HPE to start pumping AI capabilities into Greenlake under Project Ethan

HPE Discover EMEA HPE chief technology officer Fidelma Russo showed off an upcoming platform, codenamed Project Ethan, at the company's Discover event in Barcelona this week.

The project – aimed at orchestrating resources across on-premises or public clouds for processing large AI models – was amongst a number of announcements around how the company aims to integrate AI with its Greenlake hybrid cloud platform.

Speaking at the conference, Russo also disclosed that OpsRamp, the SaaS-based IT operations platform it bought earlier this year, is now available via Greenlake. The latter is the company's subscription-based IT-as-a-service platform, through which both on-premises and public cloud resources are accessed via a single portal.

OpsRamp itself now comes with the addition of HPE Sustainability Insight Center, a tool for tracking and monitoring the energy consumption of the IT resources being operated by an organization.

This was added for customers that are training and operating AI models, Russo said, to help them keep an eye on energy consumption.

According to Russo, it can take 1,200 MWh to train a large language model (LLM), and 250 MWh per day to operate one for inferencing purposes, contributing significantly to the energy bills an organization's IT systems generate.

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The CTO also lifted the lid on the HPE Greenlake Hybrid Operations Software Suite. The product brings together the Ezmeral software, OpsRamp with Sustainability Insight Center, and HPE's Data Protection Suite for backup and recovery. This is intended to let customers manage, observe, and protect their data and workloads from edge to cloud, she said.

Also coming soon is HPE Private Cloud Solutions for AI, an addition to its on-prem cloud portfolio specifically designed for AI. This is based on the newly announced enterprise computing solution for generative AI, HPE Greenlake for File Storage, OpsRamp, plus Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault. The latter is an offline data vault platform to help an organization to recover from a ransomware attack if their data is encrypted or deleted.

Full details and availability dates for the new products were not disclosed as The Reg was told that it was a last-minute decision to announce them at this event.

Russo concluded her keynote by making a laborious point that AI is not just a technological leap, but a cultural shift. "It impacts how we work, how we innovate, how we secure and share data, and how we run and transform our businesses," she said. ®