Back in 2019 HPE CEO Antonio Neri made a bold and public commitment at the company’s Discover event. By 2022, every element of the HPE portfolio would be available as-a-Service.
3 years on, as HPE hosted its first large-scale, in-person Discover event for over 2 years, it was very evident that this transformation is now complete.
Yes, unexpected curveballs during that time have slowed progress in some areas, but the whole outlook for HPE has now shifted. As Neri put it himself, HPE is now a completely new company. They are no longer just a hardware manufacturer, and everything at Discover was about HPE the services provider.
It’s a fairly drastic shift, but one that brings with it a number of exciting opportunities and developments.
Here’s a few of the main takeaways:
- HPE GreenLake takes centre stage
From humble beginnings as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service model, GreenLake has evolved to become the heart of HPE’s offering to make Neri’s promise a reality.
In simple terms, everything that HPE does today can be delivered as-a-Service and is available through GreenLake. That includes management platforms, network services, public cloud services, private cloud environments, managed services, and yes, even on-premises infrastructure, baked into a single consumption-based platform. As Neri summarised, it’s about ‘’one platform, one experience’’.
HPE has also evolved the GreenLake platform to create solutions that work not only for the biggest enterprise organisations, but smaller SMEs.
In his keynote address, Neri also highlighted a common question he is often asked by prospective customers. How do they work out the best place for a key workload to reside? Should this be in the cloud, or on-premises?
There was a simple response – those customers are asking the wrong question. They should be asking how they can achieve a public cloud-like experience regardless of where their apps or data live. This is exactly what HPE is looking to achieve with GreenLake. A single platform that helps deliver a truly public cloud-like experience across the entire stack from Edge-to-Cloud.
- A seamless Edge-to-Cloud experience
As highlighted above, HPE’s GreenLake is all about helping businesses achieve a public cloud experience everywhere. To further support this, HPE announced the launch of HPE Ezmeral’s GreenLake Data Fabric.
This new offering delivers a single point for the collation and analysis of data delivered by GreenLake across the entire Edge-to-Cloud infrastructure, including the 70+ cloud services accessible through the platform. Everything from the public cloud, to on-premises datacentres and edge devices can be managed in one place, allowing faster access to key data and insights company-wide that help to inform your understanding of performance, and guide future strategy,
- Major breakthrough in private cloud
Another significant announcement was the launch of HPE GreenLake Private Cloud for Enterprise, a new private cloud offering for enterprise organisations.
With Private Cloud for Enterprise, businesses can now enjoy the hyperscaler-like experience of public cloud with their own private cloud environment.
Available as a complete managed service, the burden of procuring, managing and refreshing the underlying infrastructure is removed, with businesses able to consume private cloud resource and spin up new services just as easily as they would do in the public cloud.
- New Arm-based server helps HPE embrace the cloud
As part of HPE’s new as-a-Service outlook, there was very little focus given over to the specifics of HPE’s hardware portfolio. Where in previous years Discover would have been a hotbed of new product releases and updates, the focus is now very much on services, with the underlying hardware taking less of the limelight.
That said, HPE still has a wide array of compute, network and storage hardware available for customers, and one release that did make the headlines was a new Arm-based ProLiant server. A 1U single socket server, The RL300 Gen11 includes up to 128 single-threaded Ampere Altra CPUs and is specifically targeted at digital enterprises and service providers.
This approach makes sense, with Arm-based instances in the cloud matching the performance of x86 cloud-native applications with lower cost and power requirements thrown in for good measure.
- Zero -trust architecture for GreenLake architecture
Security is never far from the top of mind for IT teams, and it’s certainly a major consideration for HPE. Originally announced at Discover 2020, Project Aurora was teed up as a zero-trust architecture model for HPE infrastructure from procurement to end of life.
At that time Aurora was still very much in development, but HPE has now confirmed that this will be integrated into the GreenLake platform, starting with the new Private Cloud for Enterprise offering.
Project Aurora delivers much more than infrastructure security. It creates a chain of trust across the entire stack, continuously verifying the integrity of hardware, firmware, operating systems, platforms and workloads.
Unlock the power for GreenLake
As a long-standing HPE partner, we’re perfectly placed to help you unlock the full potential of HPE GreenLake and HPE’s as-a-Service model for your business.
Whether you’re simply looking for an alternative route for the refresh of your on-premises infrastructure, or want to revolutionise your IT estate with a seamless cloud-like experience across your entire stack from a single platform, we’re here to support.
Get in touch with the team to discuss your requirements and learn more about the complete HPE portfolio.