In its most recent earnings release on Dec. 1, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. reported 25% growth for its high-performance computing or HPC portfolio and a 20% increase in orders for the company’s as a service GreenLake business.

Today, HPE unveiled new cloud services for critical workloads designed to strengthen its hand in both of these business areas, which have become key to the company’s long-term success.

“We’re expanding our HPE capabilities to make things easier and more effective,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake. “Today’s news is going to speed up deployment of HPC projects by 75% and reduce total cost of ownership by up to 40% for customers. What’s key is that any enterprise will be able to run their modeling and simulation workloads in fully managed, pre-bundled small, medium and large HPC services to operate in any data center or in a colocation.”

White spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE GreenLake Day event. Vellante also spoke with Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager of high-performance computing and mission-critical solutions at HPE; Addison Snell, chief executive officer of Intersect360 Research; and Skip Bacon, vice president of product management at Splunk Inc., in separate interviews. They discussed how GreenLake fits with HPE’s high-performance computing initiatives, the attraction of as-a-service models in the enterprise, use of the company’s offerings by an HPE partner, and integration of the service with other HPE solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Extending HPC portfolio

HPE’s strategy with GreenLake and its high-performance computing initiative is to offer customers a powerful platform for an elastic, pay-per-use cloud experience in the data center.

“We take our entire HPC portfolio that we have today and extend it with GreenLake and offer customers expanded consumption choices,” Ungaro explained. “Customers that potentially are dealing with the growth of their data or they are moving to digital transformation applications can use GreenLake to easily scale up from workstations and manage their system or operational costs. If they’re going from a pilot environment into a production environment over time, GreenLake enables them to do that very simply and easily without having all of that internal infrastructure.”

HPE’s approach highlights how the definition of cloud is expanding, and GreenLake is a prime example of the change that is taking place. “As-a-service” models, such as software as a service, are becoming more attractive in the enterprise to facilitate cost efficiencies and allow businesses to embrace hybrid models, which can bolster functionality in the data to handle critical production workloads.

“We’re seeing double-digit growth that accounted for about $1.4 billion in the high-performance computing industry last year,” Snell noted. “The bigger trend, which makes GreenLake really interesting, is that we saw an additional billion dollars-worth of spending outside what was directly measured in the cloud portion of the market in areas we deemed to be ‘cloudlike,’ which were as-a-service types of contracts.”

Kubernetes deployment

Among HPE’s partners, the expansion of HPC and customer desire for a “cloudlike” experience have opened new windows of opportunity. For Splunk Inc. and its “Data-to-Everything” platform, GreenLake’s as-a-service model has enabled customer capabilities in container orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes.

“We take our core data platform, deploy that as an enterprise operator for Kubernetes, place that atop HPE’s GreenLake, which is really a Kubernetes as-a-service platform, and prove performance, scalability, agility, flexibility and cost economics starting with some of Splunk’s biggest customers,” Bacon said. “Anything that we can do and that our partners can do to improve cost economics, to improve the agility and responsiveness of systems is huge to the customer value proposition.”

HPE has also integrated GreenLake with other elements in its portfolio to handle demanding customer workloads. This includes a managed security solution, advisory and professional services support, and HPE’s Ezmeral software offering for modernizing applications.

“This provides customers with the ability to modernize their apps and data, unify hybrid cloud and edge computing, and operationalize artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics,” White said. “We manage it all for the customer.”

HPE GreenLake has provided a tailwind for the company. Channel orders for GreenLake are up 62% year-over-year, and the number of active partners now selling GreenLake, such as Splunk, has grown 68%.

HPE has booked over $4 billion in total contract value for GreenLake to-date and has over 1,000 customers using the product, according to White.

In a year where the operative word has been “uncertainty,” solutions that offer the most options without locking businesses into expensive capital outlays are finding a receptive audience.

“Anything that accelerates uncertainty is actually going to increase the need for something like GreenLake or an as-a-service cloud type of environment,” Snell said. “We’re expecting those sorts of deployments to come in over and above where we were already previously expecting them in 2020 and 2021 because as-a-service deals well with uncertainty.”

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

Image: HPE