data-driven intelligence

I often get asked if people really care about Hybrid Cloud. Of course, customers do. Not only do they care, but it’s also the reality. According to the latest State of the Cloud report from Flexera, 80% of customers agree that they will operate in a Hybrid Cloud going forward. I think customers realize that it’s not all-or-nothing when it comes to cloud, and they start to pay a lot more attention to placing their workloads in the most appropriate locations.

What Hybrid Cloud means to HPE

Hybrid Cloud is a way to architect and operate IT ​that takes advantage of cloud capabilities, cost, performance, and agility available on-premises, on private and public cloud, and at edge locations. It is not simply using ​public cloud and private cloud for your workloads.​ To us and to our customers, it is a cloud experience everywhere.

We serve and deliver value to some of the most respected brands around the world, and they tell us that they already have and will continue to place workloads and data at the edge, on-premises and in public cloud, but they want the same level of cloud experience everywhere also. Hybrid Cloud is the way to uplift their operating model to provide them with that experience. But that experience would not be complete unless it focuses on getting the right insights out of data which needs to be collected from distributed data sources and then analyzed. That’s why our key priorities are: cloud, data, and connectivity.

Drilling more into the operating model concept, we all know how public clouds operate. Do we provide the same experience on-premise? Having the right strategy and governance plan ensures we do

Strategy and governance of the cloud operating model:

Customers have long been saying that they want to match IT spend to usage and to the value it generates. Customers are demanding to only pay for what they use, control how and when they provision resources, and ask for ability to match it with specific business outcomes. We are giving them those capabilities in their data centers, in colocations, remote offices, or at the edge. If you think about it, when the cloud revolution first started, it was never about the public cloud itself. Public cloud provided enterprises with certain capabilities that were not previously available on-premises to central IT or to the Business Units. Now these capabilities are. So, businesses are now looking at how to get that experience in the most secure and cost-effective way, and that’s what we deliver with HPE GreenLake. We bring the cloud to them.

Capabilities everywhere and delivering customer value with HPE GreenLake

We, ourselves, are transforming. In the very near future, we will have the ability to deliver all our offerings in a true as-a-service fashion in addition to a traditional way of doing so. HPE GreenLake is our edge-to-cloud platform that will deliver these capabilities. HPE GreenLake already has a set of capabilities to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service (compute, storage, and networking), platform-as-a-service (unified data analytics, containers-as-a-service), and even solutions and workloads-as-a-service. We can deliver SAP, EPIC, Splunk, or data backup and recovery solutions right now. We are continuously building new capabilities in the platform to allow customers to run their business in the most efficient way from edge to cloud.

Determining the right workload placement and biases toward on-premises

Fundamentally, the right workload placement starts with a strategy. What are you trying to do? To that end, our Edge-To-Cloud Adoption Framework contains the most comprehensive set of proven methodologies that identify the critical capabilities required to accelerate and de-risk the path to an optimal hybrid cloud operating model for their business needs. We can help customers determine what they are trying to do and how to get there.

HPE Right Mix Advisor:

We’ve invested heavily in the tooling and data to deliver intelligence and automation with respect to the workload placements. For several years, we’ve used our Right Mix Advisor methodology and tools to help customers quickly identify and adapt optimal workload placement across hybrid architectures so they can move forward with confidence. In February 2021, HPE acquired CloudPhysics, a SaaS service for more intelligent IT decisions across edge-to-cloud. This service expands data-driven insights to IT procurement. With 200 trillion data samples across 3 million virtual machines and more than 4,500 assessments, HPE CloudPhysics delivers a proven solution to help customers simulate a cloud migration, optimize workload placement and right-size infrastructure.

Our goal is to guide our customers on their transformation journeys, and between our comprehensive adoption framework and data-driven tooling services, we are confident we can help in a very objective and pragmatic way.

The application landscape between on-premises and public cloud

I see our customers using a variety of clouds already – private cloud, whether Azure Stack or VMWare or OpenStack as well as one or more public clouds. According to various analysts the simple apps have already moved to public cloud but the customized and legacy applications, which make up about 55% of all enterprise applications are only very slowly migrating to cloud-based options. Why is that? The obvious reasons are security, latency, data gravity, and similar concerns. But another important one is – companies often see no financial benefit for moving some of these apps to the cloud. It takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money to move and then to operate in the cloud. But what’s the actual end-user business benefit for that? There isn’t always one which goes back to strategy – know why you’re doing it. So, we’re bringing those cloud capabilities to our customers premises, so they don’t have to choose between “going to the cloud” and “staying on-prem”. They can have both. I believe companies will have workloads everywhere, but they will make the determination on where to place them based on strategic business factors such as cost, business value, security, compliance as opposed to simply picking the latest trend.

Again, I think the key is to really understand what the business is trying to do. It’s never cloud for the sake of cloud, whether it’s on-premises or elsewhere. It’s cloud because it helps the business achieve its objectives.

HPE GreenLake- The right choice for your applications or workloads

Customers can run any enterprise application on HPE GreenLake, but we are particularly good for large mission-critical applications. Particularly the ones that capture, process, store, and analyze lots of data. We power many SAP installations worldwide, we drive excellence in healthcare through our EPIC offerings, and we help a lot of customers with their data analytics & ML/Ops needs. IDC estimates that by 2025 we’ll have 175 zettabytes of data. That’s a lot of data with a whole bunch of zeros behind it (21 to be exact). This data will be generated everywhere, particularly at the edge, and a lot of this data will be very sensitive (personally identifiable, proprietary, and mission-critical). We provide capabilities to our customers to gain insights into this data via the HPE GreenLake platform and to protect it. Everyone knows that ransomware is on the rise and is not going away any time soon. With our acquisition of Zerto, we just added market-leading protection to our cloud services portfolio to help enterprises take cyberthreats and ransomware attacks head-on.

With our HPE Ezmeral software platform, we can help customers run their most data-intensive containerized applications. So, as you can see from small containers to the largest HPC systems, HPE GreenLake can support our customers’ workloads very effectively.

HPE’s position on data

Data is at the heart of every modernization initiative in every industry. It converts to the insight and intelligence required to shape the operating model capable of delivering on enterprise digital agendas

Edge-to-cloud operating model:

I think there are a few areas to address here.

First, for IT operations it’s incredibly important to have operational visibility into what’s going on “behind the scenes”. We are providing our customers this cloud operational experience with data-driven intelligence from HPE InfoSight and HPE CloudPhysics. As the industry’s leading AIOps for infrastructure, InfoSight has pioneered a decade of innovations to make infrastructure invisible and shift operations to app-centric. Now, with new HPE InfoSight App Insights, customers gain end-to-end visibility across the IT stack, including up to the app layer.

Second, we just unveiled HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics and Data Lakehouse Cloud Services optimized for hybrid environments which provides an elastic, unified analytics platform for data and applications on-premises, at the edge and in public clouds. Now analytics and data science teams can leverage the industry’s first cloud-native solution on-premises, scale-up Apache Spark lakehouses, and speed up AI and ML workflows.

And finally, all that data needs to be protected from malicious activity, cyberthreats, and ransomware. With HPE Backup and Recovery Service for VMWare and our new HPE GreenLake for data protection service, we give our customers the flexibility to modernize data protection – from rapid recovery to ransomware protection to long-term data retention – either on-premises or in the public cloud with operational simplicity, meeting every SLA at the right cost.

Why enterprises should pick HPE GreenLake for their cloud

Customers don’t want to manage their datacenter if it doesn’t provide them with a competitive advantage. And frankly, a lot of enterprises were overspending before on hardware and facilities without the ability to show the value they got from it. HPE GreenLake is changing that. Not only do we provide customers with cloud capabilities on-premises to match usage and costs with the needs, but we can also deliver those capabilities out of a colocation if a customer wants to exit a data center and not focus on managing it. More importantly, our HPE GreenLake Management Services offering has full MSP capabilities and can provide full support for the entire HPE GreenLake operations to deliver true cloud-like services if the customer doesn’t have the capacity, capabilities, or desire to do so.

How to adopt HPE GreenLake

We have a very comprehensive Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework that objectively helps customers understand how to get the right value. The framework can help focus on the business goals and objectives, and then map how HPE GreenLake can help customers achieve them.

What’s even more important is that we have a very strong globally distributed team of consultants in our Advisory & Professional Services (A&PS) organization that help our customers on hundreds of digital transformation initiatives around the globe every year. They have skills ranging from strategic road mapping to hands-on-the-keyboard and cover all major public clouds as well as our entire suite of HPE GreenLake offerings.

Our A&PS organization will work with customers to chart the right course and utilize the framework to get them to business outcomes in the most efficient way possible.

I encourage you to review our capabilities on https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake.html to see how we can help you and engage with our advisors on  https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/consulting.html.