Author: Danielle Palmer

Now more than ever, you need to move faster and adapt quickly to change. HPE GreenLake brings the cloud experience to apps and data everywhere, enabling you to adopt transformative technology faster and simplify your operations. HPE GreenLake delivers public cloud services and infrastructure as-a-service for your workloads – on premises, fully managed in a pay-per-use model at the edge, in co-locations, and in your data center. Now you can bring cloud speed, agility, and an as a service model to where your apps and data are today. Transform the way you do business with one experience and one operating model across your distributed clouds, for apps and data at the edge, in co-locations and in your data center.

HPE GreenLake is HPE’s pay-per-use platform that delivers cloud services to wherever your apps and data live – from edge to colocation to data center. It’s quick and easy to scale up or down as your needs change. HPE GreenLake is a powerful solution, right-sized to make your growing business faster and more agile while saving you money.

As-A-Service – Everywhere

If you’re not familiar with a consumption-based IT model, let me explain a bit more about how HPE GreenLake works. HPE cloud services cover a huge range of workloads, including compute, networking, storage, SAP HANA, virtual desktop infrastructure, VMs, and a lot more, and they can deliver the infrastructure in as few as 14 days. HPE metering technologies ensure that you pay only for the resources you consume, and a built-in buffer capacity enables you to handle both steady growth and unexpected increases in demand. HPE GreenLake also takes care of the operational side for you.

You also get HPE GreenLake Central, a self-service platform that centralises operations and insights across your entire estate – cloud as well as on-premises – giving you a unified view of usage, cost performance, compliance and more.

4 Key Advantages Of as-a-Service Infrastructure 

Consider what this cloud services model could mean for your growing business. You can:

• Do more while spending less upfront. HPE GreenLake gives you exceptional financial flexibility. You can sidestep big upfront expenditures, pay on a monthly bill, and easily expand capacity when you need it.
• Simplify IT purchasing decisions and move faster. Every purchase counts, in a big way. With HPE GreenLake cloud services and MJ Flood Technology, you can access the latest technologies quickly and with minimum risk. And when you’re ready to make your move, you can bypass the all-too-familiar purchasing and deployment delays. You can get new services pushed out to your end users faster.
• Eliminate the management burden. Your teams will no longer have to strain to keep up with the latest knowledge for a vast range of new technologies. With the management services that are wrapped into every HPE GreenLake solution, you can free up talent to accelerate what’s next for customers. You can focus on expanding your business and taking care of your team/
• Unlock the power of colocation. Many organizations prefer not to host a data center on their own premises – they prefer to get out of the business of managing infrastructure. Instead, they opt for a colocation facility so that their teams can focus more on business initiatives. HPE GreenLake can bring all of the agility and flexibility of cloud to this type of IT footprint.

Learn more about HPE Greenlake – https://mjf.ie/partners/hpe-greenlake/ 

These are unpredictable times. But that does not mean your business can be put on hold. On the contrary, now is the exact right time to start or accelerate digital transformation. In fact, a recent survey of more than 3,600 small and midsized businesses shows that 51% of SMBs have stepped up their digital transformation investments—and digital transformation is prominent in the plans of 22% of SMBs who report that current crisis has amplified their sense of urgency for an organisation-wide digital transformation.

So you are definitely not alone as you look for ways to power recovery and future growth. To do that, you need intelligent infrastructure to unlock scale through innovation and customer excellence. Because let’s face it, no matter the size of your business, the future belongs to those who use data to differentiate, who understand customers better than anyone else—and who can innovate boldly and quickly.

One piece of the digital transformation puzzle is the need to deploy foundational infrastructure technology that can help you create new market opportunities—faster, cheaper, and more effectively. The way forward? It starts with second-generation hyper-converged infrastructure – HCI 2.0.

First, a brief history of hyper-converged infrastructure

HCI combines server hardware and locally attached storage resources with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure. It consists of separate servers, networks, and storage arrays that together enable organizations to take advantage of cloud-like simplicity and scale. You can think about it as an all-in-one appliance that is easy to install and operate.

The first generation of HCI was designed for key jobs and workloads such as data storage, application virtualisation, and application development. The technology allowed businesses to be agile with easily expandable compute, storage and networking resources bundled into a single node. So scaling up infrastructure for things like virtualisation or app development meant just adding another node – and the use of industry-standard hardware reduced over-provisioning and lowered costs.

Now it’s time to take hyper converged even further, faster

In many IT environments today, data is stored and process away from the data center and at the edge. Whether this is surveillance video data for retailers or sensory tags at a manufacturing site, the ability to collect, transcribe, and act on data in real time requires a next-level type of solution. At a time when data drives growth, HPE HCI 2.0 was developed to meet the needs of businesses that need to scale and meet their IT demands today and also 3-to-5 years down the road.

HCI 2.0, exemplified by HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, brings together the best of converged and hyper-converged architectures on a flexible platform with independent scaling of compute and storage. It overcomes the limitations and drawbacks of first-generation HCI with several key innovations.

By disaggregating compute and storage resources, HCI 2.0 makes it possible to scale each independently to maximise efficiency. Shared storage that eliminates the network traffic across nodes means low-latency performance with fewer bottlenecks. What’s more, always-on data reduction eliminates tuning and improves performance, while keeping storage dense. And business continuity is assured through advanced replication for multi-site disaster recovery.

Adding intelligence to hyper-converged

HCI 2.0 incorporates HPE InfoSight monitoring tools that use artificial intelligence to predict and prevent disruptions and provide cross-stack analytics that improve application performance and optimise resource use. The simplicity of HCI and the flexibility of a three-tier architecture are now combined with intelligence. This means your organisation can enjoy the benefits of cloud-like architectures without any compromise on performance, availability, or scale.

Put HCI 2.0 to work for your organisation

If your business is in search of:

• Faster time to market—with new opportunities to develop new products and services
• Faster, better user experience—with reduced complexity in IT operations with not tradeoffs or compromises
• Lower costs—derived from using time and skills more efficiently
• Time savings—as businesses respond more quickly and effectively to changing conditions by supporting rapid, no-fuss resource
• Increased productivity—letting predictive analytics help streamline IT operations

Then HCI 2.0 might be the solution for you—one that brings:

• Simple intelligence—automated and on demand, using predictive analytics to quickly diagnose performance problems and identify the root cause so that you don’t have to
• Absolute resilience—designed for 9999% availability of resources, so that even three simultaneous drive failures will not bring the system down
• Efficient scalability—grow compute and storage independently, extended across a hybrid cloud, with industry-leading data efficiency
• Built-in speed—an install time of 15 minutes from rack to apps plus easy administration from one single dashboard

Power into the future

If you’re a small business, consider how HPE HCI 2.0 can help you accelerate scale through innovation—completely free from vendor lock in and free from mundane frustrations. That leaves you with more time to better focus on innovation and how to scale and grow.

If you’re a midsized business, look to HPE HCI 2.0 to deliver meaningful business value and drive greater efficiencies through smoother, reliable IT processes. The stress meter goes down for you too, knowing you have made a smart investment that can improve ROI.

Learn more about our HPE solutions – https://mjf.ie/solution/infrastructure-solutions/