You Don't Have to Move to the Cloud to Get the Benefits

10 years ago, companies were reluctant to move their workloads to the cloud. They cited security, performance and hidden costs as objections, and time has proven many of them right. Reading the trade press, you could be led to believe that every company has moved everything to the cloud. Yet, many companies have operational necessities - such as low network and machine infrastructure latency - or compliance requirements that means workloads have to remain on-premise. Cloud providers, like AWS, want your data and they are not really interested in your workloads. Which is why it is the easier ones, such a dev and email that moved to the cloud-first, leaving the traditional enterprise scale workloads remaining on-premise. But companies with these workloads do not need to be tied to the CAPEX heavy traditional IT model.

You can still enjoy the benefits achieved from cloud adoption, including the as a service charging model. This will enable you to deliver an on-premises experience with the look and feel of the public cloud whilst maintaining full control.

HPE GreenLake delivers exactly this by focussing on outcome-based consumption and simplifying IT. You no longer need to invest in on-premises hardware, just pay for what you use. There is no delay in the purchasing and provision of new hardware, it is already there. And since its’ release in 2017, it has evolved from a converged infrastructure delivery with allocation software and services into a hybrid cloud platform, controlled by HPE GreenLake Central. It doesn’t create a “walled garden” like its competitors and instead uses the public cloud providers’ native languages and tools.

HPE's as a Service model can be applied to a wide variety of workloads. For virtualisation, private cloud, backup and general storage, HPE GreenLake provides purpose-built infrastructure using portfolio offerings like HPE SimpliVity hyper-converged and HPE Nimble storage. For other workloads, HPE leverages a broad ecosystem of partners — VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, and others.

Many enterprise applications have not been designed as cloud-native, ruling out a simple lift and shift re-platforming and leaving the options to re-architect or rebuild the application to move it to the cloud. This is often impractical even if it is in theory achievable. These workloads will remain on-premise, often as a result of complex integrations with existing systems.

Security and Governance often dictate where a workload can reside. Public cloud services such as Azure and AWS provide highly flexible access to resources, but some kinds of data are subject to privacy regulations that preclude the use of public cloud. These regulations may prohibit storing or transferring information with a third party. In these instances, the on-premise approach gives companies the ability to keep the information within their own data centre. Some industries and geographies have regulations that require additional data governance regulations regarding data sovereignty, such as storing citizens data on physical servers within a country's borders. The HPE GreenLake service has been designed to deliver the performance and control required by enterprise for both cloud-native and traditional workloads from within their own data centres.

HPE GreenLake enables you to keep complete control over your infrastructure, while it's as a Service pricing model gives a lower cost than public cloud. On-premise deployments always include a degree of over provisioning, often as high as 50%, catering for planned growth and some unplanned peaks but with HPE GreenLake payments are based on metered consumption so you only pay for the additional capacity and resource when it's used. By having a real-time picture of services and consumed capacity you will have the ability for ongoing rightsizing.

Cost analysis of HPE GreenLake against AWS found it coming out considerably cheaper. One of the factors in this price saving was removing the charges for outbound data transfer, while data ingress is usually free, egress is a different matter with public cloud providers. HPE GreenLake also removes vendor lock-in or switching costs. these costs have always existed in IT but in an increasingly hybrid world, where apps and data live everywhere, the model of moving the data to where the cloud is has become outdated. With data increasing being processed at the edge HPE GreenLake you can integrate Aruba Intelligent Edge.

For enterprise applications that cannot move easily to the cloud, you can still take a cloud-first approach, bringing the benefits of the cloud, including innovation, improved internal SLA and cost efficiencies to your IT operations without loss of control by using HPE GreenLake. You will enjoy the benefits of automation and simpler management enabling operational scale and far greater efficiency from your in-house team.

SCC and HPE have been working together in partnership for over 30 years. Our expertise has led us to become one of just eleven Platinum partners and we have more accredited professionals, including Master ASE Data centre and Cloud Architects, than any other UK company. SCC is the only company to hold accreditations across each of HPE’s business groups including number one partner in multiple groups. It all adds to our ability to deliver exactly what a client needs every time.

If you’d like to find out more then please get in touch - we can advise you of where to start your journey.