The global pandemic has charged companies with two seemingly incompatible responsibilities: The first is to maintain business continuity, which includes finding solutions to the growing demand for data storage and management. The second is to reduce costs in order face current financial hardships.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. promises to address these two issues with GreenLake, which offers solutions for a hybrid-cloud experience with a pay-per-use pricing model, giving customers more financial flexibility.

“GreenLake not only enables a pay-as-you-go [information-technology] service offering, but it brings the digital-transformation technologies to your data center and allows you to build, operate and manage in a modern way without having to move your data to public cloud,” said Scott Yow (pictured), vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud at HPE. “It really has the ability to transform the way IT gets deployed, scaled and operated from now into the future.”

Yow spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. They discussed GreenLake’s alternative approach in the hybrid cloud market, innovations around artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the way GreenLake is working to increasingly ensure security. (* Disclosure below.)

An alternative approach

For the hybrid-cloud environment, HPE’s GreenLake has what it calls an alternative approach, different from those offered by traditional public cloud or on-premises services. Instead of creating vertically integrated stacks that span multiple data centers, it builds an environment in which it can seamlessly connect to all native services residing on cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, according to Yow.

“Hybrid is not just about on-prem and off-prem; it’s about multicloud — but also connects all of the richness of public cloud services [with] on-prem … and makes the on-prem environment available to a multiple set of cloud technologies, whether containers, virtual machines, or bare metal,” Yow explained. “With GreenLake and GreenLake Central, we provide the ability to control and manage workloads in a very congruent fashion across that entire state.”

Feedback from HPE customers about the pandemic has shown global data growth, the need to understand how that data is accessed, and the need to ensure that the hybrid IT environment is compliant with regulations and security requirements, according to Yow. Because of this demand, GreenLake Central is constantly monitoring thousands of parameters and looking at how data is used in its environment.

“We provide a dashboard that helps our customers understand if there are areas that they need to look at if they’re in compliance or not,” Yow added.

On the security side, HPE is getting flexible in order to adopt and incorporate existing security profiles into GreenLake. In addition, for a number of years, HPE has been embedding security technology directly into its hardware to prevent the insertion of malware, for example.

With about 1,000 customers and a renewal rate over 99%, according to Yow, GreenLake considers the pricing model to be one of its main assets.

“Many times customers, just being able to take the GreenLake technology and look at what’s being deployed, where, what they’re spending, having the ability to understand what would it cost me to deploy this workload in a public cloud versus my GreenLake environment — it actually facilitates a significant amount of growth,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE