The complexity of today’s IT brings many challenges. IT organizations find themselves dealing with clustered applications, multiple data centers, public, private, and hybrid clouds, and applications with complex dependencies. Deploying and operating enterprise workloads across these varied environments is often a time-consuming, manual process, which is both inefficient and often fraught with errors.

You need a solution and approach that can orchestrate and automate your processes and ensure that all tasks happen efficiently and in the proper order. HPE GreenLake provides a solution for private clouds that enables savings in both time and money, elimination of errors, and construction of more predictable and reliable services.

The all-encompassing cloud

In the early days of cloud computing, private clouds promised the scalability, elasticity, and manageability of public clouds, combined with the security and control within on-premises datacenter environments. Providing a private cloud turned out to be harder than everyone expected. Some of the earliest private cloud implementations didn’t offer the same scalability, elasticity, and resilience characteristic of cloud environments. Fortunately, over time, vendor offerings improved.

While private clouds still retain their importance, they are now necessarily part of a broader discussion. The role of a private cloud is looked at more in terms of how it is implemented within a hybrid cloud strategy, taking into account the application it serves and the desired outcome. For instance, depending on the application, it could be cheaper to run a workload in a private cloud versus a public cloud (or vice versa).

Managing private cloud environments can be quite arduous, involving many repetitive tasks. These tasks might include sizing, provisioning and configuring resources like virtual machines (VMs), establishing VM clusters and load balancing, creating storage logical unit numbers (LUNs), invoking virtual networks, making the actual deployment and then monitoring and managing availability and performance. Although each of these processes is effective, they are inefficient and can lead to errors. These errors then require troubleshooting, which delays the workload's availability. They may also expose security vulnerabilities that can put the enterprise at risk.

With complete automation across the cloud environment, an organization eliminates these repetitive and manual processes for workload deployment and management. To achieve cloud automation, an IT team needs to use orchestration and automation tools that run on top of their virtualized environment. Orchestration enables an administrator to codify the various steps and processes involved with workload deployment and management, while automation invokes those steps without human intervention.

The HPE GreenLake for private cloud technical whitepaper describes the application blueprint capabilities inherent with HPE GreenLake that provides this automation for private clouds. The solution enables savings in both time and money, elimination of errors, and construction of more predictable and reliable services beyond bare virtual machines.