HPE and Digital Realty unveil partnership to deliver the cloud experience with colocation

By Scott Thomson, HPE Worldwide Partner Development Manager, HPE GreenLake with colocation and Frank Sancho, Senior Director in the Service Provider Strategy and Market Segment group at Digital Realty.

HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform and a colocation strategy are deeply synergistic, each strengthening the other. Now HPE and global datacenter provider Digital Realty have teamed up to help you tap into the benefits with an integrated experience.

Businesses everywhere are facing the challenges of data gravity as they are working to transform how they create and deliver value for their customers. These challenges are forcing companies to adapt their IT architectures toward a decentralized model which leverages colocation to solve the challenges of global coverage and capacity and to gain proximity to centers of data exchange and digital ecosystems.

As colocation and data-centric architectures continue to gain traction, there's increasing awareness, too, of a move that can hugely amplify its benefits. Companies are finding that by combining colocation with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, they can unlock the full potential of the strategy with some truly powerful synergies. HPE GreenLake platform brings the cloud experience to your colo estate; it's self-service, pay-per-use, easy to scale up or down, and managed for you by HPE.

We’ll delve into the synergies in a moment, but first we want to share some exciting news that HPE just announced today (See the press release: HPE GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud Platform Delivers Greater Choice and Simplicity with Unified Experience, New Cloud Services, and Expanded Partner Ecosystem.) HPE is partnering with Digital Realty, one of the largest global colocation facility providers, to securely host and manage HPE GreenLake cloud services for customers in Digital Realty’s facilities. "Customers benefit from one contract agreement and invoice, from design to support, with pre-configured solutions and one integrated service management process – speeding up time to value and innovation."

Let's unpack that a little. HPE's partnership with Digital Realty brings you:

A vast choice of locations. Digital Realty operates PlatformDIGITAL, a global platform of more than 280 data centers across 24 countries. The company has impressive strength in EMEA, where it is the market leader. The platform gives you exceptional adjacency to other businesses as well as public cloud providers. In addition, Digital Realty is currently expanding into Africa and other emerging markets.

One contract agreement and invoice, from design to support. There's a very significant reduction in complexity here, particularly for larger organizations. Working with a partnership relieves you of the burden of negotiating and managing separate agreements with two vendors. It gives you what we like to call “the Power of One.”

Consider also the upfront costs of designing and implementing your move to colocation; companies often hire consultants to help with this. With HPE Green Lake platform, that consultancy expertise is baked in with our data center technology services team as well as the expertise that Digital Realty brings to the table.

This can greatly smooth your transition to a colo arrangement, from the logistics perspective. But don't forget, HPE GreenLake platform also helps from the financial perspective. You can minimize non-recurring, upfront costs with the pay-as-you-go cloud services model. Your payments for the infrastructure and services provided under the HPE GreenLake platform, as well as the colocation services, are combined in a single monthly invoice.

Integrated service management. While a commonly cited motive for moving to a colocation is that it “gets you out of the data center business,” that’s perhaps not entirely accurate, at least with colocation alone. It simplifies your “data center business,” certainly, but ultimately you still have to think about capacity planning, as well as managing your infrastructure and solutions.

Working closely with Digital Realty, HPE’s data center technology services team, project management team and account support management team take on that complexity on your behalf, delivering a single-service experience. The partners can help you with capacity planning, as regards both your infrastructure requirements and your facilities requirements. HPE can easily flex the design-to-support services up or down, depending on your needs. And if you choose, we can monitor, operate and optimize your infrastructure and applications end-to-end through HPE GreenLake Management Services.

Cloud services and colocation: Better together

Now that we've covered the news headlines, let's circle back to the big-picture reasons why you should be thinking about HPE GreenLake platform and colocation with Digital Realty in the first place. Here are some of the ways they reinforce and strengthen each other:

Advanced workload architecture. HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform offers a huge range of cloud services . Our portfolio includes solutions for large, mission-critical workloads, such as HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA, as well as offerings for specific verticals such as our electronic health records solution. We can help you deliver fast results with high-performance compute, machine learning, containers, big data and many other initiatives.

Digital Realty provides workload-centric and industry-centric workload architectures. When a workload lands through HPE GreenLake platform, Digital Realty customizes and optimizes the network and the space for that workload.

Security. HPE GreenLake platform protects your infrastructure, workloads and data with silicon-to-cloud security. Digital Realty’s physical security capabilities are the perfect complement, with facilities protected by 24x7 security staff and advanced security protocols to prevent unauthorized access.

Sustainability. HPE GreenLake platform gives you access to the cutting-edge energy efficiencies of HPE equipment. In addition, our advanced metering technologies enable you to align your consumption of IT resources closely with your business needs, so you eliminate much of the over-provisioning and associated energy waste in traditional IT operations.

Digital Realty has achieved 100% renewable energy coverage for its US and European colocation portfolios. The company has exceeded its global colocation PUE reduction goal of 10% by 2022. As the first data center operator of this size and global reach to join the Science Based Targets Initiative, Digital Realty has committed to reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions (direct and indirect company emissions) by area by 68% and Scope emissions (indirect emissions in the value chain) by area by 24% by 2030.

If it’s true that good things come in pairs, then it’s definitely a good thing for our customers that HPE and Digital Realty have paired up to offer a truly game-changing service.

Learn more about PlatformDIGITAL® and HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.