HPE is maximizing cloud efficiency with hybrid-by-design: A conversation with CDW’s Justin Smith

Choosing a hybrid by design approach

With many global enterprises continuing to adopt more hybrid operations, we’ve seen a shift from one-size-fits-all implementations to maximizing cloud advantages using a more nuanced approach. Where organizations once focused on adopting public platforms or establishing private clouds, many are discovering the benefits of embracing a hybrid cloud model for its flexibility, scalability, simplicity, and control. They are architecting their infrastructure to be hybrid by design.

To get a real-world perspective on how enterprise IT departments are evolving their cloud infrastructure to move beyond public and private cloud dependencies, we recently sat down with Justin Smith, Director, Platform Engineering for our long-time customer and partner, CDW. Here are some insights from our discussion.

Justin, can you share a little background on CDW to set the stage for the business your IT infrastructure supports?

Since its founding in 1984, CDW has grown from an entrepreneurial desktop hardware supplier into a Fortune 500 multi-brand information technology solutions and services provider. With primary locations across the United States, Canada, and the UK, we assist customers in the business, government, education, and healthcare sectors with fulfilling their modern technology needs.

That’s an impressive footprint. Could you tell us how you came to rely on GreenLake cloud to support your global business teams?

A few years ago, we were on the cusp of requiring a significant refresh. To move from an equipment replacement model to a strategic infrastructure approach, we took a step back and considered how other options, such as public and private cloud, could best address our needs now and in the future.

Ultimately, we decided that a hybrid by design cloud strategy would provide us with the flexibility, scalability, and controls we required. Specifically, with GreenLake cloud, we gained a unified platform that was easy to manage and provided a predictable infrastructure [and workload] consumption model to support rapid deployment of crucial systems and quickly add capacity.

In other words, what began as an equipment refresh has transformed into a hybrid cloud journey. We now have hundreds of servers currently deployed through GreenLake cloud, and we anticipate increasing that number significantly as we look ahead.

Given that a hybrid strategy highlights the importance of integrating with the public cloud, how does GreenLake cloud specifically enhance and optimize your approach?

As part of our hybrid strategy overall, GreenLake cloud allows us to move workloads where they make the most sense, whether it’s on-premise or the cloud, quickly and flexibly with just a few clicks and without creating any adverse impact to the business.

One of the keys to making this plan a reality has been our GreenLake team, which brought deep technology skills and worked seamlessly with our internal team.

Speaking of expert guidance, your GreenLake team also includes HPE Managed Services experts, correct?

Yes, that’s correct. With GreenLake cloud and HPE Managed Services we’ve gained a very focused account team to support our own experts. They work closely with us to design, implement, and manage our hybrid cloud, maintaining the high standards we pursue internally.

As we expand our services and integrate solutions, HPE experts adapt seamlessly, providing additional expertise and resources as required. This collaboration boosts our global capabilities, enabling us to efficiently cover all time zones in a cost-effective manner.

Thanks to GreenLake cloud and HPE Managed Services, we extend our global reach without the need for extensive internal hiring. This partnership not only offers substantial cost savings but also enhances operational efficiency, maximizing our internal strengths while benefiting from top-tier external support.

Could you tell us more about the overall benefits of GreenLake cloud for your hybrid cloud strategy, and selecting HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen11 servers as your cloud’s foundation?

For one, it expands my team’s global reach. For instance, we recently deployed a data center overseas using HPE Managed Services resources on-site. This enabled our internal systems engineer to manage the process from here in the U.S., considerably reducing the deployment cost and timeline.

Second, we’re vastly more agile. By combining HPE Managed Services with CDW’s expertise we were able to deliver our project 9 times faster. This efficiency not only speeds up individual projects but also allows us to handle large-scale transitions, such as migrating thousands of virtual machines to GreenLake cloud, without overburdening or expanding our internal team.

Third, we can scale up rapidly, using a smaller footprint, with HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen11 servers. For example, we have realized exceptional performance gains when placing these servers in a Hyperconvered Infrastructure (HCI) cluster, surpassing the performance of traditional high-performance storage arrays designed for workloads such as SQL and MongoDB. In fact, we've observed efficiency increases of up to 3-5x for both. And, with GreenLake cloud, we have capacity on demand, typically within minutes rather than the weeks required for traditional procurement.

Finally, we gain a robust and exciting set of tools that enable us to unify management of our entire IT infrastructure, whether cloud or on-prem. In particular, the compute ops management capabilities in GreenLake supply cloud-like supplies cloud-like experiences and new modeling capabilities that were unavailable to us before.

What about another GreenLake capability you’re using, the new HPE Sustainability Insight Center, how is it assisting with CDW’s business goals?

Sustainability has long been a CDW priority, which is why we are so pleased to leverage the sustainability insights capabilities in GreenLake. Using the HPE Sustainability Insight Center, we can monitor our energy consumption and carbon emissions. Plus, we have insights into a wide range of our company’s operations, not just within GreenLake cloud. This enables us to model the impacts of any investment, like a warehouse operations system, to help us address our decarbonization goals.