HPE expands GreenLake services

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced several expansions of its managed GreenLake services during its HPE Discover conference this week.

GreenLake is HPE’s consumption model for hardware and services. Rather than make an outright purchase, customers determine the configuration they will need and HPE installs it, with a slight overprovisioning just in case. If the customer ends up needing more hardware capacity, it’s just turned on. Until then, it just sits there, unused, and at no charge.

Use is metered and customers pay only for what they use. HPE does all the management, and when the contract is up, the hardware is returned to HPE for something new. Every IT hardware supplier has this type of program now. It’s their way of responding to the popularity of the cloud.

The first new service is HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, a cloud-native solution that reduces configuration complexity for faster delivery of cloud services. Lighthouse is described as a secure, cloud-native infrastructure that removes the entire process of having to order and wait for a new configuration by allowing customers to add new cloud services in just a few clicks in HPE GreenLake Central and run them simultaneously in just minutes.

Lighthouse is built with HPE Ezmeral software, the management software for all GreenLake platforms. Customers can use Lighthouse to run a variety of cloud services in any location, from their own data center to a colocation provider or at the edge.

Another new initiative is Project Aurora, a cloud-native, zero-trust security for HPE’s edge-to-cloud architecture. Project Aurora works to verify the integrity of the hardware, firmware, operating systems, platforms, and workloads, including security workloads.

The initiative builds on existing root of trust technology HPE embeds in its hardware platforms. HPE claims Aurora’s continuous attestation capabilities can be used to automatically detect advanced threats from silicon to cloud, in seconds compared to today’s average of 28 days.

HPE also announced that it is extending its consumption-based offerings down to the processor core and persistent memory level with Silicon on-Demand, which will optimize cost at the silicon level to offer a more granular, metered cloud experience.

Silicon on-Demand was developed in partnership with Intel and uses Intel’s Optane technology. SoD uses the same tactic of overprovisioning hardware and then activating it if you need it. So with SoD, customers no longer need to order or install new processors or Optane because it allows customers to instantly activate and pay for more capacity with just a click.

Lastly, the company announced the availability of new applications from third-party vendors such as Splunk, Epic, SAP, and Microsoft. In addition, HPE GreenLake is now integrated with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. This instance of the software stack Microsoft employs in its cloud is designed to be run on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms in on-premises IT environments.

HPE is all-in on GreenLake and plans to offer every one of its services and products through GreenLake leasing by next year. The company claims to have more than 1,200 HPE GreenLake customers, representing $4.8 billion in total contract value. The company also says 95% of its customers have renewed their GreenLake subscriptions.