The Fourth Cloud: Why HPE Must Win the Rack-Level Battle

Public cloud isn’t the only game in town. The next frontier is in your rack—and HPE has a once-in-a-decade shot to own it.

Jul 03, 2025

By Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor

As HPE integrates Juniper Networks, most of the industry conversation has revolved around network automation, its competitive stance against Cisco, and Apstra's potential to rival legacy SDN. However, there's a far more expansive and transformative opportunity on the horizon—one I call the Fourth Cloud.

This isn't merely about AI factories, though AI workloads will certainly benefit. It's about delivering a truly turnkey, rack-level cloud experience that operates entirely within the enterprise data center. Customers are actively seeking this solution, and frankly, both HPE and Dell are currently falling short.

Defining the Fourth Cloud

The Fourth Cloud exists alongside public, private, and hybrid clouds. It brings familiar cloud-like operations—elasticity, observability, self-service, and intent-based control—directly into the physical rack. It offers the benefits of cloud computing without compromising on data locality, performance transparency, or governance. In essence, the Fourth Cloud is what enterprises envision when they say: "We appreciate what the cloud offers, but we need it on our terms."

What's conspicuously absent today is this turnkey experience. CIOs I speak with report spending an inordinate amount of time managing firmware, navigating disparate, siloed tools, and struggling to reconcile inconsistencies across their compute, storage, and networking infrastructures. These aren't just minor inefficiencies. They're strategic roadblocks to agility, especially as enterprises scale their AI and data-intensive workloads.

The Juniper Advantage

With Juniper's QFX switches and Apstra's intent-based configuration and state management, HPE now controls a critical ingredient for this vision. Apstra introduces the rigorous validation and abstraction necessary to truly treat the network as code. It ensures deployed configurations precisely match intended designs and proactively highlights configuration drift before it escalates into a business-critical issue.

Rack-Scale CloudOps: The Apstra + OpsRamp + Morpheus Synergy

Combine Apstra with OpsRamp, and HPE has the foundational elements for a powerful CloudOps model at the rack level. Observability extends far beyond basic CPU metrics or VM uptime. It delves into fabric performance, storage telemetry, and the complete configuration state. Layer in Morpheus Data for orchestration and self-service, and now HPE has a control plane that rivals the public cloud experience on-prem.

The goal isn't just to monitor infrastructure. It’s to understand and actively control it with the same precision and insight enterprises expect from public cloud providers.

Packaging: The Critical Missing Piece

HPE already possesses the necessary hardware components: ProLiant for general compute, Alletra for storage, Cray for HPC and AI, and now Juniper for networking. What remains elusive is the crucial act of productization. Enterprises aren't looking for a collection of parts. They demand a unified system. They want a rack that arrives pre-wired, pre-configured, fully observable, and immediately ready to scale. They simply don't want to dedicate six months to aligning firmware across multiple vendors or painstakingly writing custom glue code for monitoring.

This is where Dell has stumbled. Despite the success of VxRail in delivering a near rack-level cloud experience, Dell appears to be losing ground in its negotiations to retain VxRail under its own roadmap. As a result, what was once its strongest turnkey offering is slipping away. Dell is now repositioning around its new Private Cloud vision—but from a customer perspective, it looks like a reset.

This market impatience is palpable. CIOs are done waiting for future product visions. They want operational outcomes now.

HPE’s Full-Stack Advantage

Some have pointed to Nutanix as a potential challenger for this Fourth Cloud concept. While Nutanix has proven itself as a strong software player in hyperconverged infrastructure, it shares the same fundamental limitation as VMware—it operates exclusively at the software layer. Both rely on hardware partners to deliver a full experience, and both are subject to the uncertainty of those relationships.

Broadcom’s move to unwind VMware’s strategic partnership with Dell around VxRail underscores the challenge of scaling a rack-level vision without control over the hardware. The result? Dell is now in reset mode, building a new Private Cloud strategy from scratch.

Nutanix faces the same ceiling. Without direct control over the hardware supply chain, firmware validation, and telemetry integration, it cannot deliver the seamless, turnkey experience the Fourth Cloud demands.

Cisco faces the inverse problem. It has strong networking and software-defined access capabilities, but it lacks a hypervisor and compute portfolio to tie it all together.

Only HPE—especially with Morpheus Data powering orchestration—holds an integrated stack spanning compute, storage, networking, observability, and automation. This is the kind of control and cohesion needed to deliver not just a platform, but a productized rack-level cloud experience. And this aligns tightly with HPE’s GreenLake vision of delivering everything as a service.

This is an Execution Play

While this isn't HPE's only opportunity post-Juniper, it's one that directly addresses immediate and acute enterprise pain points. If HPE can successfully deliver on the promise of the Fourth Cloud—a truly integrated, rack-level cloud experience delivered through GreenLake—it can establish dominance in a category that customers are already clamoring for but vendors are currently failing to provide.

This isn't about inventing new products. It's about expertly stitching together HPE's existing portfolio into a unified, repeatable, and operationally elegant solution.

The market is poised and ready. The necessary tools are in place. Now, it's time for HPE to build the Fourth Cloud.

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