Hewlett Packard Enterprise has introduced updates to its GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise offering aimed at helping users deploy and manage the system more easily.
The infrastructure vendor announced those enhancements and an early access program for a forthcoming cross-cloud data management service during the European edition of its annual Discover user conference, which takes place today and tomorrow in Frankfurt, Germany.
Introduced in June during HPE’s North American Discover event and generally available since October, GreenLake for Private Cloud for Enterprise is designed to simplify the creation and operation of flexible, scalable private cloud environments. Among the new features now available in the service are pre-configured instances for general purpose, compute-, memory-, and storage-oriented workloads.
“The idea of a single or homogenous one size fits all works for some generic compute types of workloads, but in practice many of our customers want to run more optimized workloads,” says Bryan Thompson, vice president of product management for GreenLake cloud services solutions.
In addition, businesses that combine GreenLake private clouds with public cloud resources hosted in Amazon Web Services can now use Amazon Elastic EKS Anywhere in both places. Launched last September, Elastic EKS Anywhere is a deployment option for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service that enables organizations to easily create and operate clusters of Kubernetes containers using VMware’s vSphere platform.
“Now I can give you those same experiences in either a private or a public cloud context and extend that true hybrid experience to the end users,” Thompson says.
Enhanced consumption analytics for GreenLake unveiled today merge public cloud usage and cost data with private cloud data in a single place. “We can now consume the inbound consumption data from AWS, Azure, or [Google Cloud] and bring that into that same reporting mechanism,” Thompson explains.
HPE is also now offering early access to GreenLake for Data Fabric, a new service designed to create a common management plane for multiple data types stored in onsite, cloud, and edge environments.
The solution’s edge support is especially important, according to Eng Lim Goh, HPE’s senior vice president of data and artificial intelligence. 50 billion edge devices will be online by the end of this year, according to IDC, and 50% of data will be created and processed outside of traditional data centers and clouds by 2025, according to Gartner.
“Most of the data is being generated at the edge today, and therefore in order to have unified data access from edge to cloud, you need a hybrid architecture from edge to cloud,” Goh says.
Over a third of businesses have data in siloed locations or applications at present, according to a poll of over 8,600 decision-makers in 19 countries conducted by YouGov on behalf of HPE and published today.
“Companies have some data in their data centers, some in public cloud A, some in public cloud B, some in SaaS companies,” notes Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager for GreenLake cloud services solutions at HPE. “All of a sudden they have more data fragmentation than they had in the past and getting the access to the value from the data is getting to be more and more critical.”
Yet while 62% of participants in the new survey agree that controlling data is a strategically important precursor to deriving value from it, just 13% say that data strategy is a key part of overall corporate strategy at their company.
“Control is an important factor to extract value from data, and the reason we get very low percentages of companies being able to extract value from data is because of the lack of control,” Goh observes.
The problem is particularly acute among SMBs. On a 1-5 scale of data maturity, in which 5 is the highest level and 1 is “data anarchy,” organizations with 250 or fewer employees score a 2.3 on average, HPE found in its new study, versus 2.6 for companies of all sizes.
“This tells us there’s a lot of work to be done,” Goh says.
A separate survey conducted for HPE this year and last by Bain & Company reported that 50% of organizations prefer hybrid multi-cloud environments of the sort GreenLake is designed to enable, and that some 70% will have a hybrid multi-cloud within three years.
“More and more of our customers are using some kind of a hybrid approach,” Lall says.
“It gives them the performance, and most importantly it gives them the economics.”
According to HPE, some 65,000 customers and over 900 partners have generated $8.3 billion in total contract value on GreenLake to date.
