HPE Allies With Red Hat and SUSE on Containers
At the HPE Discover 2022 conference, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) today expanded its reach into container environments via separate alliances with Red Hat and SUSE.
The Kubernetes-based Red Hat OpenShift platform along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system and Red Hat Ansible automation platform will be made available via the HPE GreenLake managed service, HPE said.
Similarly, HPE has partnered with SUSE to make it possible to deploy the SUSE Rancher management framework, the lightweight K3s distribution of Kubernetes and SUSE Linux Enterprise on HPE GreenLake platforms.
HPE GreenLake is a managed service through which the company manages HP server-based IT environments and that organizations pay for based on actual usage. The company is now offering support for container platforms from Red Hat and SUSE alongside its own HPE Ezmeral container management platform.
Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager for the HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions group, said the overall goal is to provide an IT platform capable of running virtual machines, containers and applications that run on bare-metal servers in a way that maximizes server and storage utilization. Partnerships with Red Hat and SUSE enable IT teams to consume those platforms as part of a larger set of services that the company provides via one integrated bill, noted Lall.
In total, HPE this week added an additional 12 GreenLake services, including a data fabric that spans the company’s servers and public cloud computing environments. HPE now provides more than 50 services via HPE GreenLake. In the second quarter of 2022, HPE reported an annualized revenue run rate (ARR) of $829 million with as-a-service orders growing 107% year-over-year. HPE claims to now have more than 1,600 enterprise customers consuming the various cloud services it provides. Much of that growth occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic which pushed more organizations to consume managed services—both in the cloud and in on-premises IT environments—in lieu of requiring IT staff to be physically present in a data center.
It’s not clear how many container applications are running on the HPE GreenLake platform, but as more of these applications are built HPE is betting they will be deployed across highly distributed computing environments. Many of those applications are accessing sensitive data that, for compliance and security reasons, can’t be deployed in a public cloud computing environment.
At the same time, HPE is also betting more of these workloads will be deployed at the network edge as more data is processed and analyzed closer to where it is created and consumed.
One way or another, various types of managed services are playing a much larger role in IT. In some cases, organizations are opting for managed services provided by either IT vendors or cloud service providers. In other instances, a third-party IT services firm is providing a managed service that spans multiple platforms. It will be up to each individual organization to decide to how heavily to rely on managed services providers versus their own internal IT teams, but at a time when it’s challenging to find and retain the IT talent the need for those services has never been greater.
