Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has made available HPE GreenLake Central, a self-service portal through which IT teams can collaboratively manage and monitor instances of servers deployed in IT environments that are managed by HPE on their behalf.
At its core, HPE GreenLake is a managed service that allows IT organizations to pay for IT infrastructure on a consumption basis. HPE meters usage and HPE ProLiant servers and bills customers accordingly. HPE GreenLake Central provides a portal through which IT teams can track usage themselves and provision applications both from HPE and third-party software vendors.
Data management and file management software from Cohesity and Qumulo can be provisioned via the self-service portal. In addition, HPE GreenLake systems can now be co-located in data centers managed by CyrusOne.
Keith White, vice president for HPE GreenLake, said HPE also provides via HPE GreenLake Central integration with Microsoft Azure Access Manager and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Access Manager services to make it easier for IT organizations to compare the cost of deploying workloads on-premises versus in the cloud, in addition to identifying potential compliance issues. IT teams still will need to access a separate portal provided by either AWS or Microsoft to spin up a virtual machine in the cloud.
HPE claims to now have more than 800 enterprise customers consuming HPE GreenLake services. With many organizations opting to focus their efforts on building and deploying software, HPE is now making the case for a service through which it manages ProLiant servers and associated HPE storage on their behalf. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, White said HPE expects to see increased demand for consumption-based pricing for IT infrastructure.
Of course, IT teams have been consuming cloud infrastructure using various consumption-based pricing models for years. However, there are many workloads that for a wide variety of compliance, security and performance issues that still do not lend themselves to being deployed on a public cloud. HPE GreenLake provides the flexibility of a cloud service while still employing IT infrastructure deployed in a local data center.
It’s unclear in the wake of the downturn how many additional application workloads might be moving into the cloud. The general expectation is that because many local data centers have been inaccessible during the pandemic, more organizations naturally will shift workloads to the cloud. However, a managed service from HPE also serves to eliminate the need to manage servers in an on-premises IT environment that are managed remotely by HPE. IT teams can remotely log into the HPE GreenLake portal from wherever they are located.
Undoubtedly, the relationship between IT teams and vendors such as HPE is evolving. Many rote infrastructure tasks increasingly are becoming automated not just by the IT team, but also by the vendor that built the server or storage system. Of course, the automation being provided by the IT vendor only applies to their latest generation of infrastructure.
