HPE Makes a Splash with GreenLake Cloud and AI Announcements at Discover 2023

Neri noted, however, that 70 percent of enterprise workloads currently remain on-premises because the work required to move them to the cloud is often complex and difficult. He added that only 50 percent of useful data is used for decision-making.

“It means the other 50 percent is wasted,” he said. “To answer some of the most critical business and societal questions we have, we must leverage 100 percent of the useful data to create and share knowledge to deliver better business outcomes. The reality is we have been data-rich and insight-poor.”

Neri noted that, during the last six months, AI has accelerated exponentially through the creation of generative AI and large language models. Knowledge, software and supercomputing capabilities now exist and are moving the processing of data well beyond small subsets, using systems that “mimic the human brain to adapt and learn autonomously on a massive scale.”

“AI will be the most disruptive technology of our lifetime,” he said during his keynote speech. “And 2023 will be remembered as a historic technology inflection point. AI has the potential to solve huge societal challenges, ranging from climate change to energy transition to cures for disease.”

He added that AI combined with automation will drive new levels of productivity and cost savings, help organizations make better and faster decisions and be used to predict trends and envision new business opportunities.

“In simple terms, AI creates superpowers for your business,” he said. “Those who embed AI into their strategy will leave behind those who do not.”

During Discover 2023, HPE announced what Neri described as “one of the boldest bets in the history of the company,” entering the AI public-cloud market with GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs) – a toolset for privately training, tuning and deploying large-scale AI through an on-demand, multitenant cloud service.

GreenLake for LLMs is the first in a series of industry and domain-specific AI applications to be launched, with future support planned for climate modeling, healthcare and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing and transportation. GreenLake for LLMs will be available in North America sometime during the second half of 2023 and in Europe sometime in 2024.

It will run on AI-native HPE Cray XD supercomputers and businesses of all sizes can leverage it on-demand through Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) for large-scale AI workloads. GreenLake for LLMs utilizes secure and isolated multitenancy computing without the need for virtual machines and is architected in sustainable colocations. Users can leverage their own application code within these services and have full data sovereignty without the imposition of data egress fees.

“GreenLake for LLM will help you build and privately train all those models from scratch and publish for others to consume,” Neri said. “Or you can use pre-trained LLMs to tune and deploy with your own data for your unique use cases.”

HPE also unveiled GreenLake for Compute Ops Management—OneView Edition, a new service for HPE OneView – infrastructure management software for IT administrators – and for HPE Synergy customers to manage their OneView environments from within the GreenLake cloud platform. Compute Ops Management—OneView Edition is an add-on subscription service for HPE OneView that aggregates connections of instances across data centres or distributed locations and provides a centralized, cloud-based console for multisite management support, with enhanced appliance configuration consistency, reporting, analytics and automation.

HPE also offers HPE OpsRamp, an IT operations management platform that helps streamline and optimize hybrid IT environments. HPE OpsRamp provides unified visibility, automation and orchestration capabilities for monitoring and managing infrastructure, applications and services across on-premises, cloud and edge environments. OpsRamp helps IT teams improve efficiency, reduce downtime and enhance user experience by centralizing monitoring, alerting, incident management and automation processes. HPE OpsRamp leverages AI and machine learning to provide predictive analytics and proactive recommendations for faster issue resolution and proactive capacity planning.

Also announced was GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, providing the ability to spin up on-demand virtual machines (VMs) with a self-managed AI operational function across hybrid cloud environments. Customers can now build self-service clouds on-demand in data centres or along the edge of their own computing environments.  

“It comes with an intuitive cloud operational experience and seamless integration of data protection services, so you can store, manage and protect your data from the edge to the cloud,” Neri said.

HPE announced GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation – an integration of VMware and HPE platforms that offers users a pay-per-use solution, with preconfigured and tested HPE cloud modules, optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation.

HPE also expanded its partnership with data centre platform maker, Equinix, to pre-provision GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition at Equinix data centres around the world, giving customers access to a broader range of private cloud offerings.

HPE and Amazon also jointly announced the partnership between the two companies has been enhanced, with the aim of helping customers continue migrating workloads to the cloud.

Matt Wood, Vice President of Technology for AWS, said he believes the future of computing will see a “vast majority” of workloads eventually running in the cloud. However, he admitted it will take time to get there because many customers still have workloads that can’t be moved to the cloud anytime soon.

“Customers have been asking us to help them during this transition by extending the cloud to where their on-premises applications reside,” Wood said, during a keynote discussion with Neri. “One of the areas we’re most excited about is helping HPE GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise integrate with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere.  

“EKS Anywhere’s integration with HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise will help to orchestrate and simplify Kubernetes deployment on customer infrastructures.”

For storage, it was announced that HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery now supports the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), to prevent unintended deletion of files and protect against ransomware attacks. It also supports Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as well as data stored on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

“One of the areas I’m most excited about is the dozens of other HPE solutions that (now) utilize the AWS Marketplace to provide customers with a number of ways to access and scale across their hybrid-cloud environments,” Wood said.

There are also new HPE additions to AWS Marketplace, including HPE Fraud Risk Management Software as a Service that detects fraud threats on 5G technology as well as other fraud types that target telco service providers. Also available is HPE Non-Stop Development Environment with fault tolerance for developing mission-critical applications.

Neri said these HPE offerings “add to the HPE services already available on AWS Marketplace and build on the full lifecycle of consulting, migration and modernization services for hybrid cloud that HPE delivers today.”

Delivering an intelligent, secure and advanced cloud as a service to customers sits at the core of HPE’s edge computing strategy. Neri explained that networks and security markets are converging, and secure access service edge (SASE) frameworks that integrate IT security with communication networks are the future for hybrid cloud.  

“I believe the best customer experience will be when networks and security are delivered together in one common platform,” he said.

In the networking space, HPE has created what’s described as seamless experiences across 5G and Wi-Fi networks by adding 12 new products for data centre switching, including the CX-10000 switch line. It was also revealed that HPE network offerings are currently available as cloud subscription services for the GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud platform. As Neri noted in a later presentation, “With an intelligent edge you can securely connect all of your people, devices and things.”

CDW was recognized during Discover 2023 as both HPE’s Global Solution Provider of the Year and Solution Provider of the Year in North America. HPE’s awards celebrate HPE partners who “exemplify commitment and success in delivering value to their customers on their digital transformation journeys. The companies highlighted as part of HPE’s partner awards have achieved exceptional results in financial performance, innovative solutions and meaningful business results, according to HPE.”

HPE and CDW look to provide exceptional customer experience while making IT more efficient, productive and secure.