The advantages of cloud capabilities to tap into near-infinite pay-as-you-go resource pools and services are powerful benefits. Yet increasingly, we’re finding that concerns around compliance, data sovereignty and even latency are compelling customers to keep their data closer to home. More and more of our customers are actively choosing both a public and private approach to managing workloads. The problem with this approach is that on-premises and private cloud environments are complex and costly to manage.
This is where GreenLake has become a real cloud contender: HPE believe the answer to this predicament is to deliver on-premises IT as a Service. Aptly dubbed ‘Everything as a Service’ (EaaS), customers are flocking to the comprehensive solution.
In fact, in 2020 HPE GreenLake has experienced record-breaking growth, with an 86% increase in service bookings1, in the fiscal quarter ending July 31. By comparison, Microsoft Azure revenue grew at a 47% in the most recent quarter, followed by 43% for Google Cloud and 29% for Amazon Web Services1.
Antonio Neri, HPE CEO, recently remarked, “Cloud is not a destination. It is an experience… Seventy percent of apps and data are still on-prem, and more and more apps and data are moving to the edge. Customers want a true consumption-driven model from edge to cloud1.”
Neri continued, that the “vast majority” of GreenLake growth is coming as customers measure GreenLake head to head with public cloud. “What customers realise as they get to a larger scale is that it is cheaper to keep the workloads and most importantly the data on-prem, and yet automate everything and get the same cloud experience and pay the same way as if they moved to the public cloud,” he said. “It is a cost benefit and an experience benefit.”
Independent analyst firm Forrester validated these GreenLake advantages in their recent report, ‘The Total Economic Impact™ Of HPE GreenLake4’. The researchers found that cost reduction after a GreenLake implementation led to:
Let’s look a little deeper at how these savings are delivered:
Many enterprises have data and apps that must, for compliance, security or latency reasons, remain on-premises. In contrast, edge computing – computation and data storage that’s closer to the source of the data rather than centralised to remote data centres – is on the rise.
The beauty of GreenLake is that it provides a true hybrid experience, with a suite of software tools that enable IT teams to manage data from anywhere – on the edge or in the cloud – from one central portal.
Businesses face two key, often contradictory challenges: containing IT costs and enabling corporate agility. These macro trends are driven by several operational challenges, which GreenLake has specifically been designed to address:
1. Lack of business agility
Legacy technology hampers an organisation’s ability to act quickly on time-sensitive opportunities. The recent pandemic has highlighted this, demanding many organisations digitise their offerings and adopt new ways of working to stay competitive.
GreenLake gives organisations access to the most up-to-date resources that enable developers to improve time to market for new apps, services and projects- improving both customer and staff satisfaction. The offering provides the ultimate flexibility to increase or reduce workloads, bundle new services quickly and pay only for what is consumed.
2. Budgetary pressure and increased costs
Around 60% of all businesses estimate their computing needs incorrectly2, leading to overprovisioning. Cloud has removed the barriers of software deployment and adoption, driving a huge growth of IT spend outside of the IT team. According to Gartner more than 50% of IT investment has moved out of the CIO’s control3 and into various other lines of business. This creates a concerning lack of visibility for IT teams that can no longer confidently say what cloud services their company subscribes to. How is a CIO supposed to predict and control costs, secure and optimise an environment, when they don’t have a full picture of what the environment is?
The mantra of the Data#3 Security team comes to mind when I think about this Shadow IT topic:
“Complexity is the enemy, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
That’s what you get with GreenLake, a centralised, secure platform to manage everything as a service: the one model, with one partner, on one contract. Simple.
3. Unplanned downtime
Aging infrastructure becomes more fragmented and fragile, leading to lost productivity, on top of the additional cost of maintenance and external professional services.
HPE GreenLake delivers a more streamlined and robust universe that’s managed remotely. A centralised dashboard helps to improve transparency and monitoring, which leads to fewer outages, reduced loss of productivity and lowered costs (around 60% less4) for external service providers.
4. Technology updates
Organisations feel the pressure to take advantage of the latest hardware and software solutions but don’t wish to continually replace hardware or incur large capital expenses. They need improved performance levels to meet market demand, as well as staff and customer expectations.
With GreenLake, organisations have access to the latest technology and hardware without the up-front capital expenditure.
5. Need for global standardisation
National and global organisations need transparency across multiple domains and jurisdictions.
HPE GreenLake allows global organisations to consolidate their data centres and simplify their processes, enabling IT leadership to have full visibility across domains and allocate resources where they’re needed.
6. Complexity and provisioning
The IT provisioning process can take months or, in the case of a major overhaul, years. These delays prevent leadership from tackling more strategic business initiatives.
With GreenLake, you have access to the latest hardware, plus software tools, preconfigured to suit your business.
7. Growth in useable data
In what has been dubbed ‘the era of insights’, businesses need to store and access increasing amounts of data to convert data into actionable information. Data storage has become a key issue.
Offering a true hybrid experience, GreenLake delivers the scalability of cloud plus the adaptability of tools like Hadoop, which analyses data to separate out useful information from the ocean of collected data. Automated provisioning means no overprovisioning, while offering the flexibility of extra capacity when you need it.
A new choice
HPE GreenLake now offers enterprises a true hybrid experience that enables leadership to predict costs with more certainty, manage data and compliance and access the latest software and hardware.
To learn more about how HPE GreenLake’s on-premises, consumption-based IT service can give you more control over cost and performance, make an enquiry or book an assessment workshop with Data#3 today.
1. Burke, S. CRN. (August, 2020). Antonio Neri: HPE GreenLake is Growing Faster than Public Cloud. [Online] Available at: https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/antonio-neri-hpe-greenlake-is-growing-faster-than-public-cloud?itc=refresh
2. HPE and 451 Research (2016). Consumption-based IT changes everything. [Online] Available at: http://h41382.www4.hpe.com/discover-more/application/assets/pdf/TrackA06_Consumption_Changes_Everything.pdf
3. Snow (2017) Bridging the disruption gap. [Online] Available at: https://www.snowsoftware.com/int/blog/2017/03/28/bridging-disruption-gap
4. Forrester. (June, 2020). The Total Economic Impact of HPE GreenLake. [Online] Available at: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/pdfViewer.html?docId=a00047694&parentPage=/us/en/greenlake/overview&resourceTitle=The+Total+Economic+Impact+of+HPE+GreenLake