Explaining the strategy driving these new services, HPE’s Keith White said, “Data is at the heart of our decisions, of our customers’” decisions. “They’re making a lot of decisions today and they have data spread out all over the place,” said White, HPE’s SVP and GM of Greenlake Cloud Services Commerical business. “Getting ahead in their market requires deriving insights from their data. This takes modernizing their environments, running a modern data platform and running analytics on top of that. For many of our customers, the data sits outside of the public cloud today for many reasons. So really helping our customers modernize and make the most of their data, organize it, unify it, rationalize it against all locations and analyze it represents a large opportunity.” The HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics, HPE says, is an analytics and data lakehouse platform built to be hybrid native and optimized for on-premise deployments. It’s available both as software and as a service. “We know organizations have really struggled with the modernization of data-intensive platforms – legacy warehouses, lakes and siloed deployments,” Matt Maccaux, global field CTO for HPE Ezmeral, told reporters. “Organizations are struggling to bring these along with overall digital transformational efforts.” In addition to Unified Analytics, HPE is introducing Ezmeral Data Fabric Object Store, a Kubernetes-native object store optimized for analytics performance. It provides access to data sets located in hybrid environments. “We can’t just leave our data behind,” Maccaux explained. “A lot of these organizations struggle because data is stuck in the data center.” Explaining why you would put an object store in Kubernetes, he said, “If you think about the need to spin up ephemeral compute jumps somewhere, you probably also want to think about spinning up ephemeral storage as well.” It’s deployable by the same Kubernetes control plane or run time as the compute services, and then it stretches back and connects into a larger data fabric offering. Meanwhile, the expanded Ezmeral Marketplace delivers validated, full-stack services from ISV partners for building their analytics engines. It now includes support from Nvidia, PepperData and Confluent and open-source projects such as Apache Spark. Next, HPE is entering the fast-growing data protection as-a-service marketing with GreenLake for Backup and Recovery and GreenLake for Disaster Recovery. The Backup and Recovery service provides policy-based orchestration and automation to backup and protect virtual machines. It eliminates the complexities of managing and operating backup hardware, software or cloud infrastructure. The new Disaster Recovery service follows HPE’s acquisition of the data management platform Zerto. HPE plans to deliver Zerto’s disaster recovery as a service via GreenLake, to help customers recover in minutes from ransomware attacks. Finally, HPE on Tuesday announced a new framework to help customers effectively build and implement a hybrid cloud strategy. The HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework leverages the expertise developed by HPE’s advisory and professional services group. It provides a comprehensive, proven set of methodologies and automation tools that help customers accelerate their path to a hybrid cloud experience while lowering the risks involved. The framework consists of eight domains that are critical for building an effective cloud operating model: Strategy and Governance, People, Operations, Innovation, Applications, DevOps, Data, and Security. Under each domain, HPE has identified subdomains and additional logical groups of capabilities that customers should possess. “We’ve identified certain patterns that customers care about the most, and we’ve synthesized them into the framework itself,” HPE’s Alexey Gerasimov told reporters. HPE first launched GreenLake about four years ago. The company on Tuesday shared new data demonstrating the momentum behind the platform for everything-as-a-service. The GreenLake platform now has more than 1,200 customers and $5.2 billion in total contract value.
