HPE: Our Competitors ‘Are Actually Green With Envy’ Over GreenLake

‘The message of moving from centralized to distributed solutions, from cloud first to cloud everywhere, from more data to more insights, understand that it starts again with a lower pillar that is based on security,’ says Joe Vidal, master technologist, office of North America CTO for HPE.

With its multiple data solutions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is striving to significantly cut down the time it takes to detect bad actors and restore data.

HPE GreenLake for data protection offers the next generation of data protection cloud services from early detection to disaster recovery and backup cloud services to help customers secure their data from edge to cloud.

Joe Vidal, master technologist, office of North America CTO for HPE, and Rahul Prasad, category manager for North America for HPE spoke at The Channel Company’s Best of Breed (BoB) Conference in Atlanta last week to discuss new opportunities under HPE’s edge to cloud data analytics and data protection offerings.

HPE offers a variety of GreenLake solutions such as GreenLake for analytics, GreenLake for data protection and Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework and automation tools.

HPE competitors “are actually green with envy,” Vidal said.

[Related: 10 HPE GreenLake Game Changers From HPE Discover 2021]

Through the GreenLake portfolio, customers can own their own offerings if they want to buy the infrastructure and deliver it as a service, according to Vidal.

“That’s all part of being edge-centric and delivering live data driven solutions that are cloud enabled,” he said. “That story and that message continues, nothing’s changed there. What has changed is the wrapper around security and starting with security first and foremost. It starts with security, and it ends with security.

“It has security first of mind and top of mind all throughout the process because the bad actors out there are getting worse,” he added.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said the average time to detect a bad actor went from 145 days to 240 days on average.

“We’re pivoting to where the puck’s going to be,” he said. “We’re pivoting to be able to recognize the time of detection in just a few minutes.”

With 55 billion edge devices on the market by the end of next year, Vidal said that data needs to be processed at the edge where it’s being created.

“That’s not a bad thing because we can help them achieve that cloud strategy,” he said. “Cloud isn’t a destination, it’s an experience. We want to help our customers deliver IT as a cloud service to their businesses and increase their customer experiences.”

He said HPE is the only manufacturer in the industry that can guarantee that every piece of firmware and every application specific integrated circuit that’s in its servers has firmware that HPE manufactures and oversees.

There are two ways to recover from a ransomware breach, said Prasad: either pay the ransom or protect your data.

To protect data, HPE is seeing two major trends.

“CIOs are looking for a better three-to-one implementation,” he said. “Three copies of the data, two different media types, one off site.”

The second trend is how to protect the data, make it invisible to access and make it immutable from deletion or editing.

With HPE data protection solutions, it gives the ability to protect your data, get it off site and restore it very simply.

“The name of the game with ransomware is how do you restore it as quickly as possible,” he said.

In the coming months and years, partners will be allowed to sell the GreenLake solutions as a license model without them having to be upgraded, Vidal said.

The two biggest functions within GreenLake is disaster recovery and backup as a service, powered by Zerto, a cloud data management company it acquired for $374 million in September.

“All these solutions that we’ve been acquiring for the last several years are finally culminating and coming together in solutions that you can sell with added value,” Vidal said.

Matt Bynum, director of technology for Veristor Systems, a Duluth, Georgia solutions provider, said HPE solutions are interesting because it’s selling to the business and to the CIO.

“To me, HPE is clearly evolving very quickly to way more than just a nutritional hardware provider,” he said. “For a reseller like us, we’re always looking for that added value sell. There’s a lot here, a lot more than just your typical sale to a systems administrator or an IT director.”