HPE is laying out its enterprise stall with enhancements to its GreenLake hybrid cloud portfolio, while converging its Aruba and Juniper networking to offer customers AIOps across both, plus high-speed connectivity for AI processing.

With the opening of its Discover event in Barcelona today, the IT giant is pitching its cloud credentials, claiming its enhanced GreenLake lineup is able to meet the requirements others cannot.

"As your AI initiatives continue to grow, you need more control over where and how your data and workloads are managed," said HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri.

"One of the biggest recent challenges we hear from many of you is around virtualization costs – licenses, fees are skyrocketing. You're faced with rigid architecture and upcoming deadlines and single vendor runtime models are becoming harder to adapt and afford. It is not enough to lift and shift to the public cloud. You need a cloud model and experience everywhere. That is exactly what we have delivered with the next generation of HPE private clouds, now supercharged with HPE Morpheus software."

CTO and EVP of hybrid cloud Fidelma Russo continued the theme, saying it was a misconception that enterprises are looking to just replace a hypervisor.

"They're looking for a modern platform that can run traditional virtual machines (VMs), containers, and AI-era workloads with the same levels of resilience, security, and automation they expect from the cloud," she said.

She claimed that HPE's Morpheus and OpsRamp management tools plus Zerto disaster recovery software deliver "a fully integrated enterprise-grade alternative that spans your VMs, containers, and bare metal."

Nobody mentioned what it's an alternative to, but it seems clear they are referring to Broadcom's VMware platform.

New capabilities in Morpheus, which HPE acquired last year, include zero-trust software-defined networking (SDN) for VMs hosted by its HVM hypervisor, powered by technology from Juniper, which HPE acquired this year.

Morpheus also offers full support for Kubernetes and containerized workloads on top of the HVM hypervisor, for unified VM and container operations.

Juniper's Apstra Data Center Director is now integrated into Morpheus, providing automated switch configuration for when VMs get moved or migrated.

OpsRamp is also being integrated with Apstra Data Center Director and Compute Ops Management, connecting management and intelligence across the full stack, according to HPE.

"With this integration... we now have a fully automated stack that eliminates the problems that can exist between virtual machines and the network resilience, which was another key requirement when we spoke to customers," Russo said.

Stretched clusters, where servers in a cluster are in separate locations to keep workloads online even during a full site outage at one of the locations, are now supported, with synchronous replication provided by Alletra Peer Persistence.

HPE also said its Morpheus VM Essentials will work with Veeam's Data Platform v13 to deliver hypervisor-based, image-level backup. This will enable rapid recovery for VMs across private cloud environments, including HPE's Private Cloud Business Edition, the firm said.

All these capabilities are either available now or coming in the first half of 2026.

On the networking side, HPE's head of networking business, Rami Rahim, said the firm is working to deliver "AI for networking, and networking for AI," meaning it is infusing AI-based automation into network ops and building high-performance networks to support AI infrastructure.

AIOps has moved on from just gathering telemetry and making recommendations, with the next step being self-driving capabilities with agentic AI, "where the network can practically do everything on its own, and the human equation is largely out of the picture," he said – although we're not quite there yet.

This was aptly demonstrated during the Discover keynote, where The Register's representative reports that HPE was still unable to deliver an uninterrupted Wi-Fi service, despite all the talk of AIOps and self-healing networks.

What HPE is doing now is moving to unify the experience of its two current AIOps platforms, Juniper Mist and Aruba Central. Mist was developed largely for cloud deployment, and Aruba Central has much more of a diverse deployment model, but the firm is cross-pollinating capabilities from one to the other.

From Mist, Marvis Actions, which identifies and fixes network issues, plus its Large Experience Model (LEM), will be available in Aruba Central in the first quarter of 2026.

Conversely, Aruba's AI-based Client Profiling and Organizational Insight features will migrate across to Mist, Rahim said.

"We're going to continue to do this cross-pollination, bringing the best of both platforms to all users. Nobody gets left behind," he commented.

HPE is also preparing dual-platform Wi-Fi 7 access points, which will allow customers to choose Mist or Aruba Central as their preferred point of control and switch between the two if desired, Rahim said.

When it comes to networking for AI, HPE unveiled what it claims are the first switches using Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 silicon. The Juniper QFX5250 is a liquid-cooled device intended to connect GPUs within datacenters with 102.4 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth. It is designed with Nvidia's Rubin and AMD's MI400 Series accelerators in mind.

Meanwhile, the Juniper MX301 edge router "packs all of the performance, and all of the flexibility that our customers have come to love about the MX in a small 1U power-optimized package, which makes it absolutely ideal as an on-ramp for the distributed inference cluster opportunity," Rahim said.

Updates for GreenLake include an enhanced GreenLake Marketplace, and Cloud Commit, which lets customers commit to pre-specified future spend levels.

HPE Financial Services (HPEFS) is also extending financing programs for CloudOps Software and Alletra Storage. HPEFS now allows customers to spread the costs over three years, at no additional cost for CloudOps, plus standalone Morpheus Software, OpsRamp, and Zerto. Customers for Alletra Storage, meanwhile, are eligible for up to 10 percent savings over traditional purchasing, with no payments for the first two months. ®