Everybody’s talking about HPE GreenLake

Please note: This post was written by Highlander prior to their rebrand to FluidOne Business IT - Sheffield.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about HPE GreenLake as a disruptive new service hitting the data centre. It’s critical to HPE’s ambitions as it charts its course towards being a consumption-driven business, which it believes it will achieve within 3 years. Following their largest quarter ever for consumption billing and newly announced expansion plans, GreenLake is on everyone’s lips. But why is everyone talking about it?

Let’s break it down…

GreenLake allows organisations to purchase infrastructure-as-a-Service, enabling customers to operate core elements of their environment (server, storage, network) on a pay-as-you-go consumption model. An intuitive portal allows users to gain an all-encompassing consumption assessment across these elements, enabling users to not only see what they are using but forecast what they may need in the future. GreenLake is designed so users experience cloud-like IT agility and consumption but without moving infrastructure off-premise and into the public cloud.

1. Metering

Due to its progressive metering software, HPE Consumption Analytics, GreenLake provides a billing engine that permits the user to monitor their true consumption across multiple environments, in multiple ways, simultaneously. For example, the analytics portal can meter servers based on CPU, whilst simultaneously metering your network port-by-port. By having a true view of their consumption demands, IT teams can better predict what their future usage may be and with that what they may end up spending. GreenLake’s intuitive metering software also predicts when capacity upgrades will be required, so that business infrastructures can be provisioned accordingly.

2. Buffer

When implementing GreenLake, HPE work with each individual business to assess their capacity requirements, which then form their base level commitment. Above this commitment, HPE allows extra capacity for businesses to grow, and then they allow for a buffer on top of that. It truly is a pay-as-you-use solution, as users don’t pay for any unused capacity above their initial committed amount when they use it, allowing them to both burst into additional capacity and roll-back as required. Customer accounts are proactively monitored, so if a business frequently break into their buffer, then HPE will work with them to reassess and upgrade capacity requirements.

3. HPE Support

HPE provide a high-touch, proactive support service to GreenLake users; every business experiences accelerated call support, and is assigned an Account Support Manager, who acts as a first port of call for any questions, and also leads a monthly review of capacity consumption. These regular reviews also mean that customers can be open with their Account Support Manager regarding their plans for expansion, or expected growth, and provision accordingly. Acting alongside the Account Support Manager is a support team who constantly monitor capacity usage, easing the administrative burden for IT teams. Any anomalies spotted during this monitoring are instantly picked up, and the user alerted.

4. On-prem or elsewhere

GreenLake can either be housed on-premise or off-premise. Organisations can choose whether they want their infrastructure in their own data centre or collocated elsewhere. By housing infrastructure off-site, and operating it as a Service, customers can reduce additional costs such as power and cooling and also cut back on the physical footprint of their data centre. At Highlander, we use Equinix as a partner for colocation data centres.

GreenLake is highly scalable, and monthly costs can be tailored to achieve impressive commercials. If a business experiences sudden growth, or their business model changes, then rather than having to approach their finance department to request investments in new products, IT teams can instead submit a simple change request to scale up on capacity. Likewise, IT teams are easily able to scale down if they find that they are not using their committed capacity.

Some mission-critical business applications are simply not designed to be run from the public cloud. They may be too expensive to run there, or the hyperscalers may simply not be secure enough. GreenLake offers users an alternative solution to this where they can keep commercials down, whilst ultimately maintaining control of their data. Any business that has tried to retrieve their data from the public cloud at service exit will know that this comes at a huge expense, so GreenLake negates some of this cost by functioning as a complementary solution to hyperscalers and enabling users to enjoy a cloud-like experience without the pitfalls of data lock-in.

The metering software and scalability of GreenLake means that it is ideal for businesses who are experiencing growth and can’t easily predict their requirements as they plan capacity. Accordingly, businesses can prevent over-provisioning and therefore avoid wasted expenditure.

For organisations who have experienced the agility and consumption-based benefits of the cloud, GreenLake is great opportunity to build a tailored private infrastructure based on their exact consumption and that also functions in the same way they have become accustomed to in the cloud.

There’s no necessity to be an existing HPE user to feel the benefits and the service can be deployed at almost any scale.  While only server, storage and network today, HPE plans to incorporate all of their products into the GreenLake portfolio, and make all of its infrastructure products available as a Service.

If your business is growing, you may want the confidence of HPE GreenLake behind you. Talk to our sales team now if you’d like to know more about GreenLake and how it could work for your business.