Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today unveiled a new cloud service designed to bring the different types of infrastructure that power a company’s operations together under a single set of management tools.

Dubbed OneSphere, the product offers a set of centralized controls for managing hardware resources. HPE, which debuted the product at its HPE Discover customer conference in Madrid today, said it will support Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform, as well as a range of on-premises data centers.

OneSphere is positioned as a better alternative to traditional management products that focus on just one type of infrastructure. Since most companies use a mix of on- and off-premises resources, they’ve historically had to deploy several of these specialized tools, which complicates administrators’ work. Consolidating everything into a single service can potentially enable personnel to handle day-to-day operations in a much more consistent way.

HPE hopes to realize that in several ways with OneSphere. First, the service provides a centralized view of the environments to which it’s connected and how they’re utilized. For infrastructure rented from an outside platform such as AWS, administrators also have access to a breakdown of service costs.

These different metrics can be correlated to identify underutilized hardware resources and cut unnecessary expenses. A complementary access control tool lets administrators regulate how employees use the infrastructure. And a self-service portal allows users to provision hardware on a self-service basis to save administrators the trouble of manually carrying out requests. 

OneSphere is expected to become available in January with initial support for AWS. HPE plans to gradually add the other platforms on its checklist, starting with Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

OneSphere is the fruit of a broad effort by the company to centralize infrastructure operations for enterprises. As part of the same push, HPE last week revealed plans to extend the InfoSight monitoring service included with its Nimble-branded flash arrays to other storage systems. The offering is also set to receive a new artificial intelligence engine that will automatically flag potential technical issues.

Image: HPE