UK-based bank and building society Nationwide has migrated its on-premises IT Estate to HPE GreenLake cloud.

The selection of HPE GreenLake is part of Nationwide's ongoing hybrid cloud strategy that commenced in 2018.

GreenLake is HPE's Edge-to-cloud solution, and sees HPE servers and storage deployed on-premises with cloud-like capabilities.

Nationwide aims to, with GreenLake, have an agile, scalable, and secure technology platform.

“In today’s world our customers expect us to deliver an always-on service whilst providing new, innovative features that help them better manage their finances,” said Paul Walsh, director of Infrastructure & Service Delivery, at Nationwide Building Society.

“Nationwide’s hybrid cloud strategy is vital to our ability to compete and means we can continue to meet the needs and expectations of our customers. HPE GreenLake cloud is a core component of our hybrid cloud strategy. With them we’re building a cloud platform that will further improve our resilience and agility, enabling us to provide even better levels of service and deliver new capabilities to our developers faster than ever before.”

Nationwide will use GreenLake Management Services to automate and orchestrate infrastructure management and deliver infrastructure as code so as to focus on other "value-add activities."

Additionally, Nationwide is expecting to reduce its IT cost base by at least 30 percent, as the GreenLake consumption-based model means the bank will only pay for the capacity it uses.

“We are proud to support Nationwide with their cloud vision, providing them with enhanced control and security and the reliability and flexibility for growth,” said Matt Harris, senior vice president and managing director, UK, Ireland, Middle East, and Africa at HPE.

“Nationwide’s modernization journey showcases the effectiveness of HPE GreenLake cloud, with the storied institution transitioning from complex, legacy technology to a modern, future-proofed hybrid cloud operating model where a one-size-fits-all public cloud could never be the only answer."

Nationwide is also a customer of Amazon Web Services and uses cloud-based platform Form3.

The bank has a data center in Swindon, Wiltshire, and at the end of December 2023 was looking to expand the facility.

Barclays, another UK bank, is a known customer of HPE GreenLake. Earlier this year Barclays announced its intention to double its use of GreenLake.

HPE launches new supercomputing solutions and liquid-cooled AI systems

This month has also seen HPE expanding its supercomputing solutions and launching two AI systems for service providers and large enterprises.

The supercomputing solutions are based on HPE Cray Supercomputing EX systems, and 100 percent liquid-cooled, and are designed for research institutions and government entities for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

The portfolio includes the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4252 Gen 2 Compute Blade which can deliver up to 98,304 cores in a single cabinet. It features eight fifth-generation AMD Epyc processors and will be available in Spring 2025.

Also in the portfolio, the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX154n Accelerator Blade has been designed to reduce the time it takes to complete supercomputing workloads and can accommodate up to 224 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in a single cabinet. Featuring the Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell NVL4 Superchip, each accelerator blade holds four Nvidia NVLink-connected Blackwell GPUs unified with two Nvidia Grace CPUs over Nvidia NVLink-C2C. The Blade will be available by the end of 2025.

Also included in the portfolio is the next generation of HPE's exascale-capable interconnect portfolio - the HPE Slingshot interconnect 400 which offers 400 gigabit-per-second speeds, a high-performance storage system designed for large-scale supercomputers, and software for running compute-intensive workloads.

Additionally, HPE has launched two ProLiant Compute XD servers optimized for AI model training and tuning.

The first is the HPE ProLiant Compute XD680, which is air-cooled and houses eight Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators in each node, and will be available in December 2024.

The HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 server, on the other hand, is powered by eight Nvidia H200 SXM Tensor Core GPUs or Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in a five rack-unit chassis. It is liquid-cooled. The H200 version will be available in early 2025, and the Blackwell will be "time to market."