Hewlett Packard Enterprise has added 12 new services, including eight networking-as-a-service (NaaS) bundles based on technology from its Aruba unit, to HPE GreenLake, the company’s on-demand hybrid cloud platform.
The upshot, according to CEO Antonio Neri during an online launch event this morning, is that businesses can now get everything they need to build and run an edge-to-cloud infrastructure in one place and pay for it all as a service.
“Now our connectivity business, which is our Aruba business, plus our compute and storage business, plus all the workloads that we already managed through the current platform, are all integrated into the new HPE GreenLake platform,” he said.
Collectively named HPE GreenLake for Aruba and available starting next month, the new NaaS offerings combine hardware, software, and support in pre-assembled, subscription-priced “service packs” covering eight networking use cases, including indoor wireless, outdoor wireless, and SD-branch networking.
Though GreenLake-based Aruba solutions were available before, they were typically designed and delivered through HPE itself on a customized basis, mostly for larger business. The HPE GreenLake for Aruba bundles are both easier for end users to consume and easier for partners to sell, according to Alan Ni, senior director of edge marketing at Aruba.
“They were created with the channel in mind,” said Ni in a conversation with ChannelPro.
Especially, thanks to their affordable pricing, the SMB channel, he added. “The goal is to scale this so that we can go not only after big customers but big, medium, and smaller customers,” Ni said. “There’s actually quite a sweet spot in that SMB market.”
The new services are billed monthly, with or without outsourced management services from a partner or HPE itself.
In conjunction with the launch of GreenLake for Aruba, HPE has rolled the Aruba Central management system into the interface that technicians already use to administer GreenLake services. “It sits on the same exact code base and shares the same backend now with all the other key services across compute and storage,” Ni says. As a result, he adds, users can now view and support all of their as-a-service HPE resources in one place for the first time.
“If you’re used to logging into arubacentral.com or central.arubanetworks.com, those are not going away,” Ni says. “But for our customers that share multiple services across HPE, they now can go to a single plane of glass through greenlake.com to be able to access both Aruba Central and their other key IT infrastructure services.”
HPE GreenLake for Aruba arrives at a time of widespread and accelerating demand for networking-as-a-service. Some 37% of North American businesses surveyed by IDC on behalf of Aruba for a study published today already have a NaaS solution in place, and another 32% plan to deploy one in the next 12 months. IDC expects 60% of businesses to fund line-of-business and IT projects more generally through OPEX budgets by 2025.
Also announced today is an updated edition of the GreenLake-based HPE Backup and Recovery Service that supports virtual machines on heterogenous infrastructure.
“Now customers can modernize, backup, and protect their VMware workloads effortlessly and cost-effectively across the hybrid cloud with just a few clicks,” said Flynn Maloy, vice president of HPE GreenLake cloud services marketing, in a press briefing.
To guard against ransomware, HPE Backup and Recovery Service now lets users store immutable data copies as well, either on premises or in the Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure public cloud.
A new version of HPE GreenLake for Block Storage also unveiled today includes instant quoting and self-serve provisioning functionality that, according to Neri, is easy enough for even line-of-business executives to operate.
“That to me is big revolution, because normally when you deploy storage, it’s very complicated,” he said this morning.
GreenLake block storage comes in two service tiers. The mission critical tier offers a 100% availability guarantee. The business critical tier promises “six nines” availability.
New to the HPE GreenLake for High Performance Computing solution is the ability to use NVIDIA A100, A40, and A30 Tensor Core GPUs with the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 platform, along with a high-speed HPE Parallel File System Storage service and a new Ethernet fabric optimized for HPC and AI workloads called HPE Slingshot.
In a bid to enable a broader range of businesses to afford high-performance computing, GreenLake-based HPC solutions are now available at lower entry prices too. “We want to democratize those capabilities,” Neri said today.
A new Compute Ops Management tool, first announced last year, lets data center operators perform firmware and software updates across all of their compute resources through a single console. “They no longer have to do manual tedious updates server by server by server, or cage by cage, location by location,” Maloy says.
A 90-day free trial of the new service is available now, and subscriptions will become available in June.
In a significant expansion of GreenLake’s partner ecosystem, solutions are now available via distributors ALSO Group, Arrow Electronics, and Ingram Micro in addition to TD SYNNEX. A separate pact allows businesses to run HPE GreenLake services in any of colocation vendor Digital Realty’s more than 285 data centers on six continents.
There are now over 50 GreenLake services available across 13 categories.
HPE’s as-a-service orders grew 136% year-over-year in its most recent fiscal quarter, and total contract value increased to $6.5 billion. According to Neri, echoing remarks made to ChannelPro last summer by Worldwide Head of Partner Sales George Hope, most of that revenue flows through partners.
“More than 70% of our [GreenLake] business today gets done through our channel partners and the partner ecosystem at large,” he said.
Other infrastructure vendors are betting big on as-a-service IT as well. Dell Technologies officially rolled out its APEX platform last spring, and Lenovo has offered al the PCs, tablets, edge computing devices, data center gear, and other products it makes through its TruScale purchasing program since last September.
