Nokia isn’t moving all of its crown jewels to Google Cloud. While that effort is just getting underway for Nokia’s larger businesses, the vendor’s software division is simultaneously moving its research and development (R&D) data centers to HPE GreenLake, the companies announced today.

Nokia Software’s R&D data centers, called vLabs, are moving to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s consumption-based IT portfolio to use a more flexible infrastructure to power a private cloud for its R&D functions. 

“With HPE GreenLake, we are now able to bring hardware elasticity on-premises at a fraction of the cost of public cloud,” explained Jarkko Kytömäki, Nokia Software’s vLab infrastructure manager at Nokia’s lab in Tampere, Finland. 

Nokia’s lab has already migrated to HPE GreenLake, the companies said. 

The move to HPE GreenLake, albeit more narrow in scope, closely follows Nokia’s recently announced five-year deal with Google that calls for its data centers, servers, and various software applications to migrate to Google Cloud. Nokia framed that agreement as an opportunity to improve operations and lower costs by reducing its real estate footprint, hardware purchases, and the amount of energy consumed by that equipment.

Those energy consumption benefits carry over to Nokia Software’s tie up with HPE GreenLake as well, the vendor said.

“Nokia recognizes its responsibility in the fight against climate change and our R&D vLab in Tampere, Finland, is an important example of our commitment to taking actions against climate change,” Nokia Software CTO Ron Haberman said in a statement. “Thanks to our work with HPE GreenLake, this lab is not only carbon-neutral but it recovers the heat generated by our servers and IT systems for redistribution into the surrounding city." 

“Our mission is to provide first-class virtualized, shared, and remotely accessible R&D and testing resources for our global software developers. We want to give them a public cloud user experience with on-prem control and cost points,” Kytömäki said in a statement.

Nokia Software noted that HPE GreenLake allows it to spin up or scale down capacity based on R&D demands, but didn’t explain why it chose HPE’s offering instead of grouping all of its compute and storage needs into Google Cloud. It’s not uncommon for enterprises to use multiple cloud vendors, but the realization of a carbon-negative data center operation and the ability to deploy a private cloud clearly contributed to Nokia Software’s partnership with HPE. 

“HPE GreenLake enables us to continually gain performance with fewer energy requirements. Storage is now a good example in which the same capacity that took six data center racks in the past, now fits into less than one rack,” Kytömäki said. “That smaller footprint means less electricity, less cooling, and ... less data center floor space.”

GreenLake, which is HPE’s fastest-growing business, according to HPE CEO Antonio Neri, experienced skyrocketing year-over-year growth during the company’s third quarter of 2020. “GreenLake services orders grew at a record 82% year over year,” Neri said during the earnings call. HPE has also pledged to offer its entire portfolio as a service by 2022.