HPE GreenLake: Everything You Need to Know

HPE GreenLake is a hybrid cloud platform, delivered as a service.

Rather than selling hardware to customers directly or managing their workloads in the public cloud, HPE provides and manages on-premises infrastructure. This allows organizations to run IT workloads in their own data centers or colocation facilities, while still receiving benefits typically associated with the public cloud, including flexibility, scalability and consumption-based pricing.

Key characteristics of HPE GreenLake include:

• Managed on-premises hardware. In GreenLake engagements, HPE delivers and installs the necessary data center infrastructure, including storage, compute and networking. Although the equipment lives inside the customer’s data center or colocation center, HPE retains ownership of the infrastructure and is also responsible for updating and maintaining the equipment. The infrastructure is single tenant, meaning it is dedicated to one customer, rather than shared among multiple organizations.
• Unified hybrid cloud management. GreenLake features a centralized management portal, allowing IT teams to monitor its use, provision resources on demand and manage workloads across a hybrid environment. While HPE manages the actual hardware, the GreenLake management portal lets organizations manage their overall environment, from deploying applications and managing virtual machines to tracking costs and planning capacity.
• Consumption-based pricing. Rather than making a large, upfront hardware purchase, HPE GreenLake customers pay monthly based on their actual use of compute, storage and other resources, often with a minimum baseline cost. This flips IT finances from the capital expense model traditionally associated with on-premises hardware to the operating expense model commonly associated with the public cloud. Because customers largely pay only for what they use, IT and business leaders don’t need to worry about overprovisioning expensive hardware.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, organizations are constantly evaluating the best infrastructure solutions to meet their unique needs. HPE GreenLake stands out as a compelling alternative to traditional public cloud offerings. Here is how HPE GreenLake compares with public cloud offerings in terms of infrastructure location, services offered, pricing and performance:

• Infrastructure location and control. Although some hyperscalers offer hybrid extensions, the default model is to run customers’ workloads in multitenant public cloud environments. By contrast, HPE GreenLake deploys infrastructure in customers’ own data centers or chosen colocation centers. This can be especially appealing for organizations that need to maintain control over their IT workloads for data sovereignty reasons.
• Services. GreenLake is primarily an Infrastructure as a Service hybrid platform. HPE continues to invest in GreenLake, adding backup, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. However, customers may not have access to each of the hundreds of niche services offered by hyperscalers.
• Consumption and pricing models. HPE GreenLake customers typically commit to a certain base consumption or capacity for a monthly fee, then pay extra on a per-use basis if they exceed their baseline. This provides cost predictability, and customers typically pay less for resources as their consumption grows. By contrast, public cloud consumption and pricing is fully on-demand; customers pay for exactly what they use, which provides flexibility but can lead to unpredictable costs if cloud use spikes.
• Performance. Because GreenLake is an edge-to-cloud platform, it allows organizations to run workloads near where data is stored. This can dramatically reduce latency and improve performance — an important consideration for certain applications, particularly those that support real-time decision-making. By contrast, architectures that require data to be sent to the public cloud for processing can introduce unwanted latency and poor application performance.

Understanding the details of how HPE GreenLake is designed, deployed and integrated with existing IT assets can help IT and business leaders decide if it’s a good fit for their environment:

• Architecture. Customers start by selecting the technology their organization needs, choosing from a variety of HPE solutions, including compute, storage, networking and software, as well as more specialized solutions for services such as data analytics and machine learning. The actual solutions used in an HPE GreenLake deployment may include infrastructure such as HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, the HPE Synergy software-defined infrastructure platform, HPE Nimble storage and HPE ProLiant DL servers. Based on these hardware choices, HPE and its partners can design and implement a solution that best meets an organization’s specific needs. Although these buildouts include extra resources for bursting capabilities, customers pay only for the resources they use.
• Deployment. With GreenLake, organizations’ compute, storage and networking gear is physically deployed in their on-premises data center, a colocation facility or at an edge location such as a factory or store. GreenLake’s management platform enables customers to manage resources across their hybrid cloud environment. By default, this management platform runs in the cloud (allowing HPE to easily monitor customers’ hybrid environments and make software updates). For customers with regulatory or other requirements, HPE also provides control software that can run locally at customers’ locations. Some HPE GreenLake services are fully managed, while others are designed to be self-managed by customer teams. However, HPE and its partners also offer add-on management for these services.
• Integration. HPE GreenLake is built for both cloud-native and traditional applications, and it supports self-service deployment of bare-metal hardware, virtual machines and container services. It is designed to leverage open standards and open systems, allowing organizations to place their workloads in the environment of their choice, based on cost considerations and performance requirements. HPE GreenLake also leverages open application programming interfaces, allowing for easy integration with existing solutions.

The hybrid cloud model enabled by HPE GreenLake supports a wide variety of IT and business use cases. HPE specifically cites AI inferencing and model tuning efforts that require data privacy; edge workloads that require low latency; production workloads that require cost predictability; on-premises, mission-critical applications that would benefit from modernization; and workloads with specific data sovereignty requirements.

Many organizations have seen success using HPE GreenLake to do the following:

• Simplify backup and recovery. With GreenLake for Backup and Recovery, HPE creates and maintains backup environments that can be administered through a single cloud console. This enables organizations to protect on-premises virtual machines and databases, as well as cloud-native workloads.
• Modernize storage. HPE GreenLake for File Storage is an all-flash, scalable file system that provides a cloudlike experience for AI and analytics workloads. The management, monitoring and protection features of the solution allow customers to handle massive amounts of data effectively and efficiently, with a savings ratio as high as 8 to 1 for uncompressed time-series data.
• Deploy AI models. HPE GreenLake for large language models provides the resources organizations need to privately train, tune and deploy large-scale AI models, with pay-as-you-go access to cloud supercomputers. This reduces the need for prohibitively expensive upfront capital purchases while still allowing organizations to maintain complete control over their internal data.
• Support DevOps teams. HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise allows DevOps teams to rapidly create a shared workspace and provision hardware resources, a must for teams building continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines. GreenLake also offers expanded support for critical DevOps capabilities such as Infrastructure as Code and Kubernetes clusters.

A Forrester analysis showed that HPE GreenLake reduces organizations’ total cost of ownership for infrastructure by an average of 45%. However, costs will vary for organizations with different IT environments. Business and IT leaders should carefully analyze their likely TCO before making any major technology investment, considering the following factors:

• Baseline costs. Unlike the public cloud, HPE GreenLake requires an initial financial commitment. Hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure allow organizations to spin up resources for an hour or two and then spin them back down, paying only for what they used. Because infrastructure is installed on-premises in a single-tenant environment, there are some baseline costs associated with delivering HPE GreenLake services, and customers typically commit to multiyear contracts at a minimum monthly cost.
• IT management. Like the public cloud, HPE GreenLake dramatically reduces the need for ongoing infrastructure maintenance and management. Organizations often overlook these overhead costs when making IT infrastructure decisions, but they are important. If an investment in HPE GreenLake allows a customer to reassign three data center administrators to higher-value work, that should be included in TCO calculations.
• Cost governance. HPE GreenLake environments are rightsized for organizations, and the monthly minimum makes costs more predictable than those of public cloud providers. Still, GreenLake customers will pay extra for any use over their initial cap, so it is important to proactively monitor and manage both consumption and costs. Best practices may include implementing consumption quotas or alerts for teams, regularly reviewing reports on cloud use and optimizing workloads by regularly cleaning up data and deleting unused virtual machines.

Security is a key selling point for HPE GreenLake. According to HPE, the GreenLake platform applies more than 2,200 separate security controls to protect organizations and their data in real time. In addition to locating hardware at physical facilities controlled by customers, GreenLake follows a zero-trust model, helping organizations meet compliance mandates while reducing security risks. At the same time, GreenLake’s consumption model gives enterprises control over where sensitive data resides, helping them meet regulatory requirements for data sovereignty.

• On-premises infrastructure. With GreenLake, HPE deploys compute, storage and networking infrastructure inside customer data centers, in colocation facilities or at the network edge. This model ensures that sensitive workloads remain under the customer’s direct control and oversight, while still delivering cloudlike scalability and consumption-based pricing. Most IT and business leaders have grown more comfortable with the security capabilities of the public cloud, but some organizations must be extremely careful about where they store data and run workloads due to regulatory requirements.
• Zero-trust architecture. HPE notes that organizations use GreenLake to protect their sensitive data and workloads with zero-trust security architecture “spanning everything from the supply chain to the applications layer.” Rather than granting network and system access to trusted users and devices by default, a zero-trust approach assumes that no user or device should be trusted automatically. Zero-trust strategies rely on strict policies and permissions (as well as advanced technologies including AI) to ensure authorized users can access only the resources they need to perform their work.
• Simplified compliance audits. HPE GreenLake delivers AI for IT operations (AIOps) to power observability, energy efficiency, governance, security, compliance and faster performance than many legacy builds, and often at a lower cost. The platform also enables finance and reporting teams to gain complete visibility into IT costs, cloud use and even performance against environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets. These superior visibility and reporting capabilities simplify compliance audits, ensuring that organizations do not fall out of compliance with regulatory requirements, vendor licensing agreements or other important compliance measures.

Choosing the right partner is just as critical as choosing the right platform. When it comes to HPE GreenLake, CDW stands out as a trusted adviser and award-winning solution provider with deep expertise in hybrid cloud transformation.

CDW and HPE GreenLake: A Proven Partnership

CDW has been recognized as an HPE GreenLake Partner of the Year, a testament to its ability to deliver scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions. With its long-standing relationship with HPE and a track record of successful GreenLake deployments, CDW brings both technical depth and strategic insight to every engagement.

• End-to-end support. From initial assessment and architecture design to deployment and ongoing optimization, CDW guides you through every phase of your GreenLake journey.
• Hybrid cloud expertise. CDW helps you build a hybrid-by-design strategy, ensuring workloads run where they perform best: on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge.
• Financial flexibility. With GreenLake’s consumption-based model, CDW helps you align IT spending with actual consumption, reducing overprovisioning and improving budget predictability.
• Simplified operations. CDW integrates GreenLake Central for unified visibility and control across your infrastructure, streamlining management and compliance.
• Industry-specific solutions. Whether you're in healthcare, education, government or enterprise, CDW tailors GreenLake deployments to meet your unique regulatory and operational needs.

HPE GreenLake is an enterprise-grade hybrid cloud platform that combines the data sovereignty and performance benefits of on-premises infrastructure with the simplicity and scalability of the public cloud.

The platform was recognized as a global leader in the 2025 ISG Provider Lens for private/hybrid cloud data center solutions. “HPE GreenLake offers a unified hybrid cloud platform that simplifies management across on-premises and public cloud environments,” writes ISG Provider Lens in a 2025 report. “It integrates AI-driven automation, robust security and comprehensive observability, enabling enterprises to manage workloads efficiently and securely.” The report also notes that HPE recently expanded GreenLake’s capabilities by introducing HPE Morpheus VM Essential software, which provides streamlined virtualization management and improves both performance and efficiency.

Ultimately, HPE GreenLake will be the best fit for organizations that have a compelling reason to keep IT resources in an environment they control, while still attaining many of the benefits of public cloud environments. Business and IT leaders will need to carefully analyze their unique technology environments and business needs to ensure that GreenLake provides the right balance of cost, performance and security for their organization.

For those that determine GreenLake is a good fit, the value proposition is clear: predictable expenses, reduced infrastructure management, simplified self-service, on-premises security and low-latency performance. For many organizations, this combination makes HPE GreenLake a compelling alternative to both traditional capital IT spending and full public cloud deployments.

Partnering with CDW for HPE GreenLake means faster time-to-value, reduced complexity, and a cloud experience that’s built around your business — not the other way around.