Global business technology firm Hewlett Packard Enterprise says it wants to help you achieve hybrid cloud so much, it will even buy your ageing in-house servers and provide you consumption-based billing on new gear, with an RoI of five months.
The proposition is the combination of two HPE services named GreenLake and HPEFS, or HPE Financial Services.
“If you have workloads that can use public cloud then you should,” says Flynn Maloy, vice-president, Marketing, HPE Pointnext, Enterprise Group. “For those workloads that can’t, you should get cloud economics.”
By “cloud economics”, Maloy refers to the great promise of the cloud — someone else will look after it, you pay for what you use, you can scale — and contract as needed, and your IT staff are freed from running machines to focusing on business problems.
{loadposition david08}For a start-up that’s tremendous. For the rest of us with a plethora of old servers running legacy applications, it’s not so easy. This is the problem HPE wants to solve, Flynn says.
“The GreenLake brand launched about a year ago as a consumption business. We see ourselves as pioneers in the consumption space. HPE has all this great technology but instead of customers buying it up-front or leasing it we wanted to replicate the public cloud experience on-premise. Pay for what you use and everything else is taken care of – servers, patching, and the rest. We wanted to create that experience with GreenLake,” he said. “We’re really proud of it.”
In fact, Maloy explains, GreenLake now has more than US$3 billion of equipment under contract, and the business is growing 50% per year on a nine-digit number as it is.
So, HPE GreenLake is the service which will supply, install and maintain a data centre in your own environment. You will literally only pay for what you use, meaning you save costs straight away by shutting down unused servers at night. If you require greater capacity, HPE will physically install more gear for you. If you expect your usage to reduce, they’ll take parts away. It’s not as instantaneous as the public cloud, of course, but it provides business with an on-premise data centre and zero effort on labour costs to administer the gear. “Your people can be more efficient. Our customers say they love this the most,” Maloy says.
When taking up GreenLake, HPE will work with you to identify the workloads you plan to run and consider the history and the variability. They will install the technology they think you need plus 20% on top. “We use HPE DataCentre Care to run it,” Maloy says, “and every hour on the hour we measure how much is used. We charge for what’s used and every two weeks check in with you for capacity planning.”
The other part of HPE’s value proposition is HPE Financial Services who says it will buy your existing servers from you. This is what HPE refers to as the “circular economy,” seeking to reduce waste and maximise reuse of equipment. The company claims it still refurbishes and sells VAX components every week, so it is confident it has a use for your old ProLiant.
Quite literally — and iTWire asked again to be sure — HPE is saying if you have existing on-premise equipment you manage, and you wish to move to newer equipment, still on-premise, but managed by someone else and with no upfront outlay and billing only on usage, then they will help you in this journey.
“You can get a return on investment within five months,” Maloy said, adding HPE regularly sees over-capacity savings of 40%.
The actual number will depend on how good you are at forecasting, in that your savings may even be larger if your company over-provisioned the number of servers it needed when purchasing the original gear.
“GreenLake stands out from our competition,” Maloy said, “because we see consumption using public cloud as the benchmark. We see it as a rental. With our competitors, they offer 12 decreasing monthly payments. You save some over-capacity but in their example, you still have to buy tech, stand it up, manage it, patch it, and so on. When you go to the public cloud you don’t do that.”
GreenLake is a component of HPE’s Pointnext brand, which is the new name for its all-in-one services division. Previously, Maloy explains, HPE had services in many different areas of the business but under Pointnext they are joined into one 25,000 person organisation.
HPE Pointnext offers advisory consulting services, professional services and operational services. Greenlake fits into the operational services area and runs your on-premise data centre 24x7x365.