Hybrid Cloud simplified, leaner and greener

Public Cloud adoption for many organisations has not been a smooth ride. Many decisions aimed at reducing complexity and cost have had the opposite effect often due to workload architecture and changes to modern cloud management not being adopted at the speed companies initially thought. Technology is typically moving at a faster rate than our ability to consume it, and with IDC predicting 90% of organisations will suffer from IT skill shortages by 2025 costing over $6.5 trillion globally through 2025, this pain doesn’t show any signs of decreasing.

As a result, lift and shift, followed by modernise approaches over the last few years have softened to more cloud workload appropriate messages along with an increasing growth of Hybrid Cloud Solutions that bring Public Cloud like features to Private Cloud. As a service models for private cloud and integrations with Public Cloud Services is of course not a new trend, and neither are platforms like HPE GreenLake, but what is new is their increasingly maturity and integration with public cloud services and vice versa.

With Public Cloud offerings enabling more effective Private Cloud management and Private Cloud offerings enabling more effective Public Cloud Management the possibilities for customers to unify their approach to Hybrid Cloud Management is much more achievable than ever before.

To illustrate some of these developments this article will highlight the direction HPE GreenLake is heading;

Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Management

You wouldn’t drive a car with multiple steering wheels yet Hybrid Cloud for many organisations still feels like a collection of separate portals rather than one experience. Cloud Management platforms have grown to meet this challenge but haven’t always been cost effective to adopt, or as feature rich as many would like.

HPE GreenLake is a far cry from the initial financial model it started from and “the Cloud that comes to you” is making its intentions very clear within its portfolio by unifying Public and Private Cloud services into one solution to remove Hybrid Cloud Management pains. Take for example its partnership with AWS which allows GreenLake to support AWS virtual machines, EKS, RDS and EBS or its partnerships with Microsoft with Azure Stack with lots more coming soon.

Accessing all your cloud services via a GreenLake console is converging both Private and Public together into a much more simplified Hybrid Management offering. Yes, it won’t have every service available in Public Cloud but not every workload needs every service in public cloud.

Example of HPE GreenLake Data service cloud console which provides a central workspace for all your storage service subscriptions.

Time saving to the business.

Hybrid Cloud Management pains are still far too commonplace. From patching virtual machines to simplifying back up and DR processes, the fundamentals are still not automated in a lot of organisations and more intelligent AIOps solutions are certainly not baked into wider service management processes for many. Time & IT skill shortages and multiple clouds to manage are a potent mix for complexity.

With these challenges in mind the launch of HPE Private Cloud for Business feels like a good addition to the portfolio. 80% of workloads still use virtual machines so removing VM Management pain with built in automated upgrade and patch management that reduces the risk of unplanned downtime, AIOPs monitoring that claims to resolve 80% of issues, and greatly simplified back up and DR services to reduce management time, all feel compelling.

Being able to deploy and manage Public Cloud VMs all from the GreenLake portal extends these capabilities across Public Cloud and HPEs recent acquisition of OpsRamp (2 min video here) aimed at improving multi cloud observability and IT Operations will continue to help reduce IT Hybrid Management pain. HPE claim the end result is a 80% faster deployment time for projects and a 65% increase in productivity for IT teams.

Lower Greener costs

Pay per use spend sounds easy but the reality is very different. With Public Cloud per second prices workload architecture becomes even more critical for cost savings. For some workloads the cost of this re-architecture and refactoring work simply isn’t worth the investment. Even if the work is worth doing, development capacity constraints often don’t allow for it in the time scales organisations need.

You can certainly scale workloads and costs with much more granularity in Public Cloud, but perfect need not be the enemy of good enough, and for many a scalable Private Cloud model that allows you to pay as you grow scaling compute and storage independently through GreenLake greatly simplifies the Opex model and removes the cost of overprovisioning.

HPE estimate 30-40% lower costs based on overprovisioning savings which is well worth reviewing, and that’s even before taking into account the carbon footprint reduction. On that note it’s worth noting HPE also now have a multi-vendor sustainability dashboard in early access.

Summary

The convergence of Public and Private Cloud is continuing, there are lots of options for customers as always, but its clear HPE GreenLake is taking some big steps to deliver it and combat some of the traditional draw backs of Private Cloud models and Hybrid Cloud Management.

Consolidating and automating Cloud Management while picking the right cloud for the right workload has never been more important, and the good news it’s increasingly becoming more achievable. For anyone interested in evaluating their approach to Hybrid Cloud and what can be achieved Ultima Group with our expertise in both Public Cloud with Just After Midnight and Hybrid Cloud Management is a great starting place.