AIBRIEF
Tottenham Hotspur timed a planned data center refresh to swap VMware's server virtualization software for HPE's Morpheus VM Essentials, citing licensing pressure.
Tottenham Hotspur, the Premier League soccer club, has cut the licensing bill on its stadium's data-center virtualization software by more than 85 percent by replacing its VMware stack with software from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The swap is part of a broader redesign of the club's stadium network and data-center infrastructure, and the new setup is delivered as a managed service through HPE's GreenLake platform, a hybrid-cloud management product.
The replacement software, HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, handles the same server-virtualization job as VMware. The 85 percent figure is the club's own number and applies to licensing fees only; Tottenham has not disclosed its prior VMware spend, so the savings cannot be triangulated against hardware, migration, or operational costs. CTO Rob Pickering confirmed the move to The Register this week and gave a separate interview to SDxCentral, with the cluster of reporting surfaced by Ars Technica this week.
The new stack sits on six aisles of HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers and Alletra Storage MP hardware, with HPE's OpsRamp software handling hybrid operations. HPE runs the managed service.
Pickering framed VMware as a "400-pound gorilla" whose recent decisions "run counter to both the system integrator side and the customer side," and tied the swap to a natural replacement-cycle window. The club has not said which VMware products it ran or what it paid before, and no independent data on how many enterprises are migrating off VMware versus renegotiating was found in the reporting chain.