Discover HPE HP Enterprise has expanded its GreenLake subscription technology portfolio with a supercomputing-as-a-service offering that it claims will make artificial intelligence more accessible to enterprises.
HPE has also introduced a version of the private cloud for customers wanting to self-manage, as well as partnerships with AWS and Equinix to provide more hybrid cloud options.
Advertise at HPE’s explore In Las Vegas this week, GreenLake Additional Services adds a number of options to its IT-as-a-Service system for enterprise users.
One of them is HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs) – a cloud-based computing superservice that powers HPE’s machine learning stack. It is intended to facilitate the training and deployment of LLM and other generative AI models.
The infrastructure for this will be based on HPE’s Cray XD (formerly Apollo) systems with Nvidia H100 GPU accelerators. It will initially be hosted in a data center in Canada to capture the North American market, but is slated to be available to customers in Europe by early next year.
The software package for the service includes a file HPE Machine Learning Development Environment – A platform to quickly train generative AI models. It builds on technology HPE gained from its acquisition of Determined AI two years ago, as well as an AI model library that will include both open source and third-party proprietary models.
At rollout, HPE LLM is offering a pre-trained word and image processing trainer called Luminous, from a German AI partner called thousand alpha. Unlike ChatGPT, digital assistant technology is targeted more at industry and government types and less at end consumers. HPE said this has already been used by many organizations in healthcare and financial services, and in the legal profession as a digital assistant.
HPE GreenLake for LLMs is just the first in a series of industry-specific AI applications that the tech giant plans to launch. Although HPE does not disclose pricing, it is now accepting orders.
Not this kind of PCB
The IT giant 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 premises or on a co-location, but with an in-house IT team in control of management.
This should not be confused with HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise (PCE), which was announced last year as a fully managed service.
PCB is also limited, because it only supports virtual machines, while PCE also supports container services. “PCE is really targeting our business and commercial segments. PCB has a much lower entry point, but can certainly scale to serve very large environments as well,” said Brian Thompson, HPE Vice President of GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions.
In the meantime, PCE has expanded — additional hybrid and multicloud capabilities allow users to provision workloads on AWS Cloud, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It also enables the planned future ability to deploy the Red Hat OpenShift application platform.
“What our customers are looking for is the scaling of full multicloud hybrid cloud 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 also provisioning and managing workflows in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. [I can] until [manage] The consumption data back from that, because I want full visibility of the budget across the private and public cloud. “
HPE has also expanded its partnership with colo giant Equinix to allow the deployment of HPE’s private cloud systems (both PCE and PCB) in customer data centers around the world.
Other Discover announcements include that certain HPE software services will be available via the AWS Marketplace as well as via GreenLake—including HPE NonStop Development Environment and HPE Fraud Risk Management—while HPE GreenLake Backup and Recovery is gaining support for Amazon RDS and Amazon EKS Anywhere.
HPE also announced that the OpsRamp AIOps platform is available as a SaaS offering via GreenLake, after closing the OpsRamp acquisition earlier this year. This provides customers with AI-driven operations for multi-vendor, multi-cloud IT environments.
Then there’s HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation — a pay-per-use solution built on pre-configured and tested HPE cloud modules that promises a low-cost solution for running a VMware environment, according to HPE.
The IT giant has been eager to dispel the notion that GreenLake is an attempt to bypass its resale channel.
“We see these partners as important in enabling hybrid cloud operations,” said CTO Fidelma Russo. “A lot of customers have their own preferred partners, and they serve customers that we can’t reach as well — customers who have made other choices.” ®
“Reader. Infuriatingly humble coffee enthusiast. Future teen idol. Tv nerd. Explorer. Organizer. Twitter aficionado. Evil music fanatic.”