Three Ways HPE GreenLake for Block Storage Transform On-Prem STaaS

By Simon Watkins, WW senior product marketing manager, HPE Storage

In March, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP announced a major advancement in GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

GreenLake for Block Storage is a storage as-a-service that offers self-service and a 100% availability guarantee built-in for mission-critical environments. ^[1]

Here we are in June, and I let you know that GreenLake for Block Storage is shipping in select countries and will soon be available WW.

The lead-up to this day has been fun to watch – with positive endorsements from industry analysts and press, as well as strong demand from partners and customers. That’s no surprise. GreenLake for Block Storage removes many of the roadblocks and compromises associated with current STaaS offerings. How? By eliminating storage complexity with a self-service cloud experience everywhere. The power of GreenLake for Block Storage is that it frees up organizations to simplify operations and move faster – while maintaining control of your data on premises.

GreenLake for Block Storage is changing the game entirely for storage as a service. Consider how your organization could transform faster by accelerating the following outcomes.

1. Go faster with self-service agility
The public cloud has set the standard for agility, with an operational model that enables customers to deploy new apps and services quickly and easily. However, public cloud isn’t right for every workload. Case in point: Most enterprise apps and data remain on premises today because of security, data sovereignty, and latency concerns – to say nothing of the complexity of migrating and rearchitecting apps for the public cloud.

As a result, the technology ambitions of many enterprises have moved on from ‘cloud first’ to embrace ‘cloud everywhere.’ Organizations seek to harness the benefits of the cloud operational experience wherever their workloads live – not just in the public cloud, but from edge locations to on-prem data centers to co-location facilities. And this approach, in which IT simplifies operations and moves faster with a cloud experience everywhere, is now essential to successful transformation. In fact, according to analyst group ESG, 91% of IT leaders identify mature cloud operations on premises for enterprise apps as the single most important step to eliminating IT complexity and accelerating innovation. ^[2]

On-prem StaaS is a use case for this cloud everywhere strategy, but current on-prem STaaS vendors can’t deliver self-service agility. They’ve introduced pay-as-you-go consumption and day zero optimization, which is fine as far as it goes, but customers still must deal with a traditional storage management experience, including the need for storage domain expertise for Day 2 operations and beyond. In short, existing STaaS offerings are simply not designed to deliver the on-prem cloud agility that businesses require today.

Enter GreenLake for Block Storage, which eliminates storage complexity across the IT lifecycle with end-to-end, self-service agility and an AI-driven cloud experience everywhere. By leveraging AIOps, it simplifies Day 2 operations and beyond – removing the complexity of managing underlying data infrastructure while shifting operations to be app, not infrastructure, centric.

Unlike the traditional storage management common to other storage-as-a-service options, GreenLake for Block Storage provides an AI-managed, self-service experience, so line-of-business (LOB) and application admins can accelerate app deployment by effortlessly self-provisioning storage – instantly and without relying on IT or going to the public cloud. No storage expertise is required, storage provisioning times are reduced, and IT teams are freed up to work on strategic, higher-value initiatives.

2. Reduce risk by running any app without compromise
Most on-prem and public cloud StaaS offerings – which typically commit to four nines of data availability – are not suitable for mission-critical applications requiring six-nines or even 100% availability. Here GreenLake for Block Storage stands alone, delivering a guaranteed – 100% data availability ^[3] for mission-critical apps and an industry-leading 99.9999% [4] uptime for all other workloads. This makes it the best choice for all your applications.

GreenLake for Block Storage meets any SLA for any app, from traditional to modern, with exactly the right performance, resiliency, and efficiency. Simply choose the service levels that your workloads require from an as-a-service portfolio of proven, enterprise-grade, on-premises cloud data services offered in mission critical, business critical, or general-purpose block storage tiers.

With the mission-critical service, you can accelerate your latency sensitive, mission-critical apps with an all-NVMe storage service that features predictable high-performance, ultra-low latency, and 100% availability guaranteed. This service is suitable for large-scale virtual, database, container, and consolidation environments including SAP HANA, Spark, Splunk, and Oracle workloads.

The business-critical offering enables to harness maximum efficiency for business-critical apps with a superior price-performance storage service designed for fast, reliable data access and 99.9999% measured availability. Typical use cases include medium-sized virtual and container environments, data warehousing, SQL, and test/dev.

Finally, our soon-to-be-available general-purpose service lets you leverage a cost-optimized storage service for general-purpose workloads – including small-sized virtual environments and mixed/secondary storage – with data efficiency, data integrity and data durability, flexible scale, and no more tuning, trade-offs, or wasted resources.

3. Speed time to value and slash costs by consuming as a service
GreenLake for Block Storage empowers your organization to shift from buying and maintaining data infrastructure to simply accessing and utilizing it. A flexible, as-a-service consumption model means you avoid over- and under-provisioning concerns, Capex budget constraints, and complex procurement cycles. How so?

First, you get moving quickly and easily with instant, SLA-driven quoting and rapid ordering. Instead of having to select a specific storage system or configuration, you simply choose from four key service parameters for your desired SLA: availability tier, performance level, reserve capacity, and subscription term. In other words, you simply select the outcomes you need for your apps, and HPE (or a certified partner) takes care of the rest, delivering and deploying the right data infrastructure to meet your requirements. The infrastructure is owned by the company but operated by your team. As a result, your IT staff no longer need to worry about time-consuming forecasting, procurement, maintenance, upgrades, and decommissioning activities – and you can forget complex tech refresh cycles.

Second, you scale on-demand and as necessary, with buffer capacity for unexpected workloads or usage demands. This means you don’t have to be disrupted or delayed by lengthy 3-4 month procurement cycles to take advantage of new opportunities or begin key new initiatives.

And third, you move from heavy upfront costs to a transparent, predictable monthly subscription. Leveraging the convenience of a flexible subscription to shift from an ownership model to an access model means you avoid purchasing storage assets to meet future capacity needs that then sit idle, tying up capital that could be used to benefit the business.

Get everything as-a-service
Keep in mind, the on-demand cloud data services of the HPE GreenLake platform don’t end at block storage. A comprehensive suite of cloud data services with a unified cloud operating experience enables organizations to modernize data management when and where they need it – all in a few clicks. For example, HPE Backup and Recovery Service delivers effortless cloud backup from a single pane of glass to meet every backup SLA across your hybrid cloud.

And while storage and data protection may be your immediate requirements, you also need compute, networking, database, HPC, containers, AI, VDI, and third-party applications. These are all workloads that  GreenLake can provide as a service – well beyond what competitive on-prem STaaS vendors can deliver. Consider the benefits of meeting all your IT infrastructure as a service needs, including third-party applications, via a single vendor, on a single monthly bill, with support through that same single vendor.

Transform faster with HPE GreenLake for Block Storage
In bringing a self-service cloud operational model to on-prem workloads, it helps organizations speed digital transformation through data-first modernization. And that’s precisely what makes GreenLake for Block Storage compelling. Uniquely among STaaS offerings, it empowers line of business and application admins to accelerate app deployment by effortlessly self-provisioning storage – instantly, and without going to the public cloud. And it enables IT teams both to transform from operator to service provider and to start managing business outcomes instead of infrastructure.

Resources:
Video: Three-minute demo to see GreenLake for Block Storage in action.
Blog: Modernize your Enterprise with Data Services that Deliver Cloud Operations Everywhere
Watch the chalk-talk: HPE GreenLake for Block Storage Chalk Talk
Watch the webinar: The promise of on-prem storage as a service
Other videos:
Transform faster with HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – ESG analyst video
Go faster with agility
Analyst report: ESG: HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – Impact Validation Report
Bochure, solution brief, and STaaS buyer’s guide: Top Ten Reasons to Choose HPE GreenLake for Block Storage   
HPE GreenLake for Block Storage solution brief    
Storage as a Service Buyer’s Guide    

^[1] Based on analysis of known industry block StaaS offerings available as of March 2022 that are offered self-service
^[2] HPE Data Management Maturity Research, November 2021
^[3] HPE Storage Substantiation
^[4] HPE Storage Substantiation