New HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud To Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Adoption: Partners

A new version of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake for Private Cloud is going to drive more rapid adoption of the edge to data center to cloud pay-per-use platform, HPE channel partners tell CRN.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Wednesday expanded its HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud Enterprise with new capabilities around Amazon Web Services EKS Anywhere Kubernetes service and new cloud instances as part of a move to make its platform the centerpiece of businesses’ hybrid cloud deployments.

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is the company’s platform for providing enterprises a private cloud with a public cloud experience for those applications that either businesses prefer not run in a public cloud or which cannot be migrated to a public cloud.

New to HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is integration with AWS EKS Anywhere Kubernetes service, with a similar integration using Red Hat OpenShift to come shortly followed by integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

[Related: [HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud Packs New AWS Kubernetes Punch]

HPE also introduced six new optimized instances for general compute, memory, and storage; improved usage and cost analytics of applications for hyperscale public clouds, and a new HPE Ezmeral Kubernetes early access program.

The new additions are a way that HPE channel partners said could dramatically ease the deployment of hybrid cloud while significantly reducing costs.

Enterprises are dealing with multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud, and edge-to-cloud, said Dan Molina, co-president of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and major HPE GreenLake provider.

“The reality is that at the end of the day, what customers care about is where their workloads are going to run the best,” Molina told CRN. “And that‘s where you look at, is it going to be efficient? Is it going to give you the performance you need? Is it going to help contain cost? Is it going to be available? What about security, all those kinds of things? Where’s the best location for that workload to run?”

Businesses can start with HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud Enterprise, Molina said.

“And now with all these additions, now you have basically a window to go elsewhere, if it makes sense for those workloads.”

HPE in 2022 officially declared HPE GreenLake a “platform” for helping businesses better manage their modern applications, and adding things like AWS EKS Anywhere Kubernetes

Businesses have been driving towards public cloud adoptions, and there is a lot of data showing that some organizations and applications work well in public clouds while others don’t, Molina said.

“Applications may not fit perfectly when customers migrate them over to hyperscalars with a different hypervisor and things of that nature,” he said. “Refactoring applications is a ton of work. And also moving applications out of beta is a major project for a lot of organizations going into hyperscalar clouds. It works worked for some, but not for every one.”

HPE is now providing an easy option to keep applications the way they are regardless of where they are, Molina said.

“But it will give you a modern, more advanced, more efficient infrastructure to make those applications run faster and provide better SLAs without having to invest tons of time,” he said. “[And] at the same time, HPE and a solution provider like us realize that we got to continue to help with innovation. And that means modern applications. And most organizations are now developing with Kubernetes containers, a great, excellent architecture to scale for portability.”

HPE is “lapping competitors” with the release of the new HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, said Michael Maher, director of professional services for Clinton, N.J.-based CPP Associates, one of HPE’s top enterprise partners.

“HPE is skating to where the puck is going, not where it has been,” Maher told CRN. “HPE has recognized and internalized the customer needs around flexible, elastic compute and storage infrastructure. They are providing a solution that will solve for most any modern IT problem customers are facing in the hybrid cloud world we live in.”

The integration of HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise with AWS EKS Anywhere Kubernetes service is yet another example of HPE’s hybrid cloud prowess, Maher said.

“That kind of AWS integration only proves the point that HPE knows where the industry is going and is leading the way as the single most valuable on-premises integration point between public and private cloud providers,” he said.

Maher said he expects the new version of HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise to drive more rapid adoption of the private cloud platform.

“HPE is taking an already mature platform and broadening the appeal outside of traditional swim lanes,” he said. “I think this is going to accelerate adoption of HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise in 2023.”

Customers are clamoring for ways to get value of their data, especially with the advent of public clouds which have created more independent data silos than ever in hybrid environments stretching across on-premises, public and private clouds, and the edge, said Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake cloud services solutions.

“So all of a sudden, they have more data fragmentation than they had in the past, and getting access to the value from the data is getting to be more and more critical,” Lall said late last week at a press pre-briefing.

Leveraging that data is getting more and more difficult, Lall said. “They have a need to look at the data, analyze the data, make sense of the data, across the silos I spoke about, but even more, leverage the data to predict the future using machine learning and AI-type tools,” he said.

Half of enterprises’ data is now getting produced outside the data center, Lall said. For instance, he said, 50 billion IoT devices are expected to get connected this year.

“[This] is driving the way companies are thinking about digital transformation and going down their strategies,” he said. “And one of the things that they‘re learning is that the approach that they had around public cloud-first isn’t really working very well, especially as more and more data is getting produced at the edge.”

HPE GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise, along with the new changes unveiled Wednesday, is addressing the need to find the right environment for workloads and data in the hybrid cloud.

“We are expanding our Kubernetes deployment options, from a customer perspective. We‘ve always had an open source version of it. We’ve also always had our own version, which is called HP Ezmeral. But now we are also enabling Amazon EKS Anywhere to that environment, and then adding infrastructure-as-a-code and cloud-native tool chains.”

With the additions to HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, HPE is ready to help businesses modernize their application infrastructure to run applications wherever is best for them, said Bryan Thompson, vice president of product management for GreenLake cloud services solutions.

“Many enterprises have kind of picked their horse,” Thompson told CRN. “They use OpenShift, they use EKS, they use Rancher. So where we want to take (GreenLake) PCE (private cloud enterprise), with EKS Anywhere being the first example, is allow us to deliver that cloud experience but allow you to choose what you want that underlying runtime component to be, in this case for Kubernetes.”

HPE has also added new analytics capabilities to measure AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud consumption, chargeback, or showback alongside HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, providing a single pane of glass multi-cloud view across HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and public clouds, Thompson said.

“How do I choose where certain workloads should run,” he said. “It may be more cost effective in a private cloud. Or vice versa, if this is a really bursty workload, you should be using that in public cloud and shutting it down as you need to. This really provides that foundation of one view, one single pane of glass, spanning both private and public cloud form factors now,” he said.

This lays the foundation for MSPs looking to provide everything as a service, Thompson said.

“As an MSP partner, you can now be more informed to help customers with things like workload placement decisions, cost optimization, looking at consumption of what may be idle resources [to see if a customer is] burning that meter when they don‘t need to be,” he said.