HPE Greenlake And Qumulo SHIFT Provide Expanded Cloud Capability

Companies readying themselves to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic are looking to use cloud-based tools to expand their virtual market reach and enable remote work, while controlling costs.  This piece discusses new announcements from HPE and Qumulo to accelerate this digital transformation.

At its HPE Discover virtual event HPE announced its Greenlake effort to provide cloud-like self-service pay as you go, scalable experience for data at the edge, in colocation and data centers as well as in the cloud.  They also announced Ezmeral software to help drive digital transformation.

The image below, from the press briefing shows some of the cloud services and mentioned pre-configured workload-optimized hardware and software that HPE is offering its customers for delivery in 14 days or less.  

HPE pointed out that, according to IDC, 70% of applications remain outside of the public cloud due to multiple factors.  As a result, by having to support local applications as well as cloud native applications, organizations face additional costs, complexity and inefficiency.   Greenlake is attempting to address these issues by providing a unified cloud-like experience at the edge, in data centers and in the public cloud.

HPE has no data egress fees for Greenlake, unlike the large public cloud providers, and offers pay as you use and pay as you grow resource access, including compute and storage.  This is similar to other recent offerings to make local resource access available as an opex rather than a capex expense.  HPE says it is also providing comprehensive cost and compliance analytic tools that customers can use to control cash flow and spending and to prioritize investments aligned to business priorities.  This can be important in uncertain times, like the present.

Greenlake includes cloud services for containers, machine learning, storage, compute, data protection and networking.  These services are available via a self-service point and click catalog on HPE Greenlake Central.  This allows management of multi-cloud, including local cloud resources, from one control panel.

HPE’s new software brand, Ezmeral (Spanish for Emerald) was also introduced, which will be available to customers with Greenlake services management.  The image below shows the elements of the Ezmeral software portfolio.

HPE Ezmeral is designed to help customers with their computing needs from the edge to the cloud.  The platform includes container management, artificial intelligence/machine learning, data analytics, cost control, IT automation as well as AI-driven operations and security.  The Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops will be available as HPE Greenlake cloud services.  The Ezmeral Container Platform can run containerized applications in data centers, colocation facilities, multiple public clouds and at the network edge.

Cloud file data service company, Qumulo (a long time HPE partner), announced the launch of Qumulo Shift for Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3.  This cloud-native service enables organizations to move file data from any Qumulo on-premises or public cloud cluster into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).  Shift transforms these files into an open and non-proprietary object storage format.  

Qumulo says that Shift is included as part of the standard Qumulo subscription and there there is not Qumulo capacity charge for data in AWS S3.  The image below shows Qumulo’s Shift advantages by providing both file and object data access.

SHIFT allows Qumulo file customers to leverage the ecosystem of cloud-native applications and services attached to Amazon S3.  These applications include AWS compute services, ML services, other AI services as well as transcoding services.  Qumulo says that its cloud software has achieved the Amazon Well-Architected designation, enabling organizations to run Qumulo’s validated architecture on AWS.  

Qumulo says that the cloud-native approach enables developers to quickly connect applications to file data and integrate with native cloud services, giving developers control to choose how they want applications and services to process file data at any scale.

The Qumulo SHIFT for AWS S3 service will be available as a free software upgrade, to all Qumulo customers in July 2020.

HPE’s new Greenlake cloud-like services from the edge to the cloud, enabled by its Ezmeral software platform provide enterprise capabilities and cost controls.   Qumulo’s SHIFT allows organizations to use file and cloud-based object applications on their data.  Both of these cloud-oriented services can help companies control costs without compromising scale as they emerge from the pandemic.