HPE Discover 2022: 5 Biggest News Announcements

HPE is accelerating its GreenLake edge to cloud everything as a service sales offensive with a slew of announcements – including a breakthrough GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise service. Here are the five biggest announcements from HPE Discover 2022.

A ‘Seamless’ Edge To Cloud Experience- ‘No Different’ Than Public Cloud

HPE this week at its HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas is adding more robust “seamless” edge to cloud capabilities with the addition of 12 new cloud services to its GreenLake edge to cloud service platform.

“The experience that you see from GreenLake is no different from what an end user gets when they consume from public cloud,” said Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services solutions in a press briefing on the GreenLake announcements at Discover. “That has kind of been the North Star- the user experience is the key. Users and enterprises – whether it is the CIO or developers or lines of business- can use the stack to build and run applications and then consume it as a service.”

HPE GreenLake now has 70 plus services and 80 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) – including SAP, Nutanix and Veeam- in its cloud marketplace. The HPE cloud services run the gamut from network as a service with Aruba to block storage as a service and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

At Discover, HPE unveiled HPE GreenLake for Data Fabric, a managed service that now includes a single data store for hybrid cloud.The data fabric lets customers “manage the data they have across those deployment models and run unified analytics” so they can maximize the value of their data, said Lall.

HPE’s Ezmeral GreenLake Data Fabric ensures that customers can manage data from the edge to the cloud across public clouds like AWS to on premise data centers or at the edge,said Lall.

At Discover, HPE also continued its ecosystem build out with a blockbuster partnership with open source titan Red Hat, a deeper integration with SUSE Linux that opens up edge computing opportunities for partners and an HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery offering for Amazon Web Services.“We’re adding more services and capabilities, adding more partners, making that experience richer for our customers,” said Lall.

HPE now has thousands of software engineers working on the edge to cloud platform, said Lall. “We’re super excited about the momentum we are experiencing in the market,” he said.

Private Cloud Breakthrough: HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud Enterprise

HPE’s GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is a new standardized private cloud offering that is designed to be every bit as easy to deploy as public cloud.

In fact, HPE said, the private cloud enterprise service establishes a new bar for provisioning and deploying an on premise private cloud for enterprise customers with increased automation and scalability backed up with an enterprise grade service level agreement.

The new offering – which will become available in September- is a “breakthrough” in delivering private cloud in an easy to deploy point and click model with vast options in an ala carte menu from virtual machines to containers to bare metal, said Flynn Maloy, vice president of HPE GreenLake cloud services marketing.

“Private Cloud Enterprise brings a new level of solution to our customers,” said Maloy. “What private cloud enterprise does is move it forward in a way to give customers the full private cloud experience aggregated: VMs, containers or bare metal. You don’t have to worry about managing any of that.”

In fact, the new private cloud enterprise provides the same “hyperscalar like” manageability model as found on public clouds, said Maloy. “What we manage or the partner manages on behalf of the customer is exactly the same as the public cloud,” he said.

The new offering takes the HPE GreenLake Enterprise private cloud pay as you go experience to the “next level,” said Maloy.“It is a new level of flexibility and speed pre-integrated,” he said. “No one in the market is offering that today. We hear that from our customers who want private clouds…It’s a contained private cloud that is an easy button.”

That standardized private cloud capability is a “game changer” for partners who can now more rapidly provision and deploy a private cloud for customers, said Maloy.

“This is all your storage, compute, capacity and services layered on top of that, one place where you can manage all your services, point and click and add new services,” he said. “The industry has never had an enterprise platform like this that comes to you.”

The new offering makes GreenLake a drop down choice for customers looking for a private cloud experience in the enterprise or the edge, said Maloy.

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise opens more private cloud opportunities for partners, said Maloy. Partners can manage the private cloud on behalf of cutomers and build on that private cloud with their own services and solutions.

Lall, for his part, said the new HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud establishes new performance and total cost of ownership. “From a a performance cost perspective we have optimized this entire stack,” he said.

A new Powered By GreenLake model is emerging with partners offering specialized solutions in areas like healthcare. “Now partners can offer a cloud like set of their healthcare solutions to customers, that is how this platform can really change the game for all our ISV partners, service provider partners, distributors and resellers,” said Maloy. “They can sell. They can manage and they can build on it. There is nobody out there in this space that is anywhere close to the maturity of what GreenLake can do.”

‘Big’ Opportunity For Partners: HPE GreenLake For Backup And Recovery For AWS

The new HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery offering for Amazon Web Services is yet another example of HPE’s multicloud and customer choice commitment on the GreenLake platform.

The new cloud service extends HPE GreenLake backup and recovery support for virtual machines to support workloads in AWS with a single management console.

The offering provides what HPE calls a unified backup as a service solution for both on premise and cloud workloads.

The AWS offering is a “big opportunity” for partners to extend backup services into the AWS cloud, said Flynn Maloy, vice president of HPE GreenLake cloud services marketing. “This is us building out a unified platform,” he said.

The AWS capability provides a “complete solution” for backup, said Maloy. Customers are looking for a single backup capability that extends from on premise to the public cloud, said Maloy.

“If you’ve got a bunch of stuff in AWS and you want that backed up or a bunch of stuff on prem and you want that backed up either on prem or in the cloud, we can handle all of that hybrid backup,” he said. “We think this is the backup and recovery offer of the future and that is big business.”

The HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform provides seamless integration to manage the complete hybrid estate from HPE GreenLake to all the three major public clouds: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

HPE recently emerged as one of the infrastructure as a service partners underpinning the Google Distributed Cloud Hosted offering.

Furthermore, HPE is now offering HPE GreenLake for Azure Stack HCI- a hyperconverged software defined system that supports the Azure stack.

Red Hat OpenShift On HPE GreenLake

Open source titan Red Hat is set to offer a pay per use on premise version of its OpenShift Kubernetes container platform on HPE GreenLake.

The OpenShift version of GreenLake is part of a Red Hat on GreenLake joint development pact unveiled at Discover that also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for GreenLake. Red Hat and HPE announced the joint development effort on the first day of the HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas.

The joint development effort is in response to customers that have been demanding a pay per use version of OpenShift on GreenLake, said Ryan King, senior director of the global hardware partner ecosystem for Red Hat, in an interview with CRN.“The first push is with OpenShift because that is where a lot of the interest is with hybrid cloud and pay as you go with our joint customer base,” he said.

Red Hat is seeing robust customer demand for Red Hat solutions on HPE GreenLake with joint sales teams already working with customers that are anxious to move to a pay per use on premise OpenShift cloud services model, said King.

Red Hat has long had OpenShift pay per use on public cloud, but this deal brings that pay per use model for the first time to an on premise cloud service, said King. “We are used to metering and billing in that model, but we are excited to see it in an on prem and colo environment,” he said. “There is a great deal of growth in the market right now around edge, edge AI and telco and the 5G rollout. Those are all areas of growth that we are looking at with this model.”

Red Hat OpenShift on HPE GreenLake will be available in HPE’s third calendar quarter which ends July 31. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on GreenLake, meanwhile, will be available in HPE’s fourth calendar quarter which ends Oct. 31. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will follow later year.

A New HPE GreenLake Developer Portal – Making It Easier to Develop Applications On GreenLake

HPE announced at Discover a new developer portal – along with new tools- with the aim of making it easier for developers to access Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in order to develop applications on HPE GreenLake.

That developer portal is yet another sign of HPE’s partner first strategy, said HPE Vice President of the GreenLake Partner Ecosystem Maurice Martin.

“That is to let our partners integrate with the platform using APIs to have an automated model so their cost of service and ownership is as low as possible giving the highest possible service edge to our shared customers,” said Martin in an interview with CRN. “That to me is a core pillar.”

HPE has already shown its GreenLake API partner commitment by providing tight API integration for distributor cloud marketplaces.

HPE earlier this year announced tight API integration with the cloud marketplaces of the top four global distributors – TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, Arrow Electronics and ALSO Group.

“The very first platform APIs we are integrating with is the big distys – Tech Data (Synnex), Ingram, Arrow – and also Insight,” said Martin. “That is really making it easier for them to make it easier for the channel. That is about selling our cloud services through and with the channel.”

HPE’s GreenLake strategy puts “partners right at the center in terms of how they can sell, how they can manage and service and how they can build solutions on the platform,” said Martin. “This is the whole DNA of what we are doing: it is partners at the center. Unlike some other folks that are saying you hand it off to us and we’ll take it off you, we see partners at the very center.”

Ultimately the aim is to open the full power of the platform to partners, said Martin. “The key thing is anything a customer can do with the platform a partner can do on the platform for themT” he said. “That really opens up the world of their rich services portfolio out to their customer base. It gives the customer the unique value that channel partner is giving to their customer.”

A New Everything As A Service Channel Ecosystem Program

HPE at Discover launched its first ever everything as a service channel program that is set to propel a new wave of HPE GreenLake edge to cloud everything as a service channel sales growth, said HPE partners

The new unified everything as a service program includes the full range of GreenLake partners from influencers that do not want to sell hardware to born in the cloud providers to ISVs and even traditional partners that evolve to provide their own powered by GreenLake services.

The HPE Partner Ready Vantage program for the first time unites both HPE and Aruba portfolios in an end to end edge to cloud channel program

“Ultimately, this is going to open the door to many more GreenLake opportunities for us, truly offering everything as a service from the edge to the cloud with our own PKASolveIT services,” said Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for New York-based PKA Technologies Inc., which has closed a number of blockbuster GreenLake deals and is hosting a number of customers considering GreenLake purchases at this week’s HPE Discover conference.

Cohen called the “modernizing” of the HPE channel program “great news’ for HPE partners. “Partner Ready Vantage is going to propel us into integrating traditional and even non traditional services into our already baked GreenLake managed services offerings,” he said. “That is going to allow us to be recognized for our GreenLake skill sets and the investments we are making in the overall HPE ecosystem. We are a true edge to cloud managed services provider through our PKA SolveIT suite of offerings. Being an Aruba Platinum Partner as well as an HPE Platinum partner unites the two worlds.”

C.R. Howdyshell, president of Advizex, No. 104 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, which has closed a number of high profile GreenLake deals, said he sees the new Partner Ready Vantage program leading to a dramatic increase in Aruba Network as a Service deals.

“Partner Ready Vantage is going to be a spring board for network as a service,” he said. “By bringing together Aruba and GreenLake into a single program HPE is driving a full edge to cloud GreenLake experience.”