HPE Thinks Your Next GreenLake Deploy Will Be A Private Cloud

Extending a public-cloud-like experience to on-prem datacenters has long been a promise of HPE's GreenLake anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform. At HPE Discover this week, the company made good on that promise with the launch of GreenLake for Private Cloud.

The platform enables customers "to have a cloud in their premises wherever the data is, whether it's at the edge, it's at a colo datacenter, or is at any other location," Vishal Lall, SVP and GM for HPE GreenLake cloud services solutions, said during a press briefing ahead of Discovery.

Most private clouds up to this point have been custom-built environments strapped together with some automation, he said. "It was somewhat of an improvement over the DIY infrastructure, but it really wasn't private cloud."

Like other GreenLake services, its private cloud offering bundles a combination of hardware and software services which are billed based on consumption. But unlike most GreenLake products, which target specific services – database workloads, for example – Private Cloud Enterprise claims to offer an on-prem equivalent of the public cloud.

In fact, an emphasis was put on modeling the user experience against those offered by public cloud providers, Lall said.

And much like a public cloud environment, the platform supports running workloads in any configuration desired, whether that be in a virtual machine, container, or on bare metal.

The idea is that customers can focus entirely on spinning up and scaling out workloads without concern for the underlying infrastructure. "We have basically made infrastructure completely fungible," Lall said.

As customers approach a utilization threshold, additional pre-provisioned capacity is unlocked, allowing customers to absorb things like seasonal traffic spikes, or buy time if additional infrastructure is required.

Finally, GreenLake's private cloud service offers the same kind of service-level agreements you'd expect from a traditional cloud provider. "If you think about it, the infrastructure is really our responsibility," Lall said.

HPE GreenLake for Data Fabric

Alongside the private cloud platform, HPE unveiled GreenLake for Data Fabric to unify the various data sources spread across on-premises, edge, and cloud deployments.

According to Flynn Maloy, VP of HPE GreenLake cloud services, the product addresses several challenges inherent to edge and hybrid cloud deployments, including data sovereignty, privacy concerns, bandwidth limitations, as well as information that may be spread across multiple sites or clouds.

The service is all about "being able to overcome the data silos that are in your existing IT already, as well as the data silos you've now created by putting stuff in the public cloud," he said in a press briefing.

By connecting customers' various data sources back to a single fabric, they can analyze that data in full context.

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"As an example, in healthcare, one MRI is 30GBs and very private information. So, instead of moving all of that to the public cloud, a lot of healthcare facilities would like to not bring the data to the cloud, but bring the cloud to the data," he said.

These services launch alongside a bevy of GreenLake products teased back in March that are targeted at data-intensive workloads. These include GreenLake for Block Storage, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, and compute ops management services. Check out our earlier coverage for a complete rundown of each.

HPE expands Red Hat, SUSE collabs

GreenLake customers can also expect to see an influx of open-source software on the platform after the company announced an expanded relationship with enterprise Linux vendors Red Hat and SUSE.

"We've been working with Red Hat for 15 years There's a lot of OpenShift builds on GreenLake today," Maloy said. "We're going to work together to further enhance the joint offerings that we have."

Specifically, the collab will see HPE deepen support for Red Hat's Linux operating system, Openshift container service, and Ansible automation platform on the GreenLake platform.

The company is pursuing a similar endeavor with SUSE, which offers a complimentary collection of services, including an enterprise Linux OS, a lightweight spin on Kubernetes called K3s, and the company's Rancher container management platform.

The fruits of these labors are expected to launch later this year. In the meantime, you can find storage editor Chris Mellor's take on the HPE GreenLake news right here. ®