HPE GreenLake Adds Analytics and Data Protection Services

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has strengthened its GreenLake cloud platform with two new services: unified analytics, and data backup and disaster recovery.

The company on Tuesday announced HPE GreenLake for analytics, which enables enterprises to unify, modernize and analyze all their data everywhere it’s stored, from the edge to the cloud. HPE also introduced two data-protection as-a-service offerings to provide enterprises with ransomware protection and fast data backup and recovery services.

“These announcements really represent HPE’s entry into two very large high-growth software markets: unified analytics and data protection,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s GreenLake Cloud Services Commercial Business, during an interview with the media on Monday.

HPE also announced its HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework, which encompasses advisory and professional services, a set of proven methodologies and automation tools and is designed to help organizations implement a hybrid cloud using GreenLake.

“Transformations are complex. [Customers] absolutely need help. Our customers can appreciate the experience we’re bringing to the table,” said Alexey Gerasimov, vice president for advisory and solutions at HPE’s WW Hybrid Cloud Practice, at Monday’s press briefing.

HPE’s announcements are the latest additions to its GreenLake platform, the company’s on-premises solutions that are offered through a cloudlike, subscription-based, as-a-service model. In 2019, the company pledged to make every product it sold as a service – and its success has prompted competing hardware makers, such as Dell and Cisco, to follow suit.

In fact, HPE on Tuesday announced that the company continues to gain momentum with GreenLake adoption. GreenLake now has more than 1,200 customers, totaling $5.2 billion in total contract value. During the third quarter of 2021, the company’s as-a-service orders were up 46% year-over-year, it said.

IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni said HPE’s announcements on Tuesday are important for its customers and make the GreenLake brand more versatile, providing HPE’s customers a more complete solution.

“Initially, they focused on the main infrastructure components, but now, they’re shifting their focus more on making it complete,” Nadkarni said to Data Center Knowledge.

HPE GreenLake for Analytics  

HPE executives said many organizations have struggled with digital transformation efforts because of their legacy data warehouses, data lakes and siloed deployments. In a blog post published Tuesday, HPE executives said GreenLake’s new analytics service breaks down those silos and enables enterprises to create a modern, cloud-native data analytics platform.

Essentially, HPE is federating all types of data, so the data can be analyzed under the same framework, Nadkarni said.

“They’re creating a federation layer that allows you to have all the analytics for all your cloud-native environments in a single pane of glass,” he said.

More specifically, HPE made three announcements for its HPE GreenLake for analytics service. According to the blog post, they are:

“Now analytics and data science teams can leverage the industry’s first cloud-native solution on-premises, scale up Apache Spark lake houses and speed up AI and ML workflows,” wrote Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, in the blog post.

HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery

HPE GreenLake’s new data protection service brings together the company’s own intellectual property and its recent acquisition of Zerto, a disaster-recovery-as-a-service solution, Nadkarni said.  

GreenLake now includes HPE Backup and Recovery Service for VMware. Delivered through a software-as-a-service console, the service allows customers to easily back up their virtual machines on-premises and in hybrid cloud deployments by using three simple steps, a process that takes less than five minutes, wrote Tom Black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage, in another blog post published Tuesday.

“There are no media servers, appliances or targets to manage. Customers can recover instantly on-prem, retain cost-effective long-term backups in the public cloud and enjoy the security of backups that are protected against ransomware attacks,” Black wrote in the blog post.

HPE also announced an HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery service through its Zerto service. Through Zerto’s Continuous Data Protection technology, customers can recover from backup within minutes, Black wrote.

The data protection services are available immediately. The analytics services will be available in early 2022, HPE executives said.