It’s time for a modern private cloud that really feels like public cloud.
By Flynn Maloy, Vice President of Marketing, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services
The goal was the best of both worlds: the responsiveness, pay-as-you-go simplicity and scalability of public cloud, combined with the performance and control over data sovereignty that you can only get with on-premises infrastructure – and hopefully with a lower TCO thrown in.
The private cloud strategy has been around for a while, but I don’t see any evidence that its popularity is waning – far from it. We’re hearing every day from customers that they’re building private clouds, and they’re often looking for our help to do it. Companies love having a flexible, fungible set of surface areas that they can plug applications into and make assets easily available to different groups within the company.
That said, deploying and running a private cloud has never been an easy lift. Provisioning and standing up the infrastructure and implementing the platforms takes time, and often turns out to be more difficult than expected. Today’s private clouds tend to be complex and limited to VM-based architectures. They generally require considerable up-front investments in dedicated infrastructure. Whether they come in the form of a self-assembled system or an inflexible hardware appliance, private clouds offer little in the way of capacity planning, cost management or showback capabilities.
What’s more, once a solution is up and running, managing it continues to make significant demands on IT’s attention and resourcefulness.
It’s time for a modern private cloud – one that’s easy to provision and deploy; easily scalable, up or down; pay-as-you-go; and managed for you, so that your IT staff can focus more on tapping into new business opportunities and less on keeping the infrastructure running smoothly. It’s time for a private cloud that really feels like public cloud.
Introducing the first private cloud with the true public cloud experience
Today, HPE announced HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise. It’s an automated, self-service, flexible private cloud for both cloud-native and traditional applications. Migration is secure and simple. And because the solution is based on HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, it’s pay-per-use and fully managed for you.
I’ll refer you to our press release for an overview of the many benefits; I’ll just expand on a few key points here. With HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, you can:
1. Deploy workloads on bare metal, virtual machines, or containers. With a modern private cloud, you’re not limited to VMs any more. They’re just one part of your toolkit. HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise gives you the freedom to use any or all of these architectures, in any combination, across all of your environments – edges, data centers and colocations.
A common pool of infrastructure and automated provisioning deliver a seamless self-service experience. It’s all production-ready, workload-optimized and tested to provide consistent performance for your applications. You simply spin up the right resources to meet your needs.
2. Optimize TCO. Because HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is a true pay-per-use solution, you bypass the big upfront costs associated with traditional infrastructure purchases. HPE’s advanced metering technologies track your usage of the infrastructure, and we bill on a monthly invoice. Your monthly costs will likely be on par with public cloud, and may be lower. But more importantly, your costs will be much more predictable than with public cloud. You won’t have to worry about egress fees, for example. Public cloud costs can sometimes go up unexpectedly, and figuring out exactly why it happened means a laborious check through every page of your bill.
With HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, you have clear insight into capacity, usage and costs with our intuitive, unified management portal. Our experts work with you to help you plan capacity for future needs. No hidden charges, no surprises.
3. Simplify and accelerate everything. Easy adoption is the hallmark of the modern private cloud. With HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, you just choose the compute instance type you need, and we install it on your floor, already integrated and ready to go. It’s a fast, easy start-up that accelerates time to market and gives you the maximum flexibility to change use cases on the fly.
For example, you might choose a General Purpose instance type for applications that need a balanced mix of resources. You could use it to create test/dev environments, or allocate resources for financial technology projects. But you’re not limited to specific use cases. You’ve got a multi-technology surface area that enables you to spin up resources quickly, allocate them to different teams, and then bring them back into the common pool, where they’re ready for the next group or project. And the same is true of all the instance types we offer.
In addition, you get a managed service that covers the full lifecycle, including discovery, provisioning, firmware updates, maintenance operations, hardware replacement, growth planning and support. You don’t have to worry about skills gaps for those activities. Or for security. The solution is safeguarded by HPE’s industry-leading cybersecurity capabilities, including our powerful zero-trust security architectures.
4. Easily deploy new applications in your modern private cloud. Think of HPE GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise as a surface into which you can plug new assets. Check out the HPE GreenLake Marketplace for apps that run on HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise. In the near future, you’ll be able to deploy many HPE GreenLake cloud services directly into your private cloud.
5. Leverage your Dev/Ops toolchains. We make extensive use of automation and integration tools for deployments, and we’re making all of that available through an API portal. So if you’re using Terraform, Ansible, Puppet or Chef, for example, you can just hook right into the capabilities that are already built into our platform and extend the automation into your toolchains. That’s a great opportunity for your developers. In addition, our ServiceNow platform supports integration with your configuration management databases to further automate management.
Next-gen private cloud’s broad appeal
Developers and Dev/Ops teams will love those open APIs, but they’ll also enjoy the self-service approach to infrastructure provisioning and the ability to reduce manual tasks, which enables faster application deployment.
Indeed, we think HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise will have a broad appeal across many IT roles. CIOs will appreciate the familiar cloud operating model and the deep visibility into usage and spending. With a pre-built, production-ready private cloud from a trusted partner, they can free up IT resources from routine management tasks and empower them to focus on the business’s most exciting opportunities.
IT directors will benefit from reduced complexity and enhanced standardization. HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise will reduce time between request and provision, giving users a faster, easier experience.
And everyone will benefit from the reliability, security and performance that comes from a solution backed by HPE expertise.
It’s a new kind of private cloud, one that unlocks the full potential of this savvy, best-of-both-worlds approach to IT.
We're announcing Select Availability at HPE Discover. We can price and sell; delivery will be "white glove" initially, and automated with General Availability, which is planned to be late September.
Learn more about HPE GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise
Cloud Services Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/HPE_GreenLake
linkedin.com/showcase/hpe-greenlake/
hpe.com/us/en/greenlake
Cloud_Experts
HPE experts share their insights on how you can transform your business with HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform – the cloud that comes to you, wherever your apps and data live.
