New SaaS platform aims to bring shadow IT out of the shadows
Last week at HPE Discover, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise debuted HPE OneSphere, a first of its kind multi-cloud management solution designed to offer a unified experience across on-site private cloud platforms, the public cloud, and traditional infrastructure.
Through a SaaS portal, users are presented with a singular IT resource pool that can pull from both on and off premises clouds and traditional infrastructure, simplifying management for hybrid cloud environments. HPE OneSphere is designed to empower business executives, developers, and IT professionals to better manage their entire hybrid IT estate. It allows the consumers of IT, often developers, to self-provision. In the case of non-profit genomics research institute HudsonAlpha, this helps them “accomplish their research goals” and “bring innovation faster”. That’s according to Katreena Mullican, Senior IT Architect and certified ‘cloud whisperer’. Watch our interview with her above.
Although the concept of the cloud enables better abstraction than was possible in the past, it has also created increased demands on IT. In particular, environments using multiple cloud instances often face difficult configuration and deployment challenges, especially when multiple cloud platforms need to act in harmony. Using current platforms, it can be a burden for IT teams to collate information and IT spend across multiple platforms using traditional management tools. Having no clarity on your IT spend can often mean a shock for the CFO at the end of each quarter – or as HPE put it, “surprise OpEx”. HPE OneSphere is designed to solve this problem by providing a unified interface to streamline DevOps and provide deep analytical capabilities that would previously require custom coding.
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions believes the platform has what it takes to “bring shadow IT out of the shadows”. Watch our chat with him below.
HPE OneSphere is designed to simplify customers’ end-to-end digital transformation, making it easier to implement multi-cloud setups through a single management plane that provides real-time data into cost and utilisation of multiple cloud and on premises instances. This integrated approach is designed to aid businesses executives developing strategies, and it’s also a valuable approach for both developers and the IT professionals who will create, roll out, and maintain these applications regardless of what platform they are running on.
To help customers make the most of their cloud interfaces, HPE will also offer extended consulting capabilities. With its recent acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners, HPE is poised to offer the type of advice and support enterprise customers need to fully leverage modern cloud paradigms. CTP’s history in helping customers move to cloud-based operations and incorporate new technology, including Internet-of-Things devices and machine learning, will ensure customers are prepared to embrace all the new IT paradigms have to offer.
The HPE OneSphere pay-per-use pricing model works to complement HPE’s pay-per-use capacity model for customers’ on-site infrastructure. This pricing lets customers of all sizes take advantage of various cloud offerings from small single-site projects to cloud networks that span multiple locations. Customers will also find it easy to scale up their infrastructure and can deploy containers and bare metal servers anywhere in the world with just a few clicks. As Paul Miller, their VP of Marketing for Software Defined & Cloud explains in the video below, it aims to help users “build clouds faster”.
The primary goal of HPE OneSphere is to provide a simplified approach to hybrid IT management which enables companies to spend less time managing their resources and more time developing and deploying software. Speed is a goal as well, as OneSphere’s unified interface lets users avoid time-consuming configuration and testing across multiple platforms.
Another selling point is the ability to accelerate application development through its one-of-a-kind multi-tenant work space called Projects. These environments let developers access broad catalogues of templates, services, applications, and tools all designed with cloud operations in mind.
HPE OneSphere promises to optimise cost efficiency in an era when cloud computing is becoming more complex. By providing a straightforward overview of usage and aggregate costs associated with both on-site and public cloud deployments, executives will be better able to optimise their resources and ensure their spending is used as effectively as possible. By collating data from all resource spending sources, executives will gain insight into how day-to-day operations are proceeding, and self-service cost reporting enables real-time data analysis, providing a degree of flexibility impossible with other existing solutions.
Watch the rest of our videos from HPE Discover Madrid on this YouTube playlist
