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Have you tried turning server cores off and on again? HPE wants to do it for you from GreenLake

For those times when you run software on a box bigger than your license

HPE Discover HPE has given its GreenLake cloud the power to control the numbers of cores that are active on servers and pay for usage depending on the number of cores a customer presses into service.

The new service, dubbed “Silicon on-demand”, only works with Intel-powered boxes and uses technology that Chipzilla and HPE cooked up together and aren’t sharing with others.

Usage-based consumption is one reason HPE thinks this is a good idea. Another is compliance with core-based licensing: HPE execs told The Register they’re aware that some customers occasionally run workloads on machines that pack more cores than they’ve paid to use. Turning cores on or off therefore means users aren’t tied to particular servers and won’t have to pay more for software.

HPE’s GreenLake Central self-service is required to use the service. The Register has asked the company to detail whether the service only applies to specific CPUs and can be applied to on-prem boxes. We will update this story if the company provides useful detail.

Silicon on-demand was one of several announcements revealed today at HPE’s “Discover” gabfest. Items that may interest include:

  • “Lighthouse”, a new platform-as-a-service that lets users spawn new workloads using templates suited to an application’s particular needs, and to do so across multiple clouds;
  • “Aurora”, a zero-trust security service that HPE told The Register “automatically and continuously verifies the integrity of the hardware, firmware, operating systems, platforms, and workloads, including security workloads”;
  • “Compute Cloud Console”, a service that promises to offer a view of all an organisation’s compute resources, no matter where they reside, and to automate routine tasks. And yes, you may not be alone in thinking that sounds a lot like OpenView dragged into the 2020s;
  • An HPI desktop-as-a-service product using tech from Nutanix, Nvidia and Citrix;
  • Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure as a service, naturally driven by GreenLake. As Azure Stack is itself a hybrid cloud affair, and GreenLake is SaaS, there’s a whole lot of cloud in this one.

HPE has also created new services that blend SaaS and PaaS by making it possible to quickly create new environments for workloads including SAP, Veeam, analytics, high-performance computing and more.

Company execs who explained this all to The Register also suggested HPE’s GreenLake has momentum and quoted total contract sales of $4.8bn and around 1,200 paying customers as the proof of the pudding. By contrast, HPE’s Q2 2021 revenue was $6.7 billion. ®

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