The end of June saw the HPE Discover 2022 event hit Las Vegas, brought to us by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Across two days, almost 100 speakers graced the various stages, delivering on subjects from advancing the sustainability agenda and modernizing the cloud, to securely connecting and analyzing data at the edge. For in-person and virtual attendees alike, it was truly an opportunity to fill their boots with all things HPE and enterprise technology.
Getting to the event’s heart at the keynote speech, HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri announced some recent wins and new developments for HPE GreenLake, but also emphasized the importance of partnerships in their success.
“When we work side by side to solve problems and build solutions, incredible things happen. Three years ago, I promised to deliver everything as-a-service by 2022. Thanks to HPE Greenlake, I can proudly say we have achieved our goal. We are winning with a growing partner ecosystem that includes distributors, value-added resellers, solution integrators, ISVs, and service providers. We are placing partner capabilities at the center of our platform.”
Whether handing over greater control of cloud architecture and data or creating a place where users can access core services and partner capabilities from one URL, it seems the new advancements to HPE GreenLake are ready for the challenge.
New hybrid cloud with cloud-to-edge connectivity
The biggest announcement came from the unveiling of new and advanced hybrid cloud platform capabilities, namely with HPE Greenlake for Private Cloud Enterprise.
Said to provide a ‘modern cloud experience’, the cloud is built on a modular infrastructure that supports bare metal deployment, virtual machines, and container workloads from one shared environment. With a hybrid approach, it’s claimed users can run traditional and cloud-native applications at scale, without moving or refactoring applications, or losing any data.
HPE suggests this hybrid approach will give users public cloud capabilities for at the edge, on-premise, or co-location clouds. Neri explains, “The enterprise of the future must be edge-centric. It must be cloud-enabled. I am proud to deliver the first true cloud-native private cloud with HPE Greenlake so you can bring the cloud experience anywhere.”
According to HPE and Neri, this will help businesses create cloud-native, adjacent private clouds, providing a solution for the data compliance issues that often prevent businesses from making the public cloud shift. Moreover, for users processing data in real-time at source, HPE GreenLake’s ability to extend the hybrid cloud to their edges could also prove useful.
HPE Greenlake for Data Fabric
As Fidelma Russo, chief technology officer at HPE explained “with HPE, all good things start in the garage.”
With a collection of new portals, whether for developers or partner services, as well as tools for managing your hybrid cloud, there seems to be plenty of data, APIs, and backend tools to go around in this latest HPE GreenLake release.
To keep data management in check, another addition to the GreenLake user tool kit is HPE GreenLake for Data Fabric.
In his keynote speech, Neri states the centrality of data management to HPE: “The crux of our strategy from the beginning has been to make data an asset and help you leverage it for your modernization needs.”
Supporting the hybrid cloud environment, the data fabric allows users to create sets of rules to knit together their different ‘clusters’ of data across private and public cloud environments. Making a ‘fabric’ of storage rules, data is pulled in and readily available for processing wherever and whenever it’s needed.
Bryan Thompson, vice president of product management at HPE Greenlake cloud services and solutions, explains how this works in practice for a private cloud data cluster: “[For] a node deployed in my private cloud, I’ve established a mirror and rules for a node in an AWS region. So, I can now ingest data, have it seamlessly replicated across that API interface and into my private cloud for processing, without absorbing those egress charges that would come from traditional means of moving that data.”
HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery
HPE didn’t stop at data transfer management for their new hybrid cloud. In a world where last year saw a 62 percent increase in reported instances of ransomware in North America alone, and companies rank data management as the greatest barrier to managing cybersecurity, it’s clear that many organizations are struggling with disaster recovery plans. Plus, with ongoing geopolitical issues like rising prices, supply chain disruption, and the war in Ukraine, the chance of outages or other such disasters taking place is only heightened for businesses.
“Giving the single pane of glass experience”, as Thompson describes it, HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery could provide a space for managing all disaster recovery policies across private and public clouds. HPE claims users will be able to establish replication and recovery point objectives for data files in disaster scenarios and set data requirements for normal operations to resume.
The open-source road with Red Hat-GreenLake partnership
In keeping with Neri’s theme of partners, a final Discover 2022 development to mention is HPE’s evolving partnership with Red Hat, now set to join the HPE GreenLake platform. Utilizing open-source technologies to deploy on the HPE GreenLake architecture, such as Red Hat Openshift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, HPE and Red Hat continue to combine efforts with plans to create faster, trusted, and less expensive open-source solutions.
Neri, in his keynote, summarized the HPE partner relationships, “We are truly honored to be working with amazing organizations to bring revolutionary ideas to life, and we would not be here today without our customers and partners. We have an amazing opportunity to drive the adoption of new technologies that are inclusive, accessible, and sustainable.”
An even brighter future with the world’s leading cloud-to-edge system
Positioning HPE as a key vendor for successful partner integrations and cloud-to-edge hybrid capabilities, Neri is anticipating an “even brighter future” for HPE and its partners and customers.
“I’m so proud of the work we have done over the last couple of years despite all the uncertainty, facing the challenges we faced.” Neri continues, “Before HPE GreenLake, the experience with HPE depended on which product you purchased. We have been on, what I call, a journey to one, by adopting an edge-to-cloud architecture. Today, we give you one platform, one experience from edge to cloud. Powered by software and services, we are the world’s leading edge-to-cloud company, and innovating faster than ever before.”
