HPE adds to GreenLake on-prem cloud features

HPE has upgraded its GreenLake on-premises cloud platform to include new compute offerings, services for data fabric, and disaster recovery as well as products targeting verticals including payment processing and digital engagement.

GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, which can incorporate private-cloud applications into the GreenLake framework, is the biggest announcement about the platform that the company made at its ongoing Discover conference in Las Vegas. That offering opens new options for organizations that are subject to heavy regulation or those with operational concerns about putting their data in the public cloud.

In general, GreenLake is an on-premises orchestration platform that provides cloud-like features to replicate some capability that can be provided as a service from the cloud, but that are otherwise unavailable to organizations that require on-premises IT infrastructure for some of their workloads.

The idea is to provide a cloud-like layer between on-premises or private-cloud IT resources, that enterprises can manage the same way they would in an Azure or AWS environment. The billing model for GreenLake is pay-as-you-go.

Other new GreenLake features include:

• GreenLake for hyperconverged infrastructure, designed for virtual-machine and hybrid-cloud infrastructure mangement;
• GreenLake for disaster recovery, meant to provide rapid recovery for compromised systems;
• GreenLake for block storage, which uses a cloud operational model for what HPE calls cost-optimized storage in general-purpose service tiers;
• GreenLake for backup and recovery, providing a single control panel to backup and manage AWS and on-premises workloads
• GreenLake for compute-ops management, mapping a cloud operational layer onto all compute devices in an organization, for monitoring and management;
• GreenLake for data fabric, a central data store to enable analytics for hybrid environments.

To further focus on key industries that may be particularly suitable for GreenLake, HPE announced partnerships with Lusis Tango for payment platforms, and FIS Ethos for customer engagement and data management.

According to IDC research vice president Susan Middleton, the key takeaway in the announcements is that HPE has addressed key issues for users who must adhere to in-house IT.

“I think the private-cloud announcement really helps organizations understand how they can manage their workloads that have top-of-mind privacy concerns,” she said. “Not only did they expand cross-vertical, but now they’re starting to go horizontal, after addressing pain points for various industries.”

The terminology of dubbing the new offering “GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise” is somewhat curious, according to Sid Nag, vice president and analyst at Gartner Research, given that GreenLake’s functionality essentially resembled a private cloud to begin with.

“The idea of GreenLake was to bring the public cloud experience to private clouds,” he said. “One of the key capabilities is pay-as-you-go, and they’ve had that on the market for a while.”

All the new features are available in September.