 Okay, we're back. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcement. So one of the things that we said on theCUBE when we first saw GreenLake was let's watch the pace at which HPE delivers new services. What's that cadence like? Because that's a real signal as to the extent that the company's leading into the cloud. And today, we're covering that continued expansion. We're here with Tom Black, who's the general manager of HPE Storage, Omar Assad, who's the storage platform lead for cloud data services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome, it's good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us today, good to see you. Happy to be here, Dave. So obviously a lot has changed globally, but when you think of things like cyber threats, ransomware, the acceleration of business transformation, these are new things, a lot of it is unknown, a lot of it was forced upon us, Tom. What are you guys doing to address these trends? How are you helping customers? Sure, thanks for the question. So if you think back to what we launched in early May, kind of the initial cloud transformation of what was our traditional storage business, we really focused on one key theme, very customer-in, customer-driven theme, that the cloud operational model has won. And that customers want that operational model, whether they're operating their workload in the cloud or whether they're operating that workload in their own facility or in a colo, kind of the same thing. So that was kind of our true north, and that's what we launched out of the gate in May. But we did allude in May to the fact that we would have an ongoing series of new services coming out on the HPE GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud platform. And just really excited today to be talking about some of what that expansion looks like. We will continue through this month and through the quarters ahead to really add more and more services in that vein of focusing on bringing that true cloud services model to our customers. So we're really excited today to unveil, kind of we've entered the data protection as a service market with HPE GreenLake. So this is really our expansion into a very top-of-mind topic and set of problems and solutions or headaches and aspirants to quote an old friend that CAO's face is they think about how to manage data through its life cycle in their organization. When I talked to CAO's during the pandemic, not that we're out yet, but really in the throes of it, and asked them about things like business resilience, they said, you know, we really had to rethink our disaster recovery strategy. It was sort of geared toward a fire or a hurricane and we just didn't even imagine this type of disaster, if you will. So we really needed to rethink it. So when I see your disaster recovery as a service and capabilities like that, is that the Zerto acquisition? Yes, Dave, thanks, yeah. So we're super happy to have the Zerto team now as part of our family. Just a brilliant team, a well-respected technology. It's kind of a blue chip set of customers and partners that really appreciate what Zerto has to offer. As we looked at the data protection as a service market, one of the hardest problems is really in that disaster recovery space. I think Omber's going to talk a little bit more about that today. But Zerto really does bring the leading industry, what's called continuous data protection capability into our GreenLake platform. We've just recently closed the acquisition and we're working on kind of the integration plan as we speak now that we can actually talk to each other post-close, but you'll continue to see some really exciting milestones each and every quarter as we march forward with Zerto now as part of the family. So we all talk about how data is so important. We certainly learned during the pandemic that if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and a digital business is a data business. So things like backup or data protection as a service become increasingly critical. I know you have some capabilities there. Maybe you could share with us. Absolutely, Dave. So one of the things that we noticed was as we took the storage business through its transformation and we started to convert with the launch of the Electron 9K and the 6K platform, we really, really brought the cloud operational model to our customers. So one of the things that feedback that was coming loud and clear to us is that as we look at the storage portfolio where we look at file, block and object which are now being transformed into a cloud operational experience, data protection, disaster recovery, coming back into business after a disaster, snapshot management, all of those capabilities, we still had to rely on our partner technologies in order to do that. Now it's not bad that we have great partners in the data protection world but what we're really focused on is that cloud operational model and cloud operational experience end to end as Tom mentioned through the data management lifecycle. So as a result of that, we talked to a lot of our customers, we talked to a bunch of partners and one of the things that was coming back was that yes, there are many data protection, backup offerings on the market but that true as a service experience that is completely integrated to the services experience of the storage that the customers is experiencing that is not there. So what we looked at was, especially to the largest ecosystem which is the VMware ecosystem. So we're launching data protection as a service or backup as a service for our VMware customers offered from data services cloud console as a SaaS portal. 100% SaaS service, nothing to install. No media servers, no application servers, no catalog servers, no backup targets, no patching, no expansion, no capacity planning, none of that is needed. All that's needed is sign on, click, give your vCenter credentials and off you go. That's it. That is it, three clicks and you're in business. So currently in our analysis, we offer 5x faster recovery from any of the competitive offerings that there are three and a half better dedupe ratios but for our customers, it's as simple as this VM is protected as this many dollars per gig per month, that's it. No backup target, no media server, no catalog server, nothing to manage. Total turnkey off of the portal. So that's the cadence of services that we promise and this is one of the first ones when it comes to data management that is coming out into the open. So you may have just answered this question but I want to pose it and get you maybe to summarize it because Tom was talking earlier about the customer mandate for cloud in a cloud operational model. So I want you to explain to the audience how you're making that real. Actually, can I start that one? Yeah, sure. The test was Monday morning, getting ready for this chat with you, Dave. They got me on console and I'm not kidding. Three clicks, I got back up and running off the lab VMware instance. So I'll pass it off to you the real answer but if I could do it in three clicks, we're pretty good shares. As a convenience of this service, even Tom can be your backer. I might be able to even do it this. So again, a very pertinent question, Dave. When you look at the cloud operational model, as you abstract the hardware and take the management model up into a SaaS service, it gives our customers that access to that continuous delivery access that we have. We're gonna continue to make the service model better in the cloud model and automatically customers get the value of it without even reinstalling or going through on patch cycle or an upgrade cycle. But as we get into this cloud operational model, one of the things that was missing was if you start to talk about applications, how are application workloads going to be deployed? How are they going to be protected and how are they going to be expanded? So what we did was we expanded our InfoSight offerings by merging them into the Data Services Cloud Console and we're releasing a new service called App Insects. It is going to be available to our customers at the end of the month. It is, nothing has to change. They don't have to install any sort of agents or host modifications, nothing like that. If they're customers of Electra, Nimble, Primera boxes and they're using InfoSight and Data Services Cloud Console, they will automatically get App Insights. What App Insights does is it really teases apart all that data that we have been collecting with InfoSight and now with the acquisition of HPE Cloud Physics, we're merging them together and relating the operational stack top to bottom. So discovering all the way from your application usage, network usage, storage usage, IOP usage, VMware usage, cross collaborating then and presenting that to a customer from an app or an outcome perspective, all in the Data Services Cloud Console. So what this does for our customers is it really, really transforms not only their operational experience, but also buying experience because if you remember, in one of the earlier releases of Data Services Cloud Console, we released this application called Intelligent Intent Based Provisioning in which you just describe your workload and we go ahead and we provision that. App Insights and InfoSight feed that information directly into that and Cloud Physics generates and results and displays those analytics back to us, to your partner of record and to the HPE so we can all come together on a common data-driven discussion point with our customers to continue to make their journey better. Tom, where's all the boxes? Traditional storage is changing. I've actually been waiting for this day for a long, long time. We've certainly seen glimpses of it from the Cloud players but they don't have super rich portfolio. Storage portfolios, they're growing now but this is a really good, strong example of a company with a large storage portfolio that's, I mean, I haven't heard the word three par once today, right? And so, but that says to me, that's an indication that you're thinking like a Cloud player. Can you maybe talk to that? Sure, yeah, no, we're just tremendously excited about this transformation and really the reception we've got in the market from analysts, from partners, from customers because you're right, you haven't heard us talk about a box at all today. It's really about a block service, file service, an object service, a backup and recovery service, disaster recovery service. That is the language, if you will, of the business problems of our customers. Not do they need to pick this widget or that widget and how many ops can I get here and there and what should the HA cage protection scheme be? That is our job to manage underneath our true north which is the Cloud operational model. And so that's going to be really how we've set our course and how we will kind of deliver products, solutions, offers into the market underneath that umbrella. Ultimately, getting our customers wherever their data is, Dave, to be able to interact at that service level instead of at that infrastructure box level. All right, you got my attention wherever the data, so that's the north star here is, this is, you know, you're not done today, obviously, but you've got a vision to bring that to the Cloud, across Clouds, on-prem, out to the Edge, that's the abstraction layer that you're going to build, you're hiding all that complexity. That's correct. And that's Cloud. So the definition of Cloud is changing. Yeah, it's no longer, sorry, it's no longer a remote set of services somewhere up in the Cloud. It's expanding on-prem, hybrid, across Clouds, Edge, everywhere. You're exactly right, Dave. It is, Cloud is more about the experience and the outcome it gives a customer than actually where the compute or storage is. We've chosen to take a very customer-in-agnostic position of whether it's data in your premise, data in your Cloud, we're going to help you manage that data and deliver that data to workloads and analytics, wherever the compute needs to be, wherever the data needs to be. Again, technologies like Xerto give us the ability to move data. Across Clouds, from facilities to Clouds, back and forth. So it's a really exciting new day for HPE GreenLake. We're just so super happy to bring these technologies out and really continue to follow on the course of doing what we said we would do. The new mindset starts there, I guess. It's obviously new, certainly new technologies. You're talking about machine intelligence. This is a metadata challenge. Absolutely. Big time, long term, that North Star that we talked about. And applying that machine intelligence, all the experience that you get, like data that you're gathering, I think ultimately how customers want you to solve this problem. So in the middle of InfoSight, Data Services Cloud Console, and the instrumentation that is already shipping on our appliances, both in edge appliances and the data center appliances, we're collecting more than a trillion data points over the period of a quarter at the end of the day. So it's harnessing that at the back end to cross relate and then using the cloud physics acquisition, what we're doing is we can now simulate these things on behalf of our customers into the future timeline. So at the end of the day, it's really about listening to the customer and what outcomes that they want to achieve with their data. Storage is there. We provide excellent persistence layers where customers can store their data safely. But at the end of the day, it's customer's choice. They can store their data out at the edge in compute servers, commodity servers, x86 servers. They can have their data in the data center which they are privately owned or their data can be in a service provider or it can be in a hyperscaler. The infrastructure or the persistence layer is independent from the Data Services Cloud Console. Data Services Cloud Console provides our customers with a SaaS based industry leading, metadata rich management experience which then allows you to draw conclusions. So services like cloud physics, InfoSight provide the analytics and richness of the metadata. Backup and recovery service allows us to index our customer's data and add a rich metadata to that. And then combine that with Zerto which is our disaster recovery as a service offering going to start over here. That gives the customer a very simple slider as to where they want their protection levels to be. They want their protection to be instant or they want their protection to be lazy, eight hours window. But the thing is at the end of the day it's about choice without managing the complexities of the hardware underneath. It's programmable. Completely. I come in, what I'm hearing is file object blocks are a multi-protocol, I got a full stack. So data reduction, my snaps, my replicates, whatever I need that's in there as a service. I can access latency sensitive storage if I need to or I can push it out to cheaper stores. I can push it out to the cloud presumably. I could air gap it and it's all done as infrastructure is code. And then different protection levels. Where I see this going, it really gets exciting is you're now a data company and you're bringing AI, machine intelligence and driving data products, data services for your customers who are going to monetize that at their end of the value chain. That's right, that's right. And safely and securely keeping in mind that was there at those technology, we can give you small second recovery points to protect against ransomware. So all of that operational elegance, all of those insights and intelligence to help you build a more agile workload-centric organization but then to do it safely and securely against ransomware, that's kind of the storm if you will, that's brewing. We're just really excited to be at the eye of it. I'm excited too, I've been waiting for this day for a long time and we're not talking about NVME and atomic rights and I love that stuff by the way and I'm sure it's all under the covers but that's not what drives business value. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Hey Dave, thanks for having us. It's been great to be here. Thank you Dave, appreciate it. We're seeing a transformation all through the stack and keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE and our coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcements. We'll be right back. Thank you.