 This is theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain for HP Discover. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, instruct us in the film of noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joining my co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. Our next guest is Rene Meyer, VP and GM of HP, integrity, servers. Welcome to theCUBE, again, CUBE alumni. Yeah, been here, I think this is the third or fourth time at various shows. Last show, you were on with Dave and Rick Lewis. I had to bounce it out because one of us too, I get the hook or sometimes Dave gets the hook, I'm going to bounce him out on the next segment. So I missed that on the chat, but you got to be excited. Server market share from what I'm hearing is looking good right now across the board. Yeah, we're actually seeing significant improvements and I think that's a testament to great products, great technology and then executing, working with our customers to find out what they need and deliver on that. So it's fun to see promises. Tell us what's going on here for you at the show. Integrity servers, your role, what's going on with the big announcements. Oh, so cool. So integrity servers. So I have a collection of businesses underneath that. So it's our Unix business, HPUX obviously. It's our non-stop business and it's also our scale-up X86 business that we've kind of embarked on here in terms of bringing some of the goodness of high-end clustered Unix into the X86 space. So all three very different businesses and you look at that, lots of stuff going on. One of the great parts about coming here is we get to interact with our customers face-to-face and hear about what they want to do and Unix customers, it's fascinating. You talk to them and they want to take risk out of their business. They're saying, I'm running a manufacturing. Risk as in RIC, RISC, risk like processors or like risk as in like, yeah. Risk as in business risk. No, they're looking at saying, I run a manufacturing plant. I run a hospital. I run a retail operation. How do I do that? Because you know what? IT is what drives their business. You think about going into a store. If you can't pay, if you can't find the merchandise you need, if you can't go to the e-commerce site and say I want to buy this thing and have it delivered to me in the store, they don't make money. So they're looking and saying my need for transactions, all these things are going up. And at the same time, the more change you apply to an infrastructure, the more business risk you induce in that. So they're looking at ways to say, how do you go manage that? How do you say, I want steady growth, I want predictability, I want stability? So they're looking at the fact that we've got increased capacity, our latest role to our I-4 server base. So we've got customers seeing three times performance improvement over where they were with the previous generation. That's huge. Dave and I always talk about the trends. And one of the things that we always talk about is that the old is now new. And we were talking about that with the Brocade folks yesterday at the storage party, the three-par and storage party last night. And systems management's back in. So I mean, the UNIX is back in. The mindset of large scale clustered computing, AKA whether it's big data or whatever. And we joke the mainframe never went away. So now the software mainframe, which is the cloud, as Paul Moritz once said. So I mean, this is music to your ears. I mean, maybe not buying as many boxes, but still the concentration of compute. Well, and what you've seen, the everything old is new again is exactly right. It's as we've gone where everybody's got a mobile device. There's a kiosk everywhere. You can turn your phone into a payment device. The taxi drivers are carrying around a PayPal or a square device and taking payments. Always on, mission critical. Serve the customer 24 by seven forever is way back in style. The cool part of that is you start to look at, you say, now what can you do when you say I've got this huge transaction engine? I've got this huge data engine behind it and link that with big data analytics coming in. Link that with mobility. So you say, I know where you are. I know a lot of things about you. How do I go make that all work? I mean, we're talking about my nonstop business just before we got on here. A great example is a car rental agency. Their whole back end reservation system runs on a nonstop environment. What have they done? They've put a web front end and they've put a mobile front end on. You get off the plane, you get a text. Here's your car. Would you rather have a full-size model? Would you rather have the SUV instead? Just send me a text back and I'll deal with all that before you're gone. Drive right out. Great opportunity for them. And I've noticed as I've been a user of this service, they're starting to know when I'm traveling on HP business, which is when I get, here's the full-size instead of the mid-size versus when I'm traveling on vacation and here's the convertible of the SUV instead of the compact that you bought. And that's nonstop sequel you were saying. Yeah, that's a nonstop application sitting behind on the back end managing all those reservations and you can't offer that. Think about that. The analytics lets you know what you're doing but if you make me an offer but then can't deliver the car, that's no good. That takes a... You got to go into a legacy system. Yeah. Get some data. Absolutely. And you have to marry the mobility part of it. You got to marry the big data part of it to know what I'm doing and where I'm going, what my rate plan might be, what cars you actually have an inventory so you can offer that to me and you do it right at the point of interaction. You know, when the wheels touch down, boom, the text shows up. So Randy, break down your businesses for us. You got the nonstop piece, the UNIX piece, the X86 piece, just describe a little bit what their business looks like. Yeah, so if you think about that, so the UNIX business talked about it a little bit. Really focused on lots of different customers from the smallest kind of businesses that are running, you know, some rack mount servers to run various things, could be in store controllers, whatever else, into bladed environments where people that want this converged infrastructure up into the biggest super dome things for really big applications. Typical customers, manufacturers, hospitals, retail chains, lots of places like that where they're dealing with business process, transactions, database. The nonstop piece really focused on some specific business applications, payments. If you make a payment anywhere in the world with a credit card, debit card, whatever it is, 80% chance that's going to go through a nonstop system either on the acquiring or the authorization side, or both, mobile phones. Almost 400 million subscribers around the world, their mobile phone runs through a nonstop system on the back end, and it's what lets you know what you can do, what your data plan looks like, all the services you get, how you make it work. If that system's not running, your phone doesn't work. So start to look at that. You look, again, we talked about things like reservation systems for trains, for cars, all those different sorts of things, high-end transaction systems that you see all over the world, and then this scale-up x86 business, this is fascinating. This is where the world's moving to for a variety of applications, and there's really two different models here. One of which is you're seeing people like SAP get a big focus on in-memory database. They're saying, I want to take and do my business analytics, my business processing, and instead of having it be kind of distributed all on disk, I want to move that all into memory so I can do it really fast. Guess what? If you want to put it in memory, you need large memory footprint, you need large core footprint, and you need huge I.O. because there's still storage behind that. So we've designed some appliances, and you had Tom Joyce on here earlier, so out of his Converged Systems Group, we go and say, build these engineered solutions for SAP HANA, where we can go build large-scale systems, and we're doing some exciting work around that up into the 6, 8, 12, 24 terabyte memory footprints. And for somebody who grew up where 10 megabyte disk drive was a big deal, all of a sudden, all in memory, had one customer that moved from where they were with their SAP R3 installation to moving everything into memory on the scale-up x86 architectures. They watched a 300 times improvement in their business analytics processing. It was just unbelievable. Things that were taking days were taking seconds. So that scale-up x86, that's what's known as Project Odyssey, and then there's Project Kraken, right? What is that? Project Kraken really is something we've embarked on with SAP around these large-scale memory things. So, again, large core count, 16 socket systems, and up into these 24 terabyte kinds of memory footprints. And we've paired that with our SAP HANA environment, and at Sapphire, in fact, this year, showed that and got rave reviews from people saying, I'm trying to get into that high-end business analytics and turn my SAP engine into an analytics driver for my business, and it's all about time. It's all about compressing that. So we're asking some questions about the Unix business. So this is HPUX, right? And the platform's been around for a long, long time. A lot of people might ask, well, why are people still using Unix? And so, as you said, you mentioned manufacturer. Manufacturers, you mentioned hospitals, for example. Is there a lot of custom code in there, right? So- There can be. Some of it's custom. A lot of it's still lots of ISVs. Okay, so a lot of stuff off the shelf, or, you know, medical type of software. So talk a little bit about that ecosystem, right? You don't hear much about it in the press anymore. If you think about why people used Unix in the first place. One, huge skill base out in the marketplace. You want to find a Unix operator easy to find, right? You want to find somebody that knows how to put a database up in that environment, easy to find. What are they looking for? They're looking for resilience. They're looking for reliability. They're looking for scale. And in particular, they're looking for scale in a scale up dimension, where you say, I want the whole application to be talking about the same data set, looking at the same data structures. So to do that, I need lots of cores. I need lots of memory. I need lots of IO around that. So in addition, they look at things like clustering. They look at things like failover. So we forget sometimes it's not just the box. It's not just the operating system even. It's things like service guard that say, okay, I can build higher levels of resilience into that because if I get a component failure, I don't want my business to stop. I don't want my hospital to stop. I don't want data to be wrong. Especially if I'm in it. That's it, that's it. Your doctor's looking at the electronic medical record and he either can't see it or the data's wrong. Not really a good outcome. So people are looking at that and saying, that's exactly why we chose those sorts of things. I got big applications. I need the ability to have a high degree of resilience and deal with that. And frankly, I mean, Unix still scales bigger than Linux. If you want to go get the maximum kind of availability in that environment, that's where you go to get it. So people looking for, how do I take my existing environment? The people who know what they're doing. And again, we talked about earlier, business risk. How do you minimize that for somebody running these critical applications? And you say you change as little as possible. You add capacity to make sure you're staying ahead of the curve and you invest in what you need to do to make sure it's not just the box. It's the people, it's the processes, it's the software, it's all the tools that make that ecosystem sing and dance. And again, we see people continuing to invest in this at a large clip. And one of the things I think is important is you offer people choice. One of the things that's cool about my business is tell me what your problem is. Tell me what your requirements are. Guess what? If you're trying to run and scale up a Linux application and get that or consolidate a bunch of Linux servers into a bigger footprint, we know how to do that. If you're saying I'm trying to get maximum availability for this Unix-based application, I know how to do that. Saying I'm trying to run the biggest infrastructures in the world running transactions and 400 million mobile subscribers. I know how to do that with nonstop. Tell me what the problem is and I think we have a great solution for you. Because it's not just about, in my business, it's not just form factor or box. It's the solution. It's the business solution, the business problem, the business process that drives that decision making. So, obviously you're talking to a lot of customers this week. Yep. What is it, coming by your zone? What is it, the nonstop zone? Yep. Well, they're all together, right across the way. What is the zone called? It's the Mission Critical Server Zone, I think it was the title on it. What are customers asking you? What are they talking about? What's the conversation sound like? So the conversations. Conversations are about, here's where I'm seeing growth. How can you help me with that? Where's my next capacity coming from? How do I get more memory? How do I get more storage? How do I leverage things like the new three-part technologies that are coming out? How do I take advantage of all the cool things that are out here? How do I leverage, in my blade's environment, how do I leverage Unix as a component of that converged infrastructure? In the nonstop space, lots and lots of excitement, one of the things we did talk about about a month ago, so we didn't announce it here, but we've now committed to, in addition to all the stuff we're doing in the integrity space, we're going to also port the nonstop entire stack top to bottom to an x86 architecture. So our customers are going to get tremendous amount of choice, and those customers are saying, well, if you're doing that, how can I link applications, maybe running on Linux, more tightly to my nonstop environment? So, okay, the mobile device management that's handling my home-making application or something else, how do I link that tightly to the nonstop SQL database, and make that even more resilient? So lots of excitement in that space. That's awesome. All right, well, listen, we really appreciate you coming by. I don't know, John, if you're... Yeah, well, my final question is two questions. First one is, what do you see as the next step in your world? Because, obviously, the world is shifting, cloud is here, we're hearing it, but again, we're not going to see any kind of erosion if you will, of mission critical definition may change a little bit, but in the end of the day, mission critical means, mission critical around your business. Obviously, is anything going to change? What's around the corner? Share with the folks your vision of what's around the corner and how you're attacking that. Well, so I think the important part is always on mission critical, absolutely, the demand for that is going through the roof. And it's a business process discussion. These business processes need to be always there. So the question for us is, how do we serve that? As things move to the cloud, there's going to be applications sitting out in the public cloud. There's going to be private cloud technologies deployed inside of companies. There's going to be traditional IT that has a lot of existing data and a lot of legacy business processes around them. How do you take and integrate all that so that at the end of the day, it looks real-time, modern. It looks real-time, modern. And to the end user doing the transaction, it's totally seamless. To the IT person, you say, I get flexibility so I can manage my cost. I can be more agile. And if I want to bring up new ideas, it's faster time to market for a new business idea. This idea of, okay, leverage mobile, leverage big data, how do I get all of that and connect it all in the- I was talking with Jim Compton, who's the executive vice president at United Airlines at the GE event. I hosted with the CEO, Jeff M. Alt of GE. And you know, it's all about big data and anything. Anywhere you're talking about, there's all this big data machine coming off the airplanes and turbines and all that stuff. And I asked him about the same kind of questions. He says, you know what? We still have COBOL. Yep. We have COBOL code running a lot of the backend reservation system. It's so bulletproof. It's so real-time tied into our current big data real-time system. We just can't replace it. There's no way we could actually replace that in any kind of timeframe without disrupting our operations. And that's the question. How do you take those core systems that people are running? One, you make sure they're bulletproof, make sure they're resilient. But now, how do you make a modern in this world where there's so much you can do with mobility, big data, cloud, all these different things? So how do you take and magnify that effect of this cool bulletproof stuff and link it all into the other fascinating things that are out here? Everything from software-defined storage into cloud, you pick it. A lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs to write those emulators using virtualization and cloud. There you go. This is theCUBE. Randy, really appreciate you coming in. Again, mission-critical systems, integrity servers, you guys doing great. We're here from Jim Gonti tomorrow, who's going to give us an update on all the market share numbers. Can't wait to have that conversation and how they compare against Dell on the other side of the business on the industry standard side. Great to have you. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back on SiliconANG and Wikibon's theCUBE after this short break.