The best-performing stocks over the last few years have consistently included technology businesses – from Microsoft and Apple to Amazon and Netflix. More recently, industry giants like Broadcom and Nvidia have enjoyed tremendous growth in their share price, with such industry giants representing a great opportunity to grow capital. 

There’s arguably an innovation slowdown underway, however, particularly among device manufacturers. The rising popularity of second-hand smartphones, for example, can be explained both by the cost of flagship devices as well as the fact older handsets are still functionally identical. 

As society’s appetite for the latest technologies slows, shareholders continue to place manufacturers under intense pressure to innovate in order to spark sales. Indeed, shareholders often have a significant influence on the direction of a company. They stand to gain – and lose – the most with every passing quarter, and businesses need to maintain a healthy and trusting relationship with their shareholders to see their ideas for new technologies through.  

Are shareholders a help or a hindrance?

Investors have a huge hand in the creation and maintenance of a profitable business, explains Jonathan Hunter, CEO of AIM-listed Eleco. “If you take the build tech sector, there's a huge amount of businesses entering the space that need capital, they need investors and shareholders to be able to enter the market and expand when they need to,” he tells ITPro.

“Having shareholders own part of the business means they can provide their views, vote if they agree or disagree with the direction of the business, or – as a last resort – sell their shares and move on. As a result, it’s important for executives in the business to be open and transparent with all stakeholders, communicate, and set those expectations so that investors can make sound investment decisions.”

A decision to withdraw money may be drastic and only occur in extreme circumstances, but it can seriously impact the business. As David Newns, Entrepreneur and Investor details, managing shareholder expectations has wide-ranging consequences throughout the business.

“Public companies have this real challenge of balancing the running of their business with what is essentially a promise to shareholders,” he says. “As someone running the business, if that promise looks like a challenge, you will do anything to deliver on that, because that is your job.

“If that means cutting short-term or long-term investments, that is definitely something you would consider. If a business decides to half the R&D team, they may not have a product to launch for five years, but at least some people can keep their jobs.”

Managing shareholder expectations

Job cuts are part of the process of managing a business. After all, the balancing of the books comes before uncomfortable calls with shareholders. 

Nevertheless, these are unsavory aspects of doing business, and don’t look good whatever way you spin it; all that spinning doesn’t change the fact shareholders can withdraw their money.

To negotiate this, Hunter advocates for an open policy of clear communication, adding “you have to treat all shareholders the same”.

“Fortunately, a lot of shareholders think long term so they know and understand companies better, and we find that new investors that are joining will meet a couple of times first before taking the holding,” he continues. “It's important to build trust which boils down to management. Communicating effectively as well as delivering on the things that have been committed to develops that trust.”

When ideas run out of road

Communication and building trust can only get so far though. There are several examples of shareholders in the tech industry losing faith in the direction the company is going.

From the moment Twitter became a publicly traded company to the moment Musk carried a sink into HQ, monetization has been a topic that has dogged the company. Similarly, Meta’s quest to build the metaverse has taken a backseat due to the investment this project demands, as well as the turmoil its advertising business was facing. 

Such moves from companies make shareholder value a dirty word, and headlines and opinion pieces criticizing tech giants for not staying the course only add to the discontent. As Newns explains, though, Meta’s metaverse u-turn demonstrates there has to be a cut-off point when it comes to investing in new technologies.

“When Mark Zuckerberg said the future is in the metaverse and then spent a lot of money trying to chase this opportunity, initially everyone was interested and gave him the space to pursue it,” he says. “A number of years, and a lot of billions later, the reality is nothing much was happening. But at the same time, the core business was under threat from lower consumer spending and ad revenue decreasing. 

“I think actually Zuckerberg got a lot of leeway when it came to the amount of money and the amount of time he spent on the metaverse and, at the end of the day, I think the decision to step back was more to do with the metaverse, rather than how they innovate as a company.”

How shareholders influence innovation

With shareholder value often prioritized above all else, many feel products the companies are developing begin to lose importance. This raises fundamental questions over whether this is affecting the overall health of the industry.

Although shareholders pulling their money can obviously halt innovative practices, Newns says the activity of investors is actually a reflection of the sentiment in the market. “The synthetic meats market is an example of the sentiment dropping out of the market and prime investors asking ‘If there are no requirements for this stuff, why would we invest?’

“I think that’s happening to the metaverse now, and that affects everyone in the ecosystem down to the startups. But, equally, if you're developing a ChatGPT solution, then everyone will want to invest. So it's a moving piece with lots of factors.”

Hunter adds being able to communicate the value of the company and the direction it’s going in is at the heart of reassuring shareholders. “It’s up to the investor as to whether they will stay or leave,” he says. “As a business, we have a responsibility to communicate the value that we're adding to the business and why we are making the decision we do.

“It’s about communicating across a broad audience. For example, we made a divestment this year because the business that we divested was not adding value and wasn't part of our strategic roadmap. 

“Because we communicated this with our investors, what could have been seen as a negative was well received by shareholders.

With the way organisations are now operating post-pandemic, the flexibility of agile IT infrastructures has proved significantly valuable to business continuity, with this shift to cloud and subscription-style technology models paving the way forward.

The IDC predicts that by 2024, three quarters of edge infrastructure will be operated by as-a-Service solutions, yet there can be challenges when it comes to skills shortages and limited budgets to support day-to-day operations.

Download this resource to learn how HPE GreenLake’s Everything-as-a-Service platform can give your a competitive edge offering:

• Scalable IT provision
• Centralised operations
• and Automated routine management

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Learn what you can do to get started with scaling automation on the edge and get a better understanding of Red Hat’s new features and how they work together, with examples.

Watch now to discover how automation mesh can provide you with a mechanism for global scaling and what’s next for the platform.

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Join Michele Null and Brian Coursen, product managers in edge-to-cloud technology, as they talk about the complexities of edge computing, how to define edge infrastructure locations, and what’s being done today.

Learn how edge computing can help organisations achieve improved operational efficiency in this 20 minute webinar sharing use cases and benefits of current edge technologies.

Watch now to discover how to extend automation to the edge with example deployments, and how a consistent edge platform can help you meet your needs.

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It’s often said that data is the new oil, to the extent it’s become something of a cliché in the tech industry. Perhaps another, less tired comparison is that data is like work in Parkinson’s Law – it will expand not to fill the time available for its completion, but into every element of infrastructure and activity that an organisation has available.

This is increasingly true, in fact, as the Big Data revolution made all data interesting and valuable to a business, not just the information it was used to looking at. By analysing these vast data sets, new value streams can be uncovered, and both productivity and profits increased. With this in mind, it’s important to consider where new sources of data may come from and the infrastructure that underpins their collection, analysis and storage.

Data, data everywhere

Nowadays, technology moves rapidly. Even millennials and older members of Generation Z have experienced this incessant churn, with things that once seemed core to computing, such as floppy disks, becoming obsolete in their lifetime.

But it’s worth remembering that the pace of change between the 50s and early 90s was much slower. Even until the 2000s, the data centre and mainframe were the core of companies’ IT infrastructure. Almost without exception, these behemoths comprised hardware that was fully owned by the business and located on premises.

By the turn of the millennium, colocation providers had started to spring up, offering SMBs and enterprises the opportunity to lease hardware from another company, which would also look after software and infrastructure management. Over the following decade, this evolved into what we now know as public cloud computing.

It’s easy to think of this evolution as linear – as tapes were replaced by floppies, floppies were replaced by CDs, and CDs have in turn been displaced by flash thumb drives or direct download, so the humble data centre has been replaced by the public cloud.

That is not the case, however.

Many businesses, particularly from medium-sized up, still have an on-premises data centre. Some still use colocation. Most, if not all, organisations use public cloud services of one kind or another, be that infrastructure as a service, such as that offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, or software as a service products like Workday or Box.

What has emerged is a melange of technologies – most recently joined by edge computing – that organisations are using to fulfil different business needs. But this expansion has been carried out in a largely unplanned way, which can make it difficult to manage.

More infrastructure, more problems

While concerns over ‘shadow IT’ in the early cloud years may have been overplayed, there’s no denying that modern IT infrastructure is far more difficult to manage than it was even 20 years ago.

Cloud sprawl, the addition of new technologies and services like edge and multi-cloud, and the rise of the distributed workforce have all made things trickier to manage. What’s more, we can’t expect the pace of change to stop – with increased mobility, the still growing Internet of Things, and technologies that haven’t even been invented yet, this labyrinth will grow ever harder to navigate and manage.

Yet there are few alternatives for IT departments than to accept that all these different elements are needed. If there’s an edge computing instance in their infrastructure, they will know of its existence and its importance; for this particular data source, analysis and feedback has to happen with minimum latency and there’s no alternative to edge for that. If the development or data science teams are using several AWS instances as well as on-premises infrastructure, it’s because they need it for a given project.

In short, not all data is created equal or performs the same functions. This doesn’t mean that IT departments are doomed to look after an increasingly complex infrastructure that doesn’t always play nicely together and can be both time consuming and costly to manage, though.

Managing a modern set-up

Some vendors have seen the problems IT departments face in confronting this increasing tech sprawl and have moved to resolve it, most often through computing on demand.

Computing on demand helps IT departments manage their companies’ use of infrastructure across all settings, from public cloud to on-premises data centres, to colocation, to branch offices and the edge.

One of the first movers in this area is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), with its comprehensive GreenLake offering.

GreenLake proposes not only better control over these types of mixed environments, it can also offer a more cost-effective solution. Designing and managing on-premises infrastructure, including data centres, edge environments, and branch offices, has long come with concerns over adequate provisioning. How do you ensure that you will have enough capacity for what the business will be doing in five or ten years time? This has often led to overprovisioning.

GreenLake, however, allows IT departments to spin up new compute instances, extend memory and more in a cloud-like way, all while keeping the data and processes on premises thanks to consumption-based pricing. This means the capacity is there should you need it, but you don’t actually pay for it unless you use it, which removes the problems associated with overprovisioning.

How we store and use data, and the technology we use to do that, will continue to evolve. Who would have thought, 10 years ago, that the cloud would play the role in business and in life that it does now? And that’s to say nothing of the growth of edge computing. As these new ideas continue to spring up and be added to organisations’ existing IT strategies, only truly adaptive solutions like GreenLake can help IT departments manage their infrastructure from the data centre, to the edge, to the cloud, and beyond.

Learn more about HPE GreenLake

It’s been four years since Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) first brought HPE GreenLake to market, and to say the platform has changed in that time would be an understatement.

What started out in 2017 as a handful of pay-per-use offerings delivered through the company’s Pointnext Services business has evolved to become the future of HPE. Indeed, just this year CEO Antonio Neri declared Greenlake to be the company’s “leading product, leading offer … leading experience, where everything else underneath is part of that experience”. This isn’t a new tune from him, either – in 2019 he declared that by 2022 HPE would be a “consumption driven company”, with its entire portfolio offered as a service.

What has emerged most recently, however, goes beyond even that. Silicon on Demand – launched this year in collaboration with Intel – is an innovation that takes consumption-based pricing down to the level of individual cores.

So what is Silicon on-Demand, how does it work, and what does it mean for the future of GreenLake?

Building on solid foundations

Let’s not beat about the bush. While Silicon on-Demand is an exciting, revolutionary new element of consumption based computing on demand, it couldn’t have been done without everything that had gone before.

In many ways, the shift to a consumption model as offered through GreenLake is as much a shift in mindset as it is a shift in the way IT is delivered at a technical level. IT managers and administrators have been used to buying all their hardware in monolithic blocks for decades – often leading to overprovisioning, particularly when dealing with variable workloads. Even in more recent years, when most businesses have also been implementing public cloud, there has been a separation both structurally and philosophically between how you use and manage hardware on premises versus in the cloud.

The gradual rollout of GreenLake services, incorporating more and more elements of IT on demand, from Big Data and edge computing to high performance computing (HPC) and hybrid cloud, showed this model could not only be trusted, but could be more effective than traditional ownership models.

A logical next step

With all this in place, introducing a consumption-based model that allows IT teams to turn cores on and off as they need them – Silicon on-Demand – was a logical next step.

“This first-of-its-kind feature, developed in partnership with Intel, gives you the ability to activate and pay with a click to add capacity at the processor core and persistent memory level. Nothing to order or install, just turn it on,” explained Neri at 2021’s HPE Discover conference.

Technologically, Silicon on-Demand is a great leap forward. No other company has previously been able to offer this kind of service on commodity x86 chips, never mind whether they’d thought to offer it. Working together with Intel allowed HPE to take its GreenLake philosophy and apply it to some of the smallest computing components there are.

At a business level, it also overcomes an overprovisioning issue in itself; some customers found that while they were consuming hardware at a server level on demand, they were paying for unused cores. With Silicon on Demand, users need only ever pay for what they are using, even at the most granular level.

What comes next?

The story of GreenLake so far has been one of growth and success. Starting out with just a handful of services and gradually adding to them bit by bit has increased customer interest in consuming IT this way, and has also enabled technological advancements.

It has also become ever easier to manage on-premises and edge-located hardware in a cloud-like fashion as HPE’s GreenLake software has evolved. New developments like HPE GreenLake Cloud Console make it easier to manage their entire IT estate wherever it’s located – including in the public cloud – using a consumption-based model.

With Silicon on-Demand, HPE GreenLake reached a new level. No longer was the offering just compute and storage on demand – as important as that is – instead, IT managers can now have control over exactly how many cores they want to use. Got a workload that needs more power and performance to work properly? Add some additional cores while you need them. And when you’re handling something lighter, you can scale back so you’re not overspending on silicon you’re not using. All with a few clicks of a mouse.

While Silicon on-Demand has only just been released this year, it shows what can be done – how granular these solutions can get – and what GreenLake can truly offer. So what comes next? With Neri’s declared plan for Hewlett Packard Enterprise to be a consumption-driven company by 2022 and for GreenLake to become synonymous with HPE, eventually the answer to “What’s available through GreenLake?” will surely be “everything”.

At a more granular level, there’s plenty of scope to move beyond just particular services or appliances that are available on a consumption basis. For example, the concept of Silicon on-Demand could potentially be applied not just to CPUs, but to GPUs, which are becoming increasingly important in fields like high performance computing.

No matter what comes next, though, one thing’s for certain: It will give organisations more control over their IT than they ever have before, ensuring that they’re only ever using – and paying for – the resources they need.

Learn more about HPE GreenLake

Once your organisation moves core workloads to the cloud, the cost, availability and performance of those cloud resources have a direct impact on productivity and the bottom line.

Go too far one way and overprovision, and you can drive up costs to no real benefit. Respondents to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report estimated that 30% of their cloud spend was being wasted – and that’s probably understated. A lack of visibility and control of costs plays its part, but underutilisation of cloud resources is a major contributor.

Go too far the other way, or place workloads in the wrong cloud infrastructure, and you’ll find that poor performance, latency or bandwidth-related bottlenecks render any other benefits or efficiencies from moving to the cloud near irrelevant. A 2019 IDC survey showed that, after security and cost, performance was the third biggest driver for firms repatriating applications from the cloud.

With this in mind, how can enterprises optimise their cloud workloads and ensure that they’re using the best possible mix of cloud resources? The easiest answer would be to get things right in the provisioning, design and implementation of cloud services. When organisations take the time to work out their requirements and select the right cloud resources for each workload, it’s easier to ensure that the workload will run as productively, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

This involves getting to grips with the application’s requirements in terms of storage, bandwidth, data and compute resources, and finding the platform most appropriate to those needs. It means taking latency, data flows and interdependencies with other applications into account. It also means understanding business requirements – accessibility, productivity, compliance and time to market – and balancing these with security, cost and the more technical requirements around performance and access to data.

This balance will be different for each application and will depend on how mission critical it is to existing operations and forward-looking plans. Every business has different priorities, whether those are driving cost efficiencies or adding agility and accelerating time to market. These need to be reflected in how and where their workloads run.

The right workload, the right cloud

Assigning workloads to the most appropriate infrastructure is hard. It takes experience and expertise to know what will fly in public cloud and what would be better suited to on premises. This is one reason why HPE’s Greenlake Hybrid Cloud services are supported by the HPE Right Mix Advisor – a service which looks at the applications business plan to migrate to the cloud, then uses automation to collect data about how they operate, in order to deliver recommendations on the best cloud destination and the right cloud-migration approach. Right Mix Advisor tracks how applications are used, their performance requirements and data dependencies, to give enterprises confidence that, when they move them to the cloud, they’ve moved them to the right hybrid cloud platform.

But here’s the thing about cloud: the landscape is always changing. New services appear with new performance characteristics, costs rise and fall, and new requirements emerge as enterprises explore new opportunities in machine learning, IoT, analytics or edge computing. What’s more, many organisations have moved to hybrid cloud in a somewhat ad-hoc manner, with different teams buying into different IaaS or PaaS services as the need arose. Sometimes they will have overprovisioned, resulting in unnecessary expense. Sometimes they will have underestimated the compute power or bandwidth needed by a workload or failed to take peaks of demand into account, resulting in poor performance. Often, the way an application is used, or even the numbers of people using it, will change over time.

How to optimise

So what can enterprises do to optimise those workloads once they’re in place? For starters, they need to adopt a data-driven approach, monitoring, auditing and analysing to capture as much data as possible about key workloads – how they’re used, which resources they are utilising and how intensively, how they’re performing and how they’re affected by storage or data-transfer bottlenecks or latency. It’s vital here to use all logs and tools at your disposal, particularly those built into your cloud platforms, and work to eliminate estimates and guesswork.

With that information in hand, it’s easier to see which workloads are well optimised, which are struggling for resources, and which are over resourced and wasting money. Once you know that, you can look to adjusting your cloud services or moving applications, right-sizing workloads to make sure they have appropriate resources or moving them to a different cloud – or back on premises – if the current environment doesn’t meet that workload’s needs. While there’s a tendency to see cloud repatriation as cloud failure, it’s actually smarter to see it as an act of rebalancing, moving the workload to the best platform in terms of latency, performance or data sovereignty right now.

Making optimisation easier

Three things can really help here. The first is having a modern, software-defined, composable hybrid-cloud architecture that allows you to treat on-premises, private cloud and public cloud infrastructure as one seamless architecture, using the same management tools and consoles. With HPE Greenlake and HPE Greenlake Central, this approach not only makes it easier to deploy and scale-up new cloud resources, but optimise resources for different workloads and move those workloads around where necessary.

Secondly, modernising and virtualising or containerising workloads can help, simply by making them more portable. This isn’t always possible or the right thing to do with some legacy workloads, but making the investment and effort where it is can help make operations more cost efficient in the future.

The third is having tools and services built into the cloud platform that can reduce the time and effort involved in optimisation, using automation, analytics and – increasingly – AI. For example, HPE Greenlake Lighthouse uses HPE Ezemeral software to continuously and autonomously optimise cloud services and workloads. It does so by looking at the relevant usage and performance data, then composing resources to provide the best possible balance of performance and cost, depending on the needs of the business.

As time goes on, it’s likely that optimisation will involve more automation and more AI, meaning enterprising IT teams can spend less time tinkering and shifting workloads, and more time focusing on projects with a more direct business value. Optimisation can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be – and with HPE Greenlake it’s getting much, much easier.

Find out more about HPE Greenlake and how it can help you optimise your workloads

We’re now long past the days when the value of the cloud felt unknown and unproven. Most enterprises are now fully aware of the benefits, and the vast majority are already using software-as-a-service applications or have migrated some core business applications. What’s more, cloud has momentum. Gartner now expects worldwide spending on public cloud services to grow another 18.4% in 2021 and believes that cloud will make up 14.2% of overall IT spending by 2024.

If anything, the COVID-19 pandemic has only confirmed what many of us already knew; that the flexibility, scalability and anywhere availability of cloud have become just as important to enterprise IT as cost savings, if not more so. In the words of Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner, “The pandemic validated cloud’s value proposition. The ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiencies and business continuity is providing the impetus for organisations to rapidly accelerate their business plans.”

However, as they grow more familiar with cloud, enterprises are realising something else: that cloud isn’t a solution to a problem or the end destination in a journey, but an ongoing approach and operating model that supports agility and innovation. But to do so in the real world, where businesses have to deal with legacy systems, data and regulations, it needs to work through a hybrid model.

Why hybrid cloud?

Why is this? Why not lift-and-shift, virtualise and containerise, and move everything to hyperscale public cloud? Firstly, there’s an argument that many enterprises have already tackled the easiest migration jobs, and that those workloads that could easily be moved to the cloud have been moved already. What’s left is constrained to private cloud or on-premises architecture by real issues, including data gravity, compliance, costs, bandwidth and performance, sovereignty, security or interdependencies with legacy systems.

IDC research has found that, despite the growth of public cloud, 70% of applications still remain outside it. This leaves many organisations with no choice but to adopt a hybrid cloud approach; one that bridges the gap between a cloud-native future and the legacy systems enterprises still rely on now.

Yet there are also benefits to spreading workloads across different types of cloud or multiple clouds. Hybrid cloud enables organisations to find the right environment for each application or workload, so that each gets the platform or infrastructure that best matches its requirements. Here performance, cost, availability, security, regulations and scalability all come into play, and enterprises need to find the right mix of on-premises hardware, private cloud infrastructure and public cloud services to meet their specific needs. As new demands emerge around data, IoT, AI and edge computing, this is only going to grow more important.

What’s more, hybrid cloud fits perfectly into new DevOps models of IT, giving developers the rapid deployment, flexibility and near-instant scalability they’re looking for, but with the ability to use on-premises tools and infrastructure where that’s the more practical option.

Enterprises are not blind to this. A recent Forrester survey for Intel found that 58% of North American and European infrastructure decision makers using public cloud had a hybrid strategy in place. The research firm, Markets and Markets, expects the hybrid cloud market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18.73% between 2020 and 2026. IDC has predicted that, by 2022, 90% of enterprises around the world will rely on a mix of multicloud and legacy platforms for their infrastructure needs.

Hybrid cloud complexity

However, Hybrid Cloud brings with it its own challenges. As Erik Vogel, HPE Global VP for customer experience, noted in a recent podcast, pretty much all enterprises are now hybrid, “but when we ask them how they got there, most have done it in an ad-hoc fashion. Most have had developers who went out to one or more hyperscale cloud providers, or the business units went out to consume SaaS solutions, or IT organisations built their own on-premises solutions, whether that’s an open private cloud or a Microsoft Azure Stack environment.”

“Now,” Vogel explains, “they are seeing the challenge of how to start managing and operating this in a consistent common fashion. There are a lot of different solutions and yet more technologies, yet everyone has their own operating model, own consoles and own rules to work within.”

This situation creates complexity, and that has led to hybrid cloud architectures that are harder to manage, harder to secure, and harder to gain the visibility needed for compliance and cost control. What’s more, working across different providers, APIs and management tools also makes it more difficult to manage data, compare costs and even troubleshoot issues when they do emerge.

This is where it makes sense to bring in a partner; someone with the expertise, experience and capabilities to help the organisation manage its hybrid cloud estate and create the right mix of on-premises, private and public cloud infrastructure to support its workloads. Partners have the tools and know-how to profile applications and match them to the right cloud, along with the management tools and processes needed to address hybrid cloud’s complexity and create a consistent environment where it’s easier to manage all your clouds and maintain control of costs.

Here, HPE has several advantages with its GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform. The big strength of GreenLake is that it brings all the different parts of the hybrid cloud together, from on-premises hardware to private cloud and public cloud services, in one seamless platform. This platform also features common tools, common processes and a single management console. What’s more, GreenLake works through a consumption-based pricing model where you pay for your cloud as a service, based on actual usage rather than on a resource-by-resource basis or predicted usage. All cloud services are accessible through a self-service point-and-click catalogue, with clear pricing, trials and the ability to spin up instances and clusters with just a few clicks.

With services combined into ready-made building blocks, businesses can have effective, reliable cloud infrastructure up in no time, while HPE’s new Ezmeral Container Platform makes it easier to add new capabilities for automation, machine learning, analytics, AI or security, giving businesses further scope to experiment and innovate in a low-risk, cost-effective way.

Hybrid cloud, then, is the future, and platforms like GreenLake the best way to provision, run and manage hybrid cloud.

Find how HPE GreenLake can deliver the hybrid cloud your business needs

Disruption. Agility. Hybrid. When it comes to some of the biggest business buzzwords – especially in the tech industry – the common thread that runs through all of them is flexibility. The ability to adapt, to take some services from here and others from there to create the solution you need, to be responsive.

Yet the reality of the business landscape hasn’t been particularly true to these ideals. Certain tenets that, it’s fair to say, are rather old-fashioned still sit at the heart of IT strategy and one of the most deep rooted is overprovisioning.

Overprovisioning may sound like either no big deal or a sensible precaution at first glance; buying more capacity than you need in expectation of future growth or to accommodate spikes in demand that may appear unexpectedly seems like a prudent thing to do. The costs of this unused hardware, however, can far outweigh any benefits of having this safety buffer in place.

A problem the cloud can’t solve

Not long ago, industry pundits would have informed you that the answer to overprovisioning was for businesses to turn their backs on their on-premises data centres and take their IT to the public cloud. The flexibility and scalability of the public cloud, particularly with the big hyperscalers, was supposed to mean that there was no reason for organisations to overprovision – you could instantly scale up or down depending on what you needed at any time.

The reality, however, was somewhat less straightforward for multiple reasons. The first is that old habits die hard – rather than managing cloud capacity continually, many organisations chose instead to replicate what they had been doing on-premises. Reasons may vary, from wanting a predictable cost from month to month, to still feeling safer with that extra capacity ready and waiting.

This was further complicated by the fact that the public cloud isn’t suited to all workloads, whether for latency, legislative or cost reasons, or something else altogether. In these situations, organisations were still left needing on-premises hardware that they would, once again, often overprovision.

In fact, research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) carried out in late 2020 found that two thirds of organisations are using less than 60% of their infrastructure, whether that’s on-premises in a private cloud, or in a public cloud. This can end up being more expensive than you might think – in total, each year overprovisioning across all types of infrastructure costs companies a whopping $15 million (£10 million) in total in misaligned resources.

But this isn’t to say cloud doesn’t have its advantages. Elastic compute in particular is one of the standout features of public cloud computing (even if overprovisioning does undermine it somewhat) and public cloud still attracts customers some 20 years after it was first developed.

The question, then, is what can be done to marry up the advantages of scalable, on-demand computing as offered by the cloud, the security offered by on-premises infrastructure, all while eliminating the problem of overprovisioning.

The data centre on demand

Thankfully, there is an answer to this question: On demand, on-premises infrastructure. This new trend, pioneered by HPE with its GreenLake portfolio, is gaining traction among businesses across all verticals and sizes, from the biggest enterprises down to SMBs.

On-demand infrastructure offers the best of both worlds between cloud and on-premises. It is scalable, meaning capacity can be turned up and down as needed, right down to the level of individual cores with HPE GreenLake Silicon on Demand.

With infrastructure on demand, you know that the capacity is there and ready to use when you need it, taking away many of the concerns that cause overprovisioning in the first place. As with public cloud, however, you only pay for the capacity you use – if you only use 60% of the storage you have available, for example, you only pay for that 60%. Should you need to scale up, whether temporarily or permanently, you can do so quickly and easily through the GreenLake Central console.

What’s more, by having the necessary hardware located in your own data centre, there’s no latency – a problem that still bedevils public cloud. This means you can use a consumption-based model for provisioning infrastructure even for edge workloads, where latency often causes the greatest problems.

For organisations that prefer not to manage their own infrastructure at all, GreenLake services are also available through HPE managed service partners, freeing up the IT department to do other valuable work around the business.

GreenLake was the first service of its kind when it was rolled out some five years ago, and continues to pioneer in new areas, such as Silicon on Demand and the incorporation of AI and machine learning into its offerings.

As far as HPE is concerned, this model of on demand infrastructure provisioning, which eliminates the problems of overprovisioning associated with both traditional on-premises and public cloud, is where all business IT is heading. Indeed, CEO Antonio Neri has described GreenLake as the future of HPE, saying: “GreenLake should be synonymous to HPE.

“This will be our leading product, leading offer, our leading experience, where everything else underneath is part of that experience, whether it's connectivity as a service. Whether it’s... data services, whether it's load optimisation, whether it’s [artificial intelligence], machine learning – all of that caters to that platform.”

With infrastructure on demand becoming ever more comprehensive, both in what is available and how it’s delivered, there has never been a better time to stop overprovisioning and start right sizing in a way that guarantees extra capacity will be available when needed, without needing to worry about latency or data sovereignty.

Find out how HPE GreenLake can deliver more efficient solutions for your business

If there’s one thing the past 18 months has taught us, it’s the importance of flexibility. Being able to adapt to a rapidly changing environment has been key when it comes to which businesses have survived and even thrived during the pandemic, and which have struggled or failed.

The lesson in the importance of flexibility is one that every organisation should take with it as the world begins to return to normal and incorporate into every area of its operations. A central pillar of any exercise in flexibility should be IT that can be flexible too. This is sometimes easier said than done, however; your IT estate may be seen as a ‘sunk cost’ that would be uneconomical to replace. You may be concerned about whether the resources you need will be available when you need them if you don’t build in spare capacity when you’re provisioning “just in case”. Or perhaps you’re not convinced that some of the more flexible models of IT consumption will actually be able to meet your needs.

When you’re talking about business-critical applications and workloads, these are very fair considerations. Indeed, it’s not that long ago that these kinds of reservations would have been very valid. However, on demand IT delivered in a hybrid model isn’t the same as using old-style colocation infrastructure, nor does it mean moving everything over to one of the public cloud hyperscalers. Instead, you can now bring a consumption-based, cloud-like experience to your own data centre and make it available for almost every use case you may need.

Digital transformation

Digital transformation has been a cornerstone of business development for the past several years and rightly so. Any organisation that doesn’t put digital at the heart of its operations and seek to adapt to the way business is done in an online-first world is going to struggle no matter its sector or size.

Flexibility and right-sizing are key tenets of digital transformation. Organisations need to have resources available when a project needs doing, but equally shouldn’t be weighed down by feeling they need to invest in masses of new infrastructure.

Cloud is often put forward as the answer to this particular question, but it’s not without its limitations. When used correctly for short periods in particular, public cloud compute services can be very cost effective. Frequently, however, this isn’t how it’s used, with overprovisioning or using it for the wrong kinds of workloads often making it a less cost effective choice than it may first have appeared. There are other important issues that can arise from using public cloud, too, such as difficulties with data exfiltration and questions over whether data sovereignty and data residency requirements are being met – particularly in highly regulated industries.

For this reason, organisations are increasingly choosing to adopt a hybrid cloud model. Software as a service (SaaS) is used to meet common business needs like customer relationship management (CRM), payroll, and some HR functions, while some workloads may be put in the public cloud and the rest remain on premises in a private cloud.

The private cloud element of this mix has sometimes proved controversial. Some industry watchers have argued it’s just a rebadging of co-location that long predates the cloud, or even a euphemism for a standard data centre. Infrastructure on demand, such as that offered by HPE GreenLake, overcomes many of these arguments, however. It offers a public cloud-like experience either on-premises or in a managed service provider’s facility, with the ability to scale up and down with a simple click of a button.

In fact, GreenLake goes further than some public cloud offerings as it’s not just compute or storage that can be turned on and off as needed, but even individual cores with the recently announced Silicon on Demand. In the words of HPE, it’s “the cloud that comes to you”.

DevOps and agile development

Another key trend in IT over the past few years has been DevOps. Sometimes seen as part of digital transformation, sometimes as its own separate initiative, it amalgamates the development and operations teams to reduce the amount of time it takes to put an application into production. As opposed to traditional waterfall development, it allows for a more iterative, less disruptive, and more innovative approach to the creations, management and release of business apps.

As highlighted by research firm Futurum’s Why Everything-as-a-Service? Why HPE? report, by its very nature, the infrastructure demands of DevOps are more variable than that of waterfall development. Having scalable resources on hand is therefore critical if you’re going to avoid the excess costs associated with overprovisioning. Once again, public cloud infrastructure is often put forward as an answer to this, but a private cloud underpinned by infrastructure on demand is often a better solution.

One of the problems with public cloud is latency, which is the enemy of the rapid development and deployment central to DevOps. Bringing scalable, on-demand private cloud infrastructure such as HPE GreenLake to the workloads instead, rather than sending them to a public cloud data centre that could be hundreds of miles away, reduces latency and lets DevOps projects achieve their full potential.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

While still something of an emerging technology, artificial intelligence and its subcategory machine learning are attracting increasing interest – and investment – from businesses across the board.

As it will be a new initiative for most businesses, this offers a true opportunity to invest in the right IT infrastructure and platforms. As with DevOps, AI can be highly sensitive to latency and some applications are only suited to deployment on-premises in the data centre or at the edge. Similarly, it can have variable capacity needs depending on the nature of the project that’s underway – an intensive machine learning initiative that involves training the software on huge volumes of data will be more demanding than a more basic AI application running in a production environment. Therefore there’s still a need for responsive, scalable infrastructure.

A taste of the future

While these may be the three dominant IT trends impacting businesses currently, this isn’t where our flexible future ends. As time goes on, new technologies and ways of doing business will emerge – increasingly led by user experience according to Futurum’s research – and IT infrastructure will need to be responsive to this.

On-demand infrastructure will undoubtedly prove key in facilitating all of this, bringing a true cloud-like experience across all elements of a hybrid-cloud setup and the ability to run workloads in the best possible environment, whatever they may be and wherever that is.

Find out more about the flexibility that HPE GreenLake can provide for your business

HPE has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire cloud data management and protection specialist Zerto for $374 million.

The move expands HPE GreenLake and continues HPE Storage’s shift to a cloud-native, software-defined data services business, the company said.

Zerto’s journal-based continuous data protection (CDP) technology includes disaster recovery, backup, and data mobility in a single platform that spans on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Zerto will be available as a service through HPE GreenLake and Data Services Cloud Console.

“Zerto’s market-leading cloud data management and protection software expands HPE GreenLake cloud data services, allowing customers to protect their data and rapidly act on insights, from edge to cloud,” commented Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE.

The solution is designed to help customers recover quickly from ransomware, cyber attacks, and other planned data downtime, returning data to its pre-attacked state.

Zerto also easily replicates and migrates data between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments, as well as natively to AWS and Microsoft Azure.

“Customers continue to face significant issues managing data complexity across hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Tom Black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage.

“Zerto further positions HPE to help solve these customer challenges and become the leader in data management and protection through HPE GreenLake cloud services.”

Founded in 2009, Zerto is co-headquartered in Herzliya, Israel and Boston. The firm’s 500 employees serve more than 9,000 customers – including enterprises and 350 MSPs.

HPE says the addition of Zerto will “significantly accelerate” its transformation to become a leading data management and protection provider, while Zerto will benefit from HPE’s global scope and presence.

The acquisition is expected to close during HPE’s fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Zerto’s management team will join HPE following the close of the transaction, with the company organised under HPE Storage.

“The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud strategy and strong leadership is a perfect match for Zerto,” commented Ziv Kedem, CEO of Zerto.

“Coupling Zerto’s industry-leading cloud data management and protection software platform with HPE’s cloud data services and go-to-market reach will offer an unparalleled experience for our collective customers and partners.”

Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) used the opening keynote of the company’s annual Discover conference to hail what he calls the “Age of Insight”.

According to Neri, the information age was defined by a focus on the volume, velocity and variety of data collection. In the Age of Insight, he said, the focus will instead be on deriving value from all the data businesses create and store.

A key part of this is cloud computing, he said, but rather than public cloud, hyperscalers or exascalers, Neri focused on what would commonly be recognised as private cloud – data held in the customers’ data centre or with a co-location provider.

Specifically, he said this should also be delivered on a consumption-based model rather than dealing with over-provisioning as one might in a standard data centre.

This coincides with the capability HPE offers through GreenLake, its “edge to cloud platform”. This service allows customers to provision capacity on HPE hardware as needed, either from HPE directly or from one of its partners offering GreenLake services – of which there are now 900.

GreenLake took centre stage during the keynote, with Neri highlighting new products and projects coming into this portfolio, including Lighthouse and Aurora.

Neri also took time to rail against cloud lock-in, where organisations can find it difficult to migrate their data from one public cloud provider to another, or back into their own data centre. Organisations, he said, should be able to move their data without being penalised for it – “after all, it’s your data”.

“The past decade was all about the cloud-first mandate,” Neri said. “Looking ahead, the next decade will be focused on using data everywhere across your distributed enterprise – a cloud everywhere mandate.”

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.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Antonio Neri reaffirmed his company’s commitment to delivering everything as a service, saying he would be happy if the GreenLake name became more well known than HPE.

Speaking to reporters and analysts ahead of the company’s annual Discover conference, Neri said: “That's the trend, right. That's the goal. That's why we laid out a vision that GreenLake should be synonymous to HPE.

“This will be our leading product, leading offer, our leading experience, where everything else underneath is part of that experience, whether it's connectivity as a service. Whether it is … data services, whether it's a load optimisation, whether it is AI, machine learning – all of that caters to that platform.”

He also quipped that it would be a good thing if people mistook HPE for GreenLake, rather than HP Inc – a confusion that apparently persists in the market despite the two companies having split six years ago.

To say GreenLake is taking centre stage at Discover 2021 would be an understatement. There are no big hardware announcements this year – no Primera equivalent, no Gen10 equivalent, nothing for the metalheads at all. Instead, all the announcements, from a partnership with Intel that allows customers to spin up individual cores as needed to new vertical-focused offerings, fall under the GreenLake banner. Even last year’s big announcement, Ezmeral, seems, slowly but surely, to be on its way to being another component of GreenLake.

Neri doesn’t seem particularly concerned that HPE’s great rival Dell is looking to eat its consumption-based lunch with Project Apex, either, telling reporters: “I welcome [competitors’] entrance into the space, because a validates what we said few years ago about the world being hybrid, where the world will move to a consumption driven model.”

HPE Discover kicks off this evening at 4pm BST with a keynote from Neri, and runs through to the end of the week. IT Pro will be bringing you all the latest news and analysis from the show, so be sure to check back here regularly.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has acquired open source artificial intelligence (AI) startup Determined AI.

The four-year-old company, which only brought its product to market in 2020, specialises in machine learning (ML), with the aim of training artificial intelligence (AI) models quickly and at any scale. While it hasn’t been around long, the startup has managed to secure customers in a number of sectors, including defence contracting, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles and biopharmaceuticals.

Determined AI will be brought into HPE’s high-performance computing (HPC) and mission-critical solutions (MCS) business unit, and the deal will see the startup's technology combined HPE’s AI and HPC offerings.

Justin Hotard, SVP and GM of HPC and MCS said: “Determined AI’s unique open source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. I am pleased to welcome the world-class Determined AI team, who share our vision to make AI more accessible for our customers and users, into the HPE family.”

Determined AI’s founders Neir Conway, Evan Sparks and Ameet Talwalker, described the acquisition as “a massive accelerant for our mission to empower users to efficiently build cutting-edge AI applications”.

The three added that the platform will remain open source, saying “HPE shares our vision that driving an open standard for AI software infrastructure is the fastest way for the industry to realise the potential of AI.

"Consequently, HPE is committed to investing in and rapidly growing the Determined Training Platform as an open source project. Our customers and open source community members will continue to receive the same high level of service and support that they always have, from a team of experts who are intimately familiar with the challenges they’re facing.”

HPE GreenLake now supports Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server.

The announcement of the new integration came just ahead of the company’s annual HPE Discover conference, held virtually for the second time in a row, where GreenLake is expected to take centre stage.

According to the company, the expansion of GreenLake to include support for Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server will enable customers to take advantage of a cloud-like experience for their applications and workloads even as they remain in a private environment, such as their own data centre.

This is no small amount of customers, either; according to research from IDC, some 70% of critical production applications remain outside the public cloud, in a secure single-tenant environment and at the edge.

In addition to providing a cloud-like experience, HPE said customers will benefit from a cloud-like operating model as well, as GreenLake is a consumption-based service.

This is not the company’s first foray into working with Microsoft Azure via GreenLake, which has been able to support public cloud deployments on Azure, as well as private cloud infrastructure via Azure Stack, since 2018. However, it’s the first time the relationship has focused on hyperconverged infrastructure in particular.

Speaking about the new offerings, Keith White, GM of HPE Greenlake cloud services, said: “The world is becoming hybrid and that’s why we are so excited about this collaboration with Microsoft, especially as we see significant growth in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure area.

“By combining Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with offerings like the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, customers benefit from a unified, automated experience. The solution means customers can determine their own right mix of hybrid cloud and workload placement, with flexibility but also control. We continue to deepen our collaboration with Microsoft to develop comprehensive solutions that help customers transform to modern cloud-driven organisations.”

HPE has announced a set of capabilities to equip organisations with the tools required to monetise data by tapping into the EU’s in-development Gaia-X federated data infrastructure.

Companies, service providers and public organisations can use HPE's Solution Framework for Gaia-X to gear up to be compatible with the data platform when it launches in the near future. The system supports all functionality required to provide and consume data and services in a decentralised, federated environment.

By buying into HPE’s framework, organisations can tap into huge distributed data pools, strengthen data sovereignty and create value from data in ways they could never have prior to involvement in Gaia-X.

This framework is based on a reference architecture comprising key components of HPE’s software portfolio, third-party software, and the Cloud28+ network, a marketplace for monetising data and services. Everything will also be bundled in an ‘as a service’ HPE Greenlake model, meaning it’s more accessible to customers and partners.

“Gaia-X is not about US versus Europe, but about the key question of the next wave of digital transformation and how to create network effects without centralisation in order to unlock the value of distributed data, while at the same time reserving sovereignty of every participant,” said Johannes Koch, HPE’s senior vice president for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and MD for Germany.

“Gaia-X is the focal point of this endeavour, and as such is also a catalyst to create the future architecture of the digital world. In essence, it’s about restoring the original freedom of the internet and about creating an open, decentralised cloud.”

The EU proposed Gaia-X as a next-gen continental-wide system in order to reduce the reliance on, and domination of, large US tech companies with regards to data, the cloud, and digital transformation.

The platform connects a host of cloud service suppliers through an interoperable data exchange platform that serves as a warehouse for several industries and data sources. It also acts as a data repository for businesses to pick specific services, such as IoT, big data and machine learning.

HPE joined the non-profit organisation managing and contributing to Gaia-X on day one, and has contributed to its architecture, standards and certification since.

The message HPE was keen to stress is that businesses cannot reap the benefits of Gaia-X unless their infrastructures and data operations are configured in such a way that they’re compatible with the platform. This is where the firm’s HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X steps in as a means of getting businesses ready to be a part of the Gaia-X project.

The firm says its own strategy is perfectly aligned with the approach Gaia-X is taking, and the problems that it’s trying to solve, with HPE’s software portfolio and business model pivoted to it.

A key component of the HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X is a reference architecture that defines the foundation of the components needed to decentralise workloads, and this also includes a central governance structure

The HPE Ezmeral Software Platform, which provides tools such as access to distributed data and unified control of distributed Kubernetes clusters, serves as the technological foundation of its framework.

Its Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE) offer open source standards for securely authenticating software services.

Finally, Cloud28+ allows customers to monetise their data and services through the marketplace that this platform offers, and the partners associated with the community.

HPE has unveiled an overhaul of its storage business that has a greater focus on edge-to-cloud software and infrastructure, delivered through its consumption-based GreenLake subscription platform.

The new storage subscription model is comprised of three parts: a storage platform called the 'Data Services Cloud Console', new subscription services in its GreenLake Cloud service, and a storage management tool called HPE Alletra.

Considered the latest milestone in the company's larger shift towards a services model. The new subscription model aims to provide holistic cloud software provisioning, from billing to data processing, and also more financial flexibility for its customers.

The Data Services Cloud Console is an API with which customers can manage cloud and data-centric operations. It can be used for HPE-led application automation and developers can use it to access infrastructure and data as code.

HPE Alletra, however, is a completely new 'pay-as-you-go' suite of cloud storage tools, managed through the Data Services Cloud Console. It aims to deliver a unified operation from edge to cloud, with customers no longer needing to make specific hardware choices. Instead, Alletra will run on all-NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) HPE systems, which includes HPE Alletra 9000 and Alletra 6000.

The tech giant said the new offerings will simplify edge to cloud management, but there are some concerns, according to Forrester's cloud analyst, Naveen Chhabra. Customers will not only still need to have substantial technical knowledge to fully utilise the service, but the new model may do little to alleviate friction in the procurement process.

He also told IT Pro that decision-makers will have to evaluate the tech and overall pricing, which will require a full understanding of the finer details of the service, its payment model and the overall costs. What's more, he suggests that customers will still be responsible for their data centre facilities, which only adds to the complexity.

However, Chhabra also explained that companies moving to edge computing should not be seen as the "panacea" for data centre infrastructure vendors. While companies will require more compute storage infrastructure, HPE will be up against established firms that are already specialists in this area. The likes of Honeywell, Schlumberger, and Siemens already provide embedded tech infrastructure and Chhabra suggests it might be difficult for HPE to find traction with its pay-as-you-use offerings.

"Tech infrastructure, certainly, is an embedded solution in all these edge use-cases, but not the leading solution," argues Chhabra. "Hence, leading with an IT solution will not cut the ice much longer and deeper. These tech vendors that are going after edge use-cases and with flexible pay-per-use pricing will have to go to these vertical solution builders and get themselves embedded, to the point that the factory floor decision-maker won't even know whether it's HPE, Dell, or Lenovo under the hood."

"The tech infrastructure vendors will continue to remain relevant and known in the IT deployments but not in the true edge scenarios as they would like," Chhabra added. "Will businesses care if Siemens bases its solution on a low cost yet reliable system from an ABC vendor? Maybe not as much."

HPE has been awarded $40 million SGD (£22 million) to build a new supercomputer for the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore which will be operational in early 2022.

The new system will reportedly be 8x faster than the NSCC’s existing pool of HPC resources. It will use the system to unlock scientific discoveries across medicine, diseases, climate, engineering and more.

The new supercomputer will be built and powered using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, deliver 10 petabytes of storage with over 300GB/s of read/write performance speeds, use 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and contain 352 Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs for HPC and AI workloads.

Furthermore, the system will be housed in a data centre designed to increase sustainability and reduce energy consumption, according to HPE. The new system will have liquid-cooling capabilities to increase energy efficiency and power density by transferring heat generated by the new supercomputer with a liquid-cooled process.

“The new system will provide the necessary resources to meet the growing supercomputing needs of our researchers, and to enable more of such significant scientific breakthroughs at the national and global level.” said associate professor Tan Tin Wee, CEO at the NSCC Singapore.

Earlier this month, the Met Office signed a multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft for a new supercomputer to be built also using HPE’s Cray supercomputer hardware. It is set to provide highly-accurate weather forecasts, will be powered by renewable energy, and will save 7,415 tonnes of CO2 in its first year of operational service.

Dell and Nvidia are also set to power new supercomputers to help researchers at Cambridge and Durham universities investigate the universe’s biggest questions. The move was part of a deal with the Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing (DiRAC) project, which operates as a distributed computing network with several deployments across the UK.

HPE has doubled down on its commitment to data-driven insights with the acquisition of cloud analysis platform provider CloudPhysics, as well as the release of its new Software-Defined Opportunity Engine (SDOE).

The acquisition adds CloudPhysics' SaaS-based, data-driven platform for analysis of on-premises and cloud setups, bringing detailed insights to customers and partners across most IT environments, the firm said.

CloudPhysics' solution monitors and analyses IT infrastructures, estimates costs and viability of cloud migrations, as well as model a customer’s IT infrastructure as a virtual environment.

Quick to deploy, the solution can generate insights in as little as 15 minutes, HPE says, while its data capture includes over 200 metrics for VMs, hosts, datastores and networks.

"Through increased visibility and understanding, CloudPhysics transforms the procurement process to be a win-win for both customers and partners,” commented Tom Black, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Storage.

"Our partners will benefit from shorter sales cycles, an increase in assessed to qualified opportunities and higher close rates. More importantly, our partners become trusted advisors to accelerate the transformation agendas of our customers."

The CloudPhysics solution will be integrated into HPE’s freshly unveiled Software-Defined Opportunity Engine (SDOE), which is designed to provide customers with data-backed customised sales proposals.

Powered by HPE InfoSight, the SDOE solution uses intelligence and deep learning to generate holistic technology recommendations for businesses to optimise their infrastructure and accelerate digital transformation.

The platform auto-generates a quote with the best storage solution for a customer in as little as 45 seconds – a dramatic reduction on a process that could take weeks previously.

HPE says SDOE will enable businesses to work as trusted partners with their customers as they build a detailed understanding of their workloads, configuration and usage patterns. On average, the streamlined tool also eliminates five meetings from the current sales process, the tech firm added.

"By utilising software and data-driven analytics, HPE Storage is transforming the sales and customer experience with real intelligence - removing complexity and guesswork, and turning it into a simple and data-driven decision making process, based on the preference and specific needs of the customer,” Black added.

The UK government has established a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with HPE that will allow public sector organisations to adopt a pay-per-use model when acquiring hybrid cloud services for digital transformation.

The MoU, agreed between HPE and the government’s Crown Commercial Service (CCS), will allow to public sector bodies to take advantage of preferential rates when seeking a third-party provider for cloud services.

"Despite the growth of cloud strategies in the public sector, many organizations have struggled to move business-critical applications to the public cloud, due to application entanglement, data gravity, security and compliance, and unpredictable costs," said vice president and GM UK&A at HPE Pointnext Services, Sue Preston.

"By leveraging HPE technologies, like HPE GreenLake, public sector organizations can reduce complexity, boost innovation and bring cost efficiency to their digital transformation efforts."

Qualifying organisations can benefit from minimum agreed discounts on a range of HPE systems and platforms, including HPE GreenLake cloud services, Aruba enterprise networking and security products, as well as HPE’s storage and compute technology.

The agreement also gives public sector bodies access to HPE’s pay-as-you-use cloud model in their own data centres, at the edge, as well as at facilities such as Crown Hosting Data Centres. Organisations can also use the full extent of GreenLake services, including its pre-integrated configurations of varying sizes.

"CCS provides commercial agreements which help organisations across the entire public sector save time and money on buying everyday goods and services," said the chief executive of CCS, Simon Tse.

"This Memorandum of Understanding with HPE not only provides great value for public sector organisations, it also allows them to innovate more readily and improve services for the citizens they serve."

This is the fourth such arrangement that the CCS has struck with cloud service providers over the last few months, as part of the One Government Cloud Strategy. This venture offers public sector bodies comprehensive guidance on pursuing cloud-powered digital transformation projects.

MoUs have previously been established with Google Cloud, UKCloud, and most recently with IBM to give public sector bodies a number of options when looking for digital transformation services from a third-party provider.

HPE has unveiled the first products released under the HPE Cray umbrella brand more than a year after its $1.3 billion acquisition of the supercomputing giant.

The HPE Cray EX supercomputer and HPE Cray supercomputer comprise the first units of hardware released under the new brand and aim to tackle the challenges of data growth and the need for companies to scale-up operations.

The company has released the new supercomputing line in response to what it has coined the challenges of the ‘Exascale Era’. This mantra demands that only the most valuable insights are extracted from rapidly growing volumes of data that need to be processed.

Supercomputing, in light of this new era, requires a broader set of analytical methodologies to be applied to data in a coordinated fashion, and not just about building the largest machines that only the largest labs can use.

“This new era of computing is entirely different. It isn’t about single, gigantic supercomputers or specific, one-of-a-kind technologies,” said senior vice president and GM of HPC and mission-critical solutions with HPE, Peter Ungaro.

“This new era is born of the massive growth in data and the need for converged use of modelling and simulation with AI and analytics in applications and workloads to power discovery and digital transformation in enterprises of all shapes and sizes. It encompasses a host of new requirements for both research and commercial institutions alike. And it will deliver insights and innovation on a scale never before seen.”

The HPE Cray line is based on a combination of technologies from the two companies, following completion of the integration process, including new capabilities from Cray’s Shasta architecture.

The HPE Cray EX supercomputer targets organisations that want the highest density and efficiency, liquid-cooling cabinetry, that supports liquid cooling of all components in a dense bladed configuration. The cabinets contain eight chassis, each of which supports up to eight compute and eight switchblades.

The HPE Cray supercomputer, meanwhile, is a standard 19in rack configuration that gives flexibility for smaller and air-cooled systems. The platform is currently based on the Apollo 2000 Gen10 Plus with four AMD EPYC 7002 nodes in a 2U compute server, with HPE Cray software and HPE Slingshot networking pre-installed.

The acquisition of Cray, a specialist in high-performance computing (HPC), represents the company’s second move after having bought SGI in 2016.

HPE has announced that it is helping the University of Edinburgh build what will be Europe’s first regional data innovation centre.

The company is to provide high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools powered by HPE Apollo Systems and HPE Superdome Flex Servers, as well as software supported by HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. The deal is expected to be worth over $125 million (£95 million) over the next 10 years.

The Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF) will assist 1,000 public, private and non-profit organisations in developing products and services using R&D and other data-driven programmes, as well as elevate Edinburgh to the title of the Data Capital of Europe, the company claims.

The EIDF is expected to play a crucial role in the region's Data Driven Innovation (DDI) programme, pioneered by the University of Edinburgh to overcome societal and industrial challenges as well as deliver benefits from the data economy, all while improving the digital and data skills of over 100,000 people from across the region.

Mark Parsons, director of EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, said that the institution is “pleased to be working with HPE” on what he believes is “the only facility of its kind in Europe focused specifically on data-driven regional growth”.

“With the Edinburgh International Data Facility, we are combining computing and data resources to create a facility that will allow organizations to use data to innovate throughout their organizations. HPE is uniquely positioned to provide the spectrum of infrastructure and services, as well as the flexibility that this project demands,” he added.

In order to manage AI workloads and applications crucial to scientific research and engineering, EIDF will be deploying the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, which provides native Kubernetes support and enables self-service ML applications with flexible use of accelerators, such as GPUs.

The platform runs on HPE Apollo Systems, which are purpose-built to support HPC, deep learning and other data-intensive workloads. What is more, the platform will also support HPE Superdome Flex Servers to support applications requiring large in-memory processing, as well as include pre-integrated persistent data storage in the form of the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric file system.

HPE is also set to provide the Cray Shasta ClusterStor E1000 storage system, which is purpose-built to support EIDF’s ongoing data growth and converged HPC and analytics workloads using intelligent data management.

EIDF is expected to gain 20 petabytes of storage capacity with the new system which will also be used for vital COVID-19 research at the University of Edinburgh.

Lee Rand, director of HPC and AI at HPE EMEA, said that the company is “proud to embark on this long-term initiative with the University of Edinburgh, following a highly competitive tender process”.

“We were chosen due to the flexibility and reliability offered through our end-to-end solutions portfolio, and because we were one of the very few organizations able to seamlessly combine all of the Edinburgh International Data Facility’s requirements into a single framework. In the data-centric era deriving insights and value from across multiple datasets will be a key to success for business and government alike. We look forward to boosting the UK’s capacity for data-driven innovation through this initiative.”

The EIDF is expected to be fully operational later this year.

HPE has launched a 5G test centre for telcos to develop and integrate 5G network projects and services and get them to market quicker.

The HPE 5G Lab has already gained support from industry leaders such as Affirmed Networks, Intel, Nokia and Red Hat.

This is a part of a growing portfolio of 5G services from HPE, which include core network, edge and enterprise services. The lab will provide a proving ground for telco firms, network equipment providers and independent software vendors (ISVs), according to HPE.

The lab is located in Fort Collins, Colorado, and available worldwide to customers and HPE partners via remote access. This also includes personnel to manage and operate the lab environment, as well as assist with integration and testing. The lab is based on HPE 5G portfolio services and will include multiple 5G related products.

"Governments and telecoms operators around the world are looking to open 5G technologies as an opportunity to move away from a number of vendors which have raised fundamental concerns around security, resilience and market diversification," said Phil Mottram, VP and GM of communications and media solutions at HPE.

"However, despite multiple successful deployments, doubts still persist about the ability of open 5G technologies to truly replace the old way of building networks. With the launch of the HPE 5G Lab, telcos, solution vendors and national stakeholders can test innovative new solutions with confidence and ensure that they are ready for mass adoption."

HPE wants to encourage telcos, vendors and platform providers to come together to test, document, and validate their technologies as a single service. It suggests that this open approach will offer the flexibility to work with practically any ISV or best-of-breed provider to create tailored networking services tuned to specific verticals and use cases.

The initial focus of the Lab is to bring innovation to the "monolithic" cellular network core, according to HPE, and enable holistic management and data sharing.

If you’re at all involved in the world of IT, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll run into containers at some point. In many ways, they’re the engine that powers the modern web, and the technology is gaining popularity among organisations of all sizes as a tool for developing robust, highly-scalable applications.

However, while you’re almost certainly aware of containers, you might not necessarily be familiar with how they came to be so beloved by software developers. The history of containers is rooted in the concept of process separation - sandboxing services running on the same hardware, for reasons of security, resource monitoring and other concerns. While the concept is similar to (and in some aspects an evolution of) virtualisation, the two are slightly different.

The first real forerunner of the technology was FreeBSD’s ‘jails’ feature. Released in 2000, this allowed admins to split FreeBSD systems into smaller independent environments. Jails were followed in 2006 by Google’s Process Containers, which isolated and controlled the resources for a small collection of processes, which in turn evolved into LXC, and eventually Docker. Docker offered the first fully-fledged container management ecosystem, and when it hit the scene in 2013, it immediately started making waves.

The next several years saw rapid advancements, as innovative startups and tech providers pushed the bleeding edge of container development forward, while slow and careful enterprise adoption ensured that it continued to grow in maturity. Over time, the Google-created Kubernetes container orchestration system came to be seen as an implementation of the technology that was stable and enterprise-friendly enough to merit mainstream adoption, and containers have now become an accepted element of infrastructures around the world.

Contain your excitement

Part of the reason that these services - and containerisation in general - were so popular, was that they gave administrators much more control over how and where they ran their apps. While virtualisation had been around since the 90s, every virtual machine runs its own separate clone of an operating system whereas containers run on top of a single OS, sharing the elements that they need to while keeping their own binaries and dependencies safely isolated.

In addition to the actual application or process it’s housing, a container also includes an individual copy of the exact binaries and configuration files required to run that specific application in the exact way its creators intended. This ensures that it will run predictably in any environment, without the prospect of different software versions introducing compatibility issues.

For this reason, containers are incredibly portable; they are pre-packaged with only the software they need in order to run, which means they can be dropped onto any OS without requiring extra configuration or software installation. They’re also much more lightweight than VMs, because multiple containers can share the same OS, rather than each application requiring its own instance. They take up less space, require fewer resources and boot much faster than VMs, which is a big bonus for efficiency-seeking businesses.

A further advantage of containers is that they allow for a modular approach to application development. Rather than constructing an application inside a single giant VM, organisations can break an application up into its constituent elements and run them in individual containers. This means that if one element experiences an issue, it doesn’t bring the whole application down with it; furthermore, it enables developers to swap components out as and when they need to without having to rebuild the whole application.

Containerised applications are more portable, more resilient, cheaper and faster to run than many bare-metal or VM-based applications, but because they can be quickly and easily duplicated, they’re also more scalable. This makes them perfect for web-based applications, which may need to be hosted across cloud, on-prem or hybrid environments, and thus benefit hugely from the predictability and low resource consumption that containers offer. The vast majority of web-scale SaaS applications are delivered via containers, and they’re ideal for services that need to be fast, stable and responsive.

Architecting for success

There are many benefits to containerisation, but while all this may sound disarmingly easy, an effective container delivery strategy requires more than just knowing how to use Docker or Kubernetes. A number of complementary and supporting functions are necessary to properly utilise containers. Most of these functions revolve around principles of agile and DevOps; part of the appeal of containers is the ability they provide to rapidly iterate on software, but they also require rapid iteration in order to maximise their impact.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are often key to this. Using these processes allows containers to be built, improved, tested and fed into an organisation’s infrastructure at rapid pace with minimal downtime. Proper use of continuous testing also means that these containers will be more stable, and ongoing monitoring as part of a good DevOps programme will enable organisations to quickly detect and remedy any faults.

So are containers set to dominate the enterprise landscape, pushing out VMs and establish a position as the only real way to run applications? Well, not quite. VMs still have their uses; they’re better suited to instances where a diverse set of operating systems need to be run on the same server, and as VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is fond of pointing out, most hyperscale public cloud providers actually run their containers inside virtual machines.

The reality for most businesses will instead likely be a mixed estate, with containers and VMs utilised in parallel for different workloads. What we are going to see, however, is a continual increase in container adoption within the enterprise, as tooling gets more sophisticated and easier to integrate with existing technologies and workflows. This mixed approach will also extend to the infrastructure that containers run on; while the scalable nature of containers makes them a natural fit for public cloud services, these benefits can also be achieved in hybrid or on-premise systems by utilising the flexible consumption models and easy on-premise scaling offered by HPE’s Greenlake IT as a service portfolio.

We may also hit a talent crunch; container management is already one of the most highly sought-after skills in the IT industry, and as it grows in importance, the demand for competent container architects could spark bidding wars and talent shortages. Businesses who want to implement containerised applications without engaging in these bidding wars, however, can also make use of HPE’s Pointnext Services, which apply the industry giant’s expert talents and specialisations to the construction, architecture and operation of its customers’ IT estates, with deep knowledge of cutting edge container technologies like Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Docker. The combination of Pointnext and Greenlake allows customers, with HPE’s assistance, to construct a flexible, performant and robust container architecture, which can be run on Greenlake infrastructure and scaled up, down and out as their capacity needs evolve.

The key for businesses who want to put themselves at the head of the curve is to look at their roadmaps, and figure out how they want to integrate containers into their ecosystems in years to come. That way, they can gradually build their competency over time, without having to suddenly pivot years down the road. Put simply - containers are here to stay.

Discover more about HPE GreenLake

As the UK, along with the entire world, continues to deal with the somewhat surreal reality of life and business under the spectre of COVID-19, organisations are starting to think about what recovery might look like.

When confronted with immense disruption to working life, it’s technology that has kept the world functioning. Now, the tools and platforms that every organisation has had to employ to stay connected and remain productive can be built upon to create a new normal. Cloud-based infrastructure and applications, in particular, have proved invaluable during the pandemic and will be a vital part of business recovery.

One huge takeaway from recent months is that remote working is clearly viable on a wide scale and can be even more beneficial than many organisations first thought. As such, it looks like it is here to stay in some capacity. According to a study by Okta, just 24% of respondents said they’d want to return to the office full-time, and with big names such as Twitter and Facebook announcing they’ll support permanent remote working and a Gartner survey finding that 74% of CFOs are planning to adopt flexible working policies, it’s clear that many companies will support this.

The road to recovery will be one that embraces the remote working practices we’ve all had to adopt, and integrates some of the benefits into everyday operations. Here we take you through the ways cloud computing has helped keep the business world running remotely and can help your organisation navigate the new normal.

The tools that have kept us running

One of the biggest challenges in recent months has been to maintain a sense of business as usual, despite significant disruption. This has meant adapting working methods and adopting the right technologies to ensure staff can communicate effectively and work collaboratively and productively.

Cloud-based collaboration tools have been gaining popularity for some time, but the coronavirus lockdown has accelerated their uptake considerably. When the government instructed all businesses to work from home if possible, those who had tried and tested collaboration and communication tools found the transition much easier, and those who didn’t rushed to get them. According to the CEO of the video conferencing solution Zoom, the platform saw an average of 220 million daily users in March 2020, up from around 10 million in December 2019

While the rise of video conferencing has been perhaps the most visible technology uptake of the pandemic, other cloud-based communication and collaboration tools have proved invaluable. When colleagues are all working together in one office and can just pop over to each other’s desks, it’s easy to deem the latest collaboration and communication tools unnecessary expenditure. Once that human contact is removed, those tools can be the difference between maintaining business continuity and battling immense disruption and frustration.

Cloud-based messaging platforms allow colleagues to quickly and easily communicate without confusing email chains. File sharing and editing platforms enable staff to collaborate in real-time as if they are in the same room. With the new world of work likely to include a combination of remote and on-site working, it’s vital for both business continuity and employee satisfaction that your remote workers feel as connected as those in the office. And, as we emerge from lockdown, it’s a good time to assess which platforms and applications have been the most valuable and could continue to help you hit core objectives as the world recovers.

The sudden shift to remote working may also have shone a light on some of your less-efficient processes, and a huge part of recovery is learning from this period and evolving to come out stronger on the other side. This may mean investing in smarter, more flexible tools and applications. For example, cloud-based creative applications may help your creative teams work more efficiently and collaboratively without the bugbears of manual file sharing and version control, or your HR department might benefit from new tools which enable personalised and effective people management from a distance.

A safe, secure future

The other major challenge of the past few months has been maintaining top-notch security. COVID-19 is not the only virus threat right now. There has been a significant rise in cyber attacks since the start of the pandemic – including phishing scams posing as public health information, and new malware designed to take advantage of the disruption. Plus, the switch to remote working has made it much harder for organisations to monitor their employees and protect their data.

Despite the damaging financial impact of COVID-19, 68% of organisations are planning to increase their cybersecurity spend in 2020, according to research by LearnBonds. Given some of the recent headline-grabbing examples of data breaches and attacks, it’s no real surprise that companies are taking the matter seriously. While it may be an investment, the alternative is much worse – now is not the time to leave your systems vulnerable.

Cloud-based platforms can help secure your valuable data in two ways. The first is providing the watertight security measures to prevent cyber attacks, giving IT departments and business leaders the peace of mind that their security is being managed by a specialist third party across their IT estate. The second is that moving to the cloud provides crucial backup and resilience, without which damage to endpoint devices and servers could erase vital information and an attack could leave you with nothing.

A flexible, hybrid solution

By now many organisations will be operating a diverse and complex IT estate – trialling new technologies and taking advantage of a combination of applications from different providers, both on-premise and through the cloud.

This is important. Digital transformation is all about flexibility, and in unprecedented times companies need to be more agile than ever to survive. Right now, organisations will want the flexibility to enable new ways of working and ride the disruption caused by COVID-19. And, in the wake of the pandemic, they will again need to adapt to find a “new normal”, which combines the best elements of their pre-pandemic and current operations.

But a diverse IT estate can also pose challenges. In an ideal situation, organisations should closely monitor their entire digital portfolio to keep things running smoothly. IT departments need the visibility to ensure all applications are secure, compliant and performing effectively, and business leaders need to know if their technology investments are helping them achieve goals in the most efficient and cost-effective way. It’s no use investing in swathes of technology if you aren’t keeping an eye on whether it’s benefitting the business, and it’s potentially catastrophic if you’re not certain of its security.

In practice, this is a huge undertaking, and one many companies will need to enlist expert help with to manage effectively. This is where investing in a hybrid cloud solution such as HPE GreenLake could play a vital role in business continuity. Compatible with all major cloud providers, it gives organisations the flexibility to pick and choose the best digital assets and provides an intuitive platform to manage them, taking away the admin and freeing up time for organisations to focus on goals.

At its centre, HPE GreenLake provides an interactive, user-friendly portal that helps you monitor and manage your IT estate, for both on-premise and cloud applications. This is not just beneficial to business leaders looking to hit goals or IT departments wanting to ensure top security, it will provide a smoother experience for every member of staff who has to deal with different applications on a day-to-day basis.

As well as investing in transformative digital assets, organisations also want to reduce unnecessary costs. A huge benefit of a service such as HPE GreenLake is that it works on a pay-as-you-go model, allowing you to identify exactly what you need and scale up or down accordingly, rather than invest in expensive systems which may not suit your needs in six months’ time.

Ultimately, diversifying your estate should significantly enhance your business, not create more headaches. If managed correctly, a hybrid cloud solution can be the ticket to put your organisation on track for a swift post-coronavirus recovery.

Discover more about HPE GreenLake

Thanks to developments in technology like the all-pervasive cloud, our IT systems are able to adapt to our organisations’ needs to an extent that they never could before. And with the rise of various as-a-service providers, this valuable flexibility is increasingly available to institutions of all sizes.

The ability to scale up and scale down and add to your infrastructure is of great value at the best of times – and in this period of unprecedented disruption caused by the coronavirus lockdown, it will be invaluable to many organisations.

The case for flexibility

The rise of the cloud has already transformed the IT infrastructure landscape, making it more flexible and affordable than ever before. This has enabled organisations to quickly and easily scale up and scale down, paying for more virtual machines, physical cores, containers, storage capacity or network ports as required, and not spending unnecessarily for extra capacity that ends up unused.

But flexibility is more than simply transferring your infrastructure to the cloud. Increasingly popular hybrid solutions combine public and private cloud solutions with on-premises infrastructure that may offer the added control, security or compatibility that your organisation requires. This is where the next step in IT flexibility comes in. HPE GreenLake is already offering a consumption-based service that includes not only your cloud usage but on-premises infrastructure too. This way, your organisation can avoid IT expenses stemming from overprovisioning, and HPE will maintain a buffer in your systems that can mitigate spikes in demand, as well as quickly and efficiently increasing your capacity if it is looking necessary.

The ability to scale up and down or to pay for only what you use means that a company’s growth and transformation no longer needs to be constrained by its immediate IT resources. And with GreenLake leading the way on services that cover the whole hybrid model, this flexibility is making success a possibility for organisations that would once not have been able to afford to deploy such an IT infrastructure in the first place.

Flexibility and uncertainty

If we’ve learned anything from the events of recent years – both domestically and globally – it’s that nothing can be taken for granted. From political upheaval to coronavirus lockdown, these unforeseen events have left no organisation unaffected. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, the value of IT flexibility is clearer than ever.

There’s no doubt that many organisations will see a negative impact from this kind of disruption, calling for a scale-down that flexible IT services can accommodate and thus help avoid incurring the extra costs of running unnecessary infrastructure.

But there are also opportunities to be found in these situations – often ones that no one could have predicted ahead of time. These services are just as valuable in allowing organisations to scale up to meet new – perhaps almost overwhelming – demands quickly and smoothly without faltering or missing out because of slow-moving, inflexible infrastructure. At moments like these, the inbuilt resource buffers will give your organisation breathing space while it adjusts to the new demands being placed on it.

Services like GreenLake come with sophisticated portals that allow for simple and easy metering and monitoring of your IT usage. With all your data in one place, you can better understand exactly what you’re using across your entire IT estate, along with accurate estimations of what it’s costing you. At times of increased uncertainty, this added level of oversight is invaluable when it comes to analysing your organisation and keeping a tighter rein on expenditure – as well as identifying areas of particular strength or weakness, and planning for the future.

That transparency, that understanding of what’s going on across your entire IT estate, regardless of whether it’s public cloud, private cloud or on-premise, is paramount for organisations who have considered the benefits of a hybrid approach, but have been put off by the complexities of managing it.

Organisations working in regulated industries, for instance, will require a proportion of both storage and compute to remain on-premise, but will also be attracted to the potential benefits of moving some, if not the majority of IT infrastructure to the cloud. GreenLake can deliver the solution these organisations need, ensuring that whatever hybrid or multi-cloud mix is employed, it’s simple to manage and cost effective.

And with the infinitely flexible model that an as-a-service solution like GreenLake provides, there’s the added peace of mind that comes from knowing that security will be baked into everything from the ground up, and that patches and upgrades will be taken care of without any drain on your organisation’s IT resources. Plus there’s the added benefit of expert support and advice for your entire IT infrastructure, ensuring that the solution you have in place is always the solution you need. And of course, helping your organisation adapt and rise to any challenges – unforeseen or otherwise – that may arise.

Investing in IT flexibility through services like HPE GreenLake gives your organisation room to change and grow, whatever the world throws at you. When it comes to times of major disruption, it may be the essential tool you need to survive and thrive

Discover more about HPE GreenLake

I don’t think virtual conferences will ever replace the real thing, particularly those that have shifted from being immense shows to video streams you can watch in your pyjamas (or Hawaiian shirt, shorts and flip flops, given the weather).

There’s a distinct lack of IT professionals wandering around bleary-eyed and just a touch hungover, nobody is drinking coffee of questionable quality, nor have I spent any time waiting in a cafe to get a decent coffee and a pastry.

I miss the pastries. But I also miss the networking and insight gained from casual conversations around the fringes of the conference. And I’m certain I’m not alone.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. HPE Discover Virtual Experience is the second annual-conference-turned-virtual event I’ve attended this year, (the first being Appian World) and there are definitely some benefits. I can clearly hear what presenters are saying without the sound of tapping on a hundred keyboards or the constant white noise of giant air conditioning systems. Nobody has turned up 30+ minutes late to their own keynote and I haven’t had to run between sessions. And, despite the title of this column, I’m also not jet-lagged, which is a bonus.

Getting more of an insight into products and strategies has also been much easier via Q&A sessions, which (and I hope you agree) has brought a more nuanced level of reporting than I’m often able to get.

So what did we find out during the show? Well, green isn’t just another colour of the rainbow as far as HPE is concerned, that’s for sure. As well as having a green logo, the company has added features to its ‘as a service’ platform, HPE GreenLake, and unveiled its software portfolio, Ezmeral, a name inspired by the Spanish word esmeralda, meaning emerald – a jewel that, as I’m sure you have noticed, is green.

Ezmeral certainly is a nice, vaguely exotic-sounding name. But I couldn’t help thinking the product itself sounded rather like the resurrection of the more mundanely named Software Business Segment. Normally, this is the kind of thing I would have heard the first of during the keynote, then headed out to accost some poor unsuspecting analyst or industry watcher by the coffee urns and biscuits to see what their take was. But instead, I had the opportunity to ask Neri himself during an early press conference.

It’ll come as no surprise that he said “no”, but it’s worth reading his full answer to make up your own mind.

Naming services after things that are green aside, there was another strong theme: getting businesses back to work and surviving the oncoming economic crisis, which is predicted to be much worse than the 2008/9 global financial crisis, which we have still been feeling the repercussions from anyway all these years down the line.

On the back-to-work element, the company has introduced a range of new offerings available through its Pointnext services business. These are primarily aimed at detecting and managing any outbreaks within a business, as well as reducing the opportunity for an outbreak to happen in the first place.

When it comes to surviving the predicted recession generated by COVID-19, Neri said the key was not to hoard money, but to focus on investment.

“We went back and looked at the 2008/2009 crisis and what were the decisions made at the time, not just in the former HP but across the industry,” he told journalists. “The one thing that was very clear to me is that we actually need to take advantage of these unfortunate events, called the pandemic, and double down on R&D investments, because fundamentally those are who will become stronger on the other end of this recovery, with the right portfolio and the right innovation, will be the winners.

"And in my view, we’re going to spend more on both organic and, assuming the right options are out there inorganically, to accelerate that vision.”

I’ll be interested to find out over the course of the next year where exactly this vision goes in concrete terms and who know, at the end of it I may even get that pastry.

HPE’s edge-to-cloud mantra continues to permeate its products, with the company announcing new cloud offerings available through its GreenLake “as a service” platform at its HPE Discover 2020 virtual event.

Machine learning, operations, containers, virtual machines (VMs), storage, compute, data protection, and networking are now all available through the GreenLake Central self-service console.

This, the company says, allows users to choose a configuration that suits them, and manage it, scaling up or down, as they need.

With these new GreenLake services, however, the company is offering customers a choice of 17 pre-defined configurations, delivered in three sizes – described by HPE as small, medium and large “t-shirt sizes” – rather than full customisability. This mode of delivery speeds up the order-to-run process to as little as 14 days, the company claims.

“[This is] a new generation of cloud services from GreenLake, bringing a new level of speed and agility to the on-prem cloud services market,” said Keith White, SVP and GM of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, during a press and analyst briefing.

White said the use of pre-configuration as a way to bring “a whole new level of automation and simplicity” to HPE’s customers.

“I think the easiest way to think about these building blocks is kind of like Lego bricks,” he explained. “With Legos, you can build almost anything with a few standard blocks.

"These can look and feel like custom offerings, but as we do it through these standard blocks and ‘t-shirt sizes’, this really accelerates time to customer, accelerates time to market for the customer’s solution and more importantly accelerates time to value for the customer.”

The service is then installed and connected by the company’s Pointnext services division, as well as through channel partners.

“Think of it as leveraging our whole HPE portfolio – hardware, software, Pointnext Services and the power of HPE FS. With third parties, we can provide complete secure and integrated services for our customers,” White added

GreenLake cloud services for VMs, compute, storage, data protection, and intelligent edge are available immediately worldwide. GreenLake cloud services for the newly announced HPE Ezmeral software portfolio, consisting of ML Ops and Containers, is currently in beta, with general availability expected for the company’s fiscal fourth quarter of the year, which ends on 31 October.

Not three years since it spun out its Software Business Segment to Micro Focus in an $8.8 billion deal, HPE has launched a new overarching software portfolio called HPE Ezmeral.

The name is “inspired by” the Spanish word for emerald – esmeralda – giving it a touch of the green-coloured branding that permeates the company now, from its logo to GreenLake “as a service” platform.

Ezmeral is, according to the company, a brand new software portfolio designed to help organisations make the most of their computing with an edge-to-cloud strategy. It includes two products, currently: Ezmeral ML Ops and Ezmeral Container Platform.

Ezmeral Container Platform, as the name suggests, allows organisations to deploy and manage containerised applications, be they cloud-native or cloud non-native, at scale on any infrastructure, be that in the cloud, a colocation facility, on-premises data centre or at the edge.

Ezmeral ML Ops, meanwhile, is focused on machine learning. It uses containerisation to manage the machine learning lifecycle in its entirety across edge, cloud, and on-premises infrastructure, allowing users to standardise workflows and, the company claims, reduce the time taken for AI deployments from months to days.

But is Ezmeral just SBS by another name? When asked by IT Pro, HPE CEO Antonio Neri said this was not the case.

“We made the decision to spin the software business [in 2016] because we felt there was not a cohesive strategy to begin [with]. You know, it was a very good portfolio of assets, in the wrong domains but not architected for the cloud reality [in which] we all live – and AI reality,” Neri said

“So not only did we do the right thing by spinning them and combining with a company which was way more focused on that space, but it also freed us up to really pivot harder to this new way to deploy software. And obviously it’s taken us a little bit of time, but I’m super excited about what we’re doing with HPE Ezmeral, with our Container Platform, with the integration of the acquisitions we’ve done, with the utilisation of AI in the form of HPE Infosight, and also the security aspect.”

It also, he said, allows the company to make the best use of assets from recent acquisitions including MapR and BlueData

Both of the current elements of Container Platform and ML Ops will be available on a consumption-based pricing model via the company’s GreenLake “as a service” platform, and as traditional software, too. It’s open in beta currently and HPE is taking applications to join the beta platform, with general availability expected in Q4 this year.

As it gears up for its first virtual Discover conference, HPE has announced five new offerings to help businesses in their efforts to recover from the COVID-19 crisis.

Delivered through the company’s Pointnext Technology Services division, the “return-to-work as a Service solutions” use HPE Proliant Servers, EdgeLine Converged Edge Systems and Aruba AI-powered network infrastructure, as well as technology from partners like Kognition and Venzo Secure, to enable organisations to safely bring workers back into the office as they reopen.

This includes a fever detection system, touchless entry, social distancing enforcement and tracking, augmented reality for more effective communication with remote workers – of which there will likely be many even once offices reopen – and workplace alerts.

For contactless building entry, the system uses biometrics – facial recognition in particular – multi-factor access control, and identity verification. This will reduce or eliminate the amount that workers are touching shared access points like doors, ensuring a more hygienic workplace, the company said.

The fever detection system, meanwhile, uses thermal cameras, machine learning and video analytics to pick out and alert anyone with a high temperature in the office, and the social distancing pillar uses Bluetooth technology to alert workers if they’re getting too close to each other, track the location of specific employees and facilitate contact tracing.

While the technical element of the AR/VR system is relatively well defined – an AR system provided in partnership with PTC and HPE’s Visual Remote Guidance (VRG) product – the use case is a little fuzzier, although the company says it can provide better learning and collaborative experiences, as well as allowing users to be guided through a complex procedure like replacing a gas valve remotely.

Finally, there’s the workplace alert system. This is already part of the company’s Intelligent Workplace offering, which the company said this initiative builds on, and allows organisations to push notifications to workers using dashboards and apps. This could be particularly useful to notify those in a particular building if someone there had tested positive for COVID-19 and that they should begin isolation, rather than sending a company-wide message incorporating people working at sites that are unaffected, for example.

Saadat Malik, vice president of IoT and Intelligent Edge Services, at HPE, said: “Since the COVID-19 outbreak, our customers have turned to HPE to help them adapt to unique challenges presented by the pandemic to maintain business continuity.

"We have been there for them throughout these difficult times, on everything from supporting a transition to a remote workforce with our comprehensive virtual desktop interface (VDI) solutions, to now helping them return back to work and to a new normal.

“As businesses are reopening and returning employees onsite, our new robust solutions, featuring a range of HPE technologies and partner capabilities, are helping them make this transition safely while building on a highly differentiated, long term workplace digitization strategy."

All five services are available worldwide from HPE’s Pointnext professional services business and use Greenlake’s as a service subscription consumption model starting today.

HPE has launched a new product to help communications services providers (CSPs) get more value from 5G by offering edge services to enterprises.

Edge Orchestrator is a SaaS-based offering that focuses on situations where low latency is key.

During a press conference, Phil Mottram, vice president and general manager of the HPE's Communications and Media Solutions business, told reporters that the company believes “the value proposition for 5G will all be firmly rooted in the enterprise space”.

“We believe that consumer customers won’t be paying any more for [telcos'] services just to get a faster download of a video – there’s only so fast you can watch a video,” Mottram said. “But all of the revenue opportunities and upside opportunities for carriers will firmly come in the enterprise new services space.”

This is far from a unique position – indeed, even before 5G standards were set, many future-gazers predicted it would be more useful in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios in particular where low latency is key, such as in fully-autonomous cars.

While we wait for such futuristic technology to arrive, however, HPE has decided to make use of existing and emerging technology and needs. Edge Orchestrator, the company says, allows telcos to deliver new services in the form of apps at the edge of the network to enterprise customers and in doing so effectively monetise apps.

Specifically, Edge Orchestrator brings together edge compute, edge communications and edge applications and allows carriers to offer them as a single, self-service proposition to enterprise customers and other service providers that might want to deploy them.

“HPE Edge Orchestrator will be the functionality which actually takes all these components, wraps it up together and makes it available to the enterprises,” said Rolf Eberhardt, head of orchestration at HPE.

“We want to make the CSP able to efficiently allow enterprises to deploy their own applications at their own locations and connect them over connectivity services provided by the CSP back to their … data centres and to deploy these applications close to the end customers,” he continued.

“We believe there are two benefits to this. First of all, the CSPs have the trust of the customers [and] they provide also the connectivity at the location, and second for the enterprise customers, they are able to, on the one hand, deploy quickly and efficiently in the edge space without having to do a major investment on their own and they can being all the functionality together into a one-stop.”

As it stands, Edge Orchestrator, which will be available from 31 July, is only being sold to telcos and only as a service – there are no plans to sell through the channel or direct to customers. And while it may be 5G-focused on the surface, for now HPE proposes telcos offer these additional services through more established network technologies like 4G, LTE and Wi-Fi, then introducing 5G later as part of its portfolio.

The announcement, which comes just before the start of the company’s virtual HPE Discover 2020 conference, builds on an earlier announcement, made in March, where the company added “5G as a service” to its GreenLake portfolio.

It also follows an announcement from the company’s networking business, Aruba, that it’s pivoting towards a more edge-focused approach to business.

IT Pro will be attending HPE Discover, starting next week, so be sure to come back for coverage of the biggest announcements and plus analysis from the event.

The promise and allure of cloud computing has always rested in its potential to lower costs, reduce management burdens, make organisations more resilient and allow them to innovate and scale-out faster. All too often, the reality is different. Organisations have found that cloud has ramped up the complexity of their operations without bringing in the promised benefits. Where costs should have been reduced, they’ve crept upwards or risen out of control. Rather than make IT easier to manage, cloud has reduced visibility and added to the challenges of managing the whole estate.

To be clear, this isn’t the case for all organisations; many cloud initiatives have been successful. Yet many businesses and institutions have found that their journey to the cloud has been more complex, expensive and slow-moving than expected. The 2019 Rightscale State of the Cloud Report found that while cloud users estimated that 27% of their cloud spend was going to waste, the report measured actual waste at 35%, with an over-reliance on public cloud services and a lack of visibility working to drive costs up.

Complexity and missed opportunities

There are several key factors at play here. Firstly, complexity. It’s one thing to run a handful of apps in a private or public cloud, but a growing number of organisations are looking for the flexibility of a hybrid cloud strategy, running different applications across a mix of on-premise infrastructure, private and public cloud.

This means managing a range of different architectures within the same estate, while the applications themselves can create management challenges, with different dependencies, data footprints and requirements. Juggling multiple platforms from multiple vendors can leave organisations without consistent tools to manage them, and with data falling into siloes rather than becoming more accessible across the different clouds.

What’s more, organisations can find themselves struggling to balance performance with security, resulting in apps that don’t scale or deliver a good user experience, or the risk of a breach further down the line. Meanwhile, a shortage of specialist talent can result in applications that don’t perform as expected and aren’t reliable – and a team that can’t respond in a crisis, turning minor issues into failures.

A recent advisory from KPMG is particularly damning, suggesting that where hybrid cloud is meant to improve availability and resiliency, it often results in longer outages, and where it should enhance agility and innovation, it often restricts them and prolongs development timelines.

A better way to manage cloud

These issues aren’t a failure of the cloud, but the result of shortfalls in strategy, management and execution. Managing hybrid clouds is a complex business, and what helps most of all is having the right tools and resources for the job.

That’s why, with HPE Greenlake, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has built a hybrid, multi-cloud platform that spreads the benefits of cloud throughout the estate, while doubling down on simplified management. With Greenlake, you can run all your IT on an ‘everything as a service’ model, reducing the complexity and work of running operations, giving you more space to optimise and innovate.

Key to this is Greenlake Central – a streamlined, unified portal that covers everything, whether on-premise, private cloud or public cloud, or even based on the edge. There’s a single dashboard to manage all your storage and compute resources, along with virtual machines, containers and application workloads.

With help from intelligent automation, you have the tools you need to provision infrastructure for new workloads, allocating the right compute and storage resources, and scaling up if you need more with a click. And because it all runs on a pay-as-you-go model, there’s no need to worry about overprovisioning or underutilisation. When organisations want to develop and release new applications, they can code, test and deploy at higher speeds.

Greenlake Central also has an advantage over many cloud management tools in that it takes a role based approach, where the portal foregrounds a different set of tools depending on your job and its requirements. Developers get a simple, self-service way to provision the infrastructure they need to code and launch new services and apps, while CIOs can operate as a service broker, monitoring and managing services and tracking KPIs, including security, capacity and cost. The built-in marketplace allows both devs and CIOs to select applications from HPE and the biggest names in cloud.

If your focus is on finance, you get the tools you need to track cloud spend across the whole organisation, while teams working on security, legal and compliance issues have a dashboard and over 150 controls to monitor compliance and identify risks.

Yet what might be Greenlake’s most important feature is that it makes it easier to manage, monitor and move workloads between different clouds. Greenlake can encompass services from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Citrix, Google, VMWare and a range of smaller players. There are tools to move workloads from one platform to another, and you can compare different cost, performance, security and governance metrics, to help you make the best choice on where to migrate or deploy each workload.

Some organisations might have the in-house skills to deliver this kind of self-service provisioning, management and automation, but the fact is that many don’t. The Rightscale 2019 State of the Cloud Report found that a lack of resources and expertise was one of the biggest cloud challenges for 79% of enterprises and 78% of SMBs.

Tools like Greenlake Central make it possible to adopt the latest technology even when you don’t have access to specialist skills, while cutting down the complexity that gets in the way of managing it all. With these tools in your toolbox you can start reducing costs, shifting burdens and exploring the full potential of cloud.

Discover more about HPE GreenLake at hpe.com

We’re entering a new era of cloud computing; one with its own new possibilities and challenges. In this new era, the hybrid multi-cloud meets edge computing, resulting in a cloud that stretches all the way from the edge to the data centre, powering not just the apps we know today but the data-driven, mobile-focused, IoT-based applications of tomorrow. And while managing this new cloud won’t be straightforward, the tools and services that will help us handle the complexity are already slotting into place.

Over the last decade or so we’ve seen organisations make the seismic shift of moving core applications from their on-premise hardware to the cloud. At first, the principal driver was cost. With time, however, other factors have become just as important, specifically scalability and the advantages of running applications in close proximity to data that’s being generated and stored in the cloud. When compute power is so readily available and affordable in the public cloud, where the data already resides, it makes no sense to keep shuttling data back and forth to a central data centre. It makes far more sense to process it within the cloud.

On-premise applications still have their place, but for many organisations this has led to the adoption of a hybrid cloud model, combining on-premise infrastructure with private cloud services and third-party public cloud services, using orchestration to manage and move data between the different platforms. The RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud report states that while 94% of organisations are now using cloud, use of hybrid cloud grew from 51% in 2018 to 58% in 2019. Right now, hybrid cloud gives them the ideal balance between the high-performance and control you need to run demanding applications in the private cloud, and the flexibility, cost-efficiency and scalability that the public cloud delivers. Organisations are even using this model to run business critical apps in private cloud, but burst them out to public cloud should the need arise.

The challenge here has always been management and orchestration, but modern hybrid cloud architectures are helping organisations maintain control. Meanwhile multi-cloud strategies, mixing best-of-breed services from different vendors, are helping them to optimise their services, avoid vendor lock-in and retain visibility of their services and – crucially – limit their costs.

The rise of edge

For some organisations, this level of change will seem more than enough to be getting on with, but they risk missing out on some of the most exciting developments in computing at the edge. Gartner has described edge computing as ‘a part of a distributed computing topology, in which information processing is located close to the edge – where things and people produce or consume that information.’

The theory is that some of the most interesting and powerful data sources exist at the edge of the network. Gartner has predicted that, while companies generated just 10% of their data outside the data centre or the cloud in 2019, the amount should reach 75% within the next six years. New 5G mobile and IoT devices, along with customers consuming services and sharing data across social networks, are all working far away from the on-premise infrastructure at the centre, or even the compute resources in the private or public cloud. Given the huge, exponential growth in the data these sources are generating, moving it through the network will only slow things down.

Edge computing devices and services offer a smarter way forward, by providing local processing and storage resources right where the data is being generated and used. In some cases, edge-based platforms will work as a gateway, processing the data and sending the most useful or relevant streams on to the cloud. In others, edge-based platforms may handle all the processing locally, getting critical data and insights out faster to a highly mobile workforce. Either way, edge computing will be crucial in helping organisations meet the challenges of latency, bandwidth, security and management. IDC predicts that, within three years, 45% of IoT generated data will be stored, processed, analysed and operated on at the edge.

The key thing is that edge computing isn’t a replacement for the traditional cloud, but something that has to work within and interact with a hybrid cloud architecture. For example, IDC has pointed out that while AI models can be executed on edge devices using local data, the inference and model training involved will require the kind of large data sets and high levels of compute power that would be better found in public or private cloud. IDC’s analysts have forecast that, in 2020, more than 50% of European cloud deployments will include edge computing, and that 20% of endpoint devices and systems will execute AI algorithms.

Bringing it all together

The challenge, as with hybrid cloud itself, will be managing this new IT frontier, which is where IT-as-a-service offerings like HPE Greenlake come in. Greenlake pulls private cloud, public cloud and edge computing services into one unified service, with managed costs and a single marketplace for self-service provisioning and deployment. What’s more, Greenlake ties these all together, along with your on-premise infrastructure, in one unified Greenlake Central portal; an operational console that can manage and optimise the whole estate, right from the server room or corporate data centre out to the edge.

Greenlake Central is designed to banish siloes, maintain a consistent experience and ensure visibility and control. Organisations can choose which mix of tools they want to use and where in that estate they want to use them, and run their workloads and store their data wherever works best for them. The upshot is cutting-edge IT with lower risks and lower costs, but also more choice, simpler management and increased speed.

Does edge computing add a new layer of complexity to cloud? Definitely. But with Greenlake and Greenlake Central, organisations have everything they need to manage it.

Discover more about HPE GreenLake at hpe.com

In a very short space of time, the coronavirus outbreak has completely transformed how organisations across all sectors operate. With lockdown restrictions rolling out across the globe, those organisations have moved quickly to instruct their staff to work from home in a bid to halt the spread of the Covid-19 infection.

The nature of the IT industry will mean many of its businesses and employees will have remote working experience, but that isn’t the same across the board. According to March 2020 research from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), only 30% of UK employees ever worked from home during 2019. For many, the change has been sharp and abrupt, and brought with it significant challenges for both the workforce and the IT infrastructure required to support it.

Due to the rapidly unfolding pace of the Covid-19 pandemic, CIOs have had little time to test the robustness of their business continuity strategy. However, the demands of the workforce will remain the same, with remote staff expecting the same resources and applications from home as they would if they were still operating out of a central office. Making sure that IT infrastructures can cope with the surge in demand for access to on-premise and cloud platforms from remote locations is key in the coming months.

Every organisation is at a different stage of its digital transformation journey, but those further along the road will likely have had a headstart when it comes to keeping day-to-day operations going. For instance, companies with an existing cloud infrastructure and agile working culture – and the IT services to support it – will have been able to pivot quickly to remote working once social distancing instructions came into place. For those lagging behind, the challenges will be far greater.

A recent report from GlobalData, Tech, Media & Telecom Trends 2020 (updated to take into account Covid-19), stated that the current crisis will have a significant impact on how businesses approach IT. Principal Analyst, Global IT Technology and Software at GlobalData, Chris Drake, said that although the coronavirus may pause some IT projects, for others “it is likely to spur demand for cloud computing and other IT solutions, including edge computing, as organisations accelerate and adjust their digital transformation strategies��.

Drake further underlined the significance of the cloud in supporting this new way of working, adding: “As businesses shutter their brick and mortar operations and, where they can, transition to a remote workforce, it is clear how important the cloud is for continuity of operations. Any organisation that actively resisted digitalisation is now confronted with a harsh reality. This puts cloud providers in a strong position.”

Though the cloud is now ubiquitous across business and the wider tech world, it has long moved beyond the public model, with new trends emerging to offer greater flexibility. Hybrid cloud, for instance, allows organisations to migrate to the cloud but retain some of their applications and data in private data centres. Multi-cloud, meanwhile, lets an organisation manage its infrastructure across different cloud environments and still use its own data centres.

The need for greater flexibility from the cloud is more relevant now than ever before. As-a-service solutions like HPE’s GreenLake offer a ready-made solution to increase control and lower TCO (total cost of ownership). Usage of GreenLake is metered, so whether its storage or network traffic, a business will only pay for what it consumes – that means no more committing capital to IT assets and resources that won’t get used.

Billed as a full everything-as-a-service offering, GreenLake hybrid cloud lets you design, build, manage and optimise your on- and off-premises solutions – it blends the agility and economics of public cloud with the security and performance of on-premises servers.

The GreenLake hybrid cloud experience lets you monitor your entire IT environment – apps, data usage, costs – via a single online portal. The HPE Greenlake Central dashboard gives oversight to purchase and manage on-premises, public and private clouds, while cost projections let you measure actual spend against projected. Moreover, the GreenLake Marketplace gives you the option to try out and purchase new apps, then quickly roll them out across your IT estate.

IT and digital transformation strategies need to be agile to respond to constant shifts and new technologies, and the current coronavirus pandemic has highlighted that external factors can play a significant part in business continuity. A solution like HPE GreenLake offers a scalable, on-demand IT and cloud infrastructure ready to meet demand – that’s essential if you want to remain competitive and keep moving your digital transformation strategy forward. When the world emerges from the other side of the pandemic, it’s the organisations with a rounded cloud strategy that will be best-placed to thrive and meet the challenges that lie ahead.

To find out more about HPE GreenLake visit hpe.com

HPE has expanded its Small Business Solutions portfolio with the new ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus, which the company claims provide industry-leading capabilities that will help SMBs drive growth and digital transformation.

Designed to address businesses’ budget, IT and special business needs, the system offers automation, remote management, security capabilities, as well as Intel Pentium and Intel Xeon E processors.

Customers can use the new MicroServer, which is the size of a typical hardback text book, for less than $20 per month. And HPE says the offering is as easy to set up as a smartphone. In fact, the new offering weighs in at just 10 pounds and is a third of the size of existing server market products, the tech firm added.

“We are committed to helping small businesses innovate, serve their customers, and drive growth and digital disruption by empowering them with enterprise-class technologies that uniquely address their needs for IT expertise, budget and space,” said Tim Peters, vice president and general manager at Global SMB & Mid-Market, HPE.

“The design of our latest HPE MicroServer and strategic pricing model was inspired by our SMB customers to meet their expectations for the most economical, secure and easy-to-manage solutions that supports their entire business operation.”

The new ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus offers a range of capabilities that HPE said enable faster performance, data protection, automation and ease-of-management. For starters, the inclusion of Intel Pentium or Intel Xeon E delivers compute support for virtualisation and database workloads but registers at just 36 decibels for versatile placement.

The system is also the first ProLiant MicroServer - and the industry’s only server family - to provide the HPE-exclusive silicon root of trust technology, the company explained, which extends security protection at the silicon level.

Users can also use cloud-based AI management tool HPE InfoSIght for Servers, HPE Integrated Lights Out 5 (iLo5) for remote management, as well as flexible options for both in-office operations and the cloud.

“SMBs are looking for easy-to-manage solutions that can scale as needed. Solutions, such as this one from HPE, addresses this demand with small businesses by delivering enterprise-grade technologies, which combine servers, software, networking and cloud capabilities that are easier for small business to adopt and manage regardless of their in-house IT capabilities,” commented Shari Lava, research director, Small Medium Business (SMB) Research Program at IDC.

HPE has added a suite of ‘as a service’ networking capabilities to its GreenLake portfolio designed to give customers the tools to accelerate 5G deployment.

The company is aiming to extend its reach with telecoms firms and enterprises with its new 5G tools, which are designed to enhance existing 5G networks and ramp up the scale of infrastructure rollout.

For example, the company’s cloud-native and container-based software platform, dubbed 5G Core Stack, will provide telecoms firms with 5G tech at the core of their mobile networks.

This is to ensure that networks are embedded with 5G technology at their hearts, as well as on the edge, termed standalone 5G networks. This is against non-standalone 5G networks (5G networks running on 4G cores) which is how many operators run their networks today.

HPE hopes that mobile network operators and virtual network operators can adopt the technology at the core and the edge, and repackage these platforms to serve their own enterprise customers.

This is in addition to technology from HPE subsidiary Aruba, which has been used to launch services geared towards raising interoperability and integration between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 networks. These services are dubbed Air Slice and Air Pass.

“Openness is essential to the evolutionary nature of 5G and with HPE 5G Core Stack telcos can reduce operational costs, deploy features faster and keep themselves open to multiple networks and technologies while avoiding being locked-in to a single vendor approach,” said Phil Mottram, VP and GM for HPE’s communications and media solutions division.

“HPE has one of the broadest 5G portfolios in the market and is uniquely positioned to help telcos build an open multi-vendor 5G core, optimise the edge with vRAN, and deliver connectivity and new compute services to the enterprise using MEC and Wi-Fi 6.”

The as a service suite is all-encompassing and includes both hardware and supporting software, as well as cloud-native 5G functions such as Air Slice and Air Pass.

While HPE initially hopes to complement technology offered by the likes of networking giants Huawei and Ericsson, Mottram conceded that smaller customers may opt to replace all services offered by these firms with HPE technology.

This bold move to give network operators and enterprises an alternative has been made possible due to the open nature of 5G standards.

These standards were devised to break the stranglehold that existed previously, and allow enterprises to effectively mix and match elements of their 5G infrastructure in a way that wasn’t possible with previous generations of technology like 3G and 4G.

The technology, which includes the underlying 5G infrastructure, as well as support software at both the core and the edge, will be made available to customers on a consumption-based model through the company’s GreenLake portfolio.

With 50 conversations currently underway with prospective customers, HPE expects larger enterprises to adopt a sample of the 5G as a service portfolio, while smaller firms are more likely to adopt the full capabilities on an end-to-end basis.

In terms of cloud-native 5G functions that can work on top of the underlying 5G infrastructure, meanwhile, HPE launched a couple of enterprise-oriented services powered by Aruba’s 16.5 million hotspots.

Air Slice, for example, allows customers to carve up their networks into segments with dedicated functions to avoid crosstalk. Air Pass, meanwhile, gives individuals the capacity to join Wi-Fi networks without having to manually enter credentials.

Users’ identities are verified using their ties with another entity, such as a bank or a mobile network, in a similar way to one-click social media logins, used by Facebook or Sign in with Apple.

“As part of the foundational capability we’re talking about here is a shared data environment, so having a data model you can utilise across different functions in the capabilities and sharing it across different functions,” HPE’s chief technologist for communications and media, Chris Dando told IT Pro.

He added HPE was looking at how the end experience could be made seamless, with individuals not just tied to a physical SIM or looked on as being a phone number, but retaining their individuality. This is just one aspect of the suite of cloud-native 5G functionality the firm is hoping to build out.

“Those sorts of things are where we’ve led the way and are taking that too the next layer with regards to building out some of these core capabilities,” he continued.

“That’s going to become more and more important if you look to add on more device types for different use cases, as you get into IoT, and being able to identify groups of things as being part of a particular workflow or enterprise-type environment.”

Cisco, incidentally, outlined a similar Wi-Fi hopping technology at its flagship Cisco Live 2020 conference in January, which has already been deployed at the Fira de Barcelona.

It was expected to allow visitors to Mobile World Congress (MWC) hop seamlessly between 4G and 5G networks and the venue’s Wi-Fi networks, before the event was cancelled due to the global coronavirus outbreak.

HPE has recruited chipmaker AMD to build components for a staggeringly high-performance supercomputer system that’s being designed to support and maintain the security of the US nuclear stockpile.

El Capitan, which is expected to be activated in 2023, will use AMD’s CPUs and GPUs to reach two exaflops of power, which HPE claims is more powerful than today’s 200 most powerful supercomputers combined.

The system, powered by HPE subsidiary Cray’s Shasta architecture, has been commissioned by the US Department of Energy to service the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

El Capitan will be used by three NNSA national laboratories to enable advanced simulation and modelling to support the nuclear stockpile.

“As an industry and as a nation, we have achieved a major milestone in computing,” said HPE’s senior VP and GM for HPC and mission critical solutions (MCS), Peter Ungaro.

“HPE is honoured to support the U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a critical strategic mission to advance the United States’ position in security and defense.

“The computing power and capabilities of this system represent a new era of innovation that will unlock solutions to society’s most complex issues and answer questions we never thought were possible.”

The supercomputer will undergo complex and time-consuming 3D exploratory simulations for NNSA missions that today’s most powerful machines aren’t currently able to perform.

It’ll also give researchers the opportunity to explore a host of new applications for data-intensive workloads, from simulation to analytics, as well as using AI to support future missions.

As per the partnership, AMD will contribute its EPYC processors, dubbed ‘Genoa’, which features the Zen 4 processor core, as well as its next-generation AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs, based on a new architecture.

El Captian will also be fitted with the 3rd-gen AMD Infinity Architecture, which will provide high-bandwidth and low-latency connections between the CPUs and GPUs.

The announcement follows HPE’s acquisition of supercomputing behemoth Cray last year, with the company seeking to reach further into the enterprise hardware market.

HPE is building on its edge to cloud security strategy by snapping up Scytale, an open-source security platform that runs across on-premise, cloud and container-based infrastructure.

Scytale is a San Francisco-based startup that looks at application-to-application identity and access management.

The company was founded in 2017 by Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup. The three co-founders have built up a workforce hailing from cloud-native enterprises like AWS, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty and Splunk.

Scytale is also recognised as the founding contributor of the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and SPIFFE Runtime Environment, along with other open-source projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Announcing the purchase on Monday, David Husak, GM of HPE's Cloudless Initiative, said that security will continue to play a fundamental role as the company progresses into its edge to cloud platform as a service strategy. Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

"We recognise that every organisation that operates in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment requires 100% secure, zero trust systems, that can dynamically identify and authenticate data and applications in real-time," Husak said in a blog post.

"We also recognise that the open-source community, which every day advances an endless array of projects designed for an open, multi-cloud, micro-services driven world, are at the forefront of writing code that delivers true zero trusts, highly secure systems."

Scytale founder Sunil James said that he met with Antonio Neri before he became HPE's CEO and that a discussion between the two left him with a stronger understanding of the company's deep roots in helping customers bridge complex enterprise IT infrastructure.

"This understanding was reinforced last year when I met Dave Husak and Dave Larson (I call them 'the Daves'), two leaders within Hewlett Packard Labs," James wrote.

"Scytale's DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us. We'll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE's plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform."

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.

Just over two years into Antonio Neri's tenure as CEO at HPE and the company is rather a different beast to how Meg Whitman left it in November 2017.

Not much has changed structurally, but this year's Discover conference in Las Vegas to me pointed to a change in culture. Of course, we had the usual product announcements some of which were quite exciting but there was a lot of time spent talking about more "businessy" elements.

GreenLake is a standout example of this. The consumption-based service was launched back in November 2017 (just as Neri took the reins, in fact) but was absolutely the star of the show this year.

It's clear the company is now aggressively pursuing an 'as a service' model, rather than sell once and hope for repeat custom down the line, as has been the case in the past, with a pledge to make the full HPE portfolio available through GreenLake by 2022. While there is a bit of a fudge (you can still buy on a one-off basis rather than consumption if you really want), this to me is a big step away from the years of talking about "hybrid IT" under Whitman, which I saw largely as an attempt to give a veneer of cloudiness to HPE's products while really maintaining a traditional, legacy vendor profile.

Speaking of the cloud, the company has really started to embrace this technology in partnership with cloud vendors and not just old friends like Microsoft, but also AWS and Google. In particular, it's using containerisation technology to its advantage, as well as public cloud companies' realisation that they need to play nice with traditional vendors in order to maximise their customer pool (not everything can be hosted on a public cloud, after all).

HPE has also brought its networking business, Aruba, front and centre in the cloud conversation with a major update to Aruba Central. Indeed, it was given one of the handfuls of product slots during the keynote, with Aruba co-founder Keerti Melkote taking to the stage alongside Neri to talk about this cloud management service.

We also saw the company's in-memory computing efforts start to bear some commercial fruit. While The Machine, as it was called, was quietly downgraded over the past few years from in-memory computing moonshot product to in-memory computing project, to really just another part of HPE Labs, its technology lives on in the shape of Primera.

This appliance which its beaming creators were clearly delighted with at the press launch comes with a 100% uptime guarantee (I'm not rounding up there, either) and was described to me by an independent analyst as the company's most important storage launch in years.

There was also a lot of emphasis on the company's corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, including its continued partnership with Purdue University aimed at using data and analytics to solve world hunger (no, really). As we were repeatedly told, the company's commitment to social good goes all the way back to "Bill and David" (Hewlett and Packard respectively, in case you're not on first name terms with the company's founders), although not an awful lot of evidence was brought along to support this claim.

Overall, particularly as someone who missed 2018's Discover and Discover Europe, I feel there's been a palpable change in the company over the last 18 months and I'm not the only one, which can be credited almost entirely to Neri.

As a couple of people I spoke to at the event pointed out, he's an unusual breed of CEO nowadays; he joined HPE's predecessor, HP as a call centre operative in 1995 and over the intervening 24 years worked his way up to the top job, rather than being a direct transplant like the four CEOs who preceded him. I understand he's quite hands-on and will have been closely involved with the development of Aruba Central (he was HP's networking head for a while after all), staking Primera's 100% uptime claim and the pivot to a consumption-based business.

Without wishing to sound like I'm completely toeing the party line, HPE really does feel like a more services-oriented and collaborative business than it was just a short two years ago. I'll be intrigued to see next year how much business is actually being done through GreenLake (of the 600 customers currently counted as doing business through the scheme, two-thirds are actually "in the pipeline"), and whether we'll see how that 100% uptime claim has held up. If it's done well we could be at a very exciting point in the development of storage technology and I would expect to see some more products using the same technology to be very literally unveiled.

All images: Jane McCallion/Dennis Publishing. All rights reserved.

HPE once again talked up its edge computing credentials by revealing a slew products and partnerships at this year's Discover conference.

Four core announcements were focused on the importance of edge technology in the industrial sector, particularly with regards to making sense of the data coming from IoT devices and other sensors, ensuring reliable connectivity and leveraging the cloud.

First up was the Secure Edge Data Center for Microsoft Azure Stack. This appliance, which was jointly developed by HPE, ABB, Rittal and Microsoft, is optimised for the harsh and sometimes outright hostile conditions of industrial environments, with IP55- rated environmental protection, cooling, and redundant power supply and distribution, as well as automated management. It also offers in-the-moment intelligence and action capabilities on site while still integrating "seamlessly" with Microsoft Azure.

Next up was the integration of ABB Ability Smart Sensor technology into Aruba access points. This, HPE claims, provides scalable, high-performance wireless connectivity for equipment such as pumps, motors and mounted bearings, known collectively as operational technology (OT). This in turn can be used in so-called predictive maintenance, where monitoring of such devices indicates when a part will need replacing before it actually fails.

Another joint development with Microsoft was Edgeline IoT QuickConnect. Based on HPE's Edgeline OT Link Platform - a late-2018 addition to the Edgeline Converged Edge Systems portfolio - IoT QuickConnect brings together OT devices, Microsoft Azure IoT managed cloud services and the HPE Edgeline EL300 Converged Edge System. This, the company said, simplifies the convergence of OT and IoT systems significantly and allows businesses to monitor and control their OT equipment in real time.

Finally, the company revealed it is offering customers help in setting up their condition monitoring through its PointNext services arm. The rather obviously named Fast Start Condition Monitoring is targeted at customers who don't have the skills to set up the kind of system described above. HPE promises a 90-day setup time, with technologies drawn from HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems, the HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform and PTC's ThingWorx Industrial IoT platform.

Edgeline IoT Quick connect will be available from July, with Fast Start Condition Monitoring having a limited release in France and the Netherlands the same month followed by global availability in August. Secure Edge Data Center for Microsoft Azure Stack is available with IEC certification immediately, with UL certification coming in August.

The theme of this year's HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas, emblazoned in the atrium of the Sands Expo Center, is "accelerating your success from edge to cloud".

It may have come as something of a surprise, then, for delegates to hear CEO Antonio Neri close out his keynote speech by declaring his vision for the future is "cloudless".

"We need to radically simplify and democratise the way developers and users access tools, services and data that power today's enterprise applications," Neri said. "And it needs to be ... a new approach that obliterates the distinction between publicness and privateness and leverages the full ... vibrant cloud-native computing development community for the benefit of all."

Declaring that cloud was not a destination but an "experience", Neri said that within five-to-ten years, during which time the world would still be hybrid, "the illusion of interconnection will be replaced by the reality". This "secure interoperability across clouds" is what underpins the concept of cloudless.

According to Neri, there are three ingredients, or "fabrics" as HPE is terming them, that make up cloudless.

The first is security the "trust fabric" which operates under a zero trust model and automates privacy and data sovereignty.

Next is the optimisation the "connectivity fabric" and finally embracing open source the "value fabric".

For now "cloudless" is very much a concept or philosophy. There are no products, there is no roadmap. However, according to Neri, we can look forward to hearing more about it at next year's conference.

There was a time, not that long ago, when "as a service" was a dirty word (or phrase) among traditional IT vendors. It seems now, however, that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) can't get enough of it. Indeed, CEO Antonio Neri has declared that by 2022 HPE will be "a consumption-driven company" with its entire portfolio offered as a service.

"In the near future, we believe everything will be delivered as a service," said Neri during his keynote presentation. "More and more of you tell me that you don't want to spend resources managing your infrastructure, whether on the edge, in the cloud or in the data centre. You just want a place for your application data and your business applications. You want to be the service provider, growing your enterprise and HPE wants to help you deliver that experience."

Indeed, attendees at this year's Discover conference in Las Vegas can barely move for mention of GreenLake, the company's pay-per-use scheme that was announced all the way back in November 2017.

According to Neri, it's HPE's fastest growing business, with 600 customers, a 99% renewal rate and contributing more than $2.8 billion in total contract value.

Following, or perhaps driving, this trend, the company is making a hard pivot towards encouraging customers to move towards "as a service" model and persuading partners to sell it.

According to several sources, this latter portion has been rather difficult, which is perhaps why GreenLake has been lying low for the past 18 months.

Services in consumption's clothing?

Amid all the lauding of GreenLake at the conference PointNext, HPE's service business, was notable by its absence. Almost two whole days passed without it being mentioned and even in the keynote its name only passed executives' lips a smattering of times.

In a move to a consumption-based business model, this seemed rather a strange oversight. Could it be, as IT Pro sources suggested, that GreenLake is, in fact, PointNext in disguise?

Well, not quite according to Flynn Maloy, VP of marketing for PointNext.

"We are the proud parents of GreenLake," he tells IT Pro. "But when we named GreenLake 18 months ago, we didn't name it PointNext GreenLake. Our vision was that this needs to become the company thing. Servers are a part of it, storage is a part of it, Aruba is a part of it and services are a part of it.

"We deliver it, we sell it, so the services organisation is really where GreenLake comes from. But when we sell a GreenLake deal I actually the majority of the revenue is the servers and the storage, which means it's the hardware that's the majority of the revenue. So when you think of GreenLake, you should think that PointNext is just one of the components you get in the deal."

"But if you're going to consume something, you know, it's the services team that's actually delivering it to you," he concludes.

Consumption-driven, but not consumption only

It would be something of a surprise if a big beast like HPE had really abandoned their traditional business model of selling boxes on a perpetual basis. After all, it's survived the explosion of cloud despite predictions some six or seven years ago that legacy vendors were about to go the way of the dodo.

So, while the GreenLake branding has been everywhere and "as a service" is very much the mantra of this conference (along with cloud-to-edge), customers can very much still go off and buy HPE hardware in a traditional way.

Scott Sinclair, senior analyst with ESG, tells IT Pro that this dual-pronged approach makes sense not just from the point of view of HPE but also its customers.

"Things like GreenLake are incredibly compelling," he says. "We've been talking about simplicity forever - it's almost a clich. But this conversation has changed. Before what we talked about was a box, but now simplicity needs to be looked at from an overall IT perspective, including data centre and hybrid cloud. [The GreenLake 2022 promise] means that if I commit to transforming my finance team to be able to accept these subscription models, I can get everything that way."

"But we know there's a decent percentage of organisations where their internal finance team are not set up to consume on premises structure as a service," he explains.

While those finance teams undergo this kind of transformation, or until Neri manages to capture their "hearts and minds" and persuade them it's a good idea, the continuation of traditional selling is both necessary and inevitable.

HPE has unveiled a top-tier storage offering that, it claims, is guaranteed to offer 100% availability.

Primera is an AI-powered storage appliance built specifically for mission-critical workloads. It draws on some of HPE's existing storage range, notably the InfoSight AI platform, which was drawn from Nimble and 3Par's multi-node, massively parallel architecture.

It can be self-installed by customers in less than 20 minutes and is simple to manage, with provisioning taking just seconds and data reduction built in and always on by default, according to HPE, which unveiled the news at its annual Discover conference in Las Vegas this week.

Key to the 100% availability claim is the nature of the OS, which is built in such a way that data services can be deployed, upgraded and restarted independently. Indeed, the company claims the software layer can be upgraded by customers in five minutes with no disruption.

Additionally, according to HPE, 90% of problems that can cause disruption occur above the storage layer in the networking and virtualisation layers. InfoSight can, the company claims, proactively detect and resolve these issues before they become a problem.

Nevertheless, 100% availability is a bold move, especially under the terms of the HPE guarantee for every outage experienced with Primera, the customer is offered up to 20% credit on their next purchase or upgrade. Five outages could mean a free product next time a purchase is made, although there are of course strings attached you have to be attached to the HPE Global Intelligence Engine, so it isn't suitable for 'dark sites', and you also have to sign up to Proactive Care.

While HPE has had high-performance storage in the form of XP7 for a number of years, it was, in fact, an OEM product from Hitachi, making Primera the company's first self-developed tier one storage product (although HPE executives have been at pains not to label it as such).

"This is HPE's most important storage launch the last few years," Henry Baltazar research vice president for infrastructure at 451 Research told IT Pro. "The storage market continues to be highly competitive, so a launch like this will draw attention especially as HPE works to displace incumbent vendors to win new customers."

HPE Primera will be available to order in August 2019.

HPE has beefed up its portfolio at its annual Discover conference this week with a suite of updates to its cloud infrastructure and management portfolio.

The company's flagship cloud-based network management product, Aruba Central, now sports AI-powered analytics technology integrated from Aruba NetInsight and User Experience Insight. These, the company says, will help IT professionals resolve intermittent network issues quickly while also identifying ways to optimise customers' infrastructure for a better overall experience.

Aruba Central also has enhancements in the software-defined arena. The new SD-WAN Orchestrator has an eye on edge computing, allowing administrators to easily deploy flexible and secure topologies in large-scale edge environments. According to HPE, this will allow organisations to connect thousands of branches to multiple data centres.

There's also a new SaaS prioritisation feature that enhances the performance of SaaS applications for end users while also giving visibility and feedback of this experience to administrators.

Finally, in the Aruba business segment, Virtual Gateways is now available for AWS and Azure.

It's not just Aruba Central that's been spruced up, though.

HPE also announced extensions to two of its most recent partnerships: Google Cloud and Equinix.

Organisations running containerised workloads on ProLiant servers or Nimble Storage on-premise can now HPE Cloud Volumes with Google Cloud Anthos for hybrid disaster recovery, hybrid continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD), or similar.

This offering is also available through HPE GreenLake, the company's consultancy and pay-per-use service.

With Equinix, businesses using the company's colocation services that are looking for cloud-based disaster recovery, backup and recovery, or test and development environments can now get Data as a Service based on HPE Cloud Volumes through the Equinix Marketplace.

All of these services are available immediately.

Late on Friday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) dropped some big news in more ways than one.

The company had acquired supercomputing behemoth Cray, one of the largest and most famous players in the field of supercomputers and high-performance computing (HPC).

Recently it has been working with the US Department of Energy on exascale computing projects, and announced in May its 'Frontier' project that it claimed will be the "world's most powerful computer" with a performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops. Although it's not due to be delivered until 2021 and a lot can happen in that time.

So what does this mean for HPE and the wider enterprise hardware market?

For a start, this is the second acquisition HPE has made in the supercomputing/HPC arena, having bought SGI in 2016, and it seems both the company's rationale and integration plans are largely the same. Cray, like SGI, provides HPC hardware that sits alongside HPE's own Apollo servers. But the similarities don't stop there. Both companies, prior to their acquisition, have been pouring resources into AI and machine learning (ML) systems; an area in which HPE is keen to expand.

Indeed, John Abbott, co-founder and distinguished analyst at 451 Research told IT Pro that while exascale is the "obvious goal that Cray will enable HPE to target", AI and ML may be the real draw.

"Cray's more recent focus on heterogeneous processors and clustering, and its interesting work on dynamic runtime software stacks that enable AI and data analytics workloads to be run on HPC-like infrastructure, will potentially be of even more interest to HPE as it looks to broaden out the applicability of supercomputing and HPC to other market areas, including hyperscale clouds," he said.

It seems HPE does have big plans for Cray spread across many of its business units, based on the company's initial announcement.

GreenLake, HPE's pay-per-use private cloud service, will in the future offer HPC-as-a-Service (HaaS? HPaaS? HPCaas? The possibilities are endless) as well as AI and ML-based analytics.

Its hardware will be separately incorporated into HPE's product line-up and the business also sees the opportunity to bolster its big data processing tech.

In short, this can be seen as a further example of the company showing its "laser focus", to use the tech world lingo, on high-performance hardware and emerging(ish) analytical systems having spent the past four years following its split from HP Inc spinning off non-core business units. It also shows the company is very serious about making a success of GreenLake by offering as many top-notch services as possible.

Industry impact

For HPE's main competitors, such as Dell Technologies, IBM and others, this acquisition may have come as something of a surprise, as it did to some industry watchers. Whether or not it will perturb them, though, is another matter.

Roy Illsley, distinguished analyst at Ovum, tells IT Pro the acquisition can be seen in one of two ways.

"Either it's a desperate attempt to create a market they can own and put their name to in an increasingly competitive market, particularly from the Chinese vendors," he said, "or it's a smart strategic move to position itself ready for the next wave of computational demand."

On this second point, however, Illsley notes that quantum computing, which is being pursued by the likes of IBM, Google and Microsoft, may render supercomputers pointless in 15 years or so. In this light, the acquisition could be "a mid-term strategic move to make cash before the next paradigm shift".

Whichever way the dice fall, more information about the acquisition and where it lies in the grand scheme of things will likely be revealed at HPE's annual Discover conference in mid-June.