Get a fluid, seamless, secure cloud experience – everywhere – with HPE GreenLake Lighthouse

[JohnGromala]

In the space of a decade or so, the IT-as-a-Service model has disrupted traditional binary thinking around infrastructure – cloud vs. on-premises – with a third way that delivers the best of both. HPE GreenLake has led the market shift towards a pay-per-use model. We like to describe HPE GreenLake as ‘the cloud that comes to you.’ It delivers the cloud experience for all of your apps and data, regardless of location. You can easily add capacity when you need it, and we manage the solution for you to keep it performing at its best. We install the infrastructure for you and meter your usage, and we bill you monthly on that basis. Any software components are rolled into that one simplified invoice.

HPE GreenLake has achieved tremendous market success, and we’ve steadily broadened our range of cloud services. Customers love being able to get projects up and running quickly, without procurement delays and major upfront expenses, and they greatly appreciate the ability to reduce their operational burden. We’re currently at around 1200 enterprises globally and counting. And we’re proud that we can point to a 95% customer retention rate.

But a tendency to rest on our laurels has never been part of HPE’s DNA, and last week we announced a raft of innovations to make the experience even more cloud-like and seamless. (Check out our press release: Hewlett Packard Enterprise announces breakthrough HPE GreenLake cloud platform innovations.) In this post, I’ll focus on HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, a breakthrough cloud-native platform that enables you to quickly and easily configure and optimize multiple cloud services across locations.

Spin up workload-optimized resources in just a few clicks

HPE GreenLake Lighthouse is paired with, and part of, the HPE GreenLake cloud services that you choose to run. HPE GreenLake provides a single, unified experience across all of the locations where you deploy it, federating across all of those environments, whether on-premises, at a colocation, at the edge or connected via HPE GreenLake to public cloud services.

Previously, if you ordered an HPE GreenLake cloud service for a particular workload we would set up the specific metered hardware to run it; if you then wanted to run a different workload, we’d set up a different set of hardware. With HPE GreenLake Lighthouse we’re not tied to this one-to-one approach. You can run different workloads on the same cloud-native platform. HPE GreenLake Lighthouse eliminates configuration complexity for these multiple workloads; you can spin up workload-optimized resources in just a few clicks.

This kind of flexibility – the ability to dynamically adapt to changing business needs over time – is one of the core tenets of the cloud-native approach and one reason we designed HPE GreenLake Lighthouse as a cloud-native platform. It is the perfect architecture to complement HPE GreenLake Cloud Services available through HPE Greenlake Central, our self-service cloud services portal that gives you insight and control across your entire hybrid IT estate.

How does it work in practice? A communication service provider, for example, might have a bunch of new services that they’re setting up at the edge with the arrival of 5G. They may also have an older set of core systems that they use for managing the business, as well as a set of services and content that they provide from the core or a colocation site – video streaming services, for instance. HPE GreenLake Lighthouse provides a standardized way to manage those distributed assets seamlessly, greatly simplifying operations.

Or imagine a healthcare organization that has edge offerings at its clinics and also runs some research and analytics, as well as core capabilities like records retention and billing, in a datacenter. HPE GreenLake Lighthouse enables compute and storage resources to be distributed among those uses as needed while providing a unified IT experience and consistent controls across all of the deployments.

4 big benefits of HPE GreenLake Lighthouse
HPE GreenLake Lighthouse enables you to:

1. Grow capacity with multi-workload orchestration. With HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, it’s easy to switch provisioning among different workload-optimized solutions as your needs change. Adding capacity is just as simple. If you want to expand capabilities, you can add modules to the systems that you’ve already set up. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a good example. There are different levels of VDI; you might start out with a basic system if you don’t need a ton of graphics processing, for example. But if you later decide that you need to do some higher-end stuff, you can add some GPUs and tap into more advanced VDI capabilities just by adding capacity onsite, while still maintaining the same, single-platform experience.
    
2. Maximize workload performance with validated catalogs and optimized blueprints. We make it easy to choose the capabilities you want with catalogs of solutions that have been tested and validated for a range of workloads such as VDI, high-performance computing, and AI/ML. Of course, you can always do some tweaking and configurability to make the solution your own, but by starting at that validated level you can be confident that you won’t have to redo all of the testing for each individual piece. You can just do a final check when those come together.
    

   We have catalogs of capabilities for the container world and the virtual machine world, as well as bare metal, which gives you an additional level of flexibility. You also take most workloads you’re running and port them over to run on bare metal as needed.
    

3. Protect your apps and data with integrated end-to-end security. HPE GreenLake Lighthouse is built on HPE’s market-leading security capabilities, starting with HPE Trusted Supply Chain and our Silicon Root of Trust architecture. We will extend that advanced protection up-stack into the virtual machines and containers and even into the workloads. You will have an attestation of zero trust up into the software layers, providing an exceptional level of security.
    
4. Simplify operations with autonomous lifecycle management. An important aspect of the cloud experience is knowing that you don’t need to worry about firmware, updates, version control management or similar nuts-and-bolts tasks. With HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, we operate, manage and service the solution for you and take care of these details so you're always up to date, and you’re free to concentrate on other business priorities.

A modular design to fit your business needs
HPE GreenLake Lighthouse is a modular as-a-service platform. It provides compute, storage, and networking in optimized configurations to meet your needs. We currently offer the solution in two series targeting specific use cases. The MS-Series for Mainstream Solutions is ideal to support diverse workloads and typical business needs. The TS-Series for Technical Solutions delivers high performance support for intensive workload needs. In addition, we plan to offer the ES-Series for Edge Solutions in the future, designed for smaller deployments at the edge.

HPE has long recognized that the next phase of digital transformation would be to build a unified and consistent cloud experience even for those assets that can’t move to public cloud. We believe that the advanced cloud experience that HPE GreenLake and HPE GreenLake Lighthouse deliver – the cloud that comes to you – is the next step in that evolution.

Learn more about HPE GreenLake Lighthouse.

Learn more about HPE GreenLake, the cloud that comes to you.

John Gromala
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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