Arrow: HPE GreenLake Provides Consumption Model Without Moving To The Cloud

‘HPE GreenLake affords customers the option to eliminate the up-front cash outlay and they only pay for what they use on-premises with metered usage. So, [it’s] similar to a cloud model, but on-premises, in their own location or in a co-location data center of their choosing,’ says Paul Poynter, supplier manager for HPE GreenLake at Arrow.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake is key for customers who are looking to move away from managing their on-premises infrastructures but may not be ready to go all in on the cloud.

That’s the word from Paul Poynter, supplier manager for HPE GreenLake at Arrow, who Wednesday told solution providers during CRN parent The Channel Company’s Best of Breed virtual conference that the traditional model for building data center infrastructures—which involves purchasing compute, storage and other equipment based on projected needs for that equipment—no longer works for many businesses.

“[Those needs] might be unknown,” Poynter said. “So to accommodate for that, they would typically overprovision and might purchase two times what they actually need. By contrast, HPE GreenLake affords customers the option to eliminate the up-front cash outlay and they only pay for what they use on-premises with metered usage. So, [it’s] similar to a cloud model, but on-premises, in their own location or in a co-location data center of their choosing.”

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“That metering can be by storage, by compute, by application,” he said. “Or we can incorporate active capacity planning for cost savings and to help to eliminate overprovisioning. Inherently, it’s multi-cloud and multi-stack. You can actually utilize GreenLake to take advantage of and to monitor your existing cloud instances, which might be based around [Microsoft] Azure or AWS. The consumption-based portal gives you that complete view, and you can see what you’re spending on a monthly basis [and] what the usage is.”

Dan Molina, chief technology officer at Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and longtime HPE channel partner, said his company’s pipeline for HPE GreenLake is quickly growing to include several major deals, including California’s Kern County government.

“We have real opportunities and are talking to a few dozen potential customers,” Molina told CRN.

Using HPE GreenLake to shift spending from capital expenditures to a consumption model is important for some customers, Molina said.

“But what they really like is the managed services,” he said. “More customers want someone else to manage their infrastructure and operate it like the cloud.”

One major priority for customers in 2021 is the distributed cloud, or the edge cloud, Molina said.

“Customers are putting workloads where it makes sense for them,” he said. “Some workloads are not suitable for the cloud, such as IoT where a lot of devices are collecting a lot of data. People want to process that data, and need to do it at the edge. HPE GreenLake makes managing the edge easier.”

Centennial, Colo.-based distributor Arrow monitors that usage along with HPE, and the distributor works with partners on any changes in consumption, either upward or downward, Poynter said.

“The consumption portal also gives you the ability to provide information that you might want to incorporate in chargebacks for your organization,” he said. “So you have more granular data to help support your needs as they change and grow.”

Arrow, working with HPE GreenLake, also helps partners work with HPE’s financial services to offer creative ways to do financing, Poynter said.

“Let’s say that your organization has an existing infrastructure and you don’t want to lose that investment that you’ve made,” he said. “HPE and Arrow can help you take advantage of what you have on-site, and there are options to repurchase or lease that equipment back to you. HPE can take your existing infrastructure and incorporate it into that consumption-based usage and the flexible cost on a monthly basis.”

The other advantage is support from HPE and Arrow for installation, upgrade support and metering, he said.

While interest in the cloud is high, there are still a large number of applications that cannot yet be moved to the cloud for a variety of reasons, including compliance or the large amount of data on-site, Poynter said.

“So GreenLake and HPE, working with Arrow, provide our customers an option that they can present for consumption-based, cloud-like usage, metered on-premises,” he said.

HPE GreenLake also helps to simplify procurement, Poynter said.

“Customers are often dealing with long procurement cycles for capital equipment, which may take up to six months, in some cases longer for some customers,” he said. “So to be able to react to changing needs can be challenging, HPE GreenLake affords them a different vehicle for accommodating changes in real time. Customers have the capacity they need on-premises at day one. There’s buffer capacity that is placed on-site as well that they can take advantage of if needed. They don’t pay for it until they use it.”

Another benefit is that the assets are owned by HPE, which handles their monitoring and management, Poynter said. “The customer’s IT staff is not tied up addressing monitoring and managing that infrastructure,” he said. “[This] allows them to go work on other projects, applications, things that might provide better use of those resources for business value for the customer.”

And because the assets are owned by HPE, the company along with Arrow handles upgrades of the technologies as new innovations become available, he said.