The new capability is slated to be the first of several for the GreenLake platform that introduces broader management tools for customers.
Krista Satterthwaite, senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s Mainstream Compute business
Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE] has announced their next generation compute portfolio with the new HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers. They support 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors, 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max Cloud Native Processors. While the new ProLiants boast performance and security innovations, the real head-turner here is the availability of a new HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management subscription. This expands the scope of GreenLake services from infrastructure as-a-service, and hardware as-a-service to broader management tools, and is the first of what HPE says will be multiple such offerings.
“HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management subscription is the biggest new news,” said Krista Satterthwaite, senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s Mainstream Compute business. “However, we also have made strides with security and have new news there, as well as news around the performance gains.”
“This is different from what we have done with GreenLake in the past,” said John Carter, VP of Product, Compute Cloud Services. “GreenLake has been a different kind of offering in the past, focusing more on infrastructure as-a-service, and hardware as-a-service. We will be adding more offerings to bridge the gap between traditional IT and self management. Compute Ops management is one of those services. Traditional services like ILO will still be around, but Compute Ops lives in the cloud, and simplifies firmware and lifecycle types of management. While GreenLake in the past has been more of a custom data centre, this is a tool we host which you can use to manage your own environment.
John Carter, VP of Product, Compute Cloud Services
“We are evolving towards this model but lots of customers still want to consume the traditional way,” Carter said. “For them, this bridges the gap, and emphasizes that GreenLake is a spectrum of different kinds of customers.”
Still, HPE expects that the attractiveness of the ProLiant Gen 11 servers, of which the Compute Ops management is just one part, will motivate some customers to take a closer look at the GreenLake option.
“With a new generation like this, customers take the opportunity to look a little differently,” Satterthwaite said. “We expect customers to consume this generation of servers differently. Some customers who are really looking for these new features and performance might upgrade earlier as a result. We have customers waiting on this generation now who may refresh early.
“Environments are more distributed than ever before, and when you have servers in many locations, this will help you see everything no matter where it is,” she added. “It is great for customers with servers at the edge.”
HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management also includes carbon footprint reporting for customers. This lets them view emission metrics, from individual servers to full compute environments, to monitor energy usage.
“Demand for this is coming fast,” Carter said. “Economic savings and environmental sustainability are made more intense by government mandates and changes in the laws. A number of things are converging to make this a high demand feature.”
Performance has also increased significantly, from a combination of improved chip capabilities that all vendors will receive, and some technology innovation unique to HPE. Compared to the previous generation, the new HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers support twice as much I/O bandwidth, 50% more cores per CPU for improved workload consolidation, and 33% more high-performance GPU density per server to support AI and graphic-intensive workloads.
“This reflects our own innovation as well,” Satterthwaite said. “When you look across our portfolio we have really improved our accelerator support to meet increased demand there. These were choices HPE made because of what we had seen in the market.”
Satterthwaite also emphasized the importance of the security innovations in the HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers.
“We pioneered the HPE Silicon Root of Trust to protect firmware code against malware and ransomware with a digital footprint, and with this generation we extended protection to include cards that plug into the server,” she stated. “We have also extended the HPE Trusted Supply Chain, which was previously available in North America. Now it is available worldwide, and more servers are supported.”
These ProLiants also feature a new version of the HPE Integrated Lights-Out [iLO], iLO6. This remote server management software lets customers securely configure, monitor, and update HPE servers seamlessly. This version features new authentication using the Security Protocol and Data Model [SPDM], a key security capability in servers for authenticating and securely monitoring devices in an open standards-based approach.
All of this is big news for partners, Satterthwaite said.
“It has been a long time since a lot of customers had a performance boost like this,” she stated. “The RL300, [a cloud-native silicon ProLiant HPE announced in June, which is now available] opened up opportunities for partners to sell laser- focused solutions.”
