HPE’s GreenLake expansion adds NaaS, HPC, storage options

HPE is significantly expanding its GreenLake cloud services platform with 12 new packages that focus on strengthening and simplifying networking, high-performance computing (HPC) and storage environments.

The goal of GreenLake and these new offerings is to offer customers greater flexibility in the way they build and manage their infrastructure, whether it’s on premises, at the edge, in a colocation facility, or in a public cloud, according to Alan Ni, HPE Aruba senior director of edge marketing.

HPE’s new network services let customers procure prepackaged components of a networking environment, such as wired, wireless and SD-Branch, as needed under the company’s HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking-as-a-service offering. GreenLake has offered NaaS since 2020, but services weren’t offered in such an incremental way.

“What we’ve done is build specific service packs around eight specific use cases where we’re including all the customer premise equipment, or CPE, that is required to provide some of these capabilities, all the software licensing and support and additional mounting hardware etc.,” Ni said. 

And from a channel perspective, which is the way most of these services are sold, these packages are closely tied to how a traditional transaction transpires. “The goal here is really to speed up deployments,” Ni said.

Delivering these services in a NaaS model is what many customers are looking for, experts say. 

IDC research has shown that some key drivers for enterprise NaaS models include the cloud-like, pay-as-you-go consumption model and having access to the latest technology (such as Wi-Fi 6E and SD-WAN). Another driver is the ability for enterprises to free up the time of their networking teams to focus on business-enabling projects by relying on a NaaS provider to manage the day-to-day, “keeping the lights on” aspects of the network, according to Brandon Butler, a research manager with IDC’s network infrastructure group.

“Aruba now offers a prepackaged NaaS for indoor or outdoor wireless, wired access or aggregation, or SD-Branch, among others,” Butler said. “In addition, Aruba is offering two versions: a NaaS offering with the prepackaged hardware, software management and lifecycle services, as well as a platform that layers in additional management atop the NaaS offering in which Aruba will monitor service levels and optimize network operations.”

“These new offerings will make it easier for customers to evaluate and implement NaaS offers, which we’re seeing more vendors come out with,” Butler said. “Equally important for Aruba is that these advancements will allow its service provider partners to more easily bring these offers to market, too, which will be a key for enterprise NaaS to expand more broadly.”

In addition to the NaaS expansion, HPE said it has now integrated Aruba’s core management system into GreenLake, which means some 120,000 Aruba networking customers can use the HPE GreenLake platform to order services on-demand and manage assets, Ni said.

The idea is that customers will have a unified operational experience with GreenLake that provides a simplified view and access to all cloud services, spanning the entire HPE portfolio, with single sign-on access, security, compliance, elasticity, and data protection, Ni said.

GreenLake for HPC, storage

The GreenLake announcement covers a variety other new services, including enhancements to HPE’s GreenLake for High Performance Computing service. Specifically, the service now includes support for the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 system to accelerate compute and advance data-intensive projects using the Nvidia A100, A40, and A30 Tensor Core GPUs in increments of 2-4-8 accelerators.

Additionally, the new service will feature the Nvidia NVLink for a seamless, high-speed connection between GPUs to enable them to work together as a single accelerator. HPE says the new support will help customers handle data-intensive workloads, such as AI and machine-learning projects.

The company also added GreenLake for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, a cloud service that will let users run Windows and Linux virtual machines in a hybrid cloud environment, on-premises and at the edge. The offering is built on HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, a cloud-native infrastructure that incorporates compute, storage, and networking, to run Azure services on premises.

On the storage front, HPE’s new services include GreenLake Cloud Data Services, which includes support for new block storage and data protection services. The idea is to let customers quickly self-provision storage infrastructure without the need for domain expertise, HPE stated. Companies can now get the storage resources they need faster, with instant quoting and ordering, the company said.

The new HPE GreenLake offerings will be available in April.