 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover, the virtual experience, I'm your host Stu Miniman and we are now excited to be able to go beyond the hype of hyperconvergence. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our regulars, even though he has a new title, Patrick Osborne is the vice president and general manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hyperconverged Infrastructure or HPE HCI as we could abbreviate. Patrick, great to see you. Thanks for much for coming back on theCUBE. Absolutely, Stu. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. All right, so HCI obviously has had a dramatic impact on the storage industry. HPE has acquisitions like SimpliVity, Nimble has a play there, you've got partnerships with some solutions, including with GreenLake. Why don't you give us just kind of the update? You've been with HPE for quite a while. What really excited you about taking this job and then we'll dig into the latest in the portfolio. Well, I think, so what's exciting about this market is it's a growth market. HCI is certainly a great solution for a whole swath of customer segments. So we talk about these HCI solutions from everyone from our largest enterprise customers all the way down to our smallest SMB customers. And it really fits the bill, not only for what you think about a standard HCI, where you're collapsing workloads and you're collapsing infrastructure, but also I think one of the interesting things that we've been able to deliver, especially with products like the HCI, is around delivering the HCI experience for three tiers of architecture. And I think that's really exciting for customers that certainly are moving more towards generalists away from specialists. And you're gonna really get that HCI experience in addition to a lot of other things we bring to the table here at HPE that we've talked about before, especially around AI ops and InfoSight and the ability to do a ton of things around predictive analytics. So it's an exciting space and it serves almost our entire customer base. Excellent, now your group, you did some announcements a little bit ahead of Discover. Why don't you give us the latest on the news and lay out how the portfolio fits? Yeah, so back in May, we made some significant announcements on in the HCI portfolio. So both on HCI SimpliVity as well as our Nimble DHCI offerings. One of the things we brought to market was around VDI specifically. And we launched a new platform called the SimpliVity 325. And based on some new technology with our partner AMD, we're able to significantly lower the cost and increase the performance for the number of remote users that we're able to support with the platform and also bring together a solution. So what you also partner with folks like Citrix and Citera and a whole number of folks so we can have a full vertically oriented solution stack for customers that are doing, they're significantly expanding their footprint around remote workers. And at the end of the day, it's gonna cut in half and so you're 50% savings on your remote worker for desktop. So some significant savings there and we've seen a huge amount of uptick for that platform in the last two months even since we announced it. And then secondly on the DHCI side, we made a number of announcements around simplicity, adding that platform to our GreenLake consumption model which is really cool. And then adding a whole set of new building blocks on the compute side based on AMD technology that allows folks to apply different types of compute per workload for our DHCI solution. So we made a pretty big announcement back in May around our portfolio for HCI solutions and their customers are definitely impacted, super positively for both announcements. Yeah, it's funny, I remember a few years back, everybody kind of rolled their eyes a little bit. It was like, oh, you know, BDI, we've talked about it to death. And of course with the global pandemic, now of course remote work so critically important. I've talked to a number of CIOs that have had HCI solutions and it's like, hey, I need to dramatically increase my services, I need to be able to scale things up. And if I didn't have these solutions, I wouldn't be able to react as fast as I need. You said you've seen an uptick, any particular anecdotes or customer stories as to how they've been able to react fast in today's climate? Yeah, so especially for knowledge workers that are working remote, I mean, I can tell you that almost 98 or 99% of my staff and the folks at HPE are working remotely and they're doing a fantastic job. So when we're able to service very small customers that are just embarking on their journey for remote workers to some of the largest corporations out there that are partners and customers of HPE, we've been able to produce a really good outcome for them in addition to working with our partners, our reseller partners to put this as another solution, building block in their bag of tricks for their customers. All right, the other thing I want to talk a bit about is HCI is a managed service. So GreenLake, I've talked to some of your team has about 1,000 customers, HCI is one of the main options that they're offering there. Why don't you bring us inside a little bit as to why customers are choosing GreenLake and what that means for your product set? So from a strategic perspective, HPE, we stated this publicly is that we want to offer all of our products and solutions as a service from a consumption perspective over the next couple of years. And so one of those key things that we want to offer from a workload perspective is certainly HCI is a service, so VMs is a service, and as well as higher level type of applications like VDI is a service. And so one of the announcements that we made was including both of our portfolios, HCI and DHCI in GreenLake, so you can essentially as a customer, you can start off very small and you are paying for the solution in meter to increments, and we have lots of flexibility. You can do it at the workload level, you can do it at the CPU consumption level, you can do it at the storage consumption level. And so that gives a lot of flexibility. And that's great for our larger customers, I want to move from a capex to an OPEX model. And, but it also really helps a lot of our small and medium-sized customers who are in this environment, they are one of the top things in their mind is maintaining liquidity. And so they can move that to an OPEX model and we actually have some really great offers that we announced with HPE financial services in conjunction with GreenLake on making this a very flexible, very cost-effective manner to consume infrastructure and provide solutions for their customers and their end-users. Excellent. You mentioned before a little bit about AI ops, give us a little bit as to how you see really the next generation of HCI taking advantage of automation, intelligence and the like. Yeah, so as we've talked on the queue before, one of the, I think one of the marquee solutions that we have and experiences that we bring to our customers, in addition to the consumption level is this ability to do AI ops, global learning, predictive analytics for our workloads, for our customers and essentially really, really cut down on the cost in people that it takes to maintain these solutions. And then you can essentially use the global learning and global aspect of a giant fleet of in our entire install base and that gets applied to HCI. So SimpliVity HCI has been plugged into InfoSight for over about a year now. Nimble, obviously a Nimble DHCI, it's core for the product offering and it's the best offering in the market for AI ops. And so our ability to do these things and provide predictive analytics, memory pressure, black listing and white listing, the install base for problems, being able to reach out to customers before issues happen, noisy neighbors, VM consumption, storage consumption, all of these things really cut down and provide a really awesome support automation experience for our customers and essentially have a seamless experience for managing all of our systems. And when you think about HCI 2.0, being able to do that not only on a compressed infrastructure like HCI, but being able to do it on DHCI, which is disaggregated hyperconverged, so you can scale storage and networking and compute separately and you provide that same HCI experience from a managing perspective and the AI ops around it is a game changer for some of the most business and mission critical applications that our customers are running. All right, one of the big themes that we're hearing across HPE at Discover this year is about edge solutions. Traditionally, I think of HCI really as helping collapse and simplify the data center, really that cloud operating model almost in the data center, where do these things connect? How does the edge fit into this whole discussion? Yeah, so one of the beauties of HCI and specifically SimpliVity is our ability to be hyper efficient, not only in just the storage of the data, so from day one, everything is dedupe, everything is compressed and that's across both your on-prem copies as well as your DR copies as well as your backup copies and one of the things that we're seeing is that, sure, HCI is great to collapse workloads in the data center and but what we're seeing now is the ability to go service workloads that are running outside of the data center and when we talk about edge, we have some fantastic assets and a lot of customers running our edge compute solutions, our edge networking solution, specifically wireless and Aruba and what we're able to do is we're bringing those services, so compute networking and storage closer to the end user but outside the data center and so there are some challenges to that, like so how do you federate the management of hundreds if not thousands of clusters of these workloads running that could be anywhere from, you could think about a small, like a micro data center to a closet to even just a small form factor like to be in a half of a rack and being able to manage those effectively but then also be able to pull the workloads and the data back, so be able to do edge to core to cloud from a data mobility perspective is something that we provide and our customers are certainly deploying our solutions because of that, so a lot of stuff going on in the edge and what I think one of the other things too is that we see is people are running virtualized workloads of VMs and then also starting to incorporate containers. So microservices for industry specific things like vision and video and a whole bunch of things that happen around AI and ML at the edge, so it's very exciting place. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up and obviously one of the things that we're hearing a lot of interest from the community when it comes to virtualization is, what is happening with that really application modernization and containerization, a big piece of that of course VMware with VCR seven really helping to bring Kubernetes together to the virtualization environment. How do you see all of these playing together? Be in a bare metal virtualization containers, edge core cloud, it's a complicated environment and the goal of HCI was always to help simplify this but we know IT is a bit messy and additive. Yeah, I think at the end of the day there are some basic services that customers want to run at the end of the day. They want to be able to deploy a workload on infrastructure that can be managed remotely, that can be managed at scale, that provides resiliency, it provides performance and it provides data mobility and HCI provides all of those capabilities whether it's through the HPE SimpliVity portfolio or Nimble DHCI and so you have a number of different building blocks that you can build but on top of that is a set of data services and cloud consumption like experience that allows you to place those workloads on the infrastructure that you need and where you need it and so if it's running at the edge, this co-mingling of VMs and containers, we have a pretty unique platform out there especially for things like AI and ML workloads in our HPE container platform and so you can run that for example on something like HPE SimpliVity or DHCI whether that's in the data center or whether you're running that on the edge and being able to service those customers but it's not an all or nothing proposition at this point, a number of our customers are running workloads that are virtualized and that are customized side by side to provide essentially services to customers, their customers at the end of the day. Excellent, Patrick, I'll give you the final word, takeaways you want your customers to have from HPE Discovery this week. Yeah, HPE Discovery, the virtual experience has been great and I think everyone participating in this, we'd love to provide you as much information as possible. We've made a number of announcements around HCI, both our HCI platform with SimpliVity, the DHCI, we've made some really great announcements recently around our primary storage and then we're gonna continue at HPE Discovery around some of our cloud data services. So when you think about someone who's gonna provide, you're gonna partner with from a customer perspective on your most valuable workloads, whether it's workloads that exist today or workloads that are gonna fuel your digital transformation, HPE really is a partner that's providing the infrastructure, the workloads and the cloud like experience both like from a management perspective as well as from an assumption perspective that's gonna service these workloads from edge to quarter cloud. So we're pretty excited about HPE Discovery and all the announcements that we have today. Excellent, thanks so much Patrick and we'll be right back with lots more coverage from HPE Discover. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.