 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. You're watching TheCube's coverage. This is day two, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Shayla Rourah is here. She's the senior vice president and GM of data, the data infrastructure business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and of course the storage division and Omar Assad. Welcome back to TheCube. Omar senior vice president and general manager for cloud data services. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Storage. Guys, thanks for coming on, good to see you. Thank you, always a pleasure, man. So, Shayla, start with you. Explain the difference to data infrastructure business and then Omar's cloud data services, you first. Okay, so data infrastructure business, so I'm responsible for the primary and secondary storage. Basically, what you physically store the data in a box, I actually own that. So I'm going to have Omar explain his business because he can explain it better than me, go ahead. So, I understand, right? So first, data infrastructure platforms, primary, secondary storage, and then what I do from a cloud perspective is wrap up those things into offerings, block storage offering, data protection offerings and then put them on top of the GreenLake platform which is a platform that Antonio and Fidelma talked about on main keynote stage yesterday. That includes multi-tenancy, customer subscription management, sign-on management and then on top of that, we build services. Services are cloud-like services, storage services are block service, data protection service, disaster recovery services. Those services are then launched on top of the platform. Some services like data protection services are software only. Some services are software plus hardware and the hardware in the platform comes along from the primary storage business and we run the control plane for that block service on the GreenLake platform and that's the cloud service. I just want to clarify, so what we maybe used to know is three-par and nimble and store once, that's those are the products that you're responsible for. That is the primary storage part, right? And just to kind of show that he and I, we do indeed work together, right? So if you think about the three-par, the primary, sorry, the Primera, the Electra, the nimble, right? All that, right? That is the building, that's the technology that you know my team builds and what Omar does with his magic is that he turns it into HPE GreenLake for storage, right? And to deliver as a service, right? And basically to create a self-service agility for the customer and also to create a cloud, a very cloud operational experience for them. So I'm a customer, I just want to get this right. I'm a customer and I want hybrid. That's what you're delivering as a cloud service and I don't care where the data is on premises, on in storage or on a cloud, right? So the way that would work is as a customer you would come along with the partner because we're 100% partner-led, you'll come to the GreenLake console. On the GreenLake console, you will pick one of our services. Could be a data protection service, could be the block storage service. All services are hybrid in nature. We, the public cloud is 100% participant in the ecosystem. You'll choose a service. Once you choose a service, you'll like the rate card for that service. That rate card is just like a hyperscaler rate card. IOPS, Commitment, Mint, Commits, whatever. Once you procure that at the price that you like with the partner, you buy the subscription. Then you go to console.greenlake.com, activate your subscription. Once the subscription is activated, if it's a service like block storage, which we talked about yesterday, service will be activated and our supply chain will send you our platform gear. And that will get activated in your site. Two things, network cable, power cable, dial into the cloud, service gets activated, and you have a cloud control plan. The key difference to remember is that it is cloud consumption model and cloud operation model built in together. It is not your traditional as a service which is just like hardware leasing. That's just, that's thing of the past. But this answers a question that I had, how do you transform from a company that is selling boxes, of course most of your engineers are software engineers, I get that, to one that's selling services and it sounds like the answer is you've organized, I know it's inside baseball here, but you organize so that you still have, you can build best-of-breed products and then you can package them into services. 100%, 100%. It's a separate but complementary organization. The simplest way to look at it would be we have a platform site of the house that builds the persistence layers, the innovation, the file systems, the speeds and feeds and then building on top of that really, really resilient storage services. Then how the customer consumes those storage services, we've got tremendous feedback from our customers is that the cloud operational model has won. It's just a very, very simple way to operate it, right? So from a customer's perspective, we have completely abstracted away our hardware, which is in the back, it could be at their own data center, it could be at an MSP, or they could be using a public cloud region. But from an operational perspective, the customer gets a single pane of glass through our service console, whether they're operating stuff on-prem or they're operating stuff in the public cloud. So they get storage, no matter what. They want it in the cloud, they get it that way and if they want it as a service, it just gets shipped and plug it in and auto-configured. It's ready to go. That's happening, and the key thing is simplicity. We want to take the headache away from our customers. We want our customers to focus on their business outcomes and their projects and we're simplifying it through analytics and through this unified cloud platform on how their data is managed, how they're stored, how they're secured. That's all taken care of in this operational model. Okay, so I have a question. So just now, the edge, take me through this now. I'm a customer. Okay, I got the data center on-premise action, cloud, love that, great sir. That's a value proposition. Come to HPE because we provide this easily. But now at the edge, I want to deploy it out to some edge node. Could be a tower with telecom, 5G, or whatever. I want boxes out there on storage. What happens there? Just ship it out there and connects up? Does it work the same way? 100%. So from our infrastructure team, you'll consume one or two platforms. You'll consume either the hyper-converged form factor, SimpliVity, or you might convert the Converged form factor, which is Proline servers powered by Electras, Electra 6Ks, either of the, but it's very different the way you would procure it. What you would procure from us is an edge service. That edge service will come configured with certain amount of compute, certain amount of storage, and a certain amount of data protection. Once you buy that on our dollars per gig per month basis, whichever way, whichever rate card you prefer, storage rate card or a VMware rate card, that's all you buy. From that point on, the platform team automatically configures the backend hardware from that, from that attribute-based ordering, and that is shipped out to your edge. Dial in the network cable, dial in the power cable, GreenLake Cloud discovers it, and then you start printing again. So self-service, configure it, it just shows up, plug it in, done. Self-service, but partner-led, because we have preferred pricing for our partners. Our partners would come in, they will configure the subscriptions, and then we activate those customers, and then send out the hardware. So it's like a, you know, hyperscale or on-prem, at-scale kind of a model. Yeah, I like it a lot. So you guys are in the data business. You run the data portion of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I used to call it storage, even though we still call it storage, but it's really, it's evolving into data. So what's your vision for the data business and your customers' data vision, if you will? How are you supporting that? Well, I want to kick it off, and then I want to have my friend Omar chime in, but the key thing is that, the first step is, is that we have to create a unified platform, and in this case, we're creating a unified cloud platform, right, where there's a single pane of, there's a single pane of glass to manage all that data, right? And also leveraging lots of analytics and telemetry data that actually comes from our infocyte, right? We use all that, we make it easy for the customer, and all they have to say, and they're basically giving the answers to the test. Hey, you know, you may want to increase your capacity, you may want to tweak your performance here, and all the customers are like, yes, no, yes, no. Basically it, right, accept, not accept, right? That's actually the easiest way. And again, as I said earlier, this feeds up the bandwidth for the IT teams to then actually focus more on the business side of the house, rather than figuring out how to actually manage every single step of the way of the data. It's exactly what Sheila described, right? The way this strategy manifests itself across an operational roadmap for us is the ability to change from a storage vendor to a data services vendor, right? Right. And then once we start monetizing these data services to our customers through the GreenLake platform, which gives us cloud consumption model and a cloud operational model, and then certain data services come with the platform layer, certain data services are software only. But all the services, all the data services that we provide are hybrid in nature, where we say when you provision storage, you could provision it on-prem, or you can provision it in a hyperscalar environment. The challenge that most of our customers have come back and told us is like, data center control planes are getting fragmented. On-premises, I mean, there's no secrecy about it, right? VMware is the predominant hypervisor, and as a result of that, vCenter is the predominant configuration layer. Then there is the public cloud side, which is through either Azure, GCP or AWS being one of the largest ones out there. But when the customer is dealing with data assets, the persistence layer could be anywhere. It could be an AWS region, it could be your own data center, or it could be your MSP. But what this does is it creates an immense amount of fragmentation in the context in which the customers understand the data. Essentially, John, the customers are just trying to answer three questions. What is it that I store? How much of it do I store? Should I even be storing it in the first place? Surprisingly, those three questions haven't been answered, and we've gotten more and more and more fragmented. So what we are trying to produce for our customers is a context-aware data view, which allows the customer to understand structured and unstructured data, and the lineage of it, how is it stored within the organization? And essentially, the vision is around simplification and context-aware data management. One of the key things that makes that possible is, again, the age-old InfoSight capability that we have continued to hone and develop over time, which is now up to the stage of 12 trillion data points that are coming into the system that are now corroborated to give that back. And, of course, cost-optimizing it as well. We're up against the clock, but take us through the announcements. What's new from when we sort of last talked, I guess it was in September? Right. What's new that's being announced here and or GA? So three major announcements that came out because to keep and establishing the context when we were with you last time, so last time we announced GreenLake Backup and Recovery service. That was VMware Backup and Recovery as a complete cloud sort of SaaS control plane. No backup target management, no media server management, no catalog management, it's completely a SaaS service. Provide your vCenter address, boom, off you go. We do the backups, agent less, 100% dedupe enabled. We've extended that into the public cloud domain. So now we can back up AWS, EC2 and EBS instances within the same constructs. So a single catalog, single backup policy, single protection framework that protects you both in the cloud and on-prem, no fragmentation, no multiple solutions deployed. And the second one is we've extended our hyperconverged service to now be what we call the hybrid cloud on demand. So basically you go to GreenLake console control plane and from there you basically just start configuring virtual machines. It supports VMware and AWS at the same time. So you can provision a virtual machine on-prem or you can provision a virtual machine in the public cloud. And it's the same framework, the same catalog, the same inventory management system across the board. And then lastly, we extended our block storage service to also become hybrid in nature. So you can manage on-prem and AWS EBS assets as well. And Sheila, do you still make product announcements or does Antonio not allow that? Well, we make product announcements. You're going to see our product announcements actually done through the HPE GreenLake for block storage. So our announcements will be coming through that because we do want to make it as a service. Again, we want to take all of that headache of what configuration should I buy? How do I actually deploy it? How do I, we really want to take that headache away. So you're going to see more feature announcements that's going to come through this. So feature acceleration through GreenLake will be exposed. Absolutely. Is there some cool stuff going on behind the scenes? No, there's a lot of good stuff. Hardware still matters. Hardware still matters. Does hardware matter? Hardware still matters, but what matters more is the experience. And that's actually what we want to bring to the customer. 100%. Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. You got it. See you again and hope the experience was good for you, Sheila. No, no, thank you. Pleasure to have you. All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back from HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCUBE.