If it wasn’t clear before, it’s definitely clear now; businesses need to able to be agile in the face of change. HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) wants to help businesses achieve this agility with HPE GreenLake, its infrastructure-as-a-service offering for customers’ workloads—on premises, fully managed in a pay-per-use model at the edge, in colocations, and in customers’ data centers.
“Customers are accelerating the digital transformation,” says Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “They need to be more data first in everything they do, and GreenLake is there as the platform that brings capabilities across edge to cloud in a data-first approach.”
The edge-to-cloud platform helps businesses accelerate digital transformation, rapidly deploy services, and simplify operations for a monthly fee. This week, HPE announced some important GreenLake updates, including a dozen new cloud services—and they are divided into three major areas including the NAS (network as a service), local storage, and HPC (high performance computing), according to Neri. “Cloud for us is not a destination, it is an experience,” he says.
In a preview press call last week, Fidelma Russo, HPE’s CTO, said the company has seen incredible momentum with GreenLake, and HPE is proud of its 96% retention rate of GreenLake customers. To keep this momentum going and maintain its customer-retention rate, HPE is pivoting the architecture of the platform and significantly increasing the number of services available on the platform. HPE is also expanding its ecosystem. Notably, HPE announced it is replacing the formerly decentralized user experience with a much more unified one. Customers will be able to go to this website and, using the new, single account structure, view all of their services available within the platform in one place. The new experience is customizable and—as Russo describes it—“Amazon-like” in its simplicity and usability.
Of course, customers come to HPE GreenLake mainly for the services that sit on top of its platform, and the company has announced 12 new cloud services, bringing the total number of available services above 50. The new services span networking, storage, and compute. For instance, HPE GreenLake for block storage offers self-provisioning without the need for domain expertise, including instant quoting and ordering. Alongside this new service announcement, HPE is now offering 100% availability guarantee for mission-critical applications. HPE is also expanding its data-protection-as-a-service offerings, improving it with backup and recovery services built explicitly for the hybrid cloud. With this announcement, the company is extending backup-as-a-service to support virtualized environments across heterogeneous storage infrastructures with just a few clicks.
Additional services include enhancements that will allow more customers to take advantage of HPC (high-performance computing), as well as enhancements to HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking and HPE GreenLake for compute ops management, which allows customers to manage their entire compute environment across edge, data center, and hybrid cloud via a single console. The compute ops manager helps businesses automate tedious activities, establish and maintain compliance controls, and provide instant availability to new features and fixes as they become available.
HPE says many companies are accelerating their digital transformations, and, increasingly, they’re realizing that hybrid cloud is the way of the future. Public cloud is one important tool in the toolbox, but the key is finding that balance of tools to solve business problems—and interest in hybrid cloud is coming from all sectors and business sizes.
“To us, data insights is where the value is,” says Neri. “So, customers realize they have a lot of data. It costs them a lot of money to store it. They need to be compliant. They need to have governance around it. They need it to be secure. For us, it is a wasted asset if you don’t get insights off of that data. That is why we enter a world called the new age of insights and minding that data at much faster speeds is absolutely critical.”
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