HPE aims to make its private and hybrid cloud platform GreenLake more porous with other clouds as well as on-premises datacenters through a handful of new services.
HPE's latest cache of services, highlighted by the IT vendor during its HPE Discover 2023 conference this week in Las Vegas, include new GreenLake capabilities for AWS and VMware Cloud Foundation customers as well as enhancements to GreenLake's networking and disaster recovery capabilities.
These services follow several months of other updates and additions made by HPE, which include the acquisition of IT automation specialist OpsRamp, an enterprise sustainability dashboard, and a partnership with Vast Data for file storage software on GreenLake.
"If you look at GreenLake and compare it with Azure or AWS, there are a lot of services [HPE has] to put in place to be a true cloud offering," Ellis said.
GreenLake continues cloud-bound journey
HPE GreenLake expands further into AWS with a handful of new capabilities.
Amazon EKS Anywhere in GreenLake's private cloud is now generally available. PE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery now supports Amazon Relational Database Service and EKS. The backup service now protects Microsoft SQL Server as well.
Other AWS focused additions for GreenLake include the HPE NonStop Development Environment within the AWS cloud as well as the HPE Fraud Risk Management service available through the AWS Marketplace.
HPE NonStop Development Environment provides a cloud testing environment for HPE NonStop, the vendor's fault-tolerant systems for workloads with high-uptime mandates, delivered as Amazon Machine Images. HPE Fraud Risk Management, now available through the AWS Marketplace, provides fraud management capabilities as a service for telecom providers.
None of these new services merge the full capabilities of HPE GreenLake into the public AWS cloud, Ellis said. But they connect the isolated GreenLake cloud into other common enterprise clouds.
"That's a recognition [HPE's] clients have a lot of data in AWS," Ellis said. "[But] they not talking about running HPE nonstop in the cloud -- just the development environment."
VMware customers can similarly use HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation offerings, which enter general availability today.
HPE also sells its Aruba networking capabilities as a service through the GreenLake using the entire suite of Aruba hardware and software, continuing the company's SaaS push from last year.
HPE's target market shift
IT giants previously focusing on selling hardware for customer-owned data centers, such as Dell and HPE, have pivoted into software and services to catch up with both the malleability and profitability of cloud hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
If you look at GreenLake and compare it with Azure or AWS, there's a lot of services [HPE has] to put in place to be a true cloud offering.
Brent EllisAnalyst, Forrester Research
The pivot still requires that companies interrogate the precise services they sell to customers, Ellis said. HPE has positioned GreenLake as a cloud service for customers who may have a business reason to avoid using public clouds, he said.
The move offers a massive depth of services but ultimately locks customers into HPE's ecosystem -- an ecosystem that can occasionally be at odds with its own offerings by promising multi-cloud functionality over services running natively in the vendor's private cloud.
By comparison, Ellis said, Dell places all its products and services in every possible marketplace. The launch of Project Alpine last month brought the company's block and file cloud storage products into public clouds.
HPE, meanwhile, folded VAST Data's file storage software into HPE hardware and GreenLake services through a new partnership. But they didn't full embrace the partner technology to avoid cannibalizing its existing object storage offerings.
"While VAST is very good, you're limiting your capability by having a GreenLake [service] for file but not for object," Ellis said.
Tim McCarthy is a journalist from the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts. He covers cloud and data storage news.
