HPE kicked off its Discover event with a flurry of announcements around HPE GreenLake, including GreenLake Lighthouse, Project Aurora, Silicon-on-Demand, a new Compute Cloud Console – and eight new services.
It really won’t come as a surprise. HPE has been giving its HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform for providing consumption-based services point of pride around its edge strategy for several years now. But on Tuesday, as HPE Discover kicks off its 2021 event – hopefully the last one in a purely virtual format – GreenLake was central to the main news announcements the company made at the event. These included four new components within GreenLake: HPE GreenLake Lighthouse; Project Aurora, which is a futures at this stage, that will be product by the end of the calendar year; the extension, in partnership with Intel, of their consumption services to Silicon on-Demand; and the introduction, as part of GreenLake, of the Compute Cloud Console. In addition to the new solution sets, HPE also unveiled eight new sets of cloud services available through GreenLake, in partnership with third-party vendors.
“As HPE transforms to an edge to cloud company, we are becoming more focused on cloud services and software,” said Keith White, SVP and GM of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. “We have seen tremendous momentum in our as-a-service model, with 1200 enterprise customers, and a total of $4.8 billion Total Contract Value booked to date.” Over 900 HPE partners are now selling GreenLake globally.
The new solutions begin with HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, a secure, cloud-native platform within GreenLake that lets customers add new cloud services in just a few clicks in HPE GreenLake Central, and run them simultaneously in just minutes.
“HPE GreenLake Lighthouse provides secure cloud operations for the enterprise by letting customers transform and modernize workloads with a cloud operating model,” said Kumar Sreekanti, HPE’s CTO and Head of Software. “Lighthouse is a purpose-built cloud platform to run cloud native applications – from the edge to the data centre. It is modular and cloud-native and can expand elastically where required.”
Kumar stressed that customers have done all of this up to now through GreenLake, but that Lighthouse has been specifically designed to smoothen out the process.
“Lighthouse was designed and built from the bottom up to do this,” he said. “It is a unified platform that has everything from hardware to software to unified console, and is workload optimized. It has full lifecycle management, with everything under one roof, and lets customers deploy faster, run multiple workloads and scale better.”
HPE also unveiled Project Aurora, which will be a foundation for HPE GreenLake’s zero-trust architecture, and deliver a cloud-native, zero-trust security to HPE’s edge-to-cloud architecture
“Project Aurora brings cloud native security into the whole thing, providing a chain of trust from silicon to the workload,” Sreekanti said. “That’s the most important thing.”
Project Aurora will embed within the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, to automatically and continuously verify the integrity of the hardware, firmware, operating systems, platforms, and workloads, including security workloads. Its continuous attestation capabilities can be used to automatically detect advanced threats from silicon to cloud, in seconds compared to today’s average of 28 days.
The key here is that it WILL do this, by the end of the year if the company keeps to schedule. Today it’s still a concept.
“Project Aurora today isn’t a product,” Sreekanti indicated. “It’s Project Aurora, not Product Aurora.”
Sreekanti also acknowledged that Aurora’s zero trust capabilities will co-exist with other, separate, zero trust capabilities within HPE and its extended family, notably Aruba, Silver Peak and strategic partner Zscaler.
“Right now, we have multiple zero trusts, and customers will have multiple sets of policies to manage,” he said. “The plan is to integrate them in the future.”
HPE also announced that it is extending its consumption-based offerings down to the processor core and persistent memory level with Silicon on-Demand.
“This is delivered through our partnership with Intel,” White said, noting that it uses Intel’s Optane memory technology to do this. “It only turns cores on as they are required, so you can see dramatic savings for customers. This ability to optimize at the silicon level is really a game-changer.”
Finally, HPE announced it is introducing unified compute operations as a service with the Compute Cloud Console, which is also part of the GreenLake platform.
“Computing needs to increase in scale, especially at the edge, so we are introducing unified compute operations as a service with the Cloud Console,” White said. “It simplifies the infrastructure management experience no matter where workloads are running.”
The Cloud Console leverages the AI-based technology of HPE’s Aruba Central networking management console. It also builds on the Data Services Cloud Console, which HPE announced in the spring, and which provides a cloud native, software-defined solution for data storage through a unified cloud operating model.
HPE also announced eight new cloud services that, thanks to GreenLake Lighthouse, can be easily accessed from the GreenLake platform with just a click. Four of them are horizontally focused while four are vertically specific.
“We are making a number of both horizontal and vertical critical partnerships,” White said. “The horizontal ones are core workloads which customers run in virtual environments .”
HPE GreenLake for SAP is delivered either through SAP’s RISE Cloud Private Edition or directly to customers from HPE. This gives customers a choice in how they receive it, White said. Both provide the SAP software either on-prem, while gaining the benefits of the cloud experience, or in a secure, single tenant, pay as you go, agile and scalable solution, all managed by HPE and SAP.
HPE GreenLake for Machine Learning Operations is designed to enable data scientists to accelerate time to market by easily deploying models from pilot-to-production with a ML Ops solution delivered as a service.
“This empowers data science and IT Ops teams,” White noted.
HPE GreenLake for High Performance Computing is an on-premises, end-to-end solution that leverages the power of supercomputers in a pay per use model, to deploy HPC and AI applications, workloads and models.
“This is designed to bring HPC to a much broader range of customers than has been the case in the past, while providing them with a true cloud experience,” White noted.
The fourth horizontal solution, HPE GreenLake for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, lets customers choose predefined virtual desktop types in any combination they need.
“This one was created by demand to provide for people working at home,” White indicated, noting that they are working with Citrix and NVIDIA on the service.
HPE also announced four new vertically-focused services.
HPE GreenLake for Electronic Medical Records (EMR) partners with EMR market leader Epic to run the Epic solution as a service. It brings validated configurations, management services and cloud experience for flexibility and optimized for quality delivery.
HPE Greenlake for Core Payment Systems comes through a partnership with Lusis, providing their Tango implementation as a service. Customers benefit from complete payment solutions, pay per transaction, a platform that supports contactless payments, and easy to maintain compliance.
HPE GreenLake for Splunk, which also involves Intel as a strategic partner, is a risk analytics solution that makes it simple to collect, analyze, and act upon the data generated by an organization’s technology infrastructure, security systems, and business applications. It provides customers with visibility across their entire hybrid estate, with scalable risk analysis to track and analyze data in real-time. It also leverages the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform as a key part of this solution.
The fourth vertical solution is around telcos. By deploying the HPE 5G Core Stack with HPE GreenLake for 5G core, carriers get a purpose-built, open, cloud-native 5G core with minimal up-front investment. It uses HPE Telco Core Blueprints, and HPE 5G Core Stack software.
HPE also gave a shout-out to other recently announced services partnerships, with included ones with Nutanix, Veeam, Qumulo, and the latest, one with Microsoft, which was announced on Monday, just before the event began. The HPE GreenLake platform now includes support for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server.
“This is an integrated solution from a GreenLake standpoint,” White said. “We already had Azure stack hardware certified, but this brings it all together in GreenLake without all the complexity. It’s a powerful hybrid offering for the data centre.”
The Microsoft service will also go to market through Microsoft sellers and partners as well as HPE ones, White added.
White also commented on the expectation that the Veeam partnership will help drive GreenLake downmarket.
“GreenLake will come down to the SMB market through our partners with this Veeam partnership,” he said. “Today, it will be on the larger ones, but will go down to the lower part of the market over time.”
HPE Lighthouse is generally available now, including through HPE’s channel partners. Silicon on-Demand is also available now. All the new services are also now generally available.
Project Aurora will become available in HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, HPE GreenLake cloud services and HPE Ezmeral software platforms late this year. Silicon on-Demand is available now on the HPE GreenLake cloud platform. The Compute Cloud Console is available today by invitation only to customers in the United States on the HPE GreenLake cloud platform. It will be offered to customers in other regions later this year.
