HPE Discover was obliged to go virtual in 2020 due to the Covid19 pandemic, so no Vegas this year. But this did not stop HPE to keep on transforming themselves to adapt to the current situation in the IT market. The result was a long list of new announcements.
HPE CEO Antonio Neri made several announcements during his keynote session. and in the following spotlight sessions.
Find here an overview of the most important announcements:
More GreenLake
HPE is growing its GreenLake portfolio that was announced 2 years ago, in their path to become an All-As-A-Service company in 2022, delivering an on-premises managed computing service aka private cloud experience to its customers.
They combine HPE technology, hardware and software, in combination with the HPE Financial Services support and HPE PointNext Services experts, and place this as a solution in the customer’s environment. Then they meter the usage of the resources every hour and bill the customer of what they are actually using. So, no over-provisioning situations anymore.
With the HPE GreenLake Central platform, the customer will get a self-service portal where you will get a point-and-click experience to consume services like machine learning tasks, containers, VM’s, storage, compute, networking and data protection services. These services can be activated in a matter of minutes on your own IT gear (managed by HPE but on-premises) or in a public cloud.
HPE has put these cloud services into pre-packaged, pre-configured building blocks, to allow customers to place orders for these use-case-optimized architectures and get them up and running in as few as two weeks.
All existing and new services under the GreenLake umbrella can be found here: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake/services.html
HPE states that GreenLake differs from public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in that it does not charge for data egress, since it is running on-premises or in HPE owned datacenters. These egress costs are always a big cost when consuming public cloud resources, and so is an advantage when selecting a GreenLake solution.
On top of that, since data is kept local it improves the latency as well, which helps AI and ML algorithms.
HPE goes Software (again)
The second big announcement is HPE entering the software market (again).
Again, since they decided to sell their entire software portfolio 3 years ago to MicroFocus.
Today HPE announced a new software portfolio called Ezmeral to modernize and manage data and operations in the edge and in the cloud. Some examples are container orchestration and management, AI, ML and data analytics, IT automation and operations supported by AI.
This portfolio was possible due to the recent acquisitions of MAPR, Blue Data and some other companies in the last year. Now HPE bundles all this intelligence into one portfolio, to be consumed as a service, on premises or in the cloud.
All existing solutions will be migrated under the Ezmeral branding, for instance the last year announced HPE Container Platform is called Ezmeral Container Platform, while the Blue Data pillar is called Ezmeral ML Ops now, and the MAPR stack can be found now inside the Ezmeral Data Fabric.
Aruba ESP
Also Aruba was on stage with some news. They announced the Aruba Edge Services Platform also known as ESP.
Given the importance of capitalizing on the opportunities at the Edge, it’s critical for businesses to ensure that they have the right network foundation. They need to prepare their IT infrastructure for the next big technology transition while ensuring they can quickly respond to the need for business continuity and resiliency in the face of unplanned events.
That’s where Aruba ESP comes in. It’s the industry’s first AI-powered platform designed to unify, automate, and secure the Edge.
Aruba ESP combines AIOps, Zero Trust Security, and a Unified Infrastructure, with financial and consumption flexibility to help IT:
• Identify and resolve issues quickly, preempting problems before they impact the business.
• Protect against advanced threats from a vanishing security perimeter.
• Monitor and manage thousands of wired, wireless and WAN devices across campus, branch, data center, or remote worker locations.
• Quickly deploy network services at scale to support changing business needs.
• Allow continued infrastructure investment in the face of uncertain financial challenges.
In upcoming articles, I will dive deeper in these announcements with more details, once they become available.
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