A better way to provision storage: As a service, with HPE GreenLake cloud services

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You probably won’t be surprised to hear that businesses tend to overprovision storage and compute infrastructure, sometimes by large amounts – it’s a widespread and longstanding tactic in IT.

The rationale, of course, is to dodge the risk of running out of capacity. But it’s a bit stunning to learn that, very often, it doesn’t work! A recent post at this blog by David Lambert, citing a recent Futurum Research report, points out that “despite the popularity of the over-provisioning strategy, many businesses still find themselves running out of storage and/or compute ... Nearly half (47 percent) say they’ve been impacted by running out of storage capacity. Forty-one percent say the same for compute.” (Read David’s blog here: Overprovisioning costs more than you think)

My main interest for years now has been storage technologies, so I decided to download the Futurum paper to dig into this a bit. You can download the report – an updated version of a survey that HPE commissioned a couple of years ago – with a simple sign-up here: The Pulse of Storage and Compute Consumption in 2020. The report looks at the costs of business disruption, including loss of productivity and revenue, caused by a lack of adequate capacity. Twenty-nine percent of respondents overall put the cost – from lack of storage capacity alone! – in the $100k to $250k range. Among larger businesses (50,000 or more employees), 30 percent said that the storage-related costs were above $250k.

The cloud experience for your data infrastructure

As David’s blog points out, an on-premises, as a service approach can go a long way towards eliminating these risks and inefficiencies, because you don’t end up buying a lot of equipment that ends up being underutilized. HPE GreenLake is a true consumption-based, pay-per-use IT solution that delivers the cloud experience for all of your apps and data, wherever they reside, from edge to data center to colocations.

HPE works with you to set up a minimum reserve capacity to fit your needs, and we meter by usage and charge on a monthly basis. We help you with capacity planning; it’s a quick and straightforward job to add capacity or reduce it as your business needs change. And the solution is managed for you by HPE Pointnext Services experts. We take care of monitoring, patching and capacity management for you, lightening your operational load.

In addition, we help you simplify IT through our self-service platform, HPE GreenLake Central. This gives you centralized operations with a unified view of all your services, and enables you to monitor usage, cost performance, compliance and more.

With storage management cloud services from HPE, you eliminate the need to buy more gear than you need, as well as the risk of running out of storage. HPE GreenLake for Storage enables you to avoid long procurement delays and accelerate time to value with pre-configured, ready-to-ship offerings. We deliver your equipment in as few as 14 days (see above) so you can get new projects up and running quickly. With HPE experts monitoring the solution to keep everything running smoothly, your IT staff can focus their efforts on strategic initiatives. We can offer our entire storage portfolio as a service, including HPE Alletra, our new all-NVMe cloud-native data infrastructure (read how HPE is reinventing storage)

HPE GreenLake for Storage is just one of our ever-growing portfolio of cloud services, and you might also want to check out our data protection as a service offering: HPE GreenLake for Data Protection. It’s a great way to modernize backup and recovery and access the full value of your data with all the agility of cloud, but without the data egress fees and lock-in.

At HPE Storage Day, I talked with some colleagues about HPE GreenLake, how it works, and why it’s transforming the storage market. We also covered our data protection services. Watch the video below: 

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You can view all of our Storage Day content now online: Unleash the Power of Data

Learn more about HPE GreenLake storage

Read more about HPE Alletra and how it powers your data from edge to cloud