Understanding HPE GreenLake and the Hybrid Cloud

Rather than requiring every workload to move to the public cloud to gain a cloud operating experience, GreenLake allows organisations to introduce cloud-style management and consumption models while retaining infrastructure in locations that meet their requirements.

This can be particularly relevant for workloads that need to remain on-premises because of performance, security, sovereignty, regulatory or operational requirements.

How Does GreenLake Work?

GreenLake provides a common platform through which organisations can access and manage HPE cloud services and infrastructure.

Users access services through the GreenLake platform, with identity and access management providing controls over who can access individual services and resources.

From there, organisations can use GreenLake services to manage different areas of their infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking, private cloud and hybrid cloud operations.

The exact model depends on the services being used.

An organisation might use GreenLake to manage infrastructure it already owns, subscribe to particular cloud services, deploy a private cloud or consume infrastructure at its own location through GreenLake Flex Solutions.

This distinction is important: GreenLake is not simply one infrastructure product or one commercial model. It is the wider platform through which HPE delivers and manages a growing portfolio of hybrid cloud capabilities.

What is GreenLake Flex Solutions?

GreenLake Flex Solutions provides consumption-based infrastructure for organisations that want to run workloads within their own data centre, at the edge or in a colocation facility while consuming the infrastructure through a cloud-like commercial model.

Instead of purchasing infrastructure solely according to predicted future demand, organisations can establish the capacity they require and pay according to their usage, subject to the terms and reserved capacity associated with their agreement.

Additional capacity can be installed to provide room for growth, helping organisations respond to changes in demand without waiting for entirely new infrastructure to be procured and deployed.

Consumption is metered, with usage and capacity information available through GreenLake.

This model can help organisations reduce the risk of significantly overprovisioning infrastructure while retaining physical infrastructure in locations under their control.

GreenLake Flex Solutions are available across a range of infrastructure and workload requirements, including compute, storage, data protection, hyperconverged infrastructure and mission-critical environments.

Consumption and Capacity Management

One of the original areas GreenLake became known for was consumption-based IT, and this remains an important part of GreenLake Flex Solutions.

Traditional infrastructure procurement often requires organisations to estimate how much capacity they will need several years into the future.

Estimate too little and additional infrastructure may need to be purchased sooner than expected. Estimate too much and significant amounts of capital can be tied up in resources that remain unused.

GreenLake Flex Solutions provide an alternative approach.

Infrastructure consumption is metered, allowing organisations to understand how much capacity they are using and how this changes over time.

GreenLake Consumption Analytics can provide visibility of capacity and consumption and help organisations understand when available capacity may be exhausted.

This can support more informed capacity planning and help IT teams take action before resource constraints begin to affect workloads.

Hybrid Cloud Management

For many organisations, the challenge isn’t choosing between on-premises infrastructure and cloud. It is managing both effectively.

Different applications have different requirements. Some may be well suited to public cloud, while others need to remain within a private environment because of data sovereignty, security, latency, performance or cost.

GreenLake is designed around this hybrid model.

It provides a platform through which organisations can manage services and infrastructure across their hybrid estate rather than treating on-premises and cloud environments as entirely separate operating models.

This can provide greater visibility and consistency while allowing workload placement decisions to be based on the requirements of the application and organisation.

Private Cloud

GreenLake includes private cloud services for organisations that want cloud-style infrastructure while retaining greater control over their environment.

HPE’s current private cloud portfolio includes options designed for different operational requirements, including HPE Private Cloud PC3000 and HPE Private Cloud PC7000.

Private cloud can provide organisations with capabilities such as self-service infrastructure, automation and centralised management while keeping applications and data within infrastructure under their control.

This can be particularly relevant where organisations need to meet specific requirements around:

• Data sovereignty
• Regulatory compliance
• Security
• Performance
• Latency
• Application dependencies
• Predictable workloads

It can also form part of a wider hybrid cloud strategy rather than operating as an isolated environment.

Compute Management

GreenLake can also provide cloud-based management for HPE compute infrastructure.

This allows IT teams to manage distributed server environments through a centralised cloud console, reducing the requirement to manage each location independently.

Depending on the infrastructure and services deployed, capabilities can include monitoring, lifecycle management, firmware management and operational insights.

This becomes particularly useful as infrastructure becomes more distributed across data centres, offices and edge locations.

A central management platform can provide IT teams with greater visibility of their compute estate without requiring infrastructure to be physically located in the same environment.

Storage and Data Management

Data is increasingly distributed across on-premises infrastructure, cloud environments and edge locations.

GreenLake supports HPE’s storage portfolio and provides a cloud operational experience for managing storage infrastructure.

Through services built around platforms including HPE Alletra Storage, organisations can gain centralised visibility and management while retaining storage infrastructure within their chosen locations.

GreenLake storage services can provide capabilities including:

• Self-service provisioning
• Centralised management
• Consumption visibility
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Capacity management
• Data protection
• File, block and object storage depending on the solution

This allows organisations to apply aspects of the cloud operating model to data that cannot, or should not, simply be moved into public cloud storage.

Security and Governance

A hybrid environment can introduce additional governance challenges because applications, users and data may span multiple locations and platforms.

GreenLake includes common platform capabilities such as identity and access management, allowing organisations to control access to services and resources.

Depending on the services deployed, organisations can apply policies, roles and permissions across their environment.

Keeping particular workloads and data on-premises or within private cloud can also help organisations address requirements that may make public cloud unsuitable, including data sovereignty, regulatory compliance and security considerations.

A hybrid approach allows organisations to select an appropriate environment according to the requirements of each workload rather than applying the same infrastructure model universally.

FinOps and Cost Visibility

Hybrid cloud can make understanding IT expenditure more difficult.

Infrastructure costs may be distributed across owned equipment, subscriptions, private cloud and multiple public cloud services.

GreenLake provides consumption and cost information that can help organisations understand how resources are being used.

Combined with HPE’s wider CloudOps capabilities, organisations can apply FinOps practices to gain greater insight into infrastructure consumption and expenditure.

This can help IT and finance teams:

• Understand resource consumption
• Allocate costs
• Identify inefficient resource use
• Monitor budgets
• Compare infrastructure options
• Improve forecasting
• Make more informed workload placement decisions

The objective is not necessarily to select the cheapest infrastructure in every instance, but to understand the relationship between cost, performance, risk and operational requirements.

than applying the same infrastructure model universally.

GreenLake for AI

AI infrastructure is placing new demands on enterprise IT.

Organisations need access to high-performance compute, large volumes of data and increasingly specialised infrastructure while also considering security, governance and data privacy.

GreenLake includes services designed to help organisations deploy and operate AI infrastructure.

This includes HPE Private Cloud AI, developed with NVIDIA, which provides a private AI platform designed to support enterprise AI workloads while allowing organisations to retain control of their data.

The wider GreenLake platform can also provide the infrastructure management, data and operational capabilities required to support AI as it moves from experimentation into production.

This is particularly relevant for organisations that want to adopt AI but cannot simply transfer sensitive or proprietary data into public AI services.

Edge Infrastructure

Not every workload runs in a traditional data centre.

Manufacturing sites, healthcare environments, retail locations and other distributed operations increasingly generate and process data at the edge.

These environments can create management challenges when infrastructure is spread across many locations.

GreenLake can extend cloud-style management and infrastructure consumption to edge environments, giving central IT teams greater visibility and control while allowing workloads to remain close to the location where data is generated.

This can support applications where latency, connectivity, data volumes or operational requirements make sending everything to a central cloud environment impractical.

Sustainability

Understanding infrastructure utilisation can also support wider sustainability objectives.

Poorly utilised infrastructure consumes space, energy and resources regardless of whether its available capacity is actually being used.

Greater visibility of utilisation can help organisations understand where infrastructure is underused and make more informed decisions about future capacity.

GreenLake also provides sustainability-related insights as part of HPE’s wider platform capabilities, helping organisations understand elements of their IT estate relevant to environmental reporting and optimisation.

Sustainability should therefore be considered alongside cost and operational efficiency when assessing infrastructure utilisation.