 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Discover 2016 Las Vegas, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas for HPE, HPE Enterprise, Discover 2016, this is SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program theCUBE where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Neil McDonald, who's the Vice President and General Manager of HPE Enterprise Synergy. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. It's great to be back, good to see you guys. So Dave and I haven't talked about Composable all couple days, obviously we love the term, it's got a lot of range in terms of marketing opportunities up and down the stack and it's been a great success and certainly a lot of the converged products kind of come into the market, really blossoming. And also, since last theCUBE in London in December, the launch of Synergy has been phenomenal. Give us the update, just momentum, talking points that you've seen, customer reaction, give us the update. Sure, so we announced our vision and point of view around Composable infrastructure a year ago at Discover and the response has been amazing. The vision is really resonating with customers, solving the problems that they have in managing and deploying their infrastructures. And in London in December, of course, we announced the industry's first Composable infrastructure that's been designed from the grounds up to deliver on that vision and promise, and that's HPE Synergy. And the big thing that's driving all this obviously is the whole movement of digital transformation, the acceleration of deploying infrastructure that code. Big, big, big driver. Why is that now hitting the tipping point? Is there a market driver you're seeing? Is there something out there right now? Is it just people are now more aware, more trained? What's the tipping point? The journey that we've been on as an industry is IT traditionally was a support function. It built some back office systems to underpin some business process, kind of as a cost center, and then we'd craft them very carefully and stand them up and then try never to mess with them because we didn't want to break anything. And then what's been happening in recent years is that the role of IT in the enterprise is changing radically from a support function to being a core part of how lines of business attract new customers, deliver new services and products, expand their margins, drive their cost structure. It's much more of a partnership role in which the lines of business are demanding from IT a much more rapid rate of innovation and change. So there's a huge amount of pressure where competitively in all kinds of industries the ability of the IT function in the company to support the lines of business as they innovate and deliver these new products and services has become incredibly critical to the competitiveness of the whole enterprise. And in that world, you can't think about managing infrastructure the way that IT managed infrastructure when it was underpinning back office process. And you talked about some of the problems, sorry that synergy was resonating with the customers in terms of the problems that they're trying to solve. Can you talk specifically about those problems? Absolutely. With composable infrastructure and with synergy, there are four key value that we bring into the customer. The first is, if you are running a composable infrastructure, you can reduce your investment in the infrastructure. When you silo infrastructure and carve it all up, every piece of infrastructure finishes up being over provisioned. All of that over provisioning adds up and strands resources. By thinking of your resources as fluid pools that you're leveraging across many workloads, you can reduce the amount of infrastructure over provisioning that you're doing. First off. Secondly, I talked to many CIOs who look at their deployment choices as they think about their right mix. And they see that for many workloads, they can absolutely achieve lower costs delivered to the lines of business when they run that workload on premises. The problem for them is that old school approaches to deploying and lifecycle management for the underlying hardware infrastructure cannot do it fast enough. So it doesn't matter what cost they could achieve in-house because they can't respond to that speed demand that I was referring to earlier from the business. So the second benefit of a composable infrastructure and synergy is enabling you to deploy that infrastructure on-prem at much more cloud-like speed. The third problem in managing infrastructure is that the update and lifecycle management can be incredibly painful. Many organizations spend 60, 70% or more of the resources maintaining that underlying infrastructure. And so the third benefit that we deliver is simplifying that lifecycle operations by making many of them frictionless, taking advantage of the fluid pools of resource and the intelligence that we wrap around them in a composable infrastructure. And finally, all of this innovation is about innovating in new applications and services. So there are developers there. So the fourth benefit is about enabling the developers to move much, much more quickly and helping IT get out of the developer's way. You mentioned infrastructure as code. The ability to treat the infrastructure as an extension of what we traditionally think of as an app and enable the developers to treat the infrastructure as programmable resources that they can shape to their needs, helps the developers move much more quickly and deliver apps and services for the business. So those are the four things that we're going to do. That's great, by the way. I'm glad you laid that. It took a time to lay that out because I want to jump into the developers. We love the DevOps concept. We know we love that in the CUBE. But when you're talking about IT operations, you're moving from a world of provisioning, as you said, slicing it up across different silos over provisioning, which is a huge issue, sprawl, whatever you want to call it. So to developing, the role of the enterprise developer is becoming more and more prevalent now. And Robert Young-Johns is all over that from a big standpoint. Absolutely. Software, so that's key, we get that. How does that translate for you guys when you talk about enabling the developers? Can you share some of the examples of that enablement and how that transforms itself? Absolutely. If you look at the kind of tool chains that are being used in the development of more cloud-native apps or using DevOps methods, you're seeing the emergence of different config management tools. Tools like Puppet, Chef, Docker, Ansible, tools of that nature that have really grown up from the DevOps community. And they're all about giving you ways of packaging the configuration management for the surrounding infrastructure so that your application can be a bit more portable, a bit more easily deployed, a bit more easily maintained. And you get rid of this historical rift between development and then production. And so what we've done with the composable infrastructure products and synergy is we've taken advantage of that philosophy and everything that we've built. We have a unified API that exposes all of the resources of the entire infrastructure as programmable assets. So rather than an old-school approach to a management tool, which might be some locked-in GUI that later has a bolt-on API on the side that you can look through a bit like a letterbox and see some of the functionality, and you make people sit and wait for releases of monolithic software to get new capability for integration, we've taken a very different approach. We've built the entire stack on open, restful APIs that are documented and available for use. We've integrated those into established management tools for virtualization, including the Ops orchestration and cloud service automation suites from HP, but also industry offerings such as vCenter and from Microsoft. But we've also done the work to integrate into tools like Chef and Pop It and Docker and Ansible so that you can take advantage of that intelligence, take advantage of all the benefits of those tools, but get the benefit from an efficiency point of view of leveraging the intelligence that we've put in the infrastructure. So I want to ask you, Neil, about this notion of fluid pools. Because we've heard that concept before over the years. We've heard it a lot with virtualization, and what I'm trying to get to is, from a customer standpoint, is this a evolutionary, is that a step function in productivity, in terms of being able to use that fungible resource across my application portfolio truly, and what impact is it having? What are you seeing, and I know it's early, what are you seeing in the field? Because so often you hear that in the marketing, and it's like, okay, definitely made it better, but it hasn't been a game changer, but the emphasis in your tone sounds like a game changer. Is it a game changer? It's absolutely a game changer. There are lots of organizations today managing their infrastructure as fleets of micromanage devices, in which every single server is told exactly what to do. Every single storage device is told exactly what to do. And there are significant investments in operations staff to actually do that work. And when it comes time to update and manage that infrastructure, the infrastructure itself really has no knowledge of how it's being consumed in aggregate, and therefore can't do very much to help you when it comes time to manage dependencies and update the infrastructure. With what we've done with a fluid resource pool approach, we get away from that model. And what we enable IT organizations to do is to think a little bit differently, get out of the mode of micromanaging every single device and being concerned about introducing any new technology into the environment, because it immediately turns into another animal in the zoo with a different diet, needing different keepers and its own enclosure and so on. What we're doing with the fluid resource pools approach is saying, well, let's stop a minute. What you really care about is what resources you're getting to support the needs of your workload. So how about you use a template to define that declaratively? I need infrastructure that looks like this, with this amount of compute. I need these storage assets. I need this from a fabric connectivity point of view. And let the infrastructure compose that for you. By doing that, instead of having a workflow that might be flowing through different departments and specialists to stand up and deploy infrastructure, they can take days or weeks to get infrastructure configured. With that approach, the infrastructure can do it itself based on the templates and the policies you've set, which means you can do it much more rapidly. You can flex how you're using your infrastructure over time. And you can do it at much lower resource cost so that instead of consuming all of your talent in your IT shop managing the plumbing, you can free up that bandwidth to go innovate and drive that acceleration of business. So if I've said it once, if you know John, I've said it a thousand times in theCUBE, you're attacking the IT labor problem. So let's say hypothetically, if I'm spending $100 on my IT and I'm spending $66 on labor and 33 of that $66 is on managing infrastructure that gives me no value to my organization, over the next 10 years, what percent of that $33 do you think you can attack as an industry? Well, I think it's less about the purely financial aspect, although that's one element of it, than it is about the bandwidth, right? Depends on your talkative. But when you look at where the resource is. Well, actually you're saying, you're saying it's the allocation of that resource. It's the allocation of the resource and the consultant. So what I'm specifically asking is, how much of that can I redeploy to frame it in your terms? Right, so I'm not going to throw that resource away. I'm going to redeploy it. So today I'm spending $33 on wasting it, on stuff that I don't need to be doing, that you're putting into your box, into your R&D. How much of that goes away? Is it 100% over the next 10 years? So if you look at the part of that spend that's related to standing up, deploying and configuring physical infrastructure, which of course you have to do, even if you're running in a virtualized environment, is running on physical infrastructure underneath. That whole process of deployment configuration and life cycle management, whatever that is consuming today, you should be able to reduce that very, very substantially by doing this kind of automation. And if you've got an environment where you have a lot of commonality in what you're deploying and how you're deploying it, that automation just keeps on giving in terms of the savings that you get. But an order of magnitude reduction and the amount of effort involved to manage that process, if you're doing it today in a traditional means, is absolutely foreseeable. 10x factor. Yeah, absolutely. In productivity there. Four of that piece of the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we understood. So orchestration is a lot of big buzzword in the cloud game. And I know we talked about this last time about Rugby, your big Rugby fan referee. What analogy in Rugby would you use to say, IT, are they more agile as a scrum huddle and then move the ball down the field? I mean, and it's kind of all joking aside, that's kind of the new market. It's not standardized anymore. It's just more agility is the focus. Yeah, it's time to beer in Rugby terms. I don't know what the good Rugby analogy would be, but if you think about the orchestration automation, you need to think at several different levels, because at the end of the day, infrastructure is a base of a stack. You have a whole stack all the way up into your workloads above that. And you still need to be thinking about cloud orchestration, brokering, cloud service automation type functionalities above the hardware. But you can make all of that more efficient if the underlying hardware is an easily programmable set of resources that can be managed in an automated way through those APIs. And that's how we're trying to contribute to all the other value from the broader portfolio that we can bring to bear for higher level stack management. You can't fault me for trying to get a Rugby exam. I can't try to fool you and sorry to let you down and I don't know what I'm looking for. I know you folks, he's a big Rugby fan. Referee, remember you, referee Rugby. Good personal side story there. With the show here, just to kind of wrap up the segment, I was obviously composable front and center. What other vibe are you getting here now that we're winding down the last day of the show with customers? What are some of the things that you're walking out of here with that you're going to jump on on the first thing in the morning on? There's just an amazing amount of excitement and it's great to see the reception that the point of view we have around composable infrastructure is getting. We're seeing great excitement and demand around our Hyperconverge 380 that we recently announced and some of the benefits that it can bring and what's been fascinating to watch is that we're winning customers to HPE with current products even before we have broadly deployed synergy at this point because they see the journey that they can get on with the bridge to composability, taking advantage of existing widely deployed product with HPE OneView and of course the new OneView 3.0 announcements we've made this week. So we're seeing lots of excitement about our future and we're also seeing great excitement about getting on that road with products that are widely deployed today. Neil, thanks so much for spending the time coming to Cuba. I want you to spend the last minute just to define composable for the audience watching. What's your version of the definition and what does it mean to them? And then summarize what is synergy and what are these on-ramps we've been hearing about? So a composable infrastructure is an infrastructure that can give you one experience across both traditional and idea economy IT. It does that with three architectural principles. Treating infrastructure as fluid pools of resource, wrapping that in a software-defined intelligence that lets you manage at a higher level of abstraction and automate many of your lifecycle and deployment processes and then exposing that through the third piece, a unified API that can integrate with your existing data center management infrastructure. From there, you get four benefits. You buy less infrastructure, you reduce your capex. You accelerate the speed at which you can deploy new infrastructure in your environment. You greatly reduce the amount of effort to maintain your infrastructure once deployed and you enable your devs to deliver those apps and services more quickly by simplifying the process of configuring infrastructure to support them. And what is Synergy and what are these on-ramps? So Synergy is the first composable infrastructure in the industry. It brings together those fluid pools of compute, storage and fabric and enables you to scale from a small deployment to a large deployment of infrastructure without propagating many, many more management points. Infrastructures you've built in the past, as you've scaled them, you've tended to create more management load. As you put different building blocks into your infrastructure, that's created more management load because all the different animals in the zoo need different care and feeding. With Synergy, we let you scale and we'll let you have diversity and you don't create a plethora of different management tools and processes. You can manage it all in one way. Simplify, easily use, reduce all those steps and costs down to, sounds like a good business model. We certainly are very excited about it. Well, we love it. We think composable really gives a developer vibe to it and it really hits up and down the stack. So congratulations on successful product and certainly the positioning we love here in theCUBE. So, the end McDonald, Vice President General Manager of HPE Synergy. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back with more live coverage. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Day three here in Las Vegas Live. We'll be right back after this short break.