 Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We're here with Omer Assad is the vice president GM of HPE's HCI and primary storage and data management business in Sandeep Singh. Who's the vice president of marketing for HPE's storage division. Welcome gents, great to see you. Great to be here Dave. It's a pleasure to be here Dave. Hey, so last month you guys, you made a big announcement and now you're shining the spotlight on that here at Discover. Sandeep, maybe you can give us a quick recap. What do we need to know? Yeah, Dave, we announced that we're expanding HPE GreenLake by transforming HPE storage to a cloud native software defined data services business. We unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates data driven transformation for our customers. And we introduced a data services platform that consists of two game changing innovations. Our first announcement was a data services cloud console. It's a SaaS based console that delivers the cloud operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud data services. Our second announcement is HPE Electra. It's cloud native data infrastructure to power your data edge to cloud and it's managed natively with data services cloud console to bring that cloud operational model to our customers wherever their data lives. Together with the data services platform, HPE GreenLake brings that cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on-premises environments and lays the foundation for our customers to shift from managing storage to managing data. Well, I think it lays the foundation for the next decade. When we entered this past decade, we at Wikibon we use terms like software led that sort of morphed into the software defined data center containers and Kubernetes. Let's zoom out for a minute if we can, Omar. Maybe you could describe the problems that you're trying to address with this announcement. Thanks, Dave. It's always a pleasure talking to you on these topics. So in my role as general manager for primary storage, I speak with hundreds of customers across the board and I consistently hear that data is at the heart of what our customers are doing and they're looking for a data driven transformative approach to their business. But as they engage in these things, there are two challenges that they consistently face. The first one is that managing storage at scale is rife with complexity. So while storage has gotten faster in the last 20 years, managing a single array or maybe two or three arrays has gotten simpler over time. But managing storage at scale when you deploy fleets of storage as customers continue to gather, store and lifecycle that data, this process is extremely frustrating for customers. Still, IT administrators are firefighting, they're unable to innovate for their business because now data spans all the way from edge to core to cloud. And then with the advent of public cloud, there's another dimension of multi-cloud that has been added to their data sprawl. And then secondly, what we consistently hear is that IT administrators need to shift from managing storage to managing data. What this basically means is that IT has a desire to mobilize, protect and provision data seamlessly across its lifecycle and across the locations that it is stored at. This ensures that IT leaders and also people within the organization understand the context of the data that they store and they operate upon. Yet data management is an extremely big challenge. And it is a web of fragmented data silos across processes, across infrastructure, all the way from test and dev to administration to production to backup to lifecycle data management. And so up till now, data management was tied up with storage management and this needs to change for our customers, especially with the diversity of the application workloads as they're growing and as customers are expanding their footprint across a multi-cloud environment. And just to add to Omar's response there, we recently conducted a survey that was actually done by ESG. And that was a survey of IT decision makers. And it's interesting what it showcased. 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management complexity is impeding their digital transformation. 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And 94% want to bring the cloud experience on premises. You know, I'll chime in. I think as you guys move to the sort of software world and container world, affinity to developers. Omar, you talked about things like data protection and we talk about security being bolted on all the time. Now it's designed in. It's done at sort of the point of creation, not as an afterthought. And that's a big change that we see coming. But let's talk about what also needs to change as customers make the move from this idea of managing storage to managing data. Omar, maybe you can take that one. That's a very interesting problem. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to move into this new data management model? So Dave, one of the things that the public cloud got right is the cloud operational model, which sets the standard for agility and a fast pace for our customers. In a classic IT on-prem model, if you ever wanted to stand up an application or if you were thinking about standing up a particular workload, you're going to file a series of IT tickets and then you're at the mercy of whatever complex processes exist within organization. And depending on what the level of approvals are within a particular organization, standing up a workload can take days, weeks or even months in certain cases. So what cloud did was it brought that level of simplicity for someone that wanted to instantiate an app. This means that the provisioning of underlying infrastructure that makes that workload possible needs to be reduced to minutes from days and weeks. But so what we are intending to do over here is to bring the best of both worlds together so that the cloud experience can be experienced everywhere with ease and simplicity and the customers don't need to change their operating model. So it's blending the two together and that's what we are trying to usher in into this new era where we start to differentiate between data management and storage management as to independent things. Great, thank you for that Omer. Sandeep, I wonder if you could share with the audience the vision that you guys unveiled. What does it look like? How are you making it actually substantive and real? Yeah, Dave, that's also a great question. Across the board, it's time to reimagine data management. Everything that Omer shared, those challenges are leading to customers needing to break down the silos and complexity that plagues these distributed data environments. And our vision is to deliver a new data experience that helps customers unleash the power of data. We call this vision Unified Data Ops. Unified Data Ops integrates data-centric policies to streamline data management, cloud native control to bring the cloud operational model to where customers data lives and AI-driven insights to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a new data experience to simplify and bring that agility of cloud to data infrastructure, streamline data management and help customers innovate faster than ever before. We're making the promise of Unified Data Ops real by transforming HPE storage to a cloud native software-defined data services business and introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. I mean, you talk about the complexity. I look at it as you kind of almost embracing the complexity, saying, look, it's going to keep getting more complex. As the cloud expands to the edge on-prem, cross-cloud, it gets more complex underneath. What you're doing is you're almost embracing that complexity and putting a layer over it and hiding that complexity from the end customer. And so they could spend their time doing other things. Over, I wonder if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the data services console. Is it sort of another software layer to manage infrastructure? What exactly is it? It's a lot more than that, Dave. And you're 100% right. It's basically we're attempting in this release to attack that complexity head-on. So simply put, data services cloud console is a SaaS-based console that delivers cloud operational model and cloud operational agility to our customers. It unifies data operation to a series of cloud data services that are delivered on top of this console to our customers in a continuous innovation stream. And what we have done is going back to the point that I made earlier, separating storage and data management and putting the strong suites of each of those together into the SaaS-delivered console for our customers. So what we have done is we've separated data and infrastructure management away from physical hardware to provide a comprehensive and a unified approach to managing data and infrastructure wherever it lives. From a customer's perspective, it could be at the edge, it could be in a colo, it could be in their data center, or it could be a bunch of data services that are deployed within the public cloud. So now our customers with data services cloud console can manage the entire lifecycle of their data from all the way from deployment, upgrading and optimizing it from a single console from anywhere in the world. This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud data services that enable access to data. It allows for policy-based data protection. It allows for an organizational wide search on top of your storage assets. And we deliver basically a 360-degree visibility to all your data from a single console that the customer can experience from anywhere. So if you look at the journey, the way we're deciding to deliver this, so the first, in its first incarnation, data services cloud console gives you infrastructure and cloud data services to start, to do data management along with that. But this is that foundation that we are placing in front of our customers, the SaaS console through which we get, touch our customers on a daily basis. And now as our customers get access to this SaaS platform, on the backend, we will continue to roll in additional services throughout the years on a true SaaS-based innovation base for our customers. And these services will be ranging all the way from data protection to multi-cloud data management, all the way to visibility, all the way to understanding the context of your data as it's stored across your enterprise. And in addition to that, we're offering a consistent, revised, unified API, which allows for our customers to build automation against their storage infrastructure without ever worrying about that. As infrastructure changes, the API proof points are going to break for them. That is never going to happen because they're going to be programming to a single SaaS-based API interface from now on. Right, and that brings in this idea of infrastructure as code. And we're coaching to talk about as a service, to talk about GreenLake. And my question is always, okay, tell me what's behind that and if you're talking about boxes and widgets, that's a problem and you're not. You're talking about services and APIs and microservices and that's really the future model and infrastructure as code and ultimately data as code is really part of that. So all right, so you guys, I know some of your branding folks, you guys give deep thought to this. So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands send deep. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Sure, ultimately delivering the cloud operational model requires cognitive data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from the cloud. And that's why we have also introduced HPE Electra. Omar, can you perhaps describe HPE Electra even more? Oh, absolutely. Thank you, Sandy. So with HPE Electra, we're launching a new brand of a cloud native hardware infrastructure to power our customer's data all the way from edge to the core to the cloud. The releases are smaller models for the edge than at the same time having models for the data center and then expanding those services into the public cloud as well, right? All these hardware devices, Electra hardware devices are cloud native and powered by our data services cloud console. We're announcing two models with this launch, HPE Electra 9000. This is for our mission critical workloads. It has its history and bases in HPE Primera. It comes with 100% availability guarantee. It's the first of its type in the industry. It comes with standard support contract, no special verbiage required. And then we're also launching HPE Electra 6000s. These are based in our history of nimble storage systems. These are for business critical applications, especially for that mid range of the storage market, optimizing price performance and efficiency. Both of these systems are full NVMe storage powered by our timeless capabilities with data in place upgrades. And then they both deliver a unified infrastructure and data management experience through the data services cloud console. And at the back end unified AI ops experience with HPE InfoSight is seamlessly blended in along with the offering for our customers. So this is what I was talking about before. It's sort of not your grandfather storage business anymore. This is something that is part of that unified vision, that layer that I talked about, the APIs, the programmability. So Omar, you're reaching into new territory here. Maybe you can give us an example of how the customers experience, what that looks like. Excellent, love today. So essentially what we're doing is we're changing the storage experience to a true cloud operational model for our customers. These recent announcements that we just went through along with Sandeep, they expand the cloud experience that our customers get with storage as a service with HPE GreenLake. So a couple of examples to make this real. So the first of all is simplified deployment. So IT no longer has to go through complex startup and deployment processes. Now all you need to do is these systems are shipped and delivered to the customer's data center. Operational staff just need to rack and stack and then leave. Connect the power cable, connect the network cable and the job's done. From that point onwards, data services console takes over where you can onboard these systems, you can provision these systems. If you have a pre-existing organization-wide security as well as standard profile setup in data services console, we can automatically apply those on your behalf and bring these systems online. From a customer's perspective, they can be anywhere in the world to onboard these systems. They could be driving in a car, they could be sitting on a beach and these systems are automatically onboarded through this cloud operational model which is delivered through the SaaS application for our customers. Another big example that I'd like to shed light on is intent-based provisioning. So Dave, typically provisioning a workload within a data center is an extremely spreadsheet-driven trial and error kind of a task. Which system do I land it on? Is my existing SLA going to be affected? Which systems are loaded? Which systems are loaded enough that I put this additional workload on it and the performance doesn't tank? All of these decisions are trial and error on a constant basis. With cloud data services console, along with the Electra new systems that are constantly in a loopback information feeding typical analytics through the console, all you need to do is to describe the type of the workload and the intent of the workload in terms of block size SLA that you would like to experience. At that point, data services console consults with InfoSight at the backend. We run through thousands of data points that are constantly being given to us by your fleet and we come back with a few recommendations. You can accept our recommendation and at that time, we go ahead and fully deploy this workload on your behalf or you can specify a particular system and then we will try to enforce the SLA on that system. So it completely eliminates the guesswork and the planning that you have to do in this regard. And last but not the least, one of the most important things is, upgrades has been a huge problem for our customers. And typically oftentimes, when you're not in this constant loopback communication with your customers, it often is a big challenge to identify which release or which bug fix or which update goes on to which particular machine. All of that has been completely taken away from our customers and fully automated. We run thousands of signatures across our install base. We identify which upgrades need to be curated for which machines in a fleet for a particular customer and then if it applies to that customer, we present it and if the customer accepts it, we automatically go ahead and upgrade the system. And last but not the least from a global management perspective, now a customer has an independent data view of their data estate independent from a storage estate and data services console can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view or the data view. It's kind of the holy grail. I mean, I've been in this business a long time and I think IT people have dreamt about, you know this kind of capability for a long, long time. I wonder if we could sort of stay on the customers for a moment here and talk about what's enabled now. Maybe we're talking digital transformation. I joke about the joke and not funny. The force marched to digital with COVID and we really wasn't planful, but customers really want to drive now that digital transfer. Some of them were on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. What are the outcomes that are enabled here, Omar? Excellent, so on a typical basis for a traditional IT customer, this cloud operational model means that, you know information technology staff can move a lot faster and they can be a lot more productive on the things that are directly relevant to their business. They could get up to 99% of the savings back to spend more time on strategic projects or best of all, spend time with their families rather than managing and upgrading infrastructure and fleets of infrastructure. For line of business owners, the new experience means that their data infrastructure can be provisioned with a self-service on demand type of capability. They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Capacity management, performance management, all of that is tied in and presented to them wherever they are in easy to consume SaaS based models and especially for data innovators, whether it's DBAs, whether it's data analysts, they can start to consume infrastructure and ultimately data as a code to speed up their app development. Because again, the context that we are bringing forward is the context of data decoupling it from actually storage management. Storage management and data management are now two separate domains that can be presented through a single console to tie the end to end picture for a customer. But at the end of the day, what we have felt is that customers really, really want to rely and move forward with data management and leave infrastructure management to machine-oriented tasks which we have completely automated on their behalf. So I'm sure you've heard, you got the memo about HP going all in on as a service. It's clear that the company's all in. How does this announcement fit in to that overall mission, Sandeep? Dave, we believe the future is edge-to-cloud and our mission is to be the edge-to-cloud platform as a service company. And as HPE transforms, HPE GreenLake is our unified cloud platform. HPE GreenLake is how we deliver cloud services and agile cloud experiences to customers' applications and data across edge-to-cloud. With the storage announcement that we made recently, we announced that we're expanding HPE GreenLake with as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a cloud-native software-defined data services business. And this expands storage as a service, delivering full cloud experience to our customers' data across edge and on-prem environments. Across the board, we're committed to being a strategic partner for every one of our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation. Yeah, that's where the puck's going, guys. Hey, as always, great conversation with our friends from HPE Storage. Thanks so much for the collaboration and congratulations on the announcements. And I know you're not done yet. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. You're very welcome. And thank you for being with us for HPE Discover 2021. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. Keep it right there.