HPE continues cloud push with new GreenLake services

HPE’s edge-to-cloud mantra continues to permeate its products, with the company announcing new cloud offerings available through its GreenLake “as a service” platform at its HPE Discover 2020 virtual event.

Machine learning, operations, containers, virtual machines (VMs), storage, compute, data protection, and networking are now all available through the GreenLake Central self-service console.

This, the company says, allows users to choose a configuration that suits them, and manage it, scaling up or down, as they need.

With these new GreenLake services, however, the company is offering customers a choice of 17 pre-defined configurations, delivered in three sizes – described by HPE as small, medium and large “t-shirt sizes” – rather than full customisability. This mode of delivery speeds up the order-to-run process to as little as 14 days, the company claims.

“[This is] a new generation of cloud services from GreenLake, bringing a new level of speed and agility to the on-prem cloud services market,” said Keith White, SVP and GM of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, during a press and analyst briefing.

White said the use of pre-configuration as a way to bring “a whole new level of automation and simplicity” to HPE’s customers.

“I think the easiest way to think about these building blocks is kind of like Lego bricks,” he explained. “With Legos, you can build almost anything with a few standard blocks.

"These can look and feel like custom offerings, but as we do it through these standard blocks and ‘t-shirt sizes’, this really accelerates time to customer, accelerates time to market for the customer’s solution and more importantly accelerates time to value for the customer.”

The service is then installed and connected by the company’s Pointnext services division, as well as through channel partners.

“Think of it as leveraging our whole HPE portfolio – hardware, software, Pointnext Services and the power of HPE FS. With third parties, we can provide complete secure and integrated services for our customers,” White added

GreenLake cloud services for VMs, compute, storage, data protection, and intelligent edge are available immediately worldwide. GreenLake cloud services for the newly announced HPE Ezmeral software portfolio, consisting of ML Ops and Containers, is currently in beta, with general availability expected for the company’s fiscal fourth quarter of the year, which ends on 31 October.