 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016, Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE. We're here at HPE Discover. This is our sixth year covering HPE Discover Las Vegas. We also cover, of course, the shows in Europe. And what would an HPE Discover be without a little conversation about dream work? So we're really excited to have Kate Swanborg here. She's the head of technology, communications, and alliances at DreamWorks Animation. And she's joined by Tim Peters, who's the vice president and general manager of ProLiant Rack servers at HPE. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to see you. Thank you very much. Thanks for spending some time, Tim. Kate, let's start with you. DreamWorks, cool business. A lot of fun. Everybody's familiar with Shrack and some of the other great movies that you guys have produced. So give us the update with DreamWorks. What's happening now down in LA? Honestly, things at DreamWorks are amazing right now. We're producing two films every year. We just released Kung Fu Panda 3 earlier this year. It was a co-production with our studio in Shanghai. First time we've ever done that. So the film was actually produced in both countries and in both languages. Everything at DreamWorks right now is on an upswing. It's just such an exciting place to be. And Tim, of course, you guys at HPE have always had a long-term relationship with DreamWorks. Jeffrey Katzenberg has been very outspoken about that relationship. So it's got to feel good to sort of sit back now in the new HPE, new company, the focus. Give us the update from your perspective. Well, things are going really well. We're actually doing exceptionally well in the market relative to our competition, but all in the context of trying to create value for our customers. And having a customer like DreamWorks animation is a dream come true because we were sharing some of the things that you guys do with the technology to produce these amazing films. And I wish I had your job. There's a lot of fun in what you're doing. So Kate, your business, the innovation in your business, it's kind of like the technology business in that it never stops. That's right, I mean, one of the things that a lot of people don't understand is just how much technology is required to make these films. These movies are 90 minutes long and every single element in them has to be crafted. So it's not like live action where you can take a camera out and film things. Everything in our movies has to be geometrically made and surfaced and textured and rendered. So by the time we're done making one of our movies, we've usually created half a billion digital files. We've usually used 75 million compute hours just to render the images. And that's just for one movie. We usually have 10 films in active production. So we are actively using 15,000 cores in a completely pro-liant blade server farm to make these movies every single day. Yeah, so in the technology business, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades and that has to be, you guys consume every compute piece of energy that's produced. So Tim, my question is, so how do the innovations that you're doing on the server side, how do you see those translating, and maybe this is a two-part question, translating Kate into your innovation. So start with the innovations that you guys are doing, then we'll map it into the DreamWorks piece. Great, yeah, so for us, we have to be driven by an insatiable maniacal focus on innovation. And we see that in three parts, and I'll relate it to what DreamWorks Animation is doing. One is innovation at the platform level, and that's in the context of how do we make this platform the most secure, how do we make sure the compute is optimized for the performance, and every cadence with our partner with Intel to do that, and then tune that to create the best of breed performance. And we see that in demonstrating a lot of benchmarks, in fact, the line share of benchmarks that are in the industry, setting tons of world records, but also in instrumenting the world's first persistent memory-enabled servers. I think that's very important relative to the demands and the workloads that DreamWorks has because it's memory-insensitive, and what we've done is creating a platform combined between the firmware, the BIOS, the device, the non-volatile DIMM itself, as well as support for the operating system and the application to allow non-volatile, which when you turn the system off, it preserves the data, and then put it on the memory bus to maximize performance for the workload. And so applications run at 2x, 4x, the speed that normally would, so that's a direct correlation to some of the differences. So, Tim, I call it chasing the chips, and in your business, new chip comes out of from Intel, new microprocessors, you got to grab it, you have to be able to exploit that as fast as possible, and Kate, your organization is consuming those innovations as fast as possible, but what's this persistent-enabled server piece, translate that into what it means for your business? Well, it's so critical for us, these types of innovations, because obviously, our artist workflows are the most important thing. Our artists are sitting there, they have ideas, they want to make these characters perform in the way that audiences are going to love, and what is important is that idea that they have, they need to be able to realize that as quickly as possible. Things like this persistent memory, that's going to give them the opportunity to keep that data, to keep those applications right there, it's going to remove any latency. Suddenly, all of our in-house proprietary applications that we've completely re-architected to take advantage of scalable, multi-core computing, so we have the compute on our side right now, and with this type of innovation, we're going to have the memory on our side too, it's a big deal for us. So this is like a little preview, showing a little leg of the machine coming out, or is this? More than a preview, this is real stuff. It is the first iteration of the machine, and that's a journey, and it has iterations over time, in fact, as we move forward in our portfolio, we're going to continue to expand the performance aspects, the persistent memory, and absolutely the capacity, so we can have a memory-centric design going forward, and you'll see that in our Gen 10 products as we move forward. So you're envisioning a world where anything that's high volume from a performance standpoint is done in memory. Absolutely. And then there's a bit bucket behind that for all this, the bazillion files that you guys store, which is going to be presumably be cheaper for your archives, is that right? Absolutely, and this is what is so important about the partnership we have with Hewlett Packard is these types of integrated solutions that aren't just thinking about one element, but are really thinking about the entire ecosystem, those make a difference in the business. That's what really can make an impact on the end user, that's what can make an impact on our buying power, and what we can really get for that investment. This is what Hewlett Packard brings to the table, and no other company can, as far as we're concerned. Yeah, in terms of looking at the holistic solution, because remember I talked about the platform that enables the capabilities, but you also have options. And so in terms of delivering IO throughput and maximizing the bandwidth there, just this week we announced a 25 gigabit ethernet, and we're the only manufacturer in the industry that has an end-to-end high integrity solution from the server adapter, the ethernet adapter, through the cabling and out to the switch, high fidelity, totally interoperable to make sure that we have a high integrity solution to deliver that highest performance. And that's beneficial for high transactional processing of read and writes across the IO, and that's great for media streaming and transcoding information. Like you said, Kate, from a workflow standpoint, you're artists, you're creators, they don't want to wait. Nobody wants to wait, especially if you've got an idea and you've got your director standing there over your shoulder and you want to say, look at this. First of all, you want to look at it in the best possible way. You want it to be high resolution. You want all of the characters. You want the entire environment. You don't want to have to give up any of that stuff in order to get performance back. What these types of solutions offer is the whole enchilada. I get everything in my shot. I get it immediately. I get feedback from the director, and I didn't have to have anybody guessing about what was there because everything can be produced on the fly real time. So I asked a question. You mentioned you made a statement we think only HPE can deliver that. I want to understand that, unpack that a little bit, because essentially you're talking about an HPE open company, standard platforms, Intel technology, you talked about adapters, et cetera. This is all off the shelf technology. Why is HPE the only company that can do that? It's their commitment to innovation. You look at other companies, they don't have HPE labs. They don't have organizations within their companies that are dedicated to looking out five or 10 years. Some of these solutions that are coming to market right now were early ideas five, six, seven, eight years ago. Only HPE is putting that investment in as far as we're concerned. And one of the other things that we see with Hewlett Packard is that they listen. They listen to the customers that they're serving. They look at us. They come in, they actually understand our business. They look at what we're doing with our artists. They look at what we're doing with our films. And they take that information back into their labs, into their workflows, and they are coming up with business solutions that happen to be technical. So the innovations in this case is broad well, okay, but it's how you're exploiting whatever, the cores, the non-volatile memory, et cetera. Talk a little bit about that and how HPE is adding value to all those standard components. Yeah, the processor is made available to everyone, but it's how you can tune that within your subsystem, and that goes down to the firmware and the BIOS and the structure behind it and how we construct and build a high integrity, high availability system. And beyond that is when you have a workload, you have certain benchmarks or application workloads from our customers, having a real good understanding of what they're trying to achieve, the business outcomes they're trying to deliver, we can match that with a configuration of options whether it's storage, memory, network interface cards, and additional software, enablement software to tune that and optimize it for success. And then when it's deployed into their infrastructure, have a management capability that can understand the orchestration across the enterprise and allow automation of workloads to be balanced and manage in resources, it's composability to deliver an efficient data center. And when we can deliver value through efficiency, economics, performance, time to value, that really sits well with our customers. So how's it translated into the market? Proof points, data that confirms your leadership? We feel, based on our customers and how they've allowed us to be for 20 years in a row, so 80 quarters, number one in servers for x86. That's IDC data? That's IDC data, yeah. We just got those results this past week. We feel like... So 80 quarters? 80 quarters, yeah, 20 years. I think it's math, right? Yeah. That's, our teams feel very proud. And we see it as, for this company and for our customers, a foundational element of, they trust us. They trust us to deliver servers that will build value for our customers and will build value for this company that then we can expand solution enablement and go beyond the data center, into the edge, into the cloud. And so the Proliant brand stands for a lot of great things but it comes down to trust. And if we can continue to be innovating and deliver relevant technologies that deliver business outcomes, we'll continue to be 81, 82, 80, 90, 100. We take that very personal. We want to be the champion quarter, after quarter, after quarter. And that drives a lot of passion in the development of these platforms. But as Kate said, you can only do that if you have a great understanding of what they're trying to achieve. Well, so that talks to the nature of your relationship. I mean, it's obviously not just one of technologists to technologists or sales person to buyer. I mean, Jeffrey has spoken a number of times at this conference. You know, you're here as one who's involved in communications and alliances which is somewhat unique as it relates to a customer and a vendor's relationship. So two questions, two part question. What do you look for in a vendor and a supplier and what is the nature of that relationship? It's obviously more than what I described. It is, I think that the most important thing about our alliance with Hewlett Packard is that it's founded in innovation. It's founded in engineering. And what we're interested in is sort of a twofold thing. I mentioned earlier that they listened to us. So there are times in which we have investments in our own technology that we want to accelerate. We want to actually get those into the hands of the artist faster. And so we'll work with them on their roadmaps for their underlying core technologies so that we can actually accelerate our own R&D investment. But equally important to that, they're innovating in ways we're not even thinking about. Few years back, we got in the next generation of ProLiant servers as we typically will do in a refresh process, right? Very standard, except that it wasn't standard because simply one generation removed and these new servers were 40% faster. Okay, that's impressive, but not as impressive as this. And took 40% less power. 40% less power in Southern California is like winning the lottery. I mean, that's where innovation with Hewlett Packard is so meaningful because we didn't put that on a roadmap. We didn't ask for that. We didn't prioritize it. They simply know that customers that can spend less on their utilities can actually then focus on innovation and their end product. What are some of the transformative things that are going on inside of DreamWorks? I mean, you hear a lot about IoT. You hear a lot about big data. What are some of the things that are changing your business? I think that one of the most interesting things that's changing our business is, I mentioned that we've re-architected our whole platform to take advantage of scalable multi-core. And what that really means is that all of our platform and all of our proprietary applications can really access all of the compute power within our servers. We didn't used to be that way. We used to be much more restrained. We bring up big data, half a billion files per movie. One of the interesting things is historically, we often dealt with sort of a brute force approach. If we had an issue with a render and we didn't understand what was going on with it, we'd add more servers in order to take care of that. That worked really well for that one idea, but something else would get left behind. We're currently now using Vertica to go in and do an entire data analytics pass on every shot that we render, and that information is sent to the producers the next morning so that they can actually get a report out of Vertica that tells them exactly what's happening with every element of every single one of those shots and whether or not there's an issue. Here's the thing about that. We fully utilize all the cores that we have, but more importantly, we don't lose wall clock time. It's the one thing you can't add back into your schedule is more time. So that's an interesting use case. So when you, I mean, I think AB testing, you know, everybody loves to do the AB testing. When you do that type of testing, you're doing it within an experienced base of experts, right? It's not like you can AB test for every consumer. And is that a right, the correct characterization that you're essentially getting it to the hands of the experts quickly and then saying, okay, no, do this, don't do that? That's exactly right. We're actually directly enabling the producers on our films to make day and hourly decisions on what they're going to prioritize within their movie making in order to optimize their artist time and our digital resources. We've never had that kind of information before and without a solution like Vertica and without a converged infrastructure solution with the ProLiant blades, we simply wouldn't be able to do it. It's too much data. And so that type of innovation is actually putting the power right back where you want it, which is with the artists and with the producers on the film, you don't have to have a middleman. It's completely configured directly for what our business needs. All right, we got to wrap Tim, I'll give you the last word. Theme here is innovation, HPE, Discover 16. What's the bumper sticker leaving the building from Vegas this year? These are exciting times. Having customers like DreamWorks drives our passion and it wants us to get back in the labs with our customers in mind and develop that innovation. And if we can do that, we're going to continue to win. Like I said, it's got to be 81, 82, 83, infinite leadership. That's what we want to do. All right, Kate, Tim, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. theCUBE bringing you the exciting innovations from HPE, Discover 16. We'll be right back right after this short break.