 From London, England, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, Cover, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in London, England for Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. HPE Discover is happening in London. Our next guest is Neil MacDonald, VP and General Manager, HPE Enterprise Blade Systems, Converged Data Center, Infrastructure Group at HPE Enterprise. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Great to be here. So obviously the big news is obviously where the market's going with cloud. We saw that with the Azure news. The ecosystem play is obviously going to be great, but also now on the portfolio side, servers, blade system, blade server, all the stuff's happening and the big synergy news. And great press by the way, congratulations. Big splash in the pool. Everyone's getting wet with synergy news. Really big deal. So I know you were behind it. A lot of energy was put into this. Give us a quick history of where this came from and where does this lead to? Is it the machine? Is this mem store? Is this the dream machine? The God box? What's going on? Well, we're really excited because our customers are really excited and our partners are really excited about what we're doing with synergy. It's the industry's first infrastructure that has been designed from the grounds up for composability. Our customers are struggling with this challenge of balancing the needs of a traditional IT infrastructure where IT's role was implementing business processes that underpinned operations and where stability and a very planful approach to IT was the norm. With the new challenge where IT's really become the engine of revenue generation and margin delivery for engaging their own customers and there's huge pressure back on IT from the lines of business to be able to deliver infrastructure and enable apps and services to be provided much, much more rapidly than they can. And the challenge for a lot of customers is how do they deal with those two computing needs? How have they got the resources to be able to deal with two infrastructures, two operating models and so on. And the cool thing about synergy is the ability to get one infrastructure that can meet that whole range of needs. It's like the aircraft carrier battleship analogy. The old IT was slow aircraft carrier, hard to move, but stable, working. And now you want the agile business execution with IT. That's the battleship to take new territory in the apps mainly. So DevOps is clearly the battleship right now. Moving fast, shipping code, infrastructure as code. That's what people want. DevOps has been hard. I mean, it's been one of those things. We've been covering it for years at SiliconANGLE on the Q. It's like all the people doing DevOps were early pioneers, rolling their own, creating their own with open source. As we say, eating glass, spitting out nails, hardcore engineering. Not trivial to do in a mainline enterprise. Is that part of the motivation? Is it customer demand? You see more and more evolution in how applications get developed. There's a huge amount of packaged application work in the classic infrastructure space, and that'll continue. But there's also in many, many, many businesses, much more effort on app development, using DevOps approaches or more modern application development philosophies in order to provide new services to the customers. And so the challenge is, how can you do that without proliferating complexity across your infrastructure? And how can you enable your developers to be very, very productive? So the key thing that we've done with HPE Synergy is we've enabled the fluid pools of resource to be treated as a programmable entity. So instead of having developers having to reach to ITNC, please, please, can I have some infrastructure for something? And then working through a deployment process, a procurement process, a whole lengthy, involved dependency. That's a lot of friction. They twiddle their thumbs waiting for that. They go right to Amazon. Well, right, they go right to Amazon. And for the enterprise, that creates a whole bunch of issues. You've got issues potentially with data governance, you've got issues with security, with compliance, and you've also got issues with cost management. So the opportunity here is for IT to be able to provide deployment and that kind of cloud-like speed, and to enable developers to treat infrastructure as code, where we can take the operations delays that would be involved in a traditional approach completely out of the picture. So the developers are more productive, the business can deploy apps much more rapidly, and they're able to do that in compliance with how their IT strategy wants to see their data and their infrastructure handled. So Neil, you mentioned this was built from the ground up. My understanding is it's been about a three-year journey. So can you take us back a few years? How did this get incubated, and what was the process to get here? Well, the great thing about my job is getting to work with so many bright engineers who've been working on technologies like this and others that we haven't talked about for years. And it really comes from the recognition that when you want to deploy an app or a service, you need the ability to provide compute, connectivity, and storage. You need to be able to think holistically about that. And in order to provide that velocity that I talked about, and provide the efficiency from a developer perspective, you have to be able to think about those together. So the fundamental principle here was rather than having discrete chunks of infrastructure, all of which are individually over provisioned, which creates a bunch of waste in procurement and a bunch of expense for our customers in both buying and administering that stuff. We really wanted to get to a model where you have a fluid pool of resources that you can consume based on the needs of your apps and services, and you compose them dynamically as you need them when you deploy the apps. So that was the fundamental principle. Then you have to think what are the implications of that for system design? A lot. How do you build an infrastructure that has the kind of bandwidth internally, that has the modularity that you need to be able to assemble resources on the fly? How do you build an infrastructure that has the flexibility and configuration to be able to provide not just compute, but great storage and great fabric experiences as well? So as you work down that path, you make a bunch of choices in the hardware architecture and the technologies you use. But the really key thing here is that composable infrastructure is a very tight combination of management, software capabilities with the hardware, and they have to be co-designed. And when you co-design these really tightly, you can deliver breakthrough experiences for our customers. The composable- And speed, too. Oh, and speed, exactly. And time to value. Speed from an operational point of view. So with the composers that are integrated into the infrastructure, you have the ability to treat that fluid pool of resources as a programmable set of resources that you can compose and assemble based on your needs. So it's much, much more efficient and enables transformation of both traditional IT operations where you no longer need to be caring and feeding for every single piece of infrastructure. And the infrastructure has more intelligence about how it's assembled, which means that it can do much more for you in the life cycle. And John references, this is sort of the first instantiation of bits and pieces of the machine, as well as memristor, correct? Well, the key thing when you're designing and building an infrastructure is anticipating the future. Customers want an infrastructure that has legs. And the wonderful thing about working in this industry is there is such a rate of change in technologies. And so when you're building an infrastructure that lasts over time, you have to give a lot of thought to what are the technologies that are going to emerge and potentially be adopted within an infrastructure's lifetime? So we've done that. We've given a great deal of thought to that. So it's yes and yes? The vision, the vision. We're talking photonics, you know. If I look at the back of synergy, it's like, that looks new and different. You guys are teasing it out. Well, exactly. You want to build an infrastructure that's got the potential to evolve over time. I'm not sure. That's a yes. I think it's a yes. It's a yes, it's a yes. So if you look at technologies that are emerging in the direction of the machine, where you start to see different approaches to computer architecture in the coming years, where you see disaggregation and distribution that's different than how we disaggregate and distribute systems today. I'll move to a more memory-centric computing model. You have to build an infrastructure that has the capacity for incredible internal backwards. Persistent memory. For example. But if you want to define a system that's distributed differently, that separates the architecture differently than we traditionally build things, you have to build in the capability to have great bandwidth in the system and throughout the whole infrastructure. So attacking a network latency problem in a different way. Well, not just the network. We think of the network today as something you do when you egress the system. In the future, there's the potential to evolve architecture in ways that chops up systems differently than we build them today. And to do that, you need to see much more capability and bandwidth in the infrastructure. And we've anticipated some of those needs inside the HPE Synergy frames that we've announced this week. And that'll give a long journey for customers in the market. For new packaging models down the road. But the really key thing is the here and now. It's great that there are visions of where architectures may evolve to over time. But the key thing is what's the value here and now? Well, the computer science is, you mentioned it earlier, and we've been seeing this. It's not like HPE's making up some fantasy architecture direction. It's really relevant because this new generation of computer scientists, they're not compiling code. It's runtime assembly. It's Lego block design. So this is the DevOps thing. This is why I think it's so killer. So that's what we're seeing in the market needs. How did you guys come to that? Was it customers saying, hey, I wouldn't need to roll my own infrastructure. I need the agile. I need to have runtime. I need API economy. Well, fundamentally what's happening is you talk to customers and they're under huge pressure in the IT function from their line of business. The IT economy is forcing companies of all sorts to be much more agile in how they bring new offerings to the customers. And in doing that, many, many, many companies are trying to embrace a much more agile approach to app development. And that often leads them to DevOps. To get there, the challenge is impedance matching your infrastructure with that need. And not building out a whole separate infrastructure to deal with it. Neil, give some color to the CIO journey because this is interesting conversation. Go back 10 years or so. The CIO is running data centers, managing the facility, power budgets. And all of a sudden, I get called in on the CIO. We need more revenue. Like overnight, like, okay, start driving the business revenue line. What the hell are they doing? What do they do? I mean, you talked to a lot of CIOs. What is the plan of attack? What's their first five moves that they make? Obviously they go, oh, hell, I got to start making some moves. They got to get development up and running, right? So they have to get a sandbox. So a progression continues. Will you share some color on that progression? You're absolutely right. I mean, the role of the CIO has evolved massively from managing downside risk and avoiding downside by keeping infrastructures running to what are you doing familiarly and helping drive the business, right? And the challenge, first off, is you need to evolve the philosophy of IT operations to be much, much more efficient. So automation is absolutely key. The world in where manual management of separate silos of classes of infrastructure is going to be effective is in the past. Everybody's struggling with a journey towards automation and simplification so that the tasks that are consuming so much of the resource and attention and an IT function can be reduced and we can shift the focus onto the app development and the service development to enable revenue. And we're hearing, we've talked with Sue yesterday, the security pillar on the transformation area and data is a big one. We talked with Dom or in wireless, it's not the purchase price of the access points, it's the data they're providing. So the CIOs see value in the data and I got to say, I mean, I talked to them, we talked to a lot of CIOs and you talked to a lot more, they don't mind the revenue pressure. They've just never done it before at this level. Well, exactly. A lot of sales look at that as a great opportunity because they've got an opportunity to not be trapped as a support function but to have a real seat at the executive table helping drive the strategy of the business, using tech as a key enabler for the company. So developers and data seem to be the big thing right now in DevOps. What's your vision on that? How does that evolve under the synergy mission? Well, one of the key things that we've done with synergy is from the grounds up, the entire thing is built on open APIs. And so we've enabled our customers to directly engage the infrastructure in a unified API so they don't have to go to every individual device, figure out how to interact with it in order to build their own automation. Because the challenge on that automation journey we just talked about is many people have found that they spend as much energy trying to automate individual products and maintain that automation over time as they would have spent just doing it manually in the first place. So we've got to give them a key- And missing the boat on some key new opportunities. Well, exactly, because of the opportunity cost of all of that. So the key for us has been giving them a very straightforward way to deal with the whole infrastructure consistently. So you don't have that integration expense. You don't have that overhead. You can quickly deal with the automation of the infrastructure and you can move on to adding value to your business. So John, I know we're tight on time, but Neil, I want to ask you, people want to know, do systems like synergy mean the end of blade system architectures? Absolutely not. Why not? Within our portfolio we're blessed with a great range of different platforms and offerings. We have our Proline DL rack mount servers, we have a whole range of other offerings in the server space, including blade system. And that blade system infrastructure is very, very widely deployed and consumed by customers all over the world. I have engineers already working on future generation blade servers that will go into that infrastructure that will ship out in the future. So that whole journey of bladed infrastructure continues into the future. Composable infrastructure moves along in parallel with blades and racks and others. There's still going to be cases for... Evolutionary moves are not ripping replaced or building on top of it. Exactly, and the key thing for us is that on that automation journey, on that evolution within IT operations, you can take existing products like blade system or like our Proline DL rack mount servers and you can put that together with HPE OneView, start to use those APIs, start to have some of that automation experience and access the ecosystem of partners whose products are already interacting with those APIs. And all of that work is a foundation that you can then build on the fullness of time as and when it makes sense for a company to embrace HPE synergy. This is awesome, Neil. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight. I'll give you the final word. Share with the folks watching the vibe at the show here. What's the bumper sticker this year? So you're part of the big news on day one and throughout the show. What's the vibe? What's the bumper sticker for HPE Discover for you? There's so much energy and excitement about bringing technology to market here that's very, very well aligned with solving the problems that our customers have and whether they're trying to reduce their capex on infrastructure, deploy apps faster, deliver their operations much, much more efficiently. We're able to bring that to them. So what's really exciting for me is how resonant that offering is with our customers and our partners and the buzz here has been amazing. Very synergistic with the customer's goals. Indeed. And business outcomes. That's theCUBE synergy here, talking synergy, the new hot product here with Neil MacDonald, Vice President General Manager of the group here at theCUBE here at HPE Discover in London. We'll see you right back more after this short break.