By HPE and OnX Canada
Public cloud promises enterprises countless rewards such as agility, simplified management, scale and, of course, reduced capital costs. But moving workloads off premise is not without risks around data integrity, application performance, cascading fees and loss of control.
In fact, data gravity, latency, application dependency and compliance demands keep most apps and data — around 70 per cent according to IDC reports — tethered to on-premises data centers or colocation facilities, denying many of the benefits of the cloud.
Those strict requirements no longer eliminate the opportunity to embrace a cloud model, according to Ron Nemecek, business alliance manager at OnX Canada. Nemecek points to HPE GreenLake, a consumption-based IT service, as a way that organizations can bring a cloud-like experience and benefits to on-premises and edge infrastructures.
“HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you,” Nemecek said during a recent company podcast. The solution sees HPE providing hardware infrastructure on customer premises on a pay-per-use basis. It allows businesses to consume as they need, to self-service for application and workload infrastructure, and to rapidly scale up or down, he added.
“It’s about accelerating digital transformation for our customers, transforming workloads to the cost-effective placement in your cloud strategy.”
Most importantly, Nemecek added, HPE GreenLake can be managed for customers by the team at OnX.
While many of HPE GreenLake’s core services — metering, usage reporting, forecasting, trend analysis and lifecycle management — are available via GreenLake central, HPEs management console, the addition of professional services is an important part of organizations making the most of their investment.
The need for professional services
As with any cloud-type experience, IT professionals need to understand both what the cloud is, what it is not, and its effect on interdependent workloads, said Stephen (Steve) Harris, senior director of professional services at OnX Canada.
After all, the cloud, he pointed out, is not a technology, but a business model; a consumption-based one allowing for automation of IT components, centralized management and scalability to better align IT with business needs.
“That’s where (HPE) GreenLake is so, so powerful. It allows you to have the benefits of a cloud model with the performance and control of an on-premises environment.”
But, through his years dealing with customers, Harris recognizes the important role professional services such as workload migration assessments plays. “In order to be ready for any environment at all, you need to understand what your applications are doing in the background,” he said.
“That’s true whether it’s a public cloud environment, as well as a hybrid or an HPE GreenLake environment.” Not every workload is cost-effective to migrate to cloud, and a workload migration assessment is essential to determining that — ultimately saving money and headaches.
Managing multiple environments — public cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure — is yet another IT challenge many organizations seek to avoid when adopting any new platform. It’s a challenge, Harris says, that is easily overcome by GreenLake Central, the platform’s management console, offering a single pane of glass for both public cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
To ease IT migrations, whether to the cloud or HPE GreenLake, OnX has expanded its professional services to incorporate both, drawing on its Platinum partnership with HPE.
“The underlying technology is the same,” Harris noted. “It’s how it’s being applied, and I really have to take my hat off to HPE and how they’ve been innovative in the marketplace… providing that cloud-based consumption model for customers in their own data center, in a colocation data center, or in an OnX data center.”
Want to learn more? Find out how OnX Canada and HPE are working together drive innovation and growth in IT through HPE GreenLake here.
