By HPE and OnX Canada
Any growing business inevitably has growing IT needs. But it can be almost impossible to know the precise computing requirements months and years in advance.
The result is overprovisioning, buying and storing IT resources to have at the ready, and tying up funds that could be better spent meeting current needs. The cloud introduces an ability to pay for resources like storage and compute only as needed but comes with its own set of issues around privacy, control, security and compliance for some organizations.
An emerging option is to use a platform that combines the flexibility of an on-demand cloud model with the control of on-premises infrastructure, such as HPE GreenLake. The solution is a consumption-based IT service, in which HPE provides hardware infrastructure on customer premises but retains title and charges on a pay-per-use basis.
One of the biggest challenges it overcomes is that of provisioning, explained Mike Hilton, president of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada, in a recent podcast hosted by Ron Nemecek, business alliance manager at OnX Canada.
“It’s always been a struggle for people with their financial model, from a budgeting perspective. They’ll buy four- or five-years worth of planned expansion,” Hilton said. This traditional approach to budgeting creates unnecessary capital costs but also added operating costs, as unused infrastructure must be powered, cooled and patched.
HPE GreenLake overcomes this challenge, having an impressive positive impact on budgets. “The ability to deploy what you need and grow into that capacity over time has massive cash flow benefits,” he added.
Hyperscale cloud and the move to net-zero IT
HPE GreenLake gives organizations the ability to apply a hyperscale cloud architecture to their on-premises data centers, mapping key workloads to a department or business unit for consumption-based billing.
“Many CIOs are trying to move to a net-zero IT model,” Hilton said. “This idea where 100 per cent of the IT operating costs is allocated to the end user. That’s where everybody wants to get to, and GreenLake gives us that ability.”
Having an operating model that mirrors hyperscale cloud but resides on-premises provides another benefit that Hilton says makes it unique in the market: allowing variable capacity both up and down. While the infrastructure can grow to be ready to meet current needs, if efficiencies are found and consumption drops so too can capacity, creating operating cost savings.
“This is where having an operating model that’s just like hyperscale cloud but on premise — where you don’t have latency, you don’t have integration issues with other systems, you don’t have egress charges, that ability to have that up-and-down flexibility — is key,” Hilton said.
Benefits beyond the financial
Of course, Hilton noted that companies don’t just move to the cloud for its financial benefits, but also for operating ones. With that in mind, HPE developed GreenLake Central, its console for managing GreenLake resources, which consolidates operating activities in a single dashboard.
GreenLake Central provides organizations with:
- consumption analytics, to analyse the metered data from workloads and right-size consumption around them;
- automated compliance, monitoring workloads to make sure compliance requirements are met; and
- capacity planning, to see trend lines and predict when the next incremental growth in infrastructure hardware is needed.
“So that you have capacity on-demand, it’s always there to meet your needs as you grow within the GreenLake environment,” Hilton added. “The other neat thing about GreenLake Central is it’s designed to integrate into your hyperscale cloud infrastructure, because we want to have cloud everywhere. We want to have a unified cloud experience.”
Armed with the intelligence provided through GreenLake Central, Hilton suggests the next step is to leverage a partner expert in public and hybrid cloud, workload migrations and governance to optimize their cloud ecosystem.
Want to learn more? Find out how OnX Canada and HPE are working together drive innovation and growth in IT through HPE GreenLake here.
