Positioned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. as a key part of its as-a-service, hybrid computing strategy, GreenLake offers a robust set of services tailored for the private cloud.

This is not an afterthought bolted on to satisfy a niche enterprise market. According to data provided by HPE during the recent HPE GreenLake Day event, 95% of organizations have both public and private cloud environments. In addition, broad cloud adopters have 40% of applications in a private cloud and 41% of businesses expect to increase spending on private cloud in 2021.

Numbers such as these make the case for why HPE is structuring GreenLake as a key solution for accelerating application delivery in the private cloud.

“The interesting thing that we see now is a moving investment to increase private cloud capability,” said Raj Mistry, worldwide go-to-market lead, Hybrid Cloud Software and Services, at HPE. “What we’ve done with GreenLake Cloud Services is create a rich portfolio that delivers a cloudlike experience either at the edge, in your datacenter, or colocation that embraces the work you do with the hyperscalers. The cloud is not an expectation anymore; it’s an absolute necessity.”

HPE’s virtual video session “Accelerate Your Application Delivery with HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud” offers an opportunity to better understand GreenLake’s capabilities in providing a self-service, pay-per-use cloud experience on-premises. The presentation was included as part of the recent HPE GreenLake Day event, hosted by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the complete video presentation below:

Eliminating complexity

HPE kicked off its GreenLake private cloud initiative less than a year ago with the introduction of its Cloud Services platform. The company announced cloud services for virtual machines, storage and compute with the aim of eliminating complexity around building cloudlike solutions in the datacenter.

“GreenLake for private cloud was initially launched in the summer of 2020,” Mistry said. “It was the first iteration of what we call the GreenLake platforms.”

Key to the GreenLake offering was an ability to provide visibility into usage and spend, along with capacity planning through consumption analytics generated in the GreenLake Central management platform.

“Pushing buttons and provisioning stuff is really easy, but a lot of our focus is in the provisioning processes of understanding if it’s turned on or off, how much it’s costing or if you are getting the most efficiency out of it,” Mistry explained. “All of this is wrapped up with the managed platform capability, which means you now have to understand and treat HPE as a managed service and cloud provider within your datacenter. We take care of the infrastructure, software and the experience.”

Onboarding automation tools

Having a managed platform provides GreenLake users with a set of tools to more clearly understand what services are being consumed and the kinds of applications running in the environment. A key feature involves the ability to integrate automation tools seamlessly into workflow streams.

In an example provided during the presentation by Steve Showalter, business development manager and technical evangelist at HPE, a set of Ansible automation playbooks can be onboarded into GreenLake from a GitHub repository.

“I just point the cloud management platform to that repository, and it scrapes all the playbooks that it finds there and those become available as tasks and workflows that I can use after I provision virtual machines,” Showalter said. “Almost every customer I talk with nowadays has made some sort of large investment typically in automation tooling. One of the things we want to provide is the ability to surface that tooling and allow customers to be able to reuse that tooling within our private cloud environment.”

The GreenLake services platform for private cloud also includes a feature that allows developers to manage blueprints, which define the structure of an application.

“These could be multi-node, multi-tier where each tier might have a different application installed,” Showalter explained. “I can stitch all of those together and make them available as one simple catalog item for a user to consume. I don’t have to understand all of the complexities that make up that multi-node, multi-tier application in the background.”

In early March, HPE announced a series of updates for its GreenLake cloud services portfolio. These included new services for virtual machines, containers and bare metal management with scalable, modular entry points designed to address the needs of mid-market businesses.

“We’re helping you to get started really quickly,” Mistry said. “It’s looking at market feedback, understanding what our customers are doing and bringing this in as an entry point into the smaller and medium enterprises who are looking to deliver private cloud capabilities. You can scale depending on how you are managing your transformation.”

Watch 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 HPE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: HPE