HPE Wins Blockbuster GreenLake VMware Cloud Foundation Deal

‘The cherry on top of the sundae (for Porsche) was GreenLake, which really enabled them to move to a new economic model and shift their resources to do application development,’ says HPE Vice President of Marketing Paul Miller. ‘It is all about getting them the right mix of technologies that allows them to move quicker with the applications they are developing.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has won a blockbuster HPE GreenLake VMware Cloud Foundation deal on Synergy with Porsche Holding Salzburg’s in-house IT service provider, Porsche Informatik.

The deal, aimed at building a next-generation digital foundation for Porsche, represents one of the biggest GreenLake VMware Cloud Foundation deals since the new HPE private cloud as a service pay-per-use offering was unveiled in August.

Porsche Informatik said the HPE GreenLake rollout began in January after six months of comparing market offerings. The deal is part of an ambitious Porsche charge to build a new digital foundation for a global network of Porsche dealers and 30,000 Porsche Holding Salzburg employees.

Since deploying the GreenLake VMware Cloud Foundation service in January, Porsche said it has already seen improved application performance and decreased data center costs. The initial roll out included eight HPE Synergy 12000 Frame composable infrastructure systems with 38 HPE Synergy 480 Gen 10 servers.

It also includes a virtual desktop infrastructure with an additional eight HPE Synergy 12000 Frame systems with 36 HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 systems with dedicated NVIDIA graphic processors.

The big HPE win comes with the Cloud Foundation infrastructure battle between HPE and Dell Technologies, which owns VMware, heating up.

Key to HPE beating out competitors in the Porsche deal was the tight integration between Synergy and HPE VMware Cloud Foundation which has provided seamless hybrid cloud applications experience across both virtual containers and bare metal servers with agility, flexibility and simplicity, said HPE Vice President of Global Marketing Paul Miller.

“The cherry on top of the sundae (for Porsche) was GreenLake, which really enabled them to move to a new economic model and shift their resources to do application development,” said Miller. “It is all about getting them the right mix of technologies that allows them to move quicker with the applications they are developing. They are modernizing what they are giving to their end users and developers.”

The HPE GreenLake VMware Cloud Foundation offering has provided Porsche with a “true end-to-end virtual compute pool of resources with compute, storage and fabric,” said Miller.

That composable pool of compute, storage and networking resoures – which is connected to vSAN – is HPE’s secret sauce, said Miller. “This is all tightly integrated with VMware vSAN to provide a highly scalable pool of storage to those environments -all interconnected with our virtual fabric,” he said.

The DevOps capabilities of the GreenLake Synergy pay per use offering with the ability to quickly spin up the exact compute,storage and networking resources they need was critical for Porsche, said Miller.

“There’s no more over-provisioning or getting what you get because it is a set of pre-defined ratios of compute storage and network,” said Miller. “What they really like about it is either through the GUI or command line interface they can provision specifically what they need for their specific application development and the roll-out of that to their dealerships.”

Another big benefit for Porsche is the ability to provide VMware virtual machines (VMs) on a pay per use basis. That ability to provide customers with VM pricing granularity in a composable pay per use model is an economic game changer that is unmatched by competitors, said Miller. “Porsche is only paying for the VMs they use when they use them,” he said. “The economics of this just blows the competition away…We monitor and bill on the exact VMs and storage they use.”

Miller said the pay per use model combined with Synergy has provided HPE with an unbeatable combination. “When I look at people trying to do these deals with non composable infrastructure, they are trying to deliver a cloud like experience with traditional infrastructure,” he said. “That’s just a heavy lift…Looking across the competition they fall down on the granularity of pay per use, they lack the capability to do the managed services with multiple applications, and they lack a truly modern infrastructure. When we go in we hit the competition on all three of those.”

The call to action for HPE partners with HPE GreenLake and VMware Cloud Foundation is to take to their customers a “better economic story” with a proven hybrid cloud environment, said Miller. “For customers that have VMware and other applications we can GreenLake those other applications as well,” said Miller. “Partners can go into a customer, land and expand and grow their annuity stream with every customer they have.”

Dan Molina, chief technology officer for Nth Generation, San Diego, one of HPE’s top enterprise partners, said the Porsche win is one more sign that customers see the “value of the HPE compute platform combined with the leading private cloud solution from VMware with consumption based IT convenience.”

Nth Generation this week is hosting its 19th annual symposium which features Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and chief technology officer of VMware; Keerti Melkote, founder of Aruba, an HPE company, and president of HPE’s Intelligent Edge business, and David Twohy, vice president of Pointnext Sales for North America for HPE.

Molina said he sees strong momentum with the HPE GreenLake VMware Cloud Foundation service. “GreenLake Synergy composable infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundation along with the ability to pay for what you use is an unbelievable combination,” he said.

Molina commended VMware for continuing to act as an independent company developing a strong ecosystem with partners like HPE. “This is another proofpoint that VMware is acting independently,” he said.