 from the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE Conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now, cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're going to talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the vice president and general manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE. Good friend in CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Great, thanks for having us. So, let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry, but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time. Everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data. Data needs to be protected in new ways now. And so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right? That's moving away, right? You're moving away from general storage administration, specialized teams to, you know, people focusing a lot of those resources now on cloud ops team, dev ops team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to reuse that data, the old days of essentially having a primary data set and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time is not something that customers want anymore. They want to be able to use that data. They want to be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. So that piece, I want to bring into the conversation is cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, average enterprise, has like eight clouds and I was saying, she's a small company like ours has eight clouds. I mean, the average enterprise must have, you know, 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the sass. So cloud and specifically multi-cloud, you guys, HPE has always been known for, you know, open, open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important and let's expand the definition of cloud to include private cloud on-prem, what we call true private cloud in the Wikibon world. But whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, you know, dot, dot, dot. What are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi? They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're going to go on-prem or off-prem, they absolutely want to have that experience on-prem. So what we're providing customers is the ability through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C which could be primary all flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated, full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and reuse directly to the developers, right? And the database admins and whoever's, doing this new sort of DevOps area. The second piece is that like you said, everyone's going to have multiple clouds. And what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data is going to land. And over time with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we want to be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where the place workloads. These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated. So they're not distinct. And before we get into the hard news, I want to kind of double down on another piece of this. So you've got data, you've got digital, which is data. You've got new pressures on data protection. You've got cloud scale, a lot of diversity. We didn't even talk about the edge. That's another sort of piece of it. But people want to get more out of their data protection investment, they're kind of sick of just spending on insurance, they'd like to get more value out of it. You mentioned DevOps before, better access to that data. Certainly compliance, things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely want to reuse data. So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very high latency, high performance, optimized flash storage in 3par and Nimble, different capabilities there. And then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that is something that we're doing today with our customers natively, as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data provenance. So I want to share some of my data, keep that in a colo, but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, Lambda functions on that data. So we want to bring the compute to the data. And that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers. And then ultimately using the cloud as a very, very low cost scalable and elastic tier of storage for archive and retention. One of the things we've been talking about in the CUBE community is you hear that bromide data is the new oil and somebody in the community was saying, you know what, it's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it in my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four pack of news that we want to talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? Yeah, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so purpose-built backup appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got an integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our fourth generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes as a system. It's available in a wrote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version. So you can run that on-prem, you can run it off-prem. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple of different use cases for it. But I think one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are three-par nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrated. So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration or confederation as you called it across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially it provides the number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application-integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework. So if you're a DBA and you do RMAN, you can do it in there. Or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones. It'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system. It'll allow you to go from primary to secondary. It'll allow you to archive out to the cloud. And then all of that in reverse. So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So it's the path where you as a customer did all this on your own, bought on horizontal lines. We're giving a customer based on a set of outcomes and applications a complete vertically oriented solution. Okay, so that's the really second piece of hard work. Recovery Manager Central, RMC6.0 is the release that we're on. And that's copy data management, essentially. It's what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right? So you're tech underneath that. And you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? Absolutely. So we're extending that from, we've had for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3-par. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble, right? So for Nimble customers that want to use all flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage and store once and then out to the cloud. Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables, that Nimble piece and that out to the cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault, take us through that. Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very focused on hybrid cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are green field, right? At the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions. And in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public, our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary and the cloud. And what we do is we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault. So they're going to be integrating with our deduplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call cloud bank, right? So we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from store once and a number of backup use cases, and then be able to go out to the cloud, all managed through a customer's Commvault interface. All right, so if I hear it correctly, just going to double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just to go to market, a setup, it's deeper engineering and integration than you guys are doing. Okay, great. And then of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here. The fourth piece is around the cloud economics, cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing, has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. Yeah, so in the technology talk track, we talk about essentially how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. Really, at the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity. So what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete rearchitecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I want to take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service. So the primary storage, your secondary storage, the cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire vetted solution with reference architectures and the expertise to implement and I can give that to a customer in an OPEX as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that. But in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience back up as a service, data protection as a service through GreenLake from HPE. So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example and then HP will put in some extra headroom. If in fact that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning or how does that actually work practically speaking? Yeah, absolutely. We work with customers on the architecture up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes right at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if customers trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that and what we can do is we don't have very high upfront commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in and then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple of years. So on the advisory side, we have cloud technology partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service so we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We have, we acquired Cloud Cruiser. So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service and that goes into how we build customers on a per metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is kind of a little known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. So the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. Okay, now all this stuff is going to be available Q calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? Correct. Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before we like to talk about what it is, how it works and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements and you can drill deeper on anyone that you like but I'd like to start, at least holistically, what's the business impact of all this? Obviously you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends upfront but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? So I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. So instead of selling customers a solution where you're going to have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data. Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that. I am actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time by providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic. I do help customers save quite a bit in OPEX from an operator perspective and they can take those resources and move them onto higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. So that's a big impact for a customer perspective. So there's a CAPEX to OPEX move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake so certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that to me anyway is most important is especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword but it's real when you go to talk to people they don't want to do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management and the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-sized customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. You hear everybody talk, Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEO's minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really want to shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. Absolutely and that's, so you said it best, right? We want to drive the customer experience to focusing on high value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for three-par and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations in some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers and that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing. Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. Absolutely. All right, Patrick, hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching in the marketplace. Great, kudos to the team, great announcement and we look forward to working with you guys again. All right, thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE.