Barclays selects HPE GreenLake to host 100,000 workloads

Barclays has become the latest organisation to sign up to HPE’s GreenLake-as-a-service offering. The strategic contract will see HPE deliver a global private cloud platform for Barclays to host more than 100,000 workloads across its strategic hubs in the UK, the US and Asia.

GreenLake is HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform, which the company says offers a unified on-premise cloud experience. It provides cloud-like services for on-premise hosted on cloud-based IT infrastructure with capacity available on demand and granular consumption-based pricing for compute, memory and storage resources. HPE said GreenLake is designed to meet the resilience, scalability and efficiency necessary in today’s digital world. 

Barclays said the edge-to-cloud platform provided through GreenLake is integral to its hybrid multicloud strategy and digital transformation across its global businesses. The automated and open cloud platform will host thousands of workloads and support the bank in delivering an enhanced personalised banking experience for customers.

The bank sees a hybrid of physical and online activities driving consumer behaviour post-pandemic. For instance, in a recent discussion on the future of retail, Barclays group CEO Jes Staley said: “The real opportunity for businesses is to provide the same seamless service whether a customer is online or standing in front of their till. For many, progress will mean integrating their payments technology online and in-store.

“Consumers want a frictionless online experience and a great app, but they also expect a physical experience that is just as user-friendly. This is the kind of next-generation commerce that Barclays is helping our customers and clients to discover.”

These changes require the bank to focus on digital experiences. Craig Bright, group chief information officer at Barclays, said: “Today our customers expect an intelligent, contextual and personalised digital experience with seamless performance. With HPE GreenLake, we’re building a cloud platform that will enable the agility and operational performance needed to achieve this ambition while providing a modern economic model for private cloud.”

Applications running on GreenLake will include virtual desktop infrastructure, SQL databases, Windows server and Linux. The migration from the legacy infrastructure to the private cloud is being performed by HPE Pointnext Services in partnership with the Barclays team.

Using the HPE GreenLake platform, Barclays only needs to pay for the resources it consumes. It also has the option to reserve workloads and run them on-demand. The bank is using HPE GreenLake Central to manage costs, utilisation, compliance and security across its entire private cloud estate through a unified global dashboard.The infrastructure environment is managed by HPE, which, it says, ensures constant uptime, regular patching and updates, and automation-driven infrastructure optimisation. 

Marc Waters, senior vice-president and managing director UK, Ireland, Middle East and South Africa at HPE, said: “Banking systems are critical national infrastructure. Resilience, sustainability and security of the underlying technology platform are the non-negotiable fundamentals that enable the provision of personalised digital experiences.”