Six big announcements from HPE ahead of Discover conference

The vendor has confirmed several additions to its as-a-service GreenLake offering

HPE's Discover conference begins today with the vendor set to announce several additions and developments to its as-a-service GreenLake offering.

The company was among the first to move towards as-a-service, announcing the launch of GreenLake as far back as 2017, and developing it considerably since.

This includes recently transforming its storage arm into a cloud-native business by bringing it into the GreenLake offering, which was announced in May this year.

HPE's move to as-a-service was represented in its recently published results, with its as-a-service annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth standing at 30 per cent year-over-year up to $678 million, while orders for as-a-service grew 41 per cent.

And HPE will use Discover to reveal several more key developments as it shifts further and further towards an as-a-service, consumption-based model.

Here are six big GreenLake announcements that HPE is set to make at the conference...

GreenLake Lighthouse

Much of the news coming out of HPE is around further innovations to its cloud offering, including the introduction of GreenLake Lighthouse, a tool for managing workloads more easily.

Lighthouse is a "secure, cloud-native platform" that is designed to "easily run and manage different workload-optimised solutions", HPE says.

HPE claims Lighthouse allows customers to add new cloud services to GreenLake Central without having to go through the process of ordering and waiting for a new configuration.

"Lighthouse is a purpose-built cloud platform that is really designed to run the cloud-native applications that are distributed across from edge to the cloud to the data centre," said Kumar Sreekanti, chief technology officer.

"Customers can deploy faster, they can run multi-workloads and you are optimised to run applications. And obviously, the most important thing of this day and age is you want to stay protected."

Project Aurora

In response to the need for increased cybersecurity, particularly when it comes to securing edge-to-cloud, HPE has announced the introduction of Project Aurora.

It will deliver a "cloud-native, zero-trust security to HPE's edge-to-cloud architecture", it says, and will work by embedding technology within the HPE GreenLake cloud platform to automatically and continuously verify the integrity of the hardware, firmware, operating systems, platforms, and workloads, including security workloads.

Aurora's can be used to automatically detect advanced threats from silicon to cloud in seconds compared to today's average of 28 days, HPE claims, and will be first embedded within GreenLake Lighthouse before moving into HPE GreenLake cloud services and HPE Ezmeral software.

"What we are providing is a chain of trust from silicon to the workload. That's the most important thing, and it is very hard for attackers to evade any of this," Sreekanti said.

Compute Cloud Console

HPE has also announced the launch of its Compute Cloud Console, a cloud-based management service to provide "unified compute operations as-a-service".

The console will automate compute operations "across an organisation's entire fleet", HPE says, and is based on the GreenLake Cloud Platform, while building on the recently announced Data Services Cloud Console.

It will provide an as-a-service experience regardless of where workloads are running, as well as automating manual tasks such as provisioning and lifecycle management, HPE claims, speeding up time-to-market and eliminating inconsistencies due to human error.

"We're excited to deliver more automated and unified tools with super simple and effortless controls," Keith White, general manager of GreenLake Cloud Services, said.

"This new cloud console builds on HPE's latest innovations for delivering centralised consoles with cloud-native and management capabilities."

Silicon on-demand payment

Silicon on-demand is a new pay-per-use, consumption-based pricing model that HPE says will "offer a more granular cloud experience with better metering, reduced buffering time and faster deployment".

It will be available first through the HPE GreenLake cloud platform and has been developed in partnership with Intel, with HPE claiming it will "remove the need to order or install new processors by allowing customers to instantly activate and pay for more capacity with just a click".

"As the world becomes increasingly digital, harnessing insights from unprocessed data will depend on technology solutions that take advantage of four key superpowers: cloud, connectivity, artificial intelligence and the intelligent edge," said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel.

"Together with HPE, we innovate from edge-to-cloud on technology solutions, including silicon on-demand, that drive the next wave of digital transformation and improve the life of every human on the planet."

Support for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server

HPE's GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform will now include support for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server.

Azure Stack HCI, a new hyperconverged infrastructure operating system, will be delivered as an Azure service on the HPE GreenLake cloud platform and will "accelerate data centre modernisation, remote office productivity, and many edge applications", HPE claims.

Customers will also be able to control their services through the Azure portal in the same way that they manage their Azure public cloud services.

"We do have Azure Stack HCI certified hardware that folks can run but this will bring all of these things together in a much more integrated solution for our customers," White said.

"As customers modernise their infrastructure, they will be able to use resources in a consistent way across their public and on prem scenario, without all the complexity, and then have it all managed for them across Azure, Azure Stack HCI, fully integrated with GreenLake to really gives customers this powerful and flexible hybrid offering."

New cloud services and partners

On top of the development of its partnership with Microsoft, HPE has announced a host of other new cloud capabilities and the expansion of its partner ecosystem.

Available as cloud services on premises, at the edge, or in colocation centres, these new services include managing electronic medical records, financial payments, risk management, machine learning operations, SAP, 5G core for Telco, Epic, Splunk and more.

It has launched both HPE GreenLake for Electronic Medical Records and HPE GreenLake for Core Payment Systems in partnership with Lusis, while HPE GreenLake for Splunk "makes it simple to collect, analyse, and act upon the data generated by an organisation's technology infrastructure, security systems, and business applications", it claims.

Meanwhile, the HPE 5G Core Stack with HPE GreenLake for 5G core allows carriers to get a purpose-built, open, cloud-native 5G core "with minimal upfront investment".

In addition to these services, HPE has announced that four previously introduced GreenLake Cloud services will become generally available - HPE GreenLake for High Performance Computing, HPE GreenLake for Machine Learning Operations, HPE GreenLake for SAP and HPE GreenLake for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.