Colocation data centers, now more than ever, play a critical role in our digital economy. With HPE GreenLake for Colocation, you can bring all of the agility and velocity of public cloud to your co-located infrastructure.

Many companies find themselves unintentionally running their core data centers as a business – taking valuable resources away from their core business. Running a data center can be complex and capital intensive, requiring continuous investments in time and talent just to keep up with security, compliance, capacity and network demands. 

Your data center should become a strategic tool helping you drive business results. It’s no wonder that more and more companies are increasing their IT spend on edge and colocation datacenters vs. core data centers. In this post, I'll explore what’s behind this trend and ways you can leverage a new consumption model to capitalize on it.

A colleague of mine often starts his data center facilities management workshop by asking participants: “What do cloud and on-premises IT infrastructures have in common?" The answer he tells them is “THE DATACENTER of course!”  

We often think about THE CLOUD as this faraway place, in total isolation. Labeling it “off-premises” vs. “on-premises” helps support this idea. But today, proximity to anything and everything is the driving force behind where cloud service providers, enterprises and governments alike locate – or in many cases co-locate – their digital presence. In a typical colocation data center you can find infrastructure running cloud native, refactored and legacy applications side by side. Why is this happening? And more importantly, what are the implications for your business? 

Rise of the mega-hubs

When I think about colocation data centers, ancient trade routes come to mind, those vital arteries that carried people, ideas and goods. Along these trade routes, hubs would develop, bringing together buyers and sellers and entire ecosystems to facilitate trade – and, of course, local officials prepared to collect tariffs and taxes. These hubs became vibrant and powerful cities and civilizations that would shape our world. 

The evolution of the data center shows some fascinating parallels. At first, large private data centers, in isolation, became mini-hubs. With the advent of the Internet it was possible to interconnect them across digital highways. As a result, cross-connections and digital exchanges emerged, becoming fertile ground for mega hubs – what we call today colocation data centers. 

These mega-hubs are reshaping our world; they're at the center of the digital economy. Ideas, software-based goods, and data move through them. Data, converted into information with actionable insights, has become a highly valuable commodity; it’s quickly becoming the currency of the digital economy. Where else can cloud service providers, SaaS providers, Internet service providers, telcos and a vibrant ecosystem of enterprises – as well as the inevitable interests of government agencies – converge?  The global pandemic has only accelerated our awareness of and dependency on the digital economy. Hybrid or multi-cloud architectures have emerged as the prevailing IT operating model, bridging between mini- and mega-hubs. 

A new consumption model : the cloud that comes to you

Colocation data centers are uniquely positioned to facilitate the adoption of this new model. Customers are now demanding robust ecosystems, cloud adjacency and efficient, low-latency networks. Modern workloads demand secure, compliant, highly available and cost-optimized environments. Ask yourself: Are you prepared to meet these demands with your existing core data center alone? Bear in mind that companies will increasingly require access to infrastructure operating at much higher performance levels than today’s standards. A new consumption model that brings together the latest in technology and in datacenter capabilities, as a service, is required. 

This is why HPE is the edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company. Our mission makes perfect sense, and at the core of our strategy you'll find HPE GreenLake – the cloud that comes to you. It's a consumption-based model that enables you to move faster, save money and take the best from the public cloud – like self-service and pay-per-use – and combine it with the features that matter most to you, like having the control to scale up and down and the flexibility to choose what parts you want managed for you. 

This strategy is realized in our latest offering – HPE GreenLake with Colocation – bringing the best of both solutions together with a single contract, single invoice and single point of contact. Imagine an on-premises cloud environment with all the features you want, and the ability to preserve cash and optimize workloads by right-sizing technology, power, cooling and networking. You’ll be able to pivot your people from running a data center to working on high-value activities. It’s all about delivering on our as-a-service vision – a new and better way to drive business outcomes for our customers. And, as always, you can engage us directly or together with our channel and service provider partners. You can take a quick tour of one of HPE's data center colocation providers in the U.S., CyrusOne, in this video: HPE GreenLake with colocation: Simplify hybrid IT to focus on your business.

A simple vision to simplify IT

With over 1000 customers and multiple billions of dollars in business for HPE GreenLake, the benefits are proven and clear. This success has come from enabling companies to drive faster value, simplified IT, cloud economics and the proper controls. It gets even better when we add colocation, with the ability to expand bandwidth, reduce latency and gain access to a robust ecosystem of adjacent providers.

Our vision is profoundly simple and has the ability to drive significant business value for your organization:

• First, choose your on-premises core or colocated datacenter location and workload; answer simple questions about your needs in just a few clicks; then get your price.
• Your order will arrive in as few as 14 days. HPE experts install and configure on-site, fitting with your policies and standards.
• Once HPE GreenLake is ready to go, fully connected to your network, your services will appear in the HPE GreenLake Central portal, and you can launch new resources within minutes. The point-and-click experience allows you to quickly spin up VMs and containers and gain insights on real-time usage and costs with our consumption analytics tool.
• We manage the solution for you, and we help with capacity planning; you’ll always have a little extra to handle unexpected growth, so you never run out. 

We are very proud of the success we have experienced with HPE GreenLake. And we could not have done it without a strong and thriving ecosystem of partners and providers. As you may have guessed, there is more to HPE GreenLake’s success than just HPE. Partnering is in our DNA. From technology partners, to channel partners and services provider, our ecosystem is stronger than ever and ready to deliver value for you. 

I mentioned that we manage the solution for you – I just want to add that if you want HPE to manage a broad swath of your IT infrastructure in general, we can do that too, through HPE GreenLake Management Services. This IDC white paper offers some truly impressive stats on the savings we can help you achieve.

To help you learn more about HPE GreenLake, we’ve compiled all of our on-demand video sessions from HPE Discover Virtual Experience at this page: HPE GreenLake: The Cloud that Comes to You. I’d strongly recommend my presentation Pivot from Running a Data Center to Driving Results with HPE GreenLake.

Learn more about HPE GreenLake cloud services.