 Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of the event, John Grimala is here. He's the senior director of product management for HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, new offering from HPE. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about cloud native. Hey John, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Awesome, we're here to be with you again. All right, so what is GreenLake Lighthouse? Yes, very excited. Another new offering and innovation from HPE to support our broader GreenLake strategy and plans. It's really a brand new purpose-built cloud native platform that we've developed and created that pulls together all of our infrastructure leadership with our platform software leadership into a single integrated system built to run GreenLake cloud services. So think of it as fully integrated, deploy at any place you want on your premises, at a co-location provider or at the edge, wherever you need. They'll all inter-operate, work together, sharing data, running apps together, great capability for people to bring the cloud where they want. As we talk about with GreenLake, it's the cloud that comes to you. So we think of this as a management platform, is it also sort of a quasi-development platform? Kind of, where does it fit in that spectrum? Well, it's really more of an integrated system with all of the integrated control planes needed to run it in a distributed fashion. So it's a true distributed cloud, intended to run at any client location that's needed, connects back to GreenLake Central and our GreenLake cloud operations teams to go ahead and run any cloud services that they want. So you get the benefit of running those workloads wherever you need, but that centralized control that people want in terms of how they run their clouds. Okay, so we think of these things like, for instance, how is it different from AWS Outposts or things like Azure Stack or Azure Hub? Yeah, very simply, this is because it's a distributed cloud, intended to make it so you could run it wherever you need. You don't need to be tethered to any of the public clouds or the various public clouds out there. So people can now run their systems wherever they want, however they need, without that required tethering that much of those other vendors require. So you can really sort of own your own cloud or have that cloud come to wherever you need it within your overall IT. Can I tether to a public cloud if I want to? Yeah, the cloud services, like many other cloud services, can interconnect together. So no issue if you want to run or even do failover between public cloud or on-premises. It's all how you want to set it up, but that connection to public cloud again through GreenLake is done at that cloud services level, where you would connect one of these GreenLake Lighthouse systems to the public cloud through services. Okay, so maybe we could talk a little bit about the use cases in a minute, but how flexible is this? How do I configure Lighthouse? What comes standard? What are my options? Yeah, so we've designed it in a very modular fashion so that people can really configure it to whatever their needs are at any given location. So there's a basic set of modules that align to a lot of the compute and storage instances that people are familiar with from all of the cloud providers. You simply tell us which workloads you want to be running on it and how much capacity you want, and that'll get configured and deployed to that given site. In terms of the different types, we have what we're calling two series or a set of series that are available for this to meet different sets of needs, one being more mainstream for broad use cases that people need, virtualized container, any other type of enterprise workloads, and another more technically focused with higher performance networking for higher performance deployments. You can choose which of those fits your needs for those given areas. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the workloads and what specifically is supported and how they get deployed. Yeah, again, all of it is managed and run through GreenLake Central. That's our one location where people can go to watch these things manage them. You can run container as a service, VM as a service as needed on these different platforms. You could actually mix and match those as well. So one of these platforms can run multiple of those and you can vary the mix of those as your business needs change over time. So think of it as a very flexible way to manage this which is really what Cloud Native is all about, having that flexibility to run those workloads wherever and however you need. In addition, we can build a more advanced type of solutions on top of those sort of foundational capabilities with things like HPC as a service and Melops as a service to better enable clients to deploy any of their given enterprise workloads. John, what about the security model for Lighthouse? That's obviously a big deal. Everybody's talking about these days. It can't open the news without seeing some kind of hacked Azure. How does Lighthouse operate in a secure environment? Well, first of all, that there's sort of a new standard that was established within these cloud operating models and HPE was leading in terms of infrastructure innovation with our Silicon Rooter Trust where we came out with the world's most secure infrastructure a few years ago. And what we're doing now since this is a full platform and integrated system, we'll be extending that capability beyond just how we create a Rooter Trust in our manufacturing facilities to ensure that it's secure, running it within the infrastructure itself, we'll be extending that vertically up into the software stacks of containers and VMs, sort of using that Rooter Trust up to make sure everything's secure in that sense and then eventually up to the workloads themselves. So by being able to go back to that Rooter Trust, it really makes a big difference in how people can run things in an enterprise secure way. Great innovations continued and one of our big focus areas throughout this year. So what is a fit in the portfolio, John? I mean, how is it compliment or how is it different from the typical HPE systems, the hardware and software that we're used to? You might think of this as sort of a best of bringing together all the great innovations of HPE. We've got awesome infrastructure that we've led for many, many years. We've got great more cloud native software that's being developed. We've got great partnerships that we've got with a lot of the leading vendors out there. This allows us to bring all of those things together into a integrated platform that is really intended to run these cloud native services. So it builds on top of that leadership fits in that sense with the portfolio, but it's ultimately about how it allows us to run and extend our green light capabilities as we know them to make them more consumable if you want to call it for a lot of our enterprise clients at whatever location that they... So when would I use Lighthouse and when would I use sort of a traditional HPE system? Yeah, again, it's a matter of which level of integration people want. Cloud is really also in terms of an experience about simplifying what people are purchasing and making it easier for them to consume, easier for them to roll out a lot of these things. That's when you'd want to purchase a Lighthouse versus our other infrastructure products. We'll always have those leading infrastructure products where people can put together everything in exactly the way that they want and go through the qualification and certification of a lot of those workloads. Or they can go ahead and select this green light lighthouse where they have a lot of these things available in a catalog. We do validation of the workloads and platform systems so that it's all sort of ready for people to roll out in a much more secure, tested and agile fashion. So if I have a cloud first strategy, but I don't want to put it in the public cloud, but I want that cloud experience and I want to go fast. It sounds like Lighthouse is, I'm the perfect customer for Lighthouse. Precisely, this is taking that cloud experience that people are wanting, the simplicity of those deployments and making it where it can come to them in whichever location that they want, running it on a consumption basis so that it's a lot easier way for them to go ahead and manage and deploy those things without a lot of the internal qualification and certifications that they've had to do over the years. Versus, okay, but and or if I want to customize it, maybe I'm a channel partner, I want to bring some of my own value, I got a specific use case that's not covered by something like Lighthouse, that's where I would go with the more traditional infrastructure. Correct, yeah. If anyone wants to do customization, we've got a great set of products for that. We really want to use Lighthouse as a mechanism for us to standardize and focus on more enabling these broader cloud capabilities required. And Lighthouse, talk a little bit more about the automation that I get. Things like patching and software updates, that's sort of included in this integrated system. Is that correct? Absolutely, you know, when people think about, you know, managing workloads in the cloud, they don't worry about taking care of firmware updating and a lot of those things. That's all taken care of by the provider. So in that same experience, Lighthouse comes with all of the firmware updating, all of the software updating all included, all managed through our GreenLake managed services teams. So that's just part of how the system takes care of itself. You know, that's a new level of capability and experience that's consistent with all of the cloud providers update. And that's, okay, so that's something that is a managed service. So let's say I have a Lighthouse on-prem, you're going to, that managed service is doing all the patching and the releases and the updates and that lives in the cloud, that lives in HPE, that lives in my prem. Well, yeah, ultimately it all goes through GreenLake Central and gets managed. You know, all of those deployments are automated in nature so that people don't have to worry about them. There's multiple ways that that can get delivered to them. We have some automation and control plane technology that brings that all together for them. You know, it can vary based on the client on their degree of how they want to manage some of that, but it's all taken care of for them. And, you know, you've got GreenLake in the name, am I to infer from that that it's sort of dovetails in? It's one of the puzzles in the GreenLake Mosaic? Yeah, exactly. So think of GreenLake as our broader initiative for everything cloud. And how do we start enabling not only these cloud services, but make it easier for people to deploy those and consume them wherever they need? And this is the enablement piece. This is that portion of GreenLake that helps them enable that connected to GreenLake Central where they can, you know, manage everything centrally. And then we've got that broad catalog of services available. And when can I get it? When's it go GA? Yeah, so it'll July is when our first set of shipments and availability are there. So just a very, you know, few days after, you know, discover here and we'll expand the portfolio over time with more of a mainstream version early, more technical or performance oriented ones available soon thereafter. And we've got plans even for edge type offerings more in the future as well. So a case where we'll continue to build and expand more targeting these platforms to folks needs whether they're enterprise or maybe there are vertical offerings that they want in terms of how they, you know, move all these things together. Think of telco is a great case where people want this healthcare is another area where we can add the value of these integrated systems in a very purpose built way. Can I ask you what like what's inside? You know, what can I get in terms of, you know, basic infrastructure, compute storage, networking? What are my options? All of the above, you know, what we'll do is we'll go through the basic selection of all of that greatest hits within our complete portfolio, pull them together, give you a few simple choices. You know, you think about it as you want general purpose compute modules. You might want compute optimized or memory optimized modules. Each of those are simple choices that you'll make that come together underlying all that are the great infrastructure pieces that you've done for years. But we take care of simplifying that for you. So you don't have to worry about those details. Great, well, John, congratulations on the new product and thank you for sharing the update with theCUBE. Thank you very much. Great to talk to you. All right, thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. Right back with more coverage right after this short break.