Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) chief executive officer Antonio Neri dedicated virtual stage time to the company’s edge to cloud platform, GreenLake, during his Discover conference keynote this week, with a series of announcements further broadening its scope.
“This is about advancing our vision to offer everything as a service through an edge to cloud architecture, where GreenLake is the North Star of everything within the company,” he told media and analysts during a pre-conference briefing. “Market leadership for us is an open platform, which allows our customers to innovate on it, again on that data, and for our partners, which obviously is an important component of our ecosystem, to add their own services.”
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While the last decade had a cloud-first mandate, he noted, the next decade will be cloud everywhere. HPE’s goal is to create environments where data can thrive throughout its lifecycle. So far, more than 1,200 customers have signed on for GreenLake with a more than 95 per cent retention rate. Neri said Q2 GreenLake growth was 41 per cent. It’s offered by more than 900 go-to-market partners and is integrated into the top five global distributors’ online marketplaces.
The announcements detailed enhancements to the GreenLake software, services, and, unexpectedly, the hardware it runs on. HPE is offering a feature called Silicon on Demand, developed in partnership with Intel, which allows users to turn individual processor cores on and off as required, paying only for what they use.
“We haven’t seen that before,” said Dr. Sally Eaves, independent technology analyst and CEO of Aspirational Futures. “I love that consumption as a service is something that’s been growing anyway, but to take that to silicon level, that chip development, I think is huge.”
Partnerships
The partnership theme continued with the addition of Splunk Cloud Services for scalable risk analysis, powered by HPE Ezmeral software. Splunk is one more addition to a substantial partner list, including Nutanix and Microsoft who were added earlier this month.
The Microsoft partnership, announced the day before the conference began, provides the GreenLake cloud experience on-premises for customers of Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server. Both Microsoft and HPE partners will sell and support the solution, with HPE training its partners on the benefits of Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and the integrated offering, and Microsoft partners receiving similar training on GreenLake. Keith White, senior vice-president and general manager, HPE GreenLake, said during a media briefing that both companies’ sales forces will work together to provide the solutions to customers.
Lighthouse updates
GreenLake Lighthouse is a modular, flexible, API-driven cloud platform designed to run and manage cloud-native applications in any location, be it on-premises, at a colocation facility, or at the edge. It connects to GreenLake Central and GreenLake cloud operations to run workloads with centralized control.
In the future, HPE plans to add zero-trust security from silicon to the cloud to the Lighthouse mix, by way of what is now known as Project Aurora. Aurora is currently a work in progress, although some of its functionality is already included in Lighthouse according to Kumar Sreekanti, chief technology officer and head of software at HPE. It will first be embedded in HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, then by year-end will land in GreenLake cloud services and HPE Ezmeral software to automatically continuously verify the integrity of the hardware, firmware, operating systems, platforms, and workloads, including security workloads, as well as detecting advanced threats.
Industry services
In addition to the broader offerings, HPE has added a set of industry-specific services to GreenLake. For telcos, it offers a ready-to-deploy 5G capability as a service using HPE 5G Core Stack and HPE GreenLake for 5G core. To address the need to scale electronic medical records in healthcare, HPE has created GreenLake for Electronic Medical Records for Epic applications. For financial services, HPE has partnered with Lusis on HPE GreenLake for Core Payment Systems.
“(GreenLake) will be our leading product, our leading offer, our leading experience, where everything else underneath is part of that experience, whether it’s connectivity as a service, whether it is data services, whether it’s load optimization, whether it is AI, machine learning, all of that caters to that platform,” Neri said. “That’s why we call GreenLake the edge to cloud platform. That’s why we say HPE is the Edge to Cloud Platform as a Service Company.”