Hewlett Packard Enterprise expands HPE GreenLake VDI cloud services and partnerships to meet growing demand for remote work

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced new HPE GreenLake cloud services and partnerships for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that support organizations’ expanding remote workforces and provide essential business continuity. The new HPE GreenLake for VDI cloud services provide organizations with a proven set of technologies to adapt to a rapidly growing remote employee population through simplified management, faster time to productivity, more security and control, and cost savings. The new cloud services also leverage technologies from key HPE partners including Citrix, Nutanix, NVIDIA, and VMware.

According to IDC, “Pre COVID-19, only 20% of organizations had at-home workers. But over half of organizations expect to have employees working from home at the end of 2020”. A recent study by Gartner also showed that almost half of employers now see remote working as part of their go-forward model, up from less than a third before the pandemic – and around 80% of employees would like to work remotely some of the time.

HPE provides industry-leading cloud services and solutions that empower organizations to re-think the way people work, including from home and on mobile devices, by delivering a secure, customized, productive, and exceptional user experience to employees. In April, HPE announced a series of VDI offerings that enable customers to adapt to a growing remote workforce, and today HPE is winning a significant number of new customers for VDI initiatives across a range of industries, including recently announced wins with Kern County and Petsure. Today’s announcement builds on this momentum, with the delivery of specialized VDI offerings to support specific roles and use cases, and expanded partnerships that provide complete solutions to customers.

With HPE GreenLake for VDI, customers can select the type of workers they want to support in their organization and the size of their remote workforce. Based on that, HPE offers customers the right mix of computers and devices, and delivers services in modules optimized for each user type, as a service. The new designed VDI configurations are optimized for each type of remote worker, including knowledge users, task users, power users, and engineering users, and the right configuration is priced, built, and shipped in predefined 100-300-500-1000 sizes. Customers are billed monthly based on usage, and can scale up or down as needed. This enables secure remote working optimized for all types of workers in an organization:

• Power users, such as application developers, who need more intensive use of office applications, have mid-level graphics requirements or multiple screens -now can have their applications delivered in a persistent or non-persistent model using HPE ProLiant servers or HPE Nimble Storage dHCI hyperconverged systems and NVIDIA GPUs coupled with NVIDIA Virtual PC software.
  
• Engineering workers, who are professionals with intensive graphics or data analysis requirements such as CAD/CAE users or financial traders, will now benefit from GPU-assisted compute and from storing data on high performance storage located close to compute resources to minimize latency, using HPE ProLiant servers or HPE Nimble Storage dHCI hyperconverged systems and NVIDIA GPUs coupled with NVIDIA Virtual Workstation software.
   
• Knowledge workers, with predominant use of office productivity applications and browsing, can be scalable to hundreds of thousands of users through using HPE ProLiant servers, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI or HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems.
  
• Task workers, who typically use a small number of low compute-intensive applications such as call center representatives, now can use HPE ProLiant servers or HPE Nimble Storage dHCI hyperconverged systems. 

Our clients are wrestling with the sudden move to working from home caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. “Beyond the initial measures that we all had to take, organizations are now thinking more strategically in the new normal post-pandemic working world, and asking for our help to shape what the future workplace looks like. With HPE GreenLake for VDI, we can deliver standardized, tested solutions as a service that improve security and productivity while reducing cost and simplifying management”.

Expanding HPE Ecosystem of Partners

HPE is expanding the way that customers can purchase HPE GreenLake for VDI through its ecosystem of partners. In addition to offering VDI from Citrix, HPE now can include VMware Horizon, as many customers have standardized on one or both, as well as NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) technology for the more demanding workloads. Customers can also choose to leverage the popular Nutanix hyperconverged (HCI) software to deliver VDI services with HPE GreenLake. Also available as part of the HPE ProLiant server family, HPE ProLiant DX powered by Nutanix software enables customers to build their private and hybrid clouds with simplified infrastructure management and the added consumption flexibility of HPE GreenLake.

“Work is no longer a place as large numbers of employees continue to work productively from anywhere – whether in their homes, public spaces and as needed from socially distanced offices. Regardless of where they happen to be, employees need secure and reliable access to the systems and applications they need to get work done, along with a consistent experience that minimizes distractions and interruptions so they can perform at their best,” said Liz Fuller, VP Alliance Marketing, Citrix. “HPE has chosen Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service as a leading solution to help customers get the best of both worlds in a flexible, pay-per-use and hybrid way of working with HPE GreenLake.”

“The appeal and even the necessity of VDI has strengthened across organizations everywhere due to the increased need to accommodate remote workers. We are proud to support these evolving requirements by partnering with HPE and enabling customers’ virtual desktop environments with VMware Horizon to be more intelligent – providing simplified management, more security, better cost efficiency and better user experience than ever before,” said Bharath Rangarajan, Vice President, Product Management, End-User Computing, VMware. “We look forward to helping organizations leverage innovative VDI solutions to meet even their most stringent, security-focused business requirements.”

Nutanix has helped power virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)-centric Digital Workspaces for thousands of organizations and millions of end users thanks to our innovative Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure software architecture delivering security, performance, reliability and flexibility,” said Tarkan Maner, Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. “Nutanix hybrid and multicloud solutions, in conjunction with HPE GreenLake, offer organizations complete choice in consumption and operating models enabling businesses to continue operations during the pandemic and beyond. Nutanix and HPE have seen a successful ramp of our partnership over the past year and look forward to tremendous growth ahead.”

“VDI solutions that enable graphics-intensive work for power users as well as creative and technical professionals are needed now more than ever as many employees work from home,” said Anne Hecht, Senior Director of Product Marketing for GPU Virtualization Software at NVIDIA. “HPE GreenLake VDI as a service supports NVIDIA vGPU to give users access to virtual desktops and workstations with the performance they need to work from anywhere.”

Furthermore, HPE’s ecosystem includes the leading system integrators who have chosen to implement their services using HPE GreenLake.  Partners such as Wipro and Accenture, offer their own advanced workplaces services leveraging HPE GreenLake. Today HPE also announced a partnership with Wipro to deliver hybrid cloud and VDI solutions as a service through HPE GreenLake.

HPE GreenLake Cloud Services provide customers with a powerful foundation to drive digital transformation through an elastic as a service platform that can run on-premises, at the edge, or in a colocation facility. HPE GreenLake combines the simplicity and agility of the cloud with the governance, compliance, and visibility that comes with hybrid IT. HPE GreenLake offers a range of cloud services that accelerate innovation, including cloud services for compute, container management, data protection, HPC, machine learning operations, networking, SAP HANA, and storage, VDI, and VMs. The HPE GreenLake Cloud Services business is rapidly growing with over $4 billion USD in total contract value, over 700 partners selling HPE GreenLake, and more than 1000 customers in all industry sectors and sizes including Fortune 500 companies.

Availability

The new capabilities from HPE and its ecosystem partners are available for sale as of December, 2020.