When Fidelma Russo looks at Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake, she sees a rapidly expanding platform that like others is trying to keep pace not only with the growing demands of organizations that are continuing to adopt the cloud but also are looking for ways to bring in and deploy emerging AI technologies.
“The public cloud has really transformed into a platform-based cloud that embraces infrastructure not just in your datacenter but in your [colocation], at the edge, and then – as appropriate – on the public cloud,” Russo, executive vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud and CTO at HPE, told journalists during a video conference before the start of the vendor’s Discover show in Barcelona, Spain, where more GreenLake capabilities were introduced. “We’ve evolved from not just a financial structure but to a platform structure. Now you can see today the ability this has given us to wrap up our innovation because platforms drive velocity and you can see that now, we are starting to really bring true innovation to our customers that are not just grappling with their traditional workloads but also with their AI workloads going forward.”
Since launching in 2018, GreenLake has become foundational to HPE’s business, with the company furiously adding features as enterprise needs grow in an always-volatile IT space that, despite fits and starts, continues to migrate to the cloud, vendors and organizations alike.
And it’s a crowded cloud world, with HPE competing with the likes of hyperscalers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform and other vendors, including IBM, Oracle, Dell Technologies, and Fujitsu, in a global cloud infrastructure services market that grew 23 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, with spending reaching $83.8 million.
What HPE has done up to this point seems to have worked. According to the company’s figures, the number of customers has grown from 25,000 organizations in the first quarter of 2023 to 37,000 in the most recent quarter. In addition, the annualized revenue run rate, increased from $1 billion at the beginning of last year to $1.7 billion in the third quarter 2024.
“We’ve been on this intentional journey to provide a hybrid cloud experience and a hybrid cloud infrastructure,” Russo said. “We are committed to being not only HPE but are committed to being multi-vendor, multi-cloud, while providing a single control plane and ensuring the security and governance of your operational procedures as you deploy your infrastructure and look at your application landscape for the next five to ten years.”
That infrastructure now includes the Alletra Storage MP X10000, an exabyte-scale system that adds object store to a lineup that already includes GreenLake for File Storage and GreenLake for Block Storage, all managed via GreenLake’s Data Services Cloud Console.
“Now we have a unified set of data services across block, file, and object on a single architecture enabled on a single cloud-enabled operating model,” Jim O’Dorisio, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage, said during the call. “Contrary to monolithic, share-nothing architectures, the Alletra MP disaggregated, shared-everything architecture offers unparallel TCO advantages and we get to that through enabling the customer to zero-over provisioning of the environment. The zero-over provisioning combined with seamless scaling will enable customers to provision just what they need without risk.”
The Alletra Storage MP family is a software-defined, multi-protocol storage platform that comprises composable blocks of compute, capacity through just-a-bunch-of-flash (JBOFs), and switches. It includes native support for the S3 and S3a cloud storage services from AWS, the NVM-Express protocol, and the Kubernetes orchestration. It can scale from three to hundreds of nodes and is six times faster than competing systems, according to HPE.
At its Discover show in Las Vegas in June, HPE announced its own virtualization technology as an embedded offering in private clouds and two months later acquired Morpheus Data that executives at the time said – in combination with its purchase of IT operation management company OpsRamp last year – would accelerate GreenLake’s evolution into a platform for managing virtualized, cloud-native, and AI workloads.
At Discover this week, HPE rolled out VM Essentials (VME) software, which unifies virtual machine management in hybrid environments leveraging the new HPE VME hypervisor. In addition, HPE’s virtualization technology will be available as a standalone offering that can run in GreenLake or third-party clouds.
“This allows customers to really enjoy the benefits of our technology, but across their entire estates and allows our customers to really protect investments they’ve already made in their infrastructure,” said Hang Tan, chief operating officer for HPE Hybrid Cloud. “Regardless of what VM Essentials runs on, whether it’s private cloud, our hardware, or third-party hardware, thanks to Morpheus, we’re able to let our customers manage all of their VMs in a single management plane with Morpheus Data.”
HPE also is giving a nod to organizations with data security and regulatory compliance requirements, rolling out a GreenLake cloud environment that is disconnected from the internet. With HPE Private Cloud Enterprise and Alletra Storage MP for disconnected and sovereign environments.
The offerings come with high security standards and managed by staff that are national security levels certification, running the applications and data with VM and bare metal services in isolated or disconnected environments.
“That allows us to deliver a cloud-like operating experience with no connection with the internet and allows us to offer our Private Cloud Enterprise in a disconnected model and Alletra MP Storage disconnected [and] all running on a disconnected GreenLake platform,” said Cheri Williams, HPE’s general manager for Private Cloud and Flex Solutions.
Through the disconnected cloud capabilities, HPE is offering organizations an alternative to traditional air-gapped datacenter systems, which are isolated from the internet and other networks to prevent cybercriminals from accessing the hardware and stealing data,” Williams said.
“Traditional air-gapped [infrastructures don’t] offer the cloud experience that we’re able to offer with the GreenLake platform in a disconnected model,” she said. “Customers are expected to have a cloud experience these days and with our disconnected offers, we now offer that cloud experience in a complete disconnected environment.”