HPE Discover 2023: 10 New HPE GreenLake Services

Hewlett Packard Enterprise kicked off its HPE Discover 2023 conference with a slew of HPE GreenLake cloud service breakthroughs, including integration of the OpsRamp AI operations platform and HPE GreenLake Private Cloud Business Edition. Here are the 10 biggest HPE GreenLake Discover 2023 announcements.

HPE Steps Up Its Hybrid Cloud Game With New GreenLake Offers

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is stepping up its hybrid cloud game with new HPE GreenLake pay-per-use offerings and advancements, including integration of the OpsRamp multivendor AI operations platform.

HPE, which acquired OpsRamp in May, is now integrating it as a SaaS offering directly into HPE GreenLake with full-stack observability, said HPE CTO Fidelma Russo.

OpsRamp—considered one of the premier AI tools used by MSPs to automate IT services management—supports hybrid multi-cloud environments including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud along with heterogenous environments including Dell Technologies, Cisco Systems, NetApp and Pure Storage.

That AI operations multivendor and multi-cloud capability is designed to effectively reduce the cost of cloud management. The IT operations market is a $39 billion market opportunity, said HPE.

“We are now extending our observability capabilities not just from the HPE infrastructure, but across a multivendor, multi-cloud infrastructure, and also not just within the hardware and the systems management layers but all the way up to the application,” said Russo. “This is enabled by the OpsRamp acquisition.”

HPE GreenLake is also now leveraging the OpsRamp AI engine capability to notice potential problems and “provide remediation actions and advice for customers in a very timely manner,” said Russo. That will dramatically reduce “false alerts” and ensure customers get effective operational data.

OpsRamp will be delivered by HPE Services and MSPs and systems integrators that are already serving the OpsRamp customer base.

Russo called the new offers—including GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition—the “next step in the evolution” of GreenLake.

“We recognize that operating in a hybrid cloud environment is incredibly complex because you are dealing not with just your current IT assets on-premises,” said Russo. “You are also dealing with assets in the public cloud. You are dealing with assets potentially in colocation.”

HPE also continues to “solve the hybrid needs of customers” with “deepened partnerships” with AWS, VMware and Equinix, said Russo.

All of the new HPE GreenLake offerings are wrapped around a common set of services from edge to cloud to public cloud that range from identity to authentication and support, said Russo.

Those common services support GreenLake infrastructure like “secure connectivity through networking all the way through storage and data management offers that are on the platform,” said Russo.

HPE is wrapping its security and compliance offerings into GreenLake with advisory, managed services and financial services to fuel customer digital transformation, she said.

“We have increased our automation and standardization at the platform layer, we have delivered a number of customer-facing offers, we have expanded the ecosystem and we have enhanced the developer experience,” Russo said.

HPE GreenLake OpsRamp Integration

HPE is making its highly regarded OpsRamp AI operations management platform available as a SaaS offering that will be available through GreenLake starting in September.

“We have now integrated the the OpsRamp platform into the GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform,” said Russo. “We have also completed the first phase of integration with our sustainability dashboard.”

HPE is also making OpsRamp, which is continuing its MSP channel buildout, available with HPE Complete Care and HPE Managed Services.

OpsRamp provides a “vendor-neutral, cloud-neutral operating model for all our customers no matter where they are on their journey,” said Russo.

OpsRamp is continuing to drive its channel sales charge even as it integrates into GreenLake, said Varma Kunaparaju, co-founder of OpsRamp, an HPE company.

“The channel strategy will not change and will provide the platform [to partners],” said Kunaparaju. “HPE Services will completely augment the channel capability to address customer needs.”

Sridevi Rao, vice president of strategy and governance for HPE Services, stressed that it is not an “either/or” choice but a combination of HPE Services “and” partners.

“As we develop it very specifically for different industry verticals, the value realization and integration into the existing customer environment is where the services will play a big role,” she said. “So it will be very profitable on both sides.”

HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud Business Edition

HPE has launched a new easy-to-deploy SaaS version of its GreenLake private cloud, GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE), that dramatically accelerates the deployment of GreenLake private clouds.

PCBE—a click-to-deploy virtual machine private cloud service based on HPE’s popular disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure solution (dHCI)—is a “breakthrough for the partner community” anxious for an easy-to-deploy private cloud, said HPE Vice President of SaaS Infrastructure Services for HPE Storage Chris Schin.

HPE has, in fact, established a “service-level objective” of delivering the hardware that powers the private cloud service from click- to-order to customers within 12 business days, said Schin. “This is changing the traditional paradigm,” he said

The click-to-order-and-deploy PCBE is in sharp contrast to the fully managed GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, which is based on a statement of work that can take months of back and forth to finalize the terms and conditions. PCBE makes it easier for partners to quickly deliver a virtual machine private cloud with their own managed services with the full 17 percent up-front rebate that has become a staple of GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, said Schin.

GreenLake PCBE can be ordered as a consumption-based cloud service or in a pay-up-front capital expenditure model, said HPE.

Greenlake PCBE also provides the ability to self-manage virtual machines deployed in AWS. HPE plans to add Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud self-manage capilities to PCBE in the future.

GreenLake PCBE effectively reduces the complexity of virtual machine life-cycle management, said HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions Vice President Bryan Thompson. “That is 80 percent of the workloads most organizations are running,” he said. “So it’s definitely serving a sweet spot of capability.”

Thompson said the new offering effectively provides a “VM vending experience” that is decidedly different than HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise.

GreenLake PCBE opens the door to “smaller entry points’ in the private cloud market, said Thompson.“PCE is really targeted at our enterprise and commercial segments,” he said. “PCBE has a much lower entry point but can certainly scale up to serve very large environments as well.”

HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud Enterprise Now Supports Hybrid Multi-Cloud Provisioning and Management

HPE has extended the “full hybrid cloud, multi-cloud provisioning” to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, said Thompson.

“So now the same role-based access control, the same budget constraints that I put on my private cloud users, I can now extend that to where I can also provision and manage workflows in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud,” said Thompson.

That multi-cloud provisioning opens the door for partners to analyze consumption data with full multi-cloud budget visibility, said Thompson. That translates to “full budget visibility across both private and public cloud spend, showback and the type of reporting that goes with that,” said Thompson.

HPE is also now providing container support for HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise for Amazon EKS and Red Hat OpenShift .

“The same underlying Kubernetes you would run in the Amazon Web Services public cloud, you can now run that Kubernetes runtime here within your private cloud,” said Thompson. “We are extending that also with Red Hat OpenShift for organizations that have standardized on that technology and the tool chain around that.”

Another new capability is click-to-deploy ISV capabilities for the HPE GreenLake marketplace.

“We have extended capabilities both in breadth and scale of different ISV partners that we continue to work with, expanding the aperture of solutions available as well as now adding new functionalities and capabilities,” said Thompson. “For those solutions that have been so enabled, there is a full click-to-deploy experience so you can easily click trial versions or even full production versions [of software].”

New HPE GreenLake Offers For Aruba Network As A Service

HPE is expanding its Aruba Network as a Service offering with new data center switching offerings, said Russo.

The Aruba capabilities also include simplified service packs that reduce the time to implement Network as a Service.

Erik Krucker, CTO of Comport Technology Solutions, one of HPE’s top partners, said customers are embracing the expansion of the HPE Aruba portfolio into the core data center.

“I love what HPE’s vision is for the Aruba product and where they are going with it,” said Krucker. “Aruba started off at the campus level and they moved into the core now. The ease of use and implementation with the telemetry they have over the last several years has been great. This is exactly what our customers want. They have asked us for Aruba from the core to the edge.”

Comport has an Aruba health-care customer that has Aruba access points and is now moving to Aruba switches, said Krucker. “They love how easy it is to manage and they want to see all that telemetry come down into the core,” he said. “So they are moving little by little into the core with Aruba.”

An Expanded Equinix Partnership To Provide Preprovisioned Colocation GreenLake Services

HPE is expanding its partnership with global colocation data center provider Equinix to provide preprovisioned HPE GreenLake capacity starting at seven data centers globally.

Customers increasingly want an option for preprovisioned and predeployed and “ready to use,” said Russo.

“We have a new relationship with Equinix to have these HPE GreenLake private cloud solutions predeployed at Equinix with over seven locations available across the world, drastically reducing the time to value for a customer from deciding to go to a private cloud and gaining value because it is predeployed at Equinix,” said Russo.

The Equinix seven global locations for the predeployed and preprovisioned GreenLake services are San Jose, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; Toronto; London; Frankfurt; Syndey; and Singapore.

“As we see customer demand, the intent from both parties is to continue to expand that reach,” said Thompson.

Equinix—which has been providing HPE GreenLake Services for at least the last three years—was named an HPE GreenLake Momentum Partner of the Year in 2022.

HPE GreenLake Cloud Solutions Senior Vice President Vishal Lall in a prepared statement called Equinix’s new offering the “next evolution in accelerating customer hybrid cloud adoption.”

New AWS Hybrid Cloud Consulting Services And AWS GreenLake Integrations

HPE is stepping up its AWS capabilities, including new unified services aimed at easing HPE-AWS hybrid cloud deployments with consulting services and app development, modernization, migration and managed services.

HPE is also providing new offerings in the AWS Marketplace with HPE Nonstop development environment and HPE Fraud Risk Management.

Among the other HPE GreenLake-AWS partnerships are the ability to self-manage virtual machines deployed in AWS through HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition and container support for Amazon EKS for HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise.

HPE is also now providing backup capabilities for the Amazon RDS database through HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery.

A Deeper VMware Partnership With HPE GreenLake For VMware Cloud Foundation

HPE, which has a long-standing VMware partnership, has released a new HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation.

The VMware Cloud Foundation provides partners and customers with a reference architecture with standardized hardware building blocks.

Customers can now “manage the configuration and have full control over the VMware experience,” said Thompson.

“So we’re helping reduce the complexity of delivering the solution yet still giving that full control and capability to the customer to manage and operate that infrastructure as they see fit,” said Thompson.

The deeper VMware relationship comes just one month after HPE was named VMware partner of the year.

The stronger HPE-VMware relationship comes since VMware was spun out of Dell Technologies in November 2021. It also comes in the midst of the proposed acquisition of VMware by Broadcom for $61 billion. That deal was announced a year ago and still must be approved by regulators.

HPE GreenLake Machine Learning Development Environment

HPE is now providing its HPE Machine Learning Development Environment on HPE GreenLake for HPC.

That new GreenLake for HPC capability provides optimized AI infrastructure and software to accelerate AI training.

The high-performance compute machine learning development environment comes on the heels of what HPE has called a ‘Herculean’ makeover of its Ezmeral Software data fabric that transforms it into a much more powerful platform for AI- and ML- based workloads.

The HPE makeover, which was unveiled last month, was made to make HPE “more relevant” with AI and ML workloads with a focus on making it easier and more cost-effective to install, build and deploy AI and ML applications.

The makeover essentially takes what were four HPE Ezmeral product lines and collapses them into two products—the HPE Ezmeral Software data fabric and a new Unified Analytics product.

The makeover has made dramatically decreased the time it takes partners to install and administer the HPE Ezmeral software.

HPE GreenLake Multicloud, Multivendor Sustainability Dashboard

HPE is showcasing its new HPE GreenLake sustainability dashboard, which provides visibility, monitoring and management of IT energy consumption and carbon footprint.

“The sustainability dashboard is now in early access with a number of customers,” said Russo. “It is available on the platform and it is also multi-cloud and multivendor. That capability to look at assets, not just your HPE assets but also across your whole IT portfolio, is fed by the data which is derived from the OpsRamp acquisition.”

The new sustainability dashboard provides “visibility, insights and analytics to customers not just on how their infrastructure is operating but also a proactive view of what their energy profile is and advice around different actions they can potentially take to mitigate and minimize their energy profiles,” said Russo.

HPE GreenLake For Backup And Recovery Support For Amazon RDS and Microsoft SQL

HPE is stepping up its HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery footprint with support for AWS’ popular RDS database and Microsoft’s SQL database.

HPE has been steadily expanding its backup and recovery cloud services offerings since acquiring storage specialist Zerto two years ago.

The additional support for both AWS RDS and Microsoft SQL is another proof point of HPE’s multi-cloud and multivendor prowess, said Michael Maher, director of professional services at CPP Associates, Clinton, N.J., one of HPE’s top GreenLake partners.

“Customers want to be able to work with who they want to work with and when they want to work with them,” said Maher. “HPE is positioning themselves to be relevant with whatever the customer wants to do on a day-to-day basis. There is so much value in that for the end customer. They are demonstrating their customer commitment.”