Dan2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
Heard about GreenLake? Where have you been?
It’s all happening, NonStop!
NonStop Insider
Adrian
This past month you may have seen many stories written about HPE, GreenLake and yes, NonStop. From the enthusiastic support coming from the NonStop product managers to the accelerated drive in support of GreenLake coming from the NonStop EMEA team (a big thanks to Neil Davis for this) these stories are being backed up by NonStop users who are showing their support for this program. Did you happen to catch the Press Release of March 22, 2022, HPE GreenLake selected by Worldline to modernize mission-critical payments:
“The HPE GreenLake platform solution leverages HPE NonStop systems, which are ideally suited to support payment transactions with trusted, reliable, 100% fault-tolerant capabilities required for mission critical environments.
“The solution was identified as the best cloud service to support Worldline’s mission critical business with the agility and flexibility to deliver an accelerated time-to-market for new applications and services.”
Surprised to read this? But wait, there is much more and there were additional stories that possibly caught the attention of the NonStop community! Did you happen to catch the March 22, 2022, webinar on GreenLake that featured HPE CEO Antonio Neri? It was once said that GreenLake wasn’t a program that the NonStop community should pay all that much attention to, but events have overtaken those early predictions.
There is no escaping that GreenLake will prove to be an option for many NonStop users starting with those who have a major commitment to HPE, have major investments in NonStop systems, or are giving serious consideration to moving away from CapEx (capital expenditures) to OpEx (operating expenses) model.
As for the stories, we can start with the first and it comes directly from HPE.
This press release, HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform delivers greater choice and simplicity with unified experience, new cloud services, and expanded partner ecosystem focused on news about new product offerings being added to GreenLake. However there were a couple of statements that caught my attention particularly as they pertain to the organization where NonStop resides, HPC & MCS:
HPE GreenLake for High Performance Computing
HPE is further enhancing its HPE GreenLake for High Performance Computing offerings, making it more accessible for any enterprise to adopt the technology, by adding new, purpose-built HPC capabilities. The new capabilities quickly tackle the most demanding compute and data-intensive workloads, to power AI and ML initiatives, and speed time to insight. These also include lower entry points to HPC, with a smaller configuration of 10 nodes, to test workloads and scale as needed. New capabilities include:
Expanded GPU capabilities that will integrate with the new addition of HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 system to accelerate compute and advance data-intensive projects using the NVIDIA A100, A40, and A30 Tensor Core GPUs in increments of 2-4-8 accelerators. Additionally, the new service will feature the NVIDIA NVLink for a seamless, high-speed connection between GPUs to work together as a single robust accelerator.
HPE Slingshot, the world’s only high-performance Ethernet fabric designed for HPC and AI solutions, to deliver high-performance networking to address demands for higher speed and congestion control in larger data-intensive and AI workloads.
Far be it for me to put words into the mouths of NonStop development but in a world where data and analysis go hand in hand will we see Slingshot provide the key fabric connections needed by NonStop that can then connect with HPC such that data created on NonStop can be analyzed in real time on HPC /Apollo adjacent processors? Might happen, and all it would take to kick this off is a commitment coming from a NonStop users. Will you be the first to step forward and participate for the benefit of the whole community?
When it comes to the second reference to GreenLake it was the reposting of a post by late Karen Copeland to the HPE Community blog in the April 2022 issue of The Connection:
With GreenLake and HPE NonStop customers can leverage cloud services in part or in full.
Yes, you can continue to rely on HPE to deliver new products dockside, as and when you need them, but now you have the option of acquiring the latest products as a service. Our customers can also choose to do both if that better meets their business demands. As the most recent HPE GreenLake campaign highlighted:
“There’s no need to choose between keeping your IT where it is or moving it all to the cloud. With HPE GreenLake you can do both and have the cloud come to you! Literally, you can stay AND go at the same time.”
In a March 16, 2021 vendor rating of HPE by Gartner, there was no ambiguity as Gartner rewarded us with an overall rating of “Positive.” When it came to addressing GreenLake specifically, Gartner wrote:
“HPE’s flagship platform-oriented solution, HPE GreenLake, is a consumption-based, as-a-service model, and the goal is to deliver, manage and service the entire HPE portfolio by 2022.
“HPE GreenLake is key to HPE’s strategy as it offers a full suite of as-a-service offerings. Among the services are private cloud, compute, containers, virtual machines, managed cloud services, SAP HANA, data protection, big data, networking, storage, machine learning, VDI, databases, HPC, governance and management.”
Coming at a time when HPE was two years into our stated three year GreenLake program and, after only passing interest by the industry, we are now encouraged to see that there has been a marked upward trend in positive reviews. It has become a matter of record that we have understood the needs of today’s enterprises and of how we are catering to all three marketplaces – traditional, hybrid on-prem with cloud and multicloud deployments. Other vendors are being forced into playing catch up.
You can read this article on the HPE Community blog or simply turn to the latest issue of The Connection. Either way, both links will take you to the story. And before leaving this reference to GreenLake, NonStop and the NonStop team we have to recognize all the work that Karen Copeland did in support of the community even as we continue to be deeply saddened by the loss of a true NonStop community supporter.
One final note; please make sure you return to the HPE Community blog with some regularity as you may be surprised to read something new for NonStop for the very first time.
Yet one more story about GreenLake appeared in the same March – April 2022 issue of The Connection and it was one I was able to write just as the submission deadline loomed large. Whereas the article by Karen was clearly objective my approach was totally subjective, but together they provide further clarity on the value proposition of GreenLake in select markets:
There’s a whirlwind almost upon us! Will these winds drive NonStop even closer to mainstream HPE?
Curiosity can only take you so far. Today, the impact of clouds is hard to miss. They are the center of attention for almost everyone in IT and their value to business is hard to ignore, but it is a complicated topic and one that brings out widely differing opinions from almost every IT professional with whom you care to begin a conversation. “The winds of change are always present,” said Karen Copeland, Manager, HPE NonStop Product Management, in her post to the HPE blog, Leverage cloud services in part or in full with HPE GreenLake and HPE NonStop.
“There are times when external forces combined with the company’s overall direction determine the course of NonStop. When these winds sweep across the entire company, it affects the course of NonStop.”
“HPE’s product strategy has changed remarkably over the past five years. While it still sells hardware appliances, both directly and through its channel partners, the company is now more focused on GreenLake – it’s as a service, consumption-based product,” said Jane McCallion in an October 1, 2021, post to ITPro, Everything you need to know about HPE.
“In short, GreenLake promises to bring a cloud-like experience to an on-premises environment, with customers only paying for what they are currently using irrespective of how much hardware they actually have in place,” McCallion said. “Neri has said GreenLake is the future of HPE, stating in 2021 that ‘this will be our leading product, leading offer, our leading experience, where everything else underneath is part of that experience’ – everything else, in this case, being HPE’s traditional hardware offerings.”
If you are still unaware of the importance to HPE of the GreenLake program or as yet haven’t made up your mind about its relevance to your NonStop environment, then perhaps reading these latest stories may go a long way to convincing you that indeed it really is all now happening and it’s happening, NonStop.
