The HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service: An exceptional customer experience

[Omar_Elissa]

HPE can help you achieve significant efficiencies and savings from an IT/facilities initiative, but we also deliver a positive experience that’s just as important in gauging the project’s success. Here’s how.

In my previous blog, I introduced the HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service (DCFhS), from HPE Data Center Technology Services (DCTS). (See: The answer to the IT/Facilities puzzle.) I explained how it works and the many benefits it can bring to businesses looking for a simpler, more effective approach to IT facilities. But however much an IT/facilities initiative may achieve in terms of efficiencies and savings, the customer’s experience of the project is just as important in gauging its overall success. Our goal is deliver a great experience that customers will always remember, one that lasts beyond a point-in-time or a one-time reporting. It is this positive experience that carries through from the technical teams, to the project directors, to the company executives.

Here are some of the ways we provide this exceptional customer experience:

1. Alignment of the Data Center Facilities Hosting Service across HPE business units:

• Starting with the HPE Advisory and Professional Services (A&PS) practices, HPE DCTS works closely to embed other HPE practices into this service, such as Data Center Transformation, Network consulting, SAP, and Security.
• We partner closely with HPE Compute and HPE Storage, as well as the Aruba organization, for all server, storage and network solutions to deliver a comprehensive and holistic solution for our customers. We coordinate closely with enterprise and solution architects on the details of these solutions to ensure that the facilities that are coupled with these IT systems match customers’ requirements while addressing their future growth and overall IT transformation.
• We work closely with HPE’s High Performance Compute (HPC) business unit on bringing these specialty compute environments into colocation facilities. Along with successes for these applications, we have also participated in HPE's HPC-as-a-Service (HPCaaS) initiative to level-set the HPC curated solutions to fit within the capabilities of common colocation facilities.

The HPE Data Center Facilities Hosting Service is positioned as an all-encompassing service that enables and supports the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, as well as traditional purchasing and customer-provided or third-party hardware. In addition, it enables us to bring all the HPE DCTS end-to-end services under a single umbrella to provide direct facility solutions, coupled with a complete suite of DCTS services to solve customer challenges.

2. Alignment with industry colocation providers: HPE DCTS has a long history of working with colocation partners in order to advise customers on data center sourcing strategies and eventually to work with these customers to deploy data center infrastructure into various colocation facilities. We have always had this direct experience with the colocation providers.

When establishing this service, our work with the colocation providers created a partner relationship. HPE DCTS helped enable the partnerships with these providers, ensuring proper service level agreements and facility operating standards that meet and exceed industry standards to offer the best technical and commercial solutions to our customers.

3. Innovation for customer needs: Traditionally, HPE has worked with our customers and the colocation facility providers separately, or to help our customers deploy infrastructure at colocation facilities with their own separate contracts. In these scenarios, HPE would offer traditional consulting services.

Under the new innovative engagement model, HPE brings a holistic solution to our customers that not only includes the complete IT hardware solutions, but also couples the data center facility. In addition, we provide exceptional HPE DCTS end-to-end services that include colocation facility assessment, plan/design, implementation, and operate/run for the ultimate customer experience.

By combining the partner colocation facility and our in-house DCTS expertise, HPE stands out in delivering this unique value addition, with more economical results for our customers.

Looking at the big picture, we believe that the HPE Data Center Facilities Hosting Service is well positioned to meet a wide range of customer needs – see the figure below.

 A proven delivery structure

The HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service provides end-to-end lifecycle services for data center strategy, planning, design, implementation, operation, and management of data center infrastructure in a colocation facility, freeing up customers' resources to focus on the core business.

HPE brings value through our skilled and experienced Data Center Facilities subject matter experts. You can confidently move workloads and applications into a remote colocation facility infrastructure (space, power, and cooling), leaving facility management to a dedicated professional service provider to look after these complex systems.

The value comes not only from the consulting aspects of the service to assess, plan, and implement, but also from how we integrate our expert team through our dedicated remote colocation project management office. This team serves as the eyes, hands, and mission control of the entire facility operation.

The HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service is defined in phases: assessment, planning, implementation, run, and decommission/exit – see the figure below:

1. Colocation Assess. During the colocation assessment phase, the HPE DCTS team engages with the customer to discover their requirements and help guide the desired journey to transform from on-prem facilities to off-prem colocation services. HPE DCTS considers many factors that relate to the customer's real estate landscape, Capex vs. Opex expenditure budgets, technical staffing, and operational constraints.

2. Facility Plan/Design: This is the integrated design of the datacenter colo facility. Data center facilities expert advisors work to coordinate and deliver all facilities-related work for a complete Colocation Facilities Plan.

3. Facility Implementation and Readiness: HPE consultants coordinate with the colocation partner, rack supplier, and structured cabling partner to ensure that the data center facility’s readiness for the hosting purpose is implemented as per the design phase. The primary focus of HPE under this phase would be to ensure the facility readiness by deploying the racks with designed power distribution, security cage and access controls as desired; structured cabling between the racks; and cross-connects lying between the telco racks and the hosted network racks.

HPE consultants ensure that the partner enrolls the new hosting environment and the components into their operations monitoring and enable the appropriate process for further engagement with HPE and customer teams during the run time of the contract.

4. Facilities Operate/Run: This work package is defined as the Operations Run and will extend through the entire term of the contract. HPE will provide integrated capacity management and SLA analysis during this period. HPE Facilities consultants support operational support staff by overseeing the facility operation, and they consistently check available capacity and growth projections to ensure that the facility fulfils contracted operational criteria. We hold the colocator to the agreed SLAs/KPIs, which ensures a comprehensive data center management approach.

For day-to-day operations, HPE sets up a Colocation PMO (project management office) which is central to several startup and ongoing activities such as: administration of colocation-related services and report requests; installation of initial and add-on systems coming into the colocation data center; and working with the customer, acting as point of contact for colocation service issue reporting (see below):

5. Facilities Decommission/Exit: HPE takes care of synchronizing all the parties involved and activities to decommission the installed technology infrastructure and associated elements in order to return the facility to the colocation provider in the same condition as at the start of the contract.

Repeat successes – is your company next?

Many of the customers who have experienced this service have multiple deployments with HPE. These deployments take many forms. Some are for production workloads, others are for disaster recovery configurations, and some are a combination of both. In other instances, customers have chosen this HPE service for multi-region implementations to establish a worldwide footprint that would not be possible to achieve on their own. These repeat success stories from returning customers are testament to the positive value and positive experience that HPE is delivering, consistently.

We can deliver the same value for your business with our comprehensive approach to facility hosting.

Learn more about the HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service – end-to-end lifecycle services for the data center from HPE Pointnext Services.

Read more about HPE data center consulting and how we deliver hybrid infrastructure-ready data centers as an integrated aspect of IT strategy.

Related posts:

Omar N Elissa: The answer to the IT/Facilities puzzle: The HPE Data Center Facilities Hosting Service

Pascal Lecoq: Maximize the value of data center management services with HPE Pointnext Services

Pascal Lecoq: DCMS: The key component of software-defined data center and digital twin initiatives

Omar Elissa
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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