What is HPE GreenLake?

Modern, forward-thinking organizations have become accustomed to agility and resilience as key ingredients for remaining competitive in the information age. With key enablers such as virtualization, the cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and other transformative technologies allowing enterprises to realize new operational efficiencies and business opportunities, the challenge becomes how to remain on the cutting edge while staying adaptable and secure—not to mention responsive to existing needs and traditional modalities like existing on-premises IT infrastructure.

GreenLake is HPE's answer to this challenge: an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering for on-premises and hybrid workloads. The solution is fully managed and consumed via a metered, pay-per-use model—in the data center, colocation facility and at the edge.

What is HPE GreenLake?

HPE GreenLake is a self-service, HPE-managed platform that marries the simplicity and agility of the public cloud with the security, governance and compliance, and performance benefits of on-premises IT infrastructure. This unified solution allows organizations to undertake data and IT environment modernizations efforts (e.g., leveraging advanced analytics, incorporating AI/ML, bolstering cybersecurity controls) more quickly and with less risk.  

Accelerating data center modernization

Regardless of an organization's respective level of IT maturity and technology adoption, GreenLake's as a service consumption model enables them to leverage the public cloud experience across all their IT environments, even across private clouds, multicloud and on-premises.

This highly agile "cloud everywhere" modality allows for the integration of on-premises and/or private cloud deployment models into a centralized HPE GreenLake interface for managing those resources. Within GreenLake, users can access a myriad of deployable resources and services: bare metal, compute, storage, container management and data protection services, as well as HPC, AI/ML and virtual desktop infrastructure, just to name a few.  

Even strictly on-premises environments can be modernized with GreenLake's simple cloud everywhere model.

Cloud-like flexibility and ease of management

HPE GreenLake Central is the solution's main management console that provides a unified view of the organization's entire IT operations; through this single pane of glass, administrators can provision, monitor and manage infrastructure with intuitive, cloud-native (e.g., SaaS-based) controls.  

GreenLake Central makes it easy to quickly deploy and turn off services, create analytics to support costing or security and compliance initiatives, and streamline management efforts in general across an organization's entire IT estate.

Pre-configured HPE systems —hardware and software included  

HPE GreenLake customers can select from a broad range of pre-configured, fully customizable end-to-end modular solutions that offer choices of infrastructure components (e.g., storage, compute, networking, containers, ML, private cloud and more) customized to their specific needs, expertise level and amount of available in-house IT resources—in fact, HPE GreenLake supports almost any HPE technology. Users simply select a preconfigured offering and size, order with a few clicks, and await delivery to their data center, colocation facility or edge location. Upon arrival, installation is plug-and-play with a quick, simple configuration process.

How Does HPE GreenLake Work?

HPE GreenLake's IaaS offering extends to organizations the ease-of-use and convenience of a self-service software platform for the services they need for all their IT computing and business needs. The following are key underlying attributes that make HPE GreenLake a powerful offering under the hood.

Single pane of glass management with GreenLake Central

GreenLake Central is the solution's intuitive platform interface that allows users to monitor and optimize their GreenLake resources, deploy new services, access usage reports and analytics, forecast cost and capacity, and more.

HPE's GreenLake offers a range of services, including the following options available as pre-configured solutions:

Virtual machines  

• General purpose virtual machines (VMs): VMware or Red Hat hypervisors and HPE converged/industry-standard systems for delivering cost or performance-optimized IT infrastructure
• Enterprise-ready VMs: HPE Synergy software-defined composable systems and HPE Primera and Nimble storage for optimizing performance and re-composing resources, as required
• Hyperconverged VMs: HPE SimpliVity and Nutanix software-defined platforms enable unprecedented efficiency, performance and resiliency

Private cloud

With HPE GreenLake, customers can deploy private cloud VMs on-premises for supporting cloud-native applications and workloads, all within the GreenLake Central management interface.

Containers

Containers are supported through HPE GreenLake's preconfigured container service—fully managed on HPE Synergy in the organization's data center  

Machine learning support

HPE GreenLake provides an optimized MLOps stack with built-in ML libraries and frameworks on top of a ML workload-centric infrastructure for supporting advanced AI/ML applications and use cases.

Storage

HPE GreenLake offers a myriad of storage options, capabilities and services, including:

• Data protection: backup administrators can select their backup/recover software of choice for enabling robust, flexible, on-premises data protection with intelligent de-duplication
• General purpose storage: HPE GreenLake systems use HPE Nimble Adaptive Flash hybrid storage arrays as both primary and secondary flash workloads to combine cost-effective performance with architectural simplicity
• Business critical storage: Organizations are empowered to deliver stringent availability/performance service level agreements (SLAs) with tier-1 configurations for primary workloads
• Mission critical storage: Tier-0 configurations are supported with extreme latency sensitivity and advanced resilience measures—critical features for ensuring maximum availability and minimal downtime

Compute

• Composable compute: software-defined solutions that power any workload in a way that is easy to consume and sized and curated for your needs—for gaining ultimate efficiency and control
• General compute: rack-optimized servers designed for scalability in a small footprint, designed for compute-intensive workloads using a flexible, software-defined approach
• Storage optimized compute: software-defined infrastructure for supporting storage–dense workloads in critical, on-premises applications and data use cases

WWT can help with HPE GreenLake Deployment

HPE GreenLake offers a myriad of configurations, deployment models and infrastructure options to suit every organization's unique requirements. To find out which options are the most appropriate for your organization, speak with a WWT expert today or visit our labs to learn about HPE's capabilities.