Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today announced a broad expansion of its GreenLake platform that advances the company’s promise to eventually make its entire product portfolio available as a service.

GreenLake is a  portfolio of hardware and software products that enterprises can buy on a pay-as-you-go basis instead of purchasing everything upfront.

Highlights include the convergence of the Aruba Central network management system from HPE’s Aruba subsidiary with GreenLake to allow more than 120,000 Aruba customers to order network equipment and services on demand. HP also announced a unified and simplified dashboard that enables customers to securely see and access all the GreenLake services they use.

The company also introduced 12 new cloud services spanning networking, data services, high-performance computing and operations management.

HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking spans eight new offerings that are now available as a service: indoor wireless, outdoor wireless, remote wireless, wired access, wired aggregation, wired core, software-defined branch and User Experience Insight, which is Aruba’s network monitoring and troubleshooting system.

The offering spans about 80% of Aruba’s portfolio, according to Larry Lunetta, vice president of wireless local area network and security solutions marketing. “You can have financing, hardware, software and services in a single SKU,” he said. “A lot of our channel resellers are moving into their own as-a-service businesses and these are building blocks that will enable them to do that.”

Expanded storage and backup options

A new block storage service that HPE said is the first in the industry provides a 100% data availability guarantee with cloud delivery. Self-service provisioning enables users to specify their own storage needs and scale up and down as needed.

A new backup and recovery service built for hybrid cloud environments protects virtual machines both on-premises and in the cloud and provides for rapid local recovery. Users can also store long-term backups in the public cloud. HP is also providing additional ransomware protection with the addition of immutable data copies that can be stored both on-premises and on Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud infrastructure. “Customers are able to recover in minutes at scale to a state seconds before an attack,” said Sandeep Singh, vice president of storage marketing.

“This protects virtual machines with three clicks or less and in less than five minutes,” said Flynn Maloy, vice president of GreenLake cloud services, in a pre-briefing. HPE also said the service has been extended to support virtualized and heterogeneous infrastructure in both HPE and non-HPE environments.

High-performance computing announcements include expanded support for Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units on the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 computer and support for Nvidia’s NVLink high-speed connections between GPUs. A new high-performance networking option called Slingshot provides Ethernet-based networking specifically for HPC environments. Other performance enhancements include parallel file system storage and application program interfaces to connect to other private and public HPC clouds.

HPE also announced a 90-day free trial for its GreenLake Compute Ops Management console for accessing, monitoring and managing servers along with the availability of GreenLake services in new cloud marketplaces and for Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure.

Ops Management allows users to “perform bulk actions across an entire fleet to automate tedious activities and maintain compliance controls with automatically applied policies using group tags and labels,” Singh said. “Zero-trust security is built-in.”

Image: HPE