Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today unveiled a broad range of enhancements and new cloud services aimed at on-premises computing environments under the banner of its GreenLake line of as-a-service infrastructure and software offerings.

GreenLake is a  portfolio of hardware and software products that enterprises can buy on a pay-as-you-go basis instead of purchasing everything upfront. The eight new services are aimed at further blurring the distinctions between public and private clouds by providing a cloudlike experience for data center equipment.

HPE is continuing to fill in the gaps on its three-year-old strategy to move its full portfolio to subscription pricing. Three months ago it folded in network management from its Aruba subsidiary, added a unified dashboard that spans the full range of a customer’s GreenLake services and introduced 12 new cloud services spanning networking, data services, high-performance computing and operations management. HPE said GreenLake has now amassed a base of more than 65,000 customers.

“It takes a long time to build out a cloud framework, platform, sets of services and ecosystem, but we’re now seeing a constant cadence of announcements from HPE which indicates to me they are on the right track,” said David Vellante, chief analyst of Wikibon, SiliconANGLE’s sister research firm. “The GreenLake platform is growing in the triple digits and approaching $1 billion in annual run rate with a strong backlog building.”

Fully managed private cloud

Asserting that traditional private cloud offerings have failed to deliver on their promise of fully automated management, HPE says the new GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is aimed at providing a private cloud with public cloudlike automation and scalability. It features modular infrastructure and software that supports workload deployment across any combination of bare metal, virtual machines and software containers.

“This is the key asset that enables customers to have a hybrid cloud wherever the data is, whether at the edge, in a colocation facility or in a factory or hospital,” said Vishal Lall, general manager of the GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions groups. “It’s for very low-latency uses that public cloud cannot provide.”

The new private cloud offering is delivered with soup-to-nuts service-level agreements that cover installation, provisioning, firmware updates, maintenance, operations, hardware, growth planning and support. HPE said the offering enables customers to run both traditional and cloud native applications without the need to move and refactor data. “It’s managed from the cloud, so as the customer wants to expand it’s very easy to scale,” Lall said.

‘Infrastructure is our responsibility’

The overarching aim is to remove complexity and shift management off of the customer’s shoulders, he said. “Five years ago, the private cloud was typically a custom-designed piece of infrastructure for the requirements of a particular customer,” Lall said. “Every private cloud was a snowflake. We’ve innovated on a fungible platform that can run any type of workload. We are promising you uptime based on your SLA. The infrastructure is our responsibility.”

The private cloud environment can be programmatically provisioned, configured and scaled while integrating into an organization’s existing configurations, toolchains, images and networks, HPE said. Customers can keep tabs on usage and spending with consumption analytics and can view and optimize costs by service type, location, or business unit, with aggregated usage data across the private cloud deployment. They can also tap into more than 80 independent software vendors, service providers and colocation partners who sell pre-tested software and services in the GreenLake Marketplace.

Eight more cloud services

Among the new cloud services being announced today is GreenLake for Data Fabric, a managed service that contains an analytic-ready data fabric for hybrid environments based on a single data store. Another is GreenLake for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, which is said to deliver cloud-like operations from a software-as-a-service-based interface for easier virtual machine and infrastructure management in a hybrid cloud.

GreenLake for Disaster Recovery is meant to enable customers to recover from an outage in minutes to a state that’s before the disruption and within desired recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. “Disaster recovery is now point-and-click,” said Flynn Maloy, vice president of GreenLake Cloud Services. “This is for the data you don’t or can’t move into the public cloud. It’s a public cloud pay-as-you-go experience for your disaster recovery needs of your private environment.

A related Backup and Recovery Service works with Amazon Web Services Inc. EC2 instances and Amazon Elastic Block Storage EBS volumes. It allows customers to set up VM protection in less than five minutes while taking most of the details of managing backup hardware, software and cloud infrastructure off the customer’s hands.

GreenLake for Block Storage delivers what the company said is 100% data availability built on a cloud operating model. Customers can leverage tiered storage to optimize costs. HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management provides a cloudlike experience for computer lifecycle management, HPE said.

New vertical offerings

HPE is also building out a line of vertical offerings based on integration with specialty ISVs. GreenLake for Payments is a secure, cloud-centric payment platform that enables customers to quickly modernize their payments operations while staying compliant with regulations. It combines payments technology from Lusis SA’s Tango payments platform with HPE’s Nonstop fault-tolerant systems.

“This is a microservices platform that brings forward low-code applications for transactional applications at high speed,” Maloy said. “It’s pay-as-you-go, managed from one place.”

GreenLake with FIS Ethos is the product of a collaboration with Fidelity National Information Services Inc. that uses the vendor’s Ethos integrated data platform for real-time customer data reporting and analytics. HPE said it enables businesses to deliver data-driven personalized customer experiences.

The private cloud platform and new cloud services will be available in September.

Image: HPE