What is HPE GreenLake?

Over the last decade or so, IT professionals have had a largely binary choice when it comes to enabling their organisation’s to access data and applications remotely – be it a handful of physical premises or thousands of users working from home, or offsite.

Option one: Purchase future proof hardware on-premises to store and serve data where it is needed. This comes with large upfront costs, maintenance, specialised service teams and the potential to over-provision; paying out immediately for capacity you may or may not use in the future. Plus, the moment you purchase your hardware, the clock ticks down to the next upgrade.

Option two: Follow the trend and move all of your apps, data and functionality into the cloud. The issues here are: Even the tech giant’s have outages, transferring data to and from the cloud can be unexpectedly expensive and challenges around privacy, risk and governance are ever changing.

But now, there is a third option; HPE GreenLake, the hybrid cloud model.

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What is HPE GreenLake?

HPE GreenLake provides cloud-like functionality to data centres, satellites, and remote locations such as offices or containerised datacentres. HPE have designed GreenLake to be an out of the box offering – delivering customised, preconfigured hardware and software – based on the needs of your organisation. So you can get up and running right away.

As a partner of HPE, Trustco provide ongoing management of your GreenLake system – this is paid for on a subscription model – based on a pay-as-you-grow basis. The more capacity you require, the more you pay. Conversely, should your requirements dip, so does your bill.

HPE’s GreenLake offers a range of infrastructure packages that can be tailored to differing situations, such as virtualisation, software-driven solutions, storage, backup, database management, hybrid or private cloud and high-performance computing. HPE have designed GreenLake to function “as-a-service” for almost any modern computing task.

How HPE GreenLake works

At the core of GreenLake are HPE hardware elements, which are preconfigured to run a multitude of modern, industry standard applications and tools, these include: Docker, Hadoop, SAP HANA, Nutanix AHV VMware Cloud Foundation, Microsoft Azure and AWS. GreenLake utilises HPE’s own hardware, such Nimble Storage/Alletra Storage or ProLiant DL servers.

Recently, HPE introduced GreenLake Central – this is a software-as-a-service platform that provides you with a consistent unified view and control system for monitoring and reporting on the usage of your GreenLake infrastructure. It provides you with insights and allows for the management of your hybrid IT estate, complementing your use of public clouds and data centres.

GreenLake’s consumption-based model

The most exciting feature of HPE GreenLake that distinguishes it from a a purchase or leasing payment model, is its consumption-based pricing system, which places the program closer to a cloud service arrangement, as you may expect from Azure or AWS. Trustco and HPE install your preconfigured hardware in a your desired setting but grants its use as a subscription model, rather than an outright sales purchase. This eliminates the sometimes large upfront cost of provisioning new hardware.

HPE GreenLake sets the fees based on exact utilisation instead of fixed prices – to prevent over-provisioning. Consequently, customers pay only for what they are using, and not for the potential capacity of the hardware they are in possession of. HPE monitors your usage, based on a wide selection of measurements, such as expenditure per server, per gigabyte, per container node or per VM. Customers pay a small base fee, but largely act on a pay as you go structure.

Measuring usage creates a form of limit control for companies, as IT consistently understands how much capability is being employed and who is using it. If more capacity is desired, buyers can implement it swiftly, so they are always in control – acting rapidly and having the physical hardware capabilities to switch-on resource at the drop of a hat.

Customers are in possession of the capacity at all times, however HPE does not bill the client for this hardware until new portions of it are activated. HPE GreenLake’s usage-dependent model allows organisations to have 21st century data centre capacity without ever over-provisioning or paying for more capacity than is required. On the flip side, should there be the desire to downgrade storage or computing capacity at any time, HPE GreenLake allows for this option as well.

Interested in HPE GreenLake?

We’re glad to hear it! If you would like more information on what HPE GreenLake can do for your organisation, head over to our HPE GreenLake partner page or give us a call on 0344 880 1999 and chat to an expert today.