The unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic has caught a lot of businesses off-guard. If managing your organisation’s IT estate was difficult before the outbreak, it’s certainly become a lot more complicated since. Undoubtably, the change in circumstances has had a big impact on your critical infrastructure, especially if most of your workforce is now working from home and need remote access to the apps and data hosted in your data centre. Existing capacity may have become stretched or you’ve even dipped into public cloud services to bridge the gaps. Conversely, if your workforce has shrunk, there’s every likelihood you could be overprovisioning data centre resources, which might mean you’re spending more than you need to.
With one eye on budget, you just can’t afford to over or underestimate your data centre capacity requirements. It’s also important to remain mindful of the usage you might be expecting once things return to normal, so you can accurately forecast for the future.
HPE GreenLake has everything you need
HPE’s consumption-based IT as a service offering, HPE GreenLake, brings all of the agility and economic benefits of the public cloud into your on-premises environment. GreenLake is Infrastructure as a service, but with the welcomed reassurance that all the technology you need is delivered on-premises. That means compute, storage, network and virtualisation technologies bundled together to create the infrastructure you need, not just today but in anticipation of your demands tomorrow. The cloud-like experience being pioneered by GreenLake meters resource usage, so you only pay for what you use while also offering a reserve of capacity for you to harness if and when the need arises. By giving businesses total control over the amount of capacity they need, it enables them to reduce time-to-value from technology investments, eliminate complexity, and optimise their IT spend. Just like the public cloud, you aren’t charged for what you don’t use, avoiding the possibility of overprovisioning, with capacity ready to be called on in minutes with a click.
Importantly, GreenLake closely tracks what combination of resources you’re using and when, which informs predictions about your usage for future capacity needs. This brings a new level of accuracy to capacity planning that assists IT teams with eliminating unnecessary spending.
As budgets are being cut in response to COVID-19, important infrastructure projects remain, and GreenLake potentially presents a new vehicle to keep projects moving without breaking the bank. Likewise, the freedom to scale back also provides a way of ensuring the cost of operating this infrastructure is more in step with the fortunes of the business.
HPE GreenLake Central just kicked things up a notch
Launched in December last year, HPE GreenLake Central has been described by HPE’s Global VP of Customer Experience for HPE GreenLake, Erik Vogel, as a “monumental” step forward for GreenLake. An advanced software platform that offers unique insights into compliance, capacity, and cost, it helps businesses drive better outcomes by enabling them to choose the best cloud destination for workloads based on spend, performance, and governance. Extending the value of GreenLake insight off-premises into the public cloud is a huge advance.
A hub for your hybrid IT, HPE GreenLake Central offers customers a consistent cloud experience across all apps and data, whether on-premises or off, thanks to a sophisticated online operations console.
Taking a closer look at the solution, here are four reasons why it could help you better control your cloud, in or out of a crisis:
1. A self-service cloud experience
There has never been a more important time to ensure that you have total control and visibility over your on-premises environment. HPE GreenLake Central brings a self-service cloud experience to GreenLake customers that matches public cloud. Its intuitive dashboard provides a single unified view of the entire hybrid cloud estate, making it easy for users to optimise how they purchase, provision, and manage their on-premises, public, and private clouds. You can provision resources in a matter of minutes and seamlessly import certified images to deploy VMs or apps anywhere in your cloud. Role-based access also means members of your IT team only have to worry about the insights that are most relevant to them, so they don’t need to wade through any waffle.
2. Intelligent analytics
While still in the midst of the pandemic, it’s now more essential than ever to ensure you’re keeping tabs on how and where your budget is being spent. GreenLake Central gives you real-time visibility over all usage and spend across your entire IT estate, providing proactive insights into how to optimise operation and gain the best possible outcomes. What’s more, simple-to-use dashboards and reports help you to see everything at a glance.
3. Future forecasts
Because of the uncertainties surrounding the current COVID-19 restrictions and their potential duration, you need to know you’re properly equipped to plan for what the future might hold. Whether this means going back to office life, or even adjusting to remote working for good, it’s essential to look ahead at what your data centre capacity might look like. Quickly compare your used capacity to the amount you have installed and reserved using the GreenLake Central portal and use this key information to help accurately forecast your needs for the future.
4. Reassurance of compliance
Even during lockdown, it’s still critical to ensure your infrastructure remains compliant with regulatory standards, so you need to know your cloud is up to the challenge. GreenLake Central helps you easily identify and mitigate any risks thanks to up-to-date KPIs and regulatory controls, ensuring you remain completely compliant with GDPR, PCI, and HIPAA standards so you’re always ready for audit.
HPE GreenLake Central is the perfect platform to provide all the tools IT teams need to optimise their hybrid cloud via a single interface, particularly in the event of an unexpected crisis. Generally available as of this month, GreenLake Central is provided at no additional cost to GreenLake customers, and is a huge leap forward for HPE’s ambition to deliver its entire portfolio as a service by 2022.
IT Corporation is a leading HPE partner and GreenLake specialist. If you would like to learn more about HPE GreenLake or HPE GreenLake Central, please contact us.