HPE has expanded its public cloud-like GreenLake subscription offering under a Private Cloud Enterprise banner with eight new services: backup and recovery, block storage, compute operations management, data fabric, disaster recovery, hyperconverged infrastructure, and industry-vertical cloud services for customer engagement and payments.
HPE’s transition from an on-premises supplier of hardware and software to a private and public cloud services supplier is being driven hard by CEO Antonio Neri, who characterizes GreenLake as the “cloud that comes to you.” The company said back in March that it was adding block storage services to GreenLake along with backup and recovery, and here we are three months later with the formal announcement.
It comes from HPE’s Discover event in Las Vegas, where Neri said: “Three years ago at HPE Discover, HPE committed to delivering our entire portfolio as a service by 2022. Today, I am proud to say that not only have we delivered on that commitment, we have become a new company. HPE GreenLake has emerged as the go-to destination for hybrid cloud, and our industry-leading catalog of cloud services enables organizations to drive data-first modernization for all their workloads, across edge to cloud.”
As of today GreenLake has 65,000 customers worldwide and over one exabyte of data under management. HPE reported Annualized Revenue Run-Rate (ARR) of $829 million in its second 2022 quarter and triple-digit as-a-service orders growth for the third consecutive quarter.
With GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, customers choose service types, consumption amounts, and service levels. It includes modular infrastructure and software, and supports the deployment of bare metal, virtual machines, and container workloads.
HPE delivers, installs, maintains, and updates the hardware and software involved, whether on-premises or in a colocation center. Customers select, manage, and modify their GreenLake services online through a central cloud-based console.
The Backup and Recovery Service protects Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes. Customers can protect their VMs, deployed on any HPE or non-HPE storage technology, in three steps and in less than five minutes according to HPE. It is not based on HPE’s Zerto technology. The service automatically retains local snapshots for instant data restores, performs local on-premises backups for rapid data recovery, and utilizes cloud backups for cost-effective, long-term data retention. The service includes data immutability for increased protection on-premises and on AWS.
We envisage this will likely spread to include the Azure and GCP clouds over time, as well as cloud-native workloads.
GreenLake for Block Storage is, HPE says, the industry’s first storage-as-a-service that offers self-service and a 100 percent availability guarantee built in for mission-critical environments. It includes general-purpose, mission-critical, and business-critical tiers. The mission-critical tier is based on Alletra 9000 (Primera) hardware and software, and the business-critical tier uses Alletra 6000 (Nimble).
The mission-critical service is suitable for large-scale virtual, database, container, and consolidation environments including SAP HANA, Spark, Splunk, and Oracle workloads. The business-critical service has 99.9999 percent availability and typical use cases include medium-sized virtual and container environments, data warehousing, SQL, and test/dev.
The customer selects their desired outcome – SLA, performance, capacity, and term – with an AI-managed, self-service experience. HPE says it delivers these outcomes through the period of the contract by matching the best suited back-end storage array. No customer storage expertise is required.
HPE provides file and object storage services through GreenLake via partnership deals with Qumulo and Scality respectively. Cohesity’s data management services are also available through GreenLake.
GreenLake for Compute Ops Management provides a cloud experience that simplifies and automates compute lifecycle management.
GreenLake for Data Fabric is a managed service that contains an analytic-ready data fabric and single data store for hybrid environments. It is powered by HPE’s Ezmeral Data Fabric, which unifies files, objects, NoSQL databases, and real-time and batch streams across distributed locations. By unifying and preparing data for processing, data integrity increases because errors and duplicate files are removed. It provides a global namespace that connects distributed data across the enterprise.
GreenLake for Disaster Recovery is based on HPE’s acquired Zerto technology and has, HPE says, unlimited scale. Customers can recover from ransomware, IT outages or natural disasters, with recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) in minutes, to a state seconds before the disruption.
The HCI offering is based on HPE’s Nimble/Alletra 6000 dHCI (disaggregated HCI) product.
GreenLake for Payments provides an end-to-end, pay-per-use payments service, combining the payments experience of Lusis TANGO and the distributed-transaction processing of HPE Nonstop for payments.
HPE says it is working on a collaboration with financial technology provider FIS, and its Ethos offering, to provide a real-time customer data platform that delivers intelligent engagement analytics. It claims that the insights from GreenLake with FIS Ethos will enable businesses to deliver personalized data-driven customer engagement that can increase customer loyalty and overall profitability.
HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise will be generally available in September this year. Read a Block Storage Service solution document and an HPE Storage as a Service buyers guide for more information. There is also a GreenLake for DR solution doc available and you can download a GreenLake Data Fabric doc here.
