HPE simplifies GreenLake provisioning with Lighthouse

HPE has announced GreenLake Lighthouse, a new element of its GreenLake portfolio that aims to reduce complexity when provisioning cloud services.

Launched during HPE's virtual Discover conference, Lighthouse is described by the company as a “secure, cloud-native platform” that will allow customers to provision new cloud services easily in just a few clicks, reducing the time they wait between ordering and availability to just a few minutes.

The offering is built around Ezmeral, the software portfolio that formed last year’s big announcement at HPE Discover, which the company says will “autonomously optimise different cloud services and workloads” depending on business priorities, be that the best performance, lowest cost, or a balance between the two.

Lighthouse will also allow customers to run cloud services across a number of environments, including their own data centre, a colocation provider, or at the edge.

While this is being positioned as a new product, it’s not going to be a standalone service. Instead, it will be fully integrated into GreenLake Central, the console launched in 2019 that now forms the heart of the GreenLake project.

Project Aurora

Unveiled alongside GreenLake Lighthouse was Project Aurora, a new set of security capabilities that will be fully available at the end of the year.

Aurora will bring zero trust security to GreenLake, extending its existing silicon root-of-trust technology to the operating system or hypervisor, the platform the workload is running on, and the workload itself.

Keith White, GM of HPE GreenLake, described it as a “holistic security offering”, adding: “We're really excited about making sure that all these things are connected for our customers so that they have confidence that they're secure from that supply chain.”

Kumar Sreekanti, HPE’s CTO and head of software, added: “What we are providing is a chain of trust from Silicon to the workload all the way up. That's the most important thing. And it is very, very hard for attackers to evade any of this.”

Silicon on Demand

The final big product news from this year’s conference was Silicon on Demand, a partnership with Intel that brings consumption-based provisioning and billing to individual cores.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the first day of Discover, CEO Antonio Neri said: “What that means is that with a single click, I can turn cores on and off. If I need more cores, I turn it on, if I need less cores, I turn it off.

“Today, [the consumption-based model goes to] the virtual or the container level, now I'm taking it to a silicon level.”

Neri said this was a significant development in helping combat the problem of excess hardware capacity “trapped in [customers’] infrastructure”.

GreenLake Lighthouse and Silicon on Demand are both available immediately through GreenLake cloud services and GreenLake Cloud Platform respectively. Project Aurora is scheduled to become available in HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, HPE GreenLake cloud services and HPE Ezmeral software platforms later this year.