 continuous coverage of HP Discover Live from Las Vegas here in the Venetian Convention Center. And joining me is Jeff Canyon, who's director of alliances in the ESSN group of HP. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, Stu. Great, so we're talking about, I believe, virtual systems, which is something that was announced this week here at HP. And people are trying to understand what it is and how it fits in with kind of matrix and cloud systems and all the other converged infrastructure you have. Can you give us a little bit of a background on virtual systems? Yeah, sure. Yeah, we had a president analyst meeting on Monday and then the kickoff of the show Monday night, we announced a number of systems, virtual system being one of them. And so what we're pulling together there is a HP storage networking and server together with some of our partners, Microsoft and VMware into a unified system that we're testing and delivering as a single SKU for customers in virtual environments. So it's a single stack that's sold as a SKU? Absolutely. Okay. And with services as well, Stu. Great, great. So as I said, I'm familiar. HP's been selling the matrix and earlier this year I heard about cloud systems. So what's different about virtual systems? So virtual systems is something that's brought together into one unified system that's been fully tested and delivers an experience that the customer can rely on. In the case of matrix and cloud system, those are not delivered as a single SKU, but as separate products that are customized for each customer's particular workload needs. Okay, so single SKU, does that ship out of the HP factory as a single rack, or is that something that your partners and integrators do? Yeah, so we're putting it all together out of HP's factory express that'll come with both startup and consulting services. So when it arises at the customer's site, it's not just a box that they have to figure out what to do with, a consultant will come on site, do startup services and implement it into their network and configuring things like LUNs and so on for their customer's environment. Well, so I mean, you and I were talking a little bit off camera earlier and talking, you know, HP has a long history of preconfiguring, getting it all together, making sure there's the management, as you said, LUNs in my IP addresses and everything's ready when it goes out of the box. So, I guess what was the drive to create virtual systems and go beyond just a kind of a packaging exercise to integrating it together? So I think one of the tenants is trying to simplify things across the entire spectrum, from the ordering, from the delivery and to the integration at the customer's site. So we certainly have integrated and will continue to do that. Virtual systems will be shipped as single SKUs, we'll also have reference architectures for customers that want an even greater amount of flexibility. Okay, so, you know, HP has a converged infrastructure group and while it has, you know, we were just listening to David Cahill talking about, you know, HP has very impressive market share in servers, now number two in networking and, you know, very strong in storage historically. But when it comes to fully baking these solutions together in a stack, it feels a little bit like HP is following in some of the footsteps of some of the other competitors out there. Do you think that's fair? So I think timing is actually pretty good for us to come in to the game here. We certainly are, HP's watching the marketplace with VCE and FlexPod. If you look at some of the recent announcements that VCE had out recently, you can see that they're evolving their solution offerings. I think actually the timing's pretty good. I think that some of the market has been seeded, but HP has strong offerings across the spectrum, as you said, for compute network and storage and timing's good for us. So the real battleground I see on Convergence seems to be the systems integrators and the service providers, what's HP's message there? So for service providers, so one of the things we're delivering as we, excuse me, as we talked off camera, one of the things is that customers aren't going to deploy just a virtual infrastructure. It doesn't really do anything for their business. And so one of the things that we'll be working with partners on is workloads on top of that. And I think you're right in terms of system integrators are going to work with customers and can enhance these virtual systems to deliver the workloads that customers are expecting to put on top of it. And I think that's great. I've talked to a number of services systems integrators and they say anything to simplify their job is good. There is a little bit of value in putting all the pieces together, but if that can be done from a single SKU standpoint, they have added services that they can put on top of it. And as you said, applications, the usage once I've got virtualization. And I should point out, I believe you said VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V today from a Hypervisor standpoint. Right, those are the two initial partners that we're working on and we'll expand that over time. And what workloads do you have targeted for the initial deployments? So the initial one that we're coming out with is a VDI workload. As you may know for app systems that were also announced this week, we have some fairly specific hardened appliances, if you will, that are dedicated towards workloads. And we will evolve those types of appliances to take advantage of the investment we're making in virtual systems as well. So you'll see over time different workloads that will work here on top of virtual systems. Okay, so maybe a VDI is the first workload. Wikibon spent a long time looking at desktop virtualization. It's something that always seems to be the next technology from a virtualization standpoint, but it's still kind of niching and the ecosystem is very dispersed. Question I have for you is, do we think desktop virtualization is really ready to take off and why does virtual systems, how does that fit into that? So for virtual systems, one of the things I think about the VDI workload is it is a bit more predictable. So we're able to size the systems more effectively. We have a lot of experience in this area and can deliver the experience the customer is going to expect. Whether that will take off in the market, I think we'll see some of our, we're looking at delivering those through reference architectures to still allow the customer to have that additional flexibility that they wouldn't get in a hardened appliance. Okay, I've also been getting information talking about the service providers doing desktop as a service. So applications from the service providers and desktop is one that can be there. Is that something that you guys are looking at? So not me particularly, I'm sitting in on the R&D side and trying to produce these products, but I think that's probably an excellent point and something that we'll need to incorporate. So one of the things we had an announcement this week about this product segment, and so we're in the labs, my team's in the labs right now developing these and we have some deeper conversations with both customers and analysts later tonight, where we're looking at gathering feedback. So I think it's good to get there. Yeah, so Jeff, yeah, you've got a lab there and you've got a bunch of hardware and you put all the pieces together. Maybe you can give us a little color as to how all of the acquisitions that HP has done. So my understanding is you have three different models of virtual system today, and on the storage standpoint, two of those are from the left-hand technology and one from 3PAR, 3PAR relatively recent acquisitions. So how fast is HP moving those into the product line and how are those products to work with on the inside? Yeah, that's right Stu. So there are three different virtual systems I just want to point out as well. Right, so it's not there's one, two, and three. Inside one, two, and three there's a lot of variability in terms of the amount of storage, the amount of servers, the memory, and so on. So we're trying to bake in a lot of variability and flexibility for the customer. Speaking to some of the technology acquisitions, one of the things we're also including, you didn't mention the 3Com networking portion. So top of rack switching, really important inside the appliance, as well as providing ease of connectivity to the core data center. So good history there, 3Com's been with HP over a year now. Obviously 3PAR newer, but I have to say even in the last six months from my own experience, the engineers are now working on a daily basis with 3PAR, we're trying to position that product. It's obviously very important for both virtualized environments and a nice pathway to the cloud. If you look at cloud system, our premier storage for that as well is 3PAR and some of the thin provisioning and autonomic capabilities are pretty well wired for virtualization in cloud. All right, great. One thing I want to poke at a little bit is if you talk about kind of variability and flexibility versus homogeneity. So one of the challenges that when you look at a traditional data center, which is very fragmented in lots of different workloads and lots of different technology as opposed to, if you look at the Googles of the world and the cloud, it's very homogeneous. So how do we balance making sure that we understand my environment can get my workloads working on it versus the traditional environment? So how do you solve that balance? So, I haven't anticipated that question, Stu. I think that, I'm sure I... Okay, so do you follow what I'm saying? Because I guess when I need to marry my storage, my memory and how much bandwidth I have and if it's very variable, I put it together and I need to make sure it all works. So how do you make sure it's baked so that it's a configuration that when I put it in my environment, I can just run with it versus there's all the permutations and combinations and thousands of pages of interoperability matrices like some companies have. So how do I go from the mess of the data center today to an operational model that looks more like pools of storage, more like what a private cloud, if you will, infrastructure as a service? So one of the things I can tell you as we're developing this product, we're going to push a lot of different workloads on it to try and understand for the customer what kind of workloads are pushing more on the network stack, which ones are pushing on the storage stack and with HP's virtual connect technology, which is going across the family here, we'll be able to tune that and work with the customer to tune it. So I think that the variability workload is something that virtualized environments are really growing up on now. I think we look at very high numbers of virtual servers on these systems, but as the workloads increase, we're going to have to look at ways to better deploy that infrastructure. Sure, so the way I look at it is when we went from physical service to virtual servers, we had some consolidation and got more utilization out of them. We need to make sure that as we put the stacks together, we do that because otherwise you'll have an imbalance where you'll have way too much memory or not enough storage or over provisioning bandwidth. And as you said, the virtual connect product line from a networking standpoint give you a lot of flexibility on the network side. We want to make sure that we have kind of the memory and the storage kind of lined up in the same way. Three par is very flexible. Left hand is very flexible. So I think the good architectural building blocks and just think we need some more maturity overall in the industry to make sure we can just push higher and higher utilization and get more out of our infrastructure. You know, one of the things I'll just, you mentioned as part of this thread connection to cloud and virtual system will have HP's inside control software. That's kind of the basis of both the matrix product offering, now cloud system matrix and cloud system enterprise. And so we already today have services to add the matrix operating environment components to virtual system and then add the CSA software stack. So you really can start out with a kind of a basic virtual system, if you will, and grow that up as your needs. Well Jeff, congratulations on the launch of virtual system. We appreciate you sharing this with theCUBE here and look forward to reading more as the product matures hits the marketplace and everything there. So thank you so much for joining us.