Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) added new features and partners to its growing GreenLake platform that should help better position the vendor against the growing number of as-a-service offerings flooding the market. The moves also highlight HPE’s growing reliance on its consumption-based, as-a-service portfolio.

HPE’s latest GreenLake update includes the integration of its Aruba Central platform and access to a dozen more vendor services. These include network-as-a-service (NaaS), data services, high-performance computing functions, and compute operations management.

The Aruba Central integration allows those customers to manage their current services and add new ones using the GreenLake platform. HPE said this will allow its more than 120,000 Aruba networking customers to more quickly add new NaaS services. This includes eight new ones the vendor also launched, tied to wireless access, wired aggregation and access, and SD-branch services. It also follows up on Aruba NaaS updates announced just last month.

“What we've done is we have now actually converged and we're now sharing a single data lake across both network compute and storage,” explained Alan Ni, senior director of edge marketing at Aruba, in a press briefing. “So it's allowing us to provide a lot more insight in terms of usage across the entire spectrum of capabilities that HPE offers.”

The update also includes new services for block storage that provides a 100% data availability guarantee and builds on an update announced last year; a cloud-native compute management console for servers; a data backup and recovery option for virtual machines (VMs) deployed on heterogeneous infrastructure; expanded HPC access designed to lower the cost of entry to the HPC space; and adds access to Microsoft’s Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

HPE also bolstered its channel partner lineup, adding access to GreenLake through ecommerce platforms of ALSO Group, Arrow Electronics, Ingram Micro, and TD Synnex. Flynn Maloy, VP of marketing for GreenLake at HPE, explained that the vendor’s goal is to have the same breakdown of direct and indirect customers using GreenLake as it has with HPE’s other platforms.

That notion is similar to recent comments from rival Cisco, which also said it continues to work with its channel partners on the roll out of its Cisco Plus NaaS offering.

GreenLake also gained a broader physical reach through a new agreement with carrier-neutral data center host Digital Reality. This will allow customers to run through GreenLake services across Digital Reality’s more than 285 data centers littered across six continents.

HPE has been steadily dropping updates to its GreenLake platforms since it launched in 2017. HPE now offers more than 50 services through the as-a-service platform.

CTO Fidelma Russo added during a press briefing that HPE was sitting on more than $6.5 billion in total contract value for GreenLake services and a 96% customer retention rate for those services.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri noted during the vendor’s most recent earnings call that GreenLake orders surged 136% during the first quarter compared to the same time period last year. This growth included 100 new customers, pushing its total GreenLake base to more than 1,350 customers. That number has exponentially increased with the latest update due to the more than 120,000 Aruba Central customers HPE is now counting as customers.

“HP GreenLake is at the center of our strategy to pivot the company and it is generating record breaking demand with impressive profitability across our business,” Neri said, according to a transcript of the earnings call.