Greenlake is a subscription service offered by HPE which allows organisations to pay for HPE infrastructure (servers, storage, etc) that they are using under a consumption-based model.
Instead of a large capital outlay at the beginning of the infrastructure cycle, customers pay a manageable (and, for finance teams, more palatable) monthly fee over a three of five year contract. The fee is based on a minimal commitment agreed in advance, however the hardware that is supplied always has additional capacity to support growth. In addition, there is built in flexibility in the contract to both add extra capacity (servers, storage) which HPE claim to be able to deliver and install within 4 weeks.
Greenlake is available for a variety of hardware including:
Greenlake is a total solution and incorporates software such as
Once the hardware and software has been ratified and agreed, HPE’s professional service division will arrange the delivery and installation at the customer’s location (such as office or colo data centre) including racking/railing/connectivity of cables/power on testing.
With the infrastructure installed and operational, Greenlake’s metering team will make contact to install their proprietory metering suite of PowerShell scripts that continually monitor the utilisation of the infrastructure. This is done to ensure:
- The infrastructure deployed is not at or above 80% utilisation (in which case, HPE will seek to flex the contract in order to provide more capacity be it servers or storage)
- The monthly subscription fee is accurate for the utilisation by the workloads (such as virtual machines) running on the platform. The metering suite continuously monitors the installation based on a wide choice of metrics, such as consumption per server, per gigabyte, per container node or per VM.
Greenlake further provides a suite of online management portals:
- Greenlake Central – This provides a centralised viewpoint of consumption
- Compute Ops – This is used to monitor the health of the servers.
- Infosight – This is used to monitor the health of HPE Nimble/Alletra storage.
It is important to point out that at the end of the contract, HPE still owns all of the hardware provided under the Greenlake contract, and will seek to collect it for environmentally responsible recycling.