Aside from its entry into the artificial intelligence AI cloud market (see link below) Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) this week made a number of additional announcements at HPE Discover 2023 revolving around its GreenLake hybrid cloud platform, all designed, it said, to reduce complexities and improve productivity.
They included the following:
- The closing of its OpsRamp acquisition, which means that OpsRamp is now available as a SaaS offering on the HPE GreenLake platform, providing customers with AI-driven operations for multi-vendor, multi-cloud IT environments.
- The adding of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings for backup and machine learning, as well as additional HPE SaaS offerings on the AWS marketplace and the extension of the Network-as-a-service (NaaS) portfolio.
- Expansion of the HPE GreenLake private cloud portfolio with HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, which allows “customers to spin up virtual machines (VMs) across hybrid cloud on demand.”
- Enhancements to HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise to address multi-cloud use cases by providing upcoming support to deploy Red Hat OpenShift.
- HPE and VMware enhance HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation pay-per-use solution with pre-configured and tested HPE cloud modules, optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation.
- An expanded partnership with Equinix to pre-provision HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition at Equinix data centres across the globe.
In a keynote speech on Tuesday in Las Vegas, Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, said the company’s three primary product strategies now revolve around edge computing, hybrid cloud, and AI, and that each are connected.
“Today, we are experiencing an explosive growth of data everywhere. But 50 per cent of the usable data is only used to make decisions, which means the other 50 per cent is wasted. And to answer some of the most critical business and societal questions we have, we must leverage (all) of the useful data to create a shared knowledge to deliver better business outcomes. But the reality is we have been data rich and insight poor.
“Through much more advanced technology, we will realize possibilities for what I call the Edge of Insight. I believe the true power of AI is in its ability to turn questions into discovery, insight into action, and our unlimited imagination into reality.”
Simplicity is pivotal, which was a key reason the company purchased San Jose, Calif.-based OpsRamp, an IT operations management (ITOM) company that HPE said “monitors, observes, automates and manages IT infrastructure, cloud resources, workloads and applications for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including the leading hyperscalers.”
Fidelma Russo, chief technology officer at HPE, said at the time that organizations today are “managing several different cloud environments, with different IT operational models and tools, which dramatically increases the cost and complexity of digital operations management.
“The combination of OpsRamp and HPE will remove these barriers by providing customers with an integrated edge-to-cloud platform that can more effectively manage and transform multi-vendor and multi-cloud IT estates.”
The deal, which closed last month, occurred because “first and foremost, we recognize that operating in a hybrid cloud environment is incredibly complex, because you’re dealing not with just your current IT assets on prem, you’re also dealing with assets in the public cloud, you’re dealing with assets potentially out in co-location,” she said during a press briefing prior to Discover.
The expansion of the relationship with AWS, HPE said in a release, took place in order to “deliver a consistent, reliable hybrid cloud experience for customers. Plans call for HPE NonStop Development Environment to be delivered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and HPE Fraud Risk Management as a SaaS in AWS Marketplace.
In addition, Amazon Elastic Kubernates Service Anywhere is now generally available on HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise.
In terms of Equinix, Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake cloud services solutions, said enabling GreenLake at the company’s “state-of-the art IBX data centres across strategic global locations is the next evolution in accelerating customer hybrid cloud adoption.”
David Tapper, program vice president at research firm IDC, said that “increasingly, global organizations are turning to digital infrastructure providers to help transform IT investments by distributing private cloud infrastructure at the edge – close to clouds, users, and applications – to enhance enterprise network capabilities that can enable rapid scaling and security, minimize latency, and ensure availability of applications
“By deepening their partnership, HPE and Equinix can assist customers in their hybrid cloud strategy by providing managed cloud services that provision standardized private clouds and simplify integration with public cloud providers, add capacity on an as-needed basis, and enable shorter time commitments. Together this should help organizations achieve critical objectives such as improved productivity, lower costs, and enhanced ROI.”
Starting this August, both HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition will be “pre-provisioned and available on a rolling basis” at Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres serving the following metro areas: Toronto, Frankfurt London, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, and Washington.
Plans call for additional locations and HPE GreenLake cloud services to be added in the future.