HPE GreenLake gets a slew of new storage features

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has added new features to its flagship HPE GreenLake platform, including block storage for AWS as well as private cloud offerings.

HPE GreenLake Storage for AWS builds on the company’s existing partnership with the public cloud hyperscaler. While the announcements made at HPE Discover 2023 were focused on compute, this latest offering is related to block storage.

The intention of HPE GreenLake Block Storage for AWS is, the company said, to simplify workload placement and data management to the cloud using software-defined storage. It is “designed to deliver a seamless, unified storage management experience across hybrid cloud” with high levels of resiliency and faster ROI.

The second block storage announcement is a new release of HPE GreenLake for Block Storage. It now supports NVMe scaling up to 5.6PB on the company’s Alletra hardware – a series of specialized block storage appliances that are only available through GreenLake.

In line with its business strategy, HPE GreenLake for Block Storage also includes an AI element, with support for HPE Infosight AIOps. Featuring cross-stack analytics it will, the company said, improve performance, resource utilization, and availability.

Finally, the company has added support for Alletra MP and SimpliVity Gen 11 to HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, a service that was also announced at Discover 2023.

HPE GreenLake updates come at a pivotal time

The announcement of these updates is very much in line with HPE’s overall strategy. HPE GreenLake isn’t the company’s only product offering or way to access HPE hardware – far from it in fact.

ITPro has been told more than once that the majority of its revenue still comes from traditional on-prem hardware sales. The data center and total ownership are, in other words, still king.

Yet the direction of travel is very much in line with the organization’s messaging – and product emphasis – since Antonio Neri took over as CEO in 2018. Indeed, in 2021 Neri declared that GreenLake is the future of HPE, saying: “This will be our leading product, leading offer, our leading experience.”

It’s no surprise to see AI get a mention, either, given it’s now one of the company’s three primary business pillars. It’s also a well established technology, rather than the more zeitgeisty generative AI that has the tech world buzzing. 

This is probably a good thing from a buyer point of view, as implementing it on critical infrastructure will take less of a leap of faith.

These announcements are also undoubtedly laying the groundwork for bigger announcements at HPE Discover 2024, which takes place in just over four weeks time.