HPE on Monday expanded customer choice for its private cloud offerings with a self-managed version and a pre-provisioned version deployed at Equinix data centers.
At HPE's annual conference, HPE Discover 2023, the vendor rolled out features to its GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise that lets users connect and manage thousands of edge locations, added support for Red Hat OpenShift, and expanded its partnership with Equinix. HPE also introduced GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, which enables self-management and the ability to spin up VMs in hybrid clouds on demand.
Architected like public clouds, private clouds are still more or less on-premises data centers, according to Dave Raffo, an analyst at Futurum Group.
"Consumption models like GreenLake are managed services, just like if users were in the [public] cloud," Raffo said.
Expanded private cloud options give users more choices and flexibility for consumption while keeping the offerings under the GreenLake umbrella, he added.
Expanding the private cloud
Debuted at last year's HPE Discover, GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is a fully managed private cloud offering with VM, container and bare metal support. HPE said it has added capabilities to allow more effective edge and distributed deployments through further container support.
Container deployment is widely used at the edge, as it makes managing software at these locations easier, according to Steve McDowell, an analyst and founding partner at NAND Research.
HPE now supports all the manager container vendors with the addition of Red Hat OpenShift, but this goes beyond just rounding out the ecosystem, he said.
"OpenShift is very popular for edge deployments," McDowell said.
Dave Pearson, an analyst at IDC, said HPE's support of OpenShift at the edge demonstrates its plans for the future and how it wants to support its ecosystem. Customers demand different options depending on their workloads, and HPE is looking to support this.
"It is not just aspirational," Pearson said. "It is possible to support the vast majority of the market offerings."
Self-managing the private cloud
Along with expanded edge support, HPE introduced a new self-managed private cloud. HPE pointed out that this is a different product than the enterprise version with a focus on VMs. The VMs will be highly automated and can be spun up in both the private cloud and within AWS.
Not everybody wants to buy things as a service.
Dave RaffoAnalyst, Futurum Group
HPE isn't the only vendor to do this, Raffo said, pointing to Dell's rollout earlier in the year of a self-managed storage option. HPE is broadening options depending on how customers want to consume their offerings.
"Not everybody wants to buy things as a service," Raffo said.
Aside from how users wish to manage and consume their environments, it is also about scale, McDowell said. Some companies are comfortable in a VMware environment and don't need the breadth and scale of Private Cloud for Enterprise.
HPE did not disclose what the price difference between the products were, only that they are two separate products for two different customer types.
Private cloud, somewhere else
Whether customers choose the enterprise or business edition, they can deploy their private cloud at Equinix data centers as opposed to their own. Equinix data centers are collocated with public clouds like AWS for easy, hybrid cloud integration.
The preconfigured HPE infrastructure lets customers deploy workloads quickly and adjacently to AWS data centers, Pearson said. This could be used for burst workloads or on a more consistent basis. The expanded partnership with Equinix also addresses the main issues concerning customers with cloud usage.
"With the cloud, customers are most concerned with egress fees and charges from cloud providers but also the location of the data," Pearson said.
Using a private cloud can lower egress fees, and taking advantage of Equinix data center locations helps users comply with data sovereignty compliance, he said.
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.com.
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