Twelve new GreenLake services were introduced, eight of which are modular channel-friendly services from HPE Aruba, two of which are brand new GreenLake services, and the final two are upgrades of services announced last year.
Fidelma Russo, CTO at HPE
Today, HPE GreenLake, which has been the focus of HPE’s transformation and modernization efforts since CEO Antonio Neri committed HPE to offering everything in the company’s portfolio as a service by 2022, has been strengthened on a number of fronts. HPE announced that their Aruba Central platform has been converged with the GreenLake platform, providing additional benefits for those customers, and significantly increasing the number of users on GreenLake. A new, unified operational experience that provides a simplified view and access to all cloud services across the whole HPE portfolio on GreenLake was also introduced. So were twelve new GreenLake services. The company also announced that HPE GreenLake is now directly available in the cloud marketplaces and ecommerce platforms of Arrow Electronics, Ingram Micro and TDSYNNEX and Swiss-based ALSO Group.
Fidelma Russo, who left VMware where she was SVP and General Manager of its Cloud Services Business Unit last September, to join HPE as Chief Technology Officer several days later, kicked off a press conference on the announcements by highlighting the continuing growth of GreenLake.
“We just saw 136% growth in Q1 of 2022, and we have more than $6.5 billion in total contract value on GreenLake booked today,” Russo said. “We will have more than 120,000 customers on the platform with the addition of Aruba network customers. Over 900 partners now sell GreenLake. And over 86% of customers renew. With this announcement, we continue to expand our leadership in the multi-cloud world. We have the broadest portfolio across the industry, and we have one broad platform”
Russo also emphasized GreenLake’s new, unified operational experience that provides a simplified view and access to all cloud services across the HPE portfolio, with single sign-on access, security, compliance, elasticity, and data protection.
“Our edge to cloud architecture has pivoted in the last 12-18 months, bringing every service onto the platform, to provide the experience regardless of whether you are working in compute, storage, workload orchestration or anything else,” she said. “It will now be the same experience for all. It emphasizes a unified experience, with a single view and a single account structure. It can support upcoming events, all customized for you, based on your persona and role from your history. This was impossible before, because it was a decentralized experience.”
Twelve GreenLake services were announced, including eight that come from bringing Aruba completely onto the platform.
“Before Aruba was one big offering on GreenLake,” said Flynn Maloy, VP of Marketing for HPE GreenLake. “Now with modularity you can get access to eight specific services.” These are Indoor Wireless aaS, Outdoor Wireless aaS, Remote Wireless aaS, Wired Access aaS, Wired Aggregation aaS, Wired Core aaS, S Branch aaS and UXI aaS.
“These modules can be bought through the channel in a much faster way,” Maloy said. “It’s a big acceleration for the overall GreenLake Business.”
Maloy also announced two brand new services.
“HPE GreenLake for Block Storage is the industry’s first Block Service as-a-Service offering,” he said. “It offers self service agility to LOB and data admins, so they can provision without expertise. We believe this will be game changing.
HPE Greenlake for Compute Ops Management is also brand new.
“It is cloud-based server management, and an enhancement to the compute block on our platform,” Maloy stated. “You can manage all the compute on a single console, and can update hundreds of servers at a time using group tags and labels. It’s in a 90 day free eval right now.”
Several previously announced GreenLake services were announced as having had major upgrades. One is the expansion of data protection as a service with HPE Backup and Recovery Service, which hit GA in November last year.
“It has been improved and can now be protected in three clicks or less with no management,” Maloy said. “We are also advancing ransomware recovery with immutable data recoveries, through Zerto.” It can now also be supported in VMware virtualized environments.
HPE GreenLake for HPC Computing, which was also announced earlier, has been accelerated and enhanced. This includes expanded GPU capabilities that will integrate with the new addition of HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 system to accelerate compute and advance data-intensive projects using the NVIDIA A100, A40, and A30 Tensor Core GPUs in increments of 2-4-8 accelerators. The new service will feature the NVIDIA NVLink for a seamless, high-speed connection between GPUs to work together as a single robust accelerator.
“This GPU enhancement for NVIDIA was a big ask from the HPC community,” Maloy said. “We have also lowered the entry point, breaking machines into smaller chunks. This will enhance the number of customers who are interested because it allows pay as you go capability.”
“Over time supercomputing as-a-service will be available as a GreenLake service as well,” said Jose Colon, Senior Product Marketing Manager for HPC, AI and Labs, at HPE, who stressed that competitors are nowhere near being capable of this.
HPE also emphasized the expansion of their ecosystem, which has been a big part of HPE’s core strategy, especially since the focus shift to GreenLake.
“We have been connecting our biggest distis to HPE, and while there has been a manual element to it before, we are now automating that,” Maloy stated. The North American ones impacted are Arrow, Ingram Micro and TDSYNNEX.
“We are also launching a new version, 6.0 of our quickQuote tooling, with enhanced tools flexibility, pricing and portfolio options,” he added.
A new partnership was announced with another colo partner, Digital Realty, which has an extensive presence in the U.S.
