 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover, the virtual experience, going to be digging into some primary storage. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guest, Omar Assad. He's the vice president and general manager for both primary storage and data services with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Omar, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Stu, happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. All right, so why don't you start out, frame out for us kind of where primary storage fits in in the portfolio and your charter there. Thanks, yeah. So primary storage is a combination of HPE Primera, HPE Nimble and all the associated software and data management services that go along with it. We are part of the broader HPE Storage umbrella. In addition to that, we have the HPE HCI business and the HPE Complete partnerships that where we partner with our go-to-market partners and bring total solutions for our customers. From my perspective, I'm the general manager for Primera, Nimble and all the data management services that come along with it. So that's what we call the primary storage portfolio mainly centered around block services for our customers. Excellent. Omar, you've been in the storage industry for quite a while. We always know that the only constant in our industry is that things are always changing. However, here in 2020, it's a little bit more unusual than normal. Give us a little bit of insight as to how your customers are responding, how HPE is helping them during the current global pandemic. Right, so obviously across the industry, across the world, it's a very difficult time. Definitely customers are facing some challenges. From our perspective, one of the biggest things that we noticed was in these unprecedented times, safety is the paramount concern for each one of our customers and for HPE employees and our fellow workers around the globe. The access to the data center has caused some challenges for our customers. So obviously for capacity expansion purposes, for scaling up work from home needs, you can do all of that. But for all of our customers, as the pandemic hit and the shelter-in-place global policies came across, the access to the data center became a big problem as well. So just a lot of the vendors are making changes to adapt up to these situations. From HPE perspective, we added a couple of policies like 90-day payment deferrals. In addition to that, a bunch of financing capabilities to allow our customers to focus on their cash flow out and not to worry about the purchase decisions when it comes to from a storage perspective. Now, in addition to that, HPE was also fortunate enough to have two cloud storage services. We have data protection online services. We have block storage online services. These are just cloud portal-based services that are available in conjunction with our portfolio to our customers. So one of the unique ways that we were able to help our customers is for without accessing their data center, they were able to slip a lot of their on-prem storage in form of either snapshots or data migrations into our cloud storage subscriptions, which we extended to our customers, and they were able to expand and create just-in-time capacity to scale up their in-data center needs without actually accessing the data center. So from that perspective, it was a very profound experience that we had in order to sort of keep our customers' operations running while we were shipping extra capacity and expansion capacity to them as they scale, sort of work from home operations like VDI, database scale-up as they adapted to these sort of uncertain times. Well, excellent, absolutely. A spotlight has been shown on, you know, can the products and services deliver for what we needed? That flexibility that you mentioned so critically important, great to see things like the financial pieces too, to make sure you can help companies in these uncertain times. Here at Discover, so of course, let's tee up and not keep things waiting any longer. What's new for your piece of the portfolio? What's next? So there are a couple of new announcements that we're bringing to the market over here, right? And one of the biggest ones that I am most excited by is obviously autonomous operations and AI ops that we are now extending for our customers for actually taking action. So what that means is we were sort of the first to market with AI ops, which is our infocyte technology that was built off the top of the nimble storage acquisition that happened with an HPE, then we sort of extended that to HPE Primera, we extended that to HPE 3-par and then also we are now extending that to HPE SimpliVity. So the enormity and the size of this AI operation on automation, that it just continues to grow, right? From a Primera perspective, especially, we are now bringing intelligent and intelligence autonomous operations onto Primera as well, which basically means all the AI models and all the AI engines that we have trained for analytics, for helping our customers auto-tune workloads, for providing proactive support and proactive recommendations to infocyte. A couple of those models are now ported into our tier zero portfolio, that is HPE Primera. So not only can we make recommendations in Primera, but now we have also made the intent if the customer allows us to go ahead and actually implement those decisions. So Primera can automatically adjust without having the user intervene because in tier zero applications, the time to intervene is very, very low to non-existent, right? So given certain set of parameters and given the certain set of policies, HPE Primera can now execute the recommendations autonomously and make real-time changes to workloads and workload profiles and QOS policies to keep our customers going rather than just a recommendation. Again, this is the first in its class for AI autonomous applications where intelligence is not only in recommendations, but now also going ahead and executing those decisions from a primary storage perspective. Yeah, Omar, with the things that you were just talking about this, bring us inside, what's changing inside the customers that you're working with? Traditionally storage, you add a storage administrator, people thinking about the speeds and feeds and all the knobs that they can turn with storage when you start talking about autonomous and AI functions coming in, I have to expect there's different requirements from the customer and there's different people engage with it. So bring us inside what you're seeing at the customer side. So actually, Listo, you hit it spot on, right? So from a customer perspective, it's always the do more with less, right? That is happening on the training side, that is happening on the customer persona side. So simplifying the portfolio is absolutely one of the biggest requirements for our customers. They are the general push towards the IT generalist where applications perspective from a management perspective, from a shortage perspective, there is a lot of simplicity that is desired. So one of the biggest things that we have changed with HPE Primera is that it's the industry's first tier zero platform, which gives 100% availability guarantee. So it really, really simplifies from a responsibility perspective, from a customer's perspective, where we pick up most of the risks by giving the customers 100% availability guarantee. It's the industry's first tier zero platform that is self-upgradable, self-installing, and now also self-autonomously executing operations on the customer's behalf. So again, from a monitoring perspective, from an installation perspective, from a day-to-day operational cost perspective, it really, really ties into that do more with less team from a customer's perspective, right? And then from an AI ops perspective, cross stack analytics, we were the first one to bring that to the market. Now we've extended that through across the portfolio. And then from a recommendations perspective, not only there are these proactive recommendations, but then also if the customer allows us, we will go ahead and execute those recommendations in order to keep the 24 by seven mission critical operations continuously running and continuously adapting to changing conditions from a customer perspective. And then on the customer side, again, there is a lot more simplicity that has been enforced into the environment. Because again, the self-install, self-unfraid, self-autonomous sort of storage operations have been introduced in tier zero environment. And I think that's the biggest breakthrough in bringing that simplicity in the tier zero environment. Excellent. You also, you mentioned that one of the things that companies are leveraging now when they need to be working remote is the remote backup capability. Bring us the latest as to what AP is doing when it comes to a cloud backup. So again, Stu, I think you raised an important point, right? One of the biggest things that this pandemic has sort of made the IT operational staff realize that although there can be an outage, but there can be an outage of the kind where the systems might be running, but you won't have access to the data center, right? This shelter in place has been a huge learning lesson for operational teams, right? So one of the things that we have now introduced, HPE was, with Nimble Storage earlier was one of the first technologies to have a cloud storage block services available to our customers. Now we've expanded that portfolio and now we have cloud volumes backup also available to our customers. So when you buy HPE Primera as your tier zero offering or if you buy HPE Nimble Storage as your mid-range tier one offering, with both we now include HPE cloud volumes backup services. So not only do you have access to on-prem storage, but you have access to backup capabilities which are now managed by HPE for our customers as well. And then in addition to that, the mobility technology that with source size D2 that transfers these backups into an HPE managed backup service is also included with the piece of software. And then in addition to that, we have also made HPE cloud backup available to our ISV partners. So whether you are Veeam, whether you're Commvault, we have source site plugins available so our customers who are on our partner ecosystem can also take advantage of that. One of the biggest changes that, as I'm reiterating this point, it is included with our portfolio. It is included from a software perspective. No particular physical changes need to be made at the data center and customers can take advantage of that as soon as they start consuming the Primera or Nimble boxes along with the rest of the portfolio. Yeah, backup to the cloud was one of the earliest cloud storage solutions that we saw up there. It's good to hear you say that you've got kind of integrations with the partners and with your portfolio. Anything else that you'd point out that really differentiates what HPE is doing compared to other cloud providers or other software solutions out there? So two things, right? So from a data protection perspective, this entire software portfolio is sort of bundled in, right? When you look at HPE Primera or when you look at HPE Nimble, one of the biggest differentiating factors is that the entire encapsulation of a solution from a workload perspective is talked through, right? Your application autonomous support, so whether you're running SQL, Oracle, BDI, Next Gen applications, the awareness of these workloads is present inside of InfoSight and it is also present inside of the boxes. And then in regards to that, their lifecycle management, their backup capabilities, their recovery capabilities, their DR capabilities, that entire ecosystem and what it takes to take a particular workload is also built into HPE Primera and HPE Nimble environments and proactive support of visibility and lifecycle operational support of these workloads, that awareness from an intelligent perspective is built in with InfoSight, right? So one of the largest or the most critical difference is that it's not a piecemeal solution. The entire ecosystem portfolio from a protection, lifecycle management, DR, test and death is completely thought through and incorporated when you buy any particular aspect of the HPE BlockStore portfolio. Excellent. Well, when we talk about primary storage, one of the big impacts on that market has been that the wave of hyper-converged infrastructure. I've had conversations, everything from your GreenLake offering is how to have a managed service with many options with HCEI underneath that. Of course, HPE purchased SimpliVity. Help us understand where you think HCEI fits today and how that relates to overall your section of the market. Absolutely, Stu, right? So HCEI has had a profound impact simplifying the consumption of the data center, right? HCEI, according to me, is an experience, right? It's an infrastructure consumption experience. Storage and networking, compute are abstracted out and you start to consume that as virtual machine instances to simplify your operations, right? So from an HCEI perspective, HPE SimpliVity is one of our largest offerings in the portfolio for smaller data centers, for IT generalists, for the edge cases, HPE SimpliVity is one of the preferred choices that the customers go to, right? Now, in addition to that, we have also introduced DHCEI, which is called Disaggregated HCEI. The Disaggregated HCEI is sort of a pun on the name. It is sort of a conversation starter. That's why we love it. But again, in keeping true to the nature of, HCEI is a consumption experience. So once you put the infrastructure in the closet and you shut the closet door, you should not be able to sort of tell whether it's a single box that's running the entire portfolio or if Disaggregated Storage, Networking and Compute instances that are running the portfolio. From our perspective, the flexibility that the customer has from a consumption model, so Storage, Networking and Compute in a single model, in a single chassis if that is simpler for the customers. But then if the Compute and the Networking and the Storage needs need to scale independently, but yet maintain the same simplicity of that consumption infrastructure, we offer that use case as well, right? And that's where DHCEI based on HPE Nimble Storage with HPE Proline servers and Aruba MCD switches all consumed as a single software layer comes into play. So all the flexibility are converged, but the simplicity of hyperconverged is consolidated into that. And then from a financial perspective, the customers can buy on CapEx and OpEx basically, GreenLake or Non-GreenLake, it's up to the customer. But again, where the focus is, focus is not on the hardware too, the focus is on what the software consumption layers are. And then from a flexibility perspective, yet being able to scale Storage and Networking independently, should the customer want that flexibility? Yeah, you know, without getting into too much of kind of the naming conventions, we actually at Wikibon, our research arm, we had put out what we called ServerSan. And it was looking at the architectures that the hyperscale environments were doing, which was even different really, you bake the scalability that you need into the application, and therefore, some of the underlying software which can scale, you can do different. So HCI, DHCI, any other prefix in there, we like to have an umbrella rather than just a bucket that you put things in with a rigid environment. Okay, so I guess, final takeaways, any other key things that you want to point out from AP Discover, any sessions, papers, the like that people should make sure that they take away from this week's event? Thanks, so obviously autonomous operations with InfoSight models being actually executed on Prime Storage is one of the biggest takeaways. In addition to that, we brought Mission Critical DR to all three, both Primera and Nimble Storage platforms as well, so three pocket DR where Cloud Storage is also integrated as part of that DR story. So you can have synchronous replication between two sites, and then a bumper site, whether that can be a third autonomous data center, or it can be HPE Cloud Storage offering as part of that DR. In addition to that, we introduced all NVMe Primera, and we introduced storage class memory on the Nimble Storage architectures as well. So obviously, further pushing the envelopes of HPE Primera being a four node massively parallel all NVMe system, and then Nimble Storage, which is our sort of cache accelerated architecture, now adds another tier of storage class memory. So we give you the performance of storage class memory at the price of all flash arrays are some of the biggest capabilities that we're putting forward. And then lastly, in regards to storage automation, we've all support on HPE Primera, and we've all legacy already supported on HPE Nimble. So combining Primera and Nimble, 3-par over there gives it one of the largest adoption and promoters of VWalls out there with the largest VWall install base. And the last but not the least, we are now introducing Google Anthos and Google CSI based container storage automation drivers for both HPE Nimble as well as for HPE Primera. So Kubernetes, CSI compliant container sort of implementation drivers are now implemented in both the platforms that are available for general use for our customers that prefer to run bare metal or container-based workloads for their production environments. All right, well, Homer, no shortage of updates that you gave our audience to be able to dig in and find out the latest on your portfolio. Thanks so much for joining us. Absolutely, pleasure to be here. Thanks so much, Stu. All right, stay with us for a lot more coverage. HPE Discover Virtual Experience, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE.