UPDATED 15:10 EDT / JUNE 22 2021

CLOUD

HPE debuts GreenLake silicon on demand, chip-level firmware security and more at Discover 2021

Hewlett Packard Co. today detailed a significant expansion of its infrastructure product portfolio that will introduce hardware offerings priced by the processor core, systems capable of verifying the security of their own firmware and new industry-specific solutions.

HPE made the announcements at its virtual Discover 2021 customer event today, where its Aruba networking unit was present as well with new hardware products.

The main focus of the announcements is HPE’s GreenLake solution lineup. Historically, companies had to pay for on-premises hardware upfront and then set it up on their own. With GreenLake, HPE sets up the hardware for customers in advance and then allows them to purchase it on a pay-as-you-go basis instead of buying everything upfront. The idea is to make purchasing on-premises hardware more similar to provisioning infrastructure in the public cloud, where hardware resources are priced per second and can be spun up with minimal effort.

GreenLake includes a wide variety of hardware systems that companies can buy under a pay-as-you-go billing model. It also includes software that makes managing deployments easier. HPE expanded both the hardware and the software components of GreenLake at Discover 2021 this morning.

The first highlight is Project Aurora, an upcoming chip-level technology that will enable HPE systems to detect malware. Many malicious programs modify a system’s firmware while attempting to steal data. Project Aurora detects such modifications using a “fingerprint” of the firmware that is embedded in a system’s silicon and can’t be edited by hackers even if they gain operating system access. Every time the machine boots, Project Aurora compares the firmware with the fingerprint it has on file and raises the alarm if there are code differences that indicate a malicious modification.

HPE says that the technology will similarly be capable of detecting attempts to tamper with a system’s operating system. Further down the line, the company also plans to add features for securing applications that will build on its acquisition of startup Scytale Inc. last year. 

“Today, regardless of where a device is physically located, it is susceptible to cyberattacks,” stated HPE Vice President Gary Campbell. “The stakes are high, and the risks are many –this is especially true at the edge of networks where enterprises don’t necessarily have the same level of physical protection the customer may likely have in their datacenter.”

Project Aurora will be available as part of GreenLake Lighthouse, a new cloud service from HPE. Lighthouse provides a workload deployment console that HPE says will enable administrators to set up new workloads on their companies’ infrastructure in a few minutes while skipping much of the manual work normally associated with the task. Moreover, Lighthouse will use artificial intelligence to fine-tune how much hardware is provisioned for a workload in a way that optimizes costs.

Lighthouse is set to be joined by Cloud Console, another infrastructure management service. As the name implies, it provides a central interface for managing processor resources in a company’s hardware environment. It complements HPE’s Aruba Central service, which provides a central interface for managing networking gear, and the recently introduced Data Services Cloud Console, which applies the same concept to storage.

The three services further advance HPE’s effort to make running on-premises infrastructure more similar to working in the cloud. In the major public clouds, administrators control hardware resources through web-based management consoles. 

“The new GreenLake Lighthouse is a good move,” Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE. Before Lighthouse, Moorhead explained, the large number of product options available in GreenLake portfolio created complexity for buyers. “Lighthouse is simpler and gets to more of a cloudlike model the public cloud providers offer, but is on-prem,” he explained. “If it executes, this should enable HPE to drive more scale with GreenLake.”

Even with the abundance of existing product options in GreenLake, HPE believes that there are still opportunities to expand the portfolio. The company debuted several new specialized infrastructure offerings as part of its announcement today.  

The GreenLake portfolio includes pre-configured systems that HPE sets up for customers, complete with the necessary management software, so they can start using the hardware as soon as it’s dropped off at their data centers. Many of GreenLake’s infrastructure solutions are customized for specific tasks, such as running a backup environment or powering databases.

At Discover, HPE debuted new infrastructure solutions optimized for the healthcare, financial services and telecommunications markets. Each is optimized to run a different set of applications. The GreenLake offering targeting telecommunications providers, for example, is built to run HPE’s 5G Core Stack software, which helps with managing 5G network infrastructure.

HPE is also rolling out a second set of GreenLake offerings that are fine-tuned for specific use cases rather than specific industries. The company announced the general availability of its previously detailed solutions for high-performance computing, machine learning, SAP SE applications and desktop virtualization. The systems were joined by the new GreenLake for Splunk, which enterprises can use to run their installations of Splunk Inc.’s popular cybersecurity and application performance monitoring platform. 

“HPE’s verticalization of GreenLake is a natural progression after building it out horizontally,” Moorhead said. “The target markets it chose are areas where the company has had historical success and has mature ISV partners, so this makes sense to me.”

HPE is giving customers a new way to buy the hardware in the newly expanded GreenLake portfolio. Normally, when a company needs to add more processors to its on-premises infrastructure, administrators have to buy servers and wait for them to arrive. HPE today introduced a new buying option called Silicon on-Demand that will make it possible to add more processors instantaneously without shipping delays. 

With Silicon on-Demand, HPE sends companies servers that have more computing capacity than they initially require. Customers only activate as many processing cores as they need and aren’t billed for the ones they don’t use. When a company needs additional processors, it simply activates more processing cores in its existing servers and thus skips the delays associated with ordering more machines. 

“Organizations today know that to succeed in their industries, they must pursue a cloud everywhere mandate, which enables them to collect, analyze and act on data, wherever it resides,” said HPE Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri (pictured), who also spoke with SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE for Discover 2021. “The HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform empowers organizations to harness the power of all their data, regardless of location.”

John Gromala, the senior director of product management for HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, discussed the company’s product strategy in an interview on theCUBE:

Photo: HPE/livestream

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