Supercomputing AI service among HPE's freshest GreenLake fare

HPE Discover HP Enterprise has extended its GreenLake subscription-based technology portfolio with a supercomputing-as-a-service offering it claims will make AI more accessible to enterprises.

HPE also pushed out a version of its private cloud for customers wanting to self-manage, plus partnerships with AWS and Equinix to provide more hybrid cloud options.

Announced at HPE's Discover event in Las Vegas this week, the extra GreenLake services add a number of options into the IT-as-a-service scheme for enterprise users.

One of these is HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs) – a cloud-based supercomputing service running HPE's machine learning stack. It's intended to make it easier to train and deploy LLMs and other generative AI models.

Infrastructure for this will be based on HPE's Cray XD (formerly Apollo) systems with Nvidia H100 GPU accelerators. They'll initially be hosted at a datacenter in Canada to capture the North American market, but availability for customers in Europe is planned by early next year.

The software stack for the service includes the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment – a platform to train generative AI models rapidly. It's based on technology HPE gained from its acquisition of Determined AI a couple of years ago, plus an AI model library that will include both open source and proprietary third party models.

At rollout, HPE is offering a pre-trained LLM for text and image processing called Luminous, from a German AI partner called Aleph Alpha. Unlike ChatGPT, the digital assistant tech is aimed more at industry and government types and less at end consumers. This has already been used by various organizations in healthcare and financial services, and in the legal profession as a digital assistant, HPE said.

HPE GreenLake for LLMs is just the first in a series of domain-specific AI applications that the tech behemoth plans to launch. Although HPE is not disclosing pricing, it is accepting orders now.

Not that kind of PCB

The IT titan is also expanding its private cloud portfolio with HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition (PCB). This is a self-managed private cloud that can be deployed on-prem or at a colocation site, but with the in-house IT team in control of the management.

This is not to be confused with HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise (PCE), which was announced last year as a fully managed service.

PCB is also limited, in that it only supports virtual machines, while PCE also supports container services. "PCE is really targeted at our enterprise and commercial segments. PCB has a much lower entry point, but can certainly scale up to serve very large environments as well," said HPE's VP for GreenLake Cloud Service Solutions, Bryan Thompson.

PCE, meanwhile, has been extended – additional hybrid and multicloud capabilities let users provision workloads onto AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure clouds. They also enable a planned future ability to deploy the Red Hat OpenShift application platform.

"What our customers are seeking is extending full hybrid cloud multicloud provisioning within that private cloud experience," Thompson explained.

"So the same role-based access controls, the same budget constraints that I put on my private cloud users, I can now extend that to where they can also provision and manage workflows in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. [I can] even [manage] the consumption data from that coming back, because I want full budget visibility across both private and public cloud."

HPE has also expanded its partnership with colo giant Equinix to allow pre-provisioned HPE private cloud systems (both PCE and PCB) to be deployed into its datacenters for customers around the world.

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Other Discover announcements include that some of HPE's software services will be available via the AWS Marketplace as well as via GreenLake – including the HPE NonStop Development Environment and HPE Fraud Risk Management – while HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery gains support for Amazon RDS and Amazon EKS Anywhere.

HPE also announced that the OpsRamp AIOps platform is available as a SaaS offering via GreenLake, following the closure of the OpsRamp acquisition earlier this year. This provides customers with AI-driven operations for multi-vendor and multicloud IT environments.

Then there's HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation – a pay-per-use solution built around pre-configured and tested HPE cloud modules, which promises a lower-cost solution for running a VMware environment, according to HPE.

The IT giant was keen to dispel the notion that GreenLake is an attempt to bypass its reseller channel.

"We see those partners as critical in enabling hybrid cloud operations. Many customers have their favorite partners, and they serve customers that we really can't reach as well – customers who've made other choices," said CTO Fidelma Russo. ®