Navigating the hybrid horizon: HPE GreenLake’s journey in the era of multicloud strategies

In the ever-evolving enterprise technology landscape, blending private, on-premises and public cloud solutions has become the norm. Meanwhile, generative artificial intelligence has changed the game for everyone, including those in the cloud.

At the same time, the cloud industry is growing rapidly. Gartner Inc. has forecasted worldwide public cloud end-user spending will reach $679 billion in 2024, up from $563.6 billion in 2023. For Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the goal has been to deliver a hybrid-cloud experience through its GreenLake platform. The company has also taken pains to point out what it views as a sort of false narrative: Should one use public cloud, private cloud or on-prem?

“The answer is all of it,” said Brian Falvey, vice president of sales for HPE GreenLake North America, who recently talked with theCUBE. “It’s this idea, this notion we have of hybrid by accident versus hybrid by design. For my future planning, my future growth, supporting my business leaders in my company, I need to have a multicloud strategy. I need to be hybrid, and so that’s hybrid by design.”

During the recent HPE Discover Barcelona event, HPE announced GreenLake for File Storage, an unstructured data platform delivered through the GreenLake cloud platform. But what else has played out for HPE GreenLake over the past year, and where does the company see it going next? Let’s take a closer look. (* Disclosure below.)

A blueprint for the future

It’s been a busy year of announcements when it comes to HPE GreenLake. In June, at HPE Discover, it consolidated numerous services within GreenLake while it highlighted its collaborations with major industry players, including Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and Amazon Web Services Inc.

“HPE is using its supercomputer mojo [from] acquisitions of Cray and SGI to really try to differentiate and move up the stack a little bit with a cloud-based offering,” said theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the time, as HPE used the event to announce large language models as a service.

The key question going into the HPE Discover Barcelona event, meanwhile, was what would come next for GreenLake. Considering the growing advent of AI, the focus was clear, according to theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay: The importance of sustainability and security in the complex world of AI.

“[HPE] talked about the growth that they’re experiencing and how they’re growing in the actual core networking of the enterprise,” Strechay said. “They’re making that more efficient and sustainable for folks as well … it could actually be a determining factor if you win the business or not.”

When it comes to HPE’s blueprint around GreenLake, it’s one that represents the future, according to Jason Newton, vice president of integrated marketing, events, and messaging at HPE, in an interview with theCUBE. The market is moving toward the strategy, he explained.

“What you’re seeing over the last five years is that bet at the edge. People kind of scratched their heads and said, ‘OK.’ But then we invested, and we delivered. Then we started talking about cloud,” Newton said. “There’s a need for hybrid; we identified that need. And they said, ‘Nah, you’re full of it. It’s all going to go to the public cloud.’ [But] hybrid’s won.”

Over the past 12 months, the company has cited various developments as evidence that its strategy is working. For instance, in September, HPE announced that Inedys Group, a French cloud services provider, had chosen GreenLake to power its cloud services offerings.

“Thanks to the HPE as-a-service solution, we can offer a better experience to our customers while gaining flexibility, scalability and security. We can also focus on our added value: Offering bespoke cloud services tailored to each company’s specific needs,” said Georges Laurent Vettraino at Inedys in a release.

Growth and recent developments

That’s not to say that the company hasn’t faced challenges in the past year. In August, shares of HPE and its one-time sister company HP Inc. trended lower after the companies offered up guidance for the fourth quarter that came up short of analysts’ expectations.

However, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said the result would have been disastrous if not for GreenLake and the company’s Intelligent Edge business unit. It was good for HPE to find a second big growth stream to support GreenLake, but will that growth “cannibalize” its traditional server-based revenue stream?

“The future will tell if this growth is organic or not. It will also tell us if HPE is able to invigorate its high-performance computing portfolio with the opportunities it spoke of in AI a few weeks ago,” Mueller said in August.

Last month, however, the company’s earnings edged past Wall Street’s estimates, driven by an upsurge in AI. Still, the company could only offer a subdued forecast moving forward, citing ongoing economic uncertainty.

When it comes to HPE’s recent developments surrounding AI, what may come to mind for many is the collaboration between the company and Nvidia Corp., seeking to provide a supercomputing solution for gen AI. Today, people are training large language models for video, image generation and more, but one size does not fit all, according to Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager of the HPC and AI Business Group at Hewlett Packard Labs.

“People need an easy way to get started. We’re working closely with Nvidia … to build a scalable AI supercomputer in a box,” said Hotard, who spoke with theCUBE in November.

The solution, which comes with all necessary software and services, is also liquid-cooled, which caters to the needs of on-prem AI solutions. This entire environment also needs to be hybrid, Hotard added.

“GreenLake was the right place for your private cloud, but some of the capabilities we’re building into it, we’ve been building into it, actually have set us up perfectly to make it the ideal destination when you go and build that AI-native architecture,” he said.

HPE’s private cloud portfolio has grown in recent years. It’s become more of delivering and operating a cloud for companies, according to Bryan Thompson, vice president of product management for HPE GreenLake cloud services.

“That now lets you run and focus your resources higher up in that stack, on those types of AI workloads, and driving business benefits and outcomes from that,” Thompson said.

That’s where GreenLake comes in. It even comes back to a cultural change, according to Thompson.

“It’s one thing to provide the technical components … those building blocks of infrastructure,” he said. “But now, delivering them in a scalable, repeatable, consumable way … it frees up those internal operational resources to be higher up in the stack.

The GreenLake model allows organizations to focus on driving value to their constituents, be it their developers, application owners or end customers. It also enables companies to bring components and solutions together and deliver more of an outcome-based experience, Thompson added.

A look ahead

Over the past year, HPE has sought to continue to leverage its GreenLake platform for converged services, while looking to determine how AI will play an increased role in supporting data migration, network security and observability. The recent HPE Discover event saw messaging “on point,” according to Strechay.

“I think there’s been a couple of really good key themes throughout, from the edge to cloud, with all of the HCI improvements,” he said. “When you start to look at sustainability, security, networking, I think a lot of that is key to the underpinnings of AI and where customers really want to go.”

Much has changed since HPE Discover in June and even since HPE Discover Barcelona, and various large-scale announcements have followed. Expect much more in 2024 as the company continues to roll out future evolutions for GreenLake, the crown jewel of its portfolio.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover Barcelona event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the main sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Created with the assistance of DALL·E