HPE takes on public cloud with GreenLake Central

GreenLake, HPE's as a service initiative, now has a new component: GreenLake Central.

The product is designed to offer IT departments a similar experience controlling and provisioning on-premises and hybrid IT as they would expect when using a public cloud service.

GreenLake Central, like many of the other offerings that fall under the GreenLake "as a service" umbrella, was created in response to the acknowledgement that public cloud doesn't serve all requirements, particularly in large enterprises.

"Part of what we are seeing within hybrid is that our clients have moved all the easy stuff off to public cloud, and there's been a bit of a stall, especially for a bunch of the legacy applications, whether that's because of regulatory issues, or data gravity issues, or application dependency complexity type issues," Erik Vogel, global vice president for customer experience for HPE GreenLake, told IT Pro.

"What we're providing... is a consistent experience. We've taken the traditional GreenLake and really enhanced it to look and feel like the public cloud. So we have now shifted that into making it making Greenlake operate in a way that our customers are used to getting from AWS or Azure," he added.

HPE has also incorporated some additional capabilities, such as delivering "EC2-like functionality" to provision and de-provision capacity within a customer's own data centre on top of their GreenLake Flex Capacity environment.

It has also bundled in some managed service capabilities to help manage a hybrid IT environment. This includes, for example, controlling cost and compliance, capacity management, and public cloud management.

"Very soon we'll be offering the ability to point and click and add more capacity," Vogel added. "So if they want to increase the capacity within their environment, rather than having to pick up the phone and call a seller and go through that process, they will be able to drive those purchase acquisitions through a single click within the within the portal, again, being able to manage capacity, see their bills, see what they're using effectively, what they're not using effectively."

GreenLake Central is in the process of being rolled out in beta to 150 customers, and will be generally available to all HPE GreenLake customers in the second half of 2020.