Your pay-as-you-go IT package is here. But are the services exactly what you wanted?

[ServicesExperts]

In contrast to many offerings in the market, HPE GreenLake features a wide array of built-in services. Plus, it’s available in an attractive wrapper of optional, tightly integrated services.

by  Marcello Bullara, HPE Global Director for HPE GreenLake and Product Management

Marcello BullaraThe rise of consumption-based IT has certainly been a gift, and a very timely one, for businesses that want a cloud-like experience for their on-premises infrastructure. Moving to a pay-as-you-go model means you can reduce a lot of upfront expenditures and wasteful over-provisioning. You can move faster, bypassing the usual procurement delays. And you can free up your teams’ time and expertise to take on transformational projects that could be vital to the company’s growth.

Still, when IT leaders unbox what many vendors offer as consumption-based IT, they often find the contents a bit disappointing. It often turns out to be basically a leasing arrangement, perhaps with some flexible payment terms, but still essentially a traditional hardware-led approach which doesn’t do anything to accelerate IT projects or align capacity to business goals.

Now, leasing infrastructure can be a smart move, and HPE has a long history of helping companies get the most value from this strategy. But leasing is very different from the on-prem, as-a-service IT solution that we deliver as HPE GreenLake.

With HPE GreenLake, the whole package is a service. It includes a buffer of capacity right-sized to your business needs and running on infrastructure which HPE owns and maintains for you, but which is located at your premises or at a hosting provider’s facility. It may also include software specific to your workloads. We meter your usage of the hardware and the platform on a pay-as-you-go basis. Support services are baked in, and we send you a single, simplified monthly invoice – one line-item for the infrastructure and core services, based on actual capacity used each month.

That said, it’s worth taking a look at the specific service elements within HPE GreenLake, and those surrounding it, because together they form an aspect of this solution that we think really sets it apart from anything else the marketplace:

High-performance support

First let’s dig a bit deeper into the support experience that comes as part of the package. All of our HPE GreenLake solutions come with the reactive and proactive features that users of our HPE Datacenter Care service know and love. This includes 7x24 break-fix support. If something goes wrong, we will come onsite and fix it. In fact, we can often resolve issues before you would normally become aware of them if you were managing the infrastructure yourself. That’s a huge advantage in terms of mitigating risk and reducing unplanned downtime.

We make sure that everything's patched to the right standard. You get a dedicated account management team, with an HPE Account Support Manager as your first point of contact. You also get enhanced call handling into a call center environment where our people know exactly what solution you have. You own the service, not a collection of hardware, so our support teams can quickly identify the right person to dispatch to your site to resolve the issue.

Just like the pay-as-you-go financial model that underlies HPE GreenLake, this built-in support architecture delivers a true cloud-like experience. It simplifies your operating environment and removes a lot of the day-to-day heavy lifting.

Accurate, agile capacity planning

This is another core element of HPE GreenLake, included in each of our solutions. HPE takes the responsibility for knowing your organization’s consumption levels. Our metering technology gathers the relevant data and makes it available to you through the HPE Consumption Analytics Portal, which we use jointly to track and plan capacity usage and growth. We reach out to you proactively to let you know well in advance of any capacity shortage that might result in an outage or a drop-off in performance.

We also meet with you on a regular basis to talk about your usage patterns and the right level of capacity for your needs. Let’s say you just landed a major new customer, and you’re expecting a spike in demand. You can share that info in the meeting, and we can quickly deploy the additional infrastructure through a simple change order, because the basic service agreement is already in place. You don’t have to wait out a procurement cycle to bring in more gear.

Here’s a great example: Online luxury fashion retailer Yoox Net-A-Porter Group leveraged HPE GreenLake and HPE 3PAR storage to improve storage performance and capacity to handle unpredictable surges in its e-commerce transactions. The company improved its online shopping throughput by more than 560 percent.

Now let’s delve into some standalone services that complement our HPE GreenLake portfolio and integrate tightly with it:

HPE Adaptive Management Services

These customizable services extend our cloud-like support experience across your entire hybrid IT estate from core to cloud – or any part of it. HPE Adaptive Management Services  helps you manage any environment – from the simplest to the most complex – and do it more efficiently. HPE Adaptive Management Services removes much of the worry and work that goes into managing the infrastructure and software stacks underlying your workloads.

We provide a secure, AI-powered management platform that monitors your infrastructure and issues automated alerts even before issues arise. We apply tried-and-true processes and best practices to ensure speedy incident management and issue resolution. And we provide the right personnel to deliver an exceptional support experience, including proactive recommendations on how to improve the infrastructure as a whole. (For more info, see Ron Irvine’s post More Elbow-Room for Innovation.

HPE Advisory and Professional Services

Wrapped around all of these offerings is HPE Pointnext Services’ global expertise across the entire spectrum of hybrid IT. We can partner with you on specific hardware decisions and projects, like transitioning from one type of storage array to another. Or, as a pioneer and longtime leader in hybrid cloud, we can help you migrate your workloads to the cloud and get the most value from your on- and off-prem environments.

With our HPE Right Mix Advisor service, for example, you can optimize the distribution of your workloads across public and private cloud venues, sidestepping the unforeseen costs and delays that often obstruct cloud initiatives.

Lower costs, accelerated time-to-market , a worry-free support experience: that’s a package that should put a smile on any IT leader’s face. With the robust services that are included with every GreenLake engagement, and a full suite of services that can easily be added to the contract, you can confident that consumption based IT will give you exactly what you asked for.

Learn more about HPE GreenLake and how it combines the agility and economics of public cloud with the security and performance of on-prem IT.

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Marcello Bullara is HPE’s Global Director for HPE GreenLake and Product Management.