Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is adding user profiles, self-provisioning and monitoring to its GreenLake composable infrastructure platform, bringing the on-premises offering closer in function to a public cloud.

The new HPE GreenLake Central option announced today enables user self-service through a unified front-end along from which users can manage and provision both their local infrastructure and that in public clouds.

The company said it’s addressing the large installed base of non-cloud-native applications that will likely remain in the data center for a long time by bridging local and cloud environments through a single console.  Whereas customers previously had to call the company for such routine tasks as turning on additional computing power, with GreenLake Central they have one window into their storage and compute resources, virtual machines, software containers and workloads.

Composable infrastructure is a framework for delivering compute, storage and network resources as services. HPE said GreenLake is its fastest-growing business, with 740 customers worldwide, and 160 new customers this year alone. HPE has promised to offer its entire portfolio on an as a service basis by 2022. Coincident with today’s announcement, the company released the results of a survey that found that 87% of IT decision-makers have started to implement or implemented some kind of infrastructure or software as a service but 71% are concerned about keeping up with the rapidly changing as-a-service landscape.

The company has been steadily tightening the bonds between GreenLake on-premises and public cloud providers with moves like the launch of a hybrid cloud management service last year. The previous GreenLake management experience “felt a lot like cloud; the capacity was there but you couldn’t add it or move it around click, click, click,” said Flynn Malloy, vice president of GreenLake marketing. “If you wanted to add more virtual machines, you’d pick up the phone and call your account manager.”

The brushed-up administration portal now supports personas corresponding to different types of users, enabling them each see a different set of services and reports. Authorized users can “click their way to adding capacity like you do in the public cloud, but it’s on-prem,” Malloy said.

Additionally, GreenLake Central can connect transparently to a company’s public cloud accounts and analyze the costs of each to enable customers to balance their cloud and on-premises workloads more efficiently, he said.

“It summarizes what you’re paying for all your clouds as well as on-prem,” Malloy said. “It gives advice on which workloads to run on which cloud and provides insight and control across your multicloud environment.” The feature currently works only with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, but other public cloud platforms will be added in the future.

HPE is leveraging technology the company picked up with its 2017 acquisition of cloud management specialist Cloud Technology Partners Inc. and last year’s purchase of cloud migration consultancy RedPixie Ltd. Intellectual property from the two companies was rolled into HPE Right Mix Advisor, an analytical platform announced earlier this year that provides guidance on how to move workloads to the right hybrid cloud platforms. Right Mix Advisor will be a standard part of GreenLake Central.

An optional algorithm checks rules from more than 1,200 regulatory bodies and compares it to a dashboard of compliance parameters set by information technology departments to flag potential compliance violations. HPE GreenLake Central was piloted to a small set of customers in November and will be available in the second half of 2020.

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