors to the open-source projects. Project Aurora will become available in GreenLake Lighthouse, GreenLake cloud services and HPE Ezmeral software platforms later this year. Building out GreenLake even further, HPE is adding a Compute Cloud Console for unified compute operations as a service. It automates compute operations across an organization’s entire fleet to simplify infrastructure management. The Compute Cloud Console follows the recently-announced Data Services Cloud Console, which provides a cloud-native, software-defined solution for data storage. HPE is introducing support for applications across industries, including healthcare, financial services, and telecommunications, as far as cloud services go. They’re available as cloud services on-premises, at the edge or in colocation centers. In healthcare, HPE is rolling out GreenLake for Electronic Medical Records (EMR) for Epic applications. The service offers validated configurations, management services and cloud experience for flexibility. In financial services, HPE is partnering with Lusis to offer GreenLake for Core Payment Systems. The platform supports contactless payments and aims to make it easy to maintain compliance. For telcos, HPE is deploying GreenLake for 5G cloud services. Carriers get a purpose-built, open platform for 5G with minimal up-front investment. It scales according to demand, and customers can pay per subscriber. HPE also announced GreenLake for Splunk for scalable risk analysis. The service makes it easy to collect, analyze, and act upon data generated by an organization’s technology infrastructure, security systems, and business applications. Lastly, there’s the new GreenLake for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server, allowing customers to consolidate virtualized Windows and Linux workloads for efficiency and run production workloads using a familiar, hybrid environment.
