 Okay, we're back here at Forecast 2012 Intel sponsored event, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLES. This is Cube Conversations with Jonathan Moore-Mile from HP. Thank you. Welcome to Cube Conversations. The discussion here is about the data center alliance, open data center alliance, cloud computing, cloud expo here in New York City. One of the hottest topics that nobody's talking about is power and cooling and space in the data center. It's that thing that everyone kind of wants in the spirit of innovation, rah rah, go cloud, go big data, but at the end of the day, they got to stare at the data center and look at the fact that there's no footprint available. And that's a scarce resource. So you're in this business. So give us the update, obviously it's talked about. I'm just kind of being kind of cynical about it, but the point is that it's an important conversation. Absolutely. And space for creating more scale is critical. So give us an update on where that is in this conversation in the data center. Well, and it's space to create more capacity, but it's got to be done smartly, right? I mean, because obviously with, you know, with densification going on and people needing that, densification needing to be elastic, whether it's from a capacity perspective or a financial aspect of it, it's how do you do that? How do you do it relevant to your organization and the IT that goes with it? And then how do you marry that, the blending of the IT and the facilities and how do you do that in a smart way, right? And so I think what we're seeing is a lot of, obviously is the strategy of modular data centers, right? Whether that's going with an external strategy of a container or something like that or going down to the rack level from a modularity perspective, deploying the optimized infrastructure to go with that IT and doing it in a smart way and looking at it from a TCO perspective, right? Not just a CAPEX, not just an OPEX, but overall how does it make me more efficient to deploy, to manage and to scale? So one of the things that we're tracking on SiliconANGLE is, we haven't been publishing about it because it's kind of in the research phase is tier two cities for data centers is a big trend that's on people's radars, which is we can put data centers in other cities that aren't quote tier one cities. They might have acceptable power but not the best power situation but power. That requires a different approach to the data center. You guys have been successful with HP pods, right? Which has been well documented as a beautiful product, but that's a full turnkey. Absolutely. So that's one interest. So talk about this one, this tier two data centers, need to expand and the benefits of having modularity and describe what modularity means. Is it space and product? Is it both? What kind of products can someone get with modularity? Sure, so when I talk about modularity, it's more of a thought process and a concept which represents not only products, deployment as well as services too, I think, and not only is it the purchasing and acquisition of it but it's also the operations and maintenance perspective of that as well. And so with HP, of course, we've got a full line of products whether it's at the facilities level with our flexible data center or all the way down to the rack level with our modular cooling system or something like that. That's something that we obviously believe in and when you start talking about going into tier two markets. It's a space issue though. On one hand, the concern is there's no space. I mean more space. Right, right. So parking lot is some free kickable parking spots for the modularity. Every area, right. I mean how can we convert an old warehouse? How can we convert an old classroom into something that's easy to use, right? But it doesn't require a heck of a lot of first cost investment and how can we repurpose it and how can it be flexible in the future to be able to reconfigure it, repurpose it and use it for what customers need whether it be to shut off the entire room or to- So that's one definition of modularity. Great, so talk about this tier two concept, tier two cities because with Modularia, you can essentially leverage these new environments whether it's parking lot or tier two cities. Absolutely. I mean I think what we're seeing too from an infrastructure perspective is that a lot of the typical redundancy, dual power pass and two end cooling and all these different things and everything's got to be kept at 70 degrees and a lot of those concepts are being challenged and a lot of them are starting to prove out that you don't necessarily need that but of course the enterprise space is always going to want availability, right? So they're like burn unicorns if I have to but keep my IT up and running, right? Where it affects scale out companies a lot more than that because obviously they're deploying tens of thousands of servers and doing it at a clip, right? And so what we're starting to see is through the redundancy software and things like that, the actual infrastructure needs in certain market segments are reduced quite a bit. So you're able to go into tier two cities and cities that may, the infrastructure may not be your areas that the infrastructure may not be as robust as customers may not have chose or maybe they've chosen a different location maybe 10 years ago where today they're like you know what it's connected, there's connectivity there, there's decent power and the price of real estate is cheap and then they use their redundancy through replication and different things like that. So it's a price issue but also from a footprint standpoint they just look at the costs. Let's go build out from scratch in tier one at cost X and when it's tier two with modularity in these elements they get the same value same uptime, same SLA, the same price. Absolutely and then you know when you start looking at providers that can provide the entire package, right? It's how do we make it easy to deploy? How can we take this entire package and if we need to move it somewhere and I'm talking about whether it's a pod or a row of racks or something like that how can we easily deploy it and how can we deploy that integrated solution and just if we need to pick it up and move it or if we need to put it anywhere location becomes almost not a dependency. Okay so HP is well known on the pod side turnkey high-end, it's great demo, great demo and a great product but the thing that we're hearing from customers in particular is they need more customization so it's almost the prefab version. We've got to wrap it around this column, I have this kind of space so that maybe there's some customization required. What's happening relative to that? What's the level of turnkey that gives the customer a maximum set of customization? What do you guys have? Is it like a portable? I'm thinking portable classroom. Kindergarten's too big, we gotta add another classroom. And you know actually we're doing that in India. We're actually deployed some portable labs and some portable classrooms in containers believe it or not but what we're noticing is it's really the base the common modular architecture of a base platform and you reduce it down the lowest element so that you give the customer choices and flexibility so that when you deploy the IT and the wrapper around it which would be the facilities and the infrastructure that you are allowing some level of customization and optimization to the IT that they're deploying and of course making it relevant for the customer so what we do is we understand at HP that customers are going to require that and so we leave the hooks in for other customized options. And they can go with non-HP gear obviously. Oh absolutely, yeah we understand that. It's not a lock in from HP standpoint. Heterogeneity is definitely something that we can't, we're never going to get away from and we're happy to even at our own factory integrate third-party gear and things like that into some of our solutions and ship them out for our customers. So last night at dinner I was talking in front of all the Intel executives doing my normal controversial statements and I said, green is bullshit in the data center. True or false? You got to say false because you work for HP. In the data center yes, we love power right? We love power, well infrastructure side I love using and cooling. Buyers aren't, I mean I'm over creating some controversy but the reality is that the buyers we talk to and the environments we talk to, green is not on the top of the list. You're absolutely right. And you're going to see that in your enterprise space. You're going to see it in Fed and things like that. They'll try to get there but on new construction it's a different ball game. You have absolutely, construction has some compliance greenish as I got to put my cracks maybe available and other things. But really where are we with the green? Both on the existing data center agenda and new construction. Sure. Or modular second tier prefabs. When I say new construction I consider that part of it. So there's pure new construction and I would say new deployment being kind of a fresh data center either through the flexibility. So what's the green agenda for those two buckets? So green agenda obviously for new data center deployments it's much easier right? I mean if you don't have a PUE of 1.5 or less you're doing something wrong of course but that's really not, I mean most of the case your data centers are going to be 10, 12 even more years old or older right? And so a lot of times the cost of retrofit becomes prohibitive for efficiency. And again, it's really worth- The rent of power supplies from 10 years ago. Right. Just killing the power. Exactly, but it's also really about too what is the customers, what is the business needs right? Is it availability? But what happens, what starts to happen is when you scale out and you're talking about buying thousands and tens of thousands of servers right? A little incremental change in efficiency translates to big bottom line savings right? Whereas an enterprise- Give me an example. So if you're looking at like a Microsoft or something like that right? So where they're buying tens of thousands of servers at a time. If you're able to lower your PUE maybe a point or two or something like that where you're talking about multi-megawatt data centers you're talking about a significant chunk of change when you're talking about- Not only costing, it's power savings. It's good for the grid too. Absolutely, yeah there's more power available. It's closer to their bottom line right? They're able to save more money there and then also we're talking about efficiency. We're not just talking about power efficiency right? There's a whole motion on deployment efficiency. Literally saving cardboard and boxes right? Having things pre-integrated, the labor and the planning to deploy these things. There's a lot of efficiency there and so green not so much but I talk more about the efficiency of process and efficiency of deployment as an overall picture. Were you involved in any of the data center announcements? You guys announced the zero- Net zero data center? Net zero data center. You unveiled it which said cut the power uses by 30%. Were you involved in that at all? That was actually more of an HP Labs project so I wasn't involved directly. But it relates to your world right? But as it relates to efficient data center infrastructure. Was that a fully developed HP Labs product like to create that shiny example? How close were we to getting the net zero? We're getting very close. I mean for example, and I keep referring to pods because it's close to my heart but I mean we're talking about PUEs of 1.05 in a pod and that's a redundant infrastructure there right? I mean you're talking tier two plus tier three infrastructure in your 1.05. So we're very close and I think again as we start to talk about redundants through replication and through software and things like that and you start talking about more efficient power systems. You start talking about flywheel UPS systems and DC systems and things like that. You're minimizing conversions and losses and so I think we're getting very close and then you start talking about things like chillerless data centers right? The ASHRAE temperatures keep going up and obviously we're staying lockstep with those things so your cooling requirements which obviously take the most amount of power in your data center are going to start being more and more diminished and therefore we are getting close to that. You know, nirvana which would be a PUE of one or heaven forbid you put a hamster wheel on it then you're selling power back to the grid and we're now negative PUEs and they're a power generating source. So we're here at the cloud computing conference. Everyone wants to know is cloud greener? Is it, you know, so what's the, I do agree that greener, I mean green isn't bullshit it's just not on the agenda but certainly like you said small advance is great, great wealth savings when you have the small improvements but the question is that is the cloud a greener strategy is one question for the data center guys who want to build out and maybe do some pods and modularity. The second question I want you to talk up to is for people building clouds we're seeing some hyper-skeleton CapCham and I's got a data center they're learning new things what would you share advice to those guys as they think about the scale? What can you pass on for them as advice? So first one is is cloud any greener for the data center in terms of a strategy and deployment and two, what do you say to the service providers that are building out at scale massive data centers to service the cloud business? So as cloud greener I would say today not yet because I don't think people are holistically committing to the cloud and I still think that they're they're still gonna be running parallel architectures and parallel infrastructure for a while and I think as we look out 2020 and things like that I think yes we might obviously advancements in server and processor efficiencies and things like that will lend to that but yeah I mean I think long term it's definitely gonna be a more efficient strategy but today I don't think we're quite there yet until it's tested out and proven some of the things that I would say to service providers that are looking at scaling out and things like that definitely obviously modularity is close to my heart so when you talk about implementing that pay as you grow approach truly be elastic and be able to use that modularity to ebb and flow with the marketing customer needs. So should they be thinking about that in terms of facility what's the variables that they need to watch in order to manage the modularity? Is it space? Is it like the parking lot? I mean is the facilities all the above? What would you say to that? It's really all the above. So you're two cities? Yeah so I would you know I think all of that I think that you know obviously we're crossing new horizons and new boundaries right? So I mean I think there are definitely some cutting edge and bleeding edge ideas and concepts but we're starting to see that tier two cities we're starting to see things as far as lack of redundancy everybody doesn't need 20 minutes of battery backup these days you know things like that and so we're starting to see people pairing it down getting more efficient more efficient. Now you know the thing that I see in on the facility side is you know is the over investment over subscription of first cost investments and things like that and I think what happens is people get locked into something and they're not able to be as agile and as flexible so you know using a model that has a smart entrance and exit strategy out of that and be able to scale that model makes sense and that would be obviously modularity all the way down to the facilities level as much as you can. Okay well last question here we're wrapping up the Cube Conversations for the day I want to ask you about retail data centers and wholesale. Get some retail players out there the go daddies of the world someone in cloud and doing all this stuff right essentially not really cloud but our data centers and then you have people getting into the wholesale data center it's a more interesting business so comment on what's going on in your mind if you can from the wholesale perspective I'm specialists who build out these data centers from scratch and then sell them to vendors this is kind of an interesting market developing around that. It is and it's Can you share any information about that and as we learn more about it? Well I think you know some of the events that I've attended uptime symposium and things like that recently you know there's that discussion between the design build guides and the real estate guys too of okay you know what are we going to do here even though we talk about modularity you know it does modularity play within the you know the brick and mortar type model that we've got and how does that work and how does everything interrelate and is it threatening or not threatening is it something that you know we're going to have to do we're being pushed to be there you know that kind of thing so I mean I see that I see the hybrid approach for you know wholesale guys and I see them you know designing a facility that can accommodate you know traditional legacy systems but also be able to look at some of the more cutting edge technologies as we start to see scale and HPC really start to increase year over year growth and things like that they're going to need to plan for that space and be able to accommodate it. Well you guys at HP have done some amazing job both on HP labs at Net Zero Data Center with Net Zero Data Center is a great case study out there and also Jim Gontier with the Gen 8 you get a building servers now that are highly cost effective, great management tools. You guys are really leading the way so congratulations. Thank you. I'm looking forward to seeing what your products are for me I'm looking for modularity I'm looking to expand that definition to understand more other than the pods the pods easy to understand, drop a pod in turnkey. Right. But I'm interested in more the prefab with kind of the end finishing touches aren't there. So we're working on the HP experience really it's all about you know the end to end experience of a customer comes to us with a problem we start with a blank piece of paper and we're able to plan, design, implement the IT the facilities and put a nice service wrapper around it for the customer literally doesn't have to worry about anything we're delivering the entire solution. We'll keep in touch, we're going to launch the data center angle verticals very shortly we're tracking DCIM, we're tracking some of the work you're doing around the modularity and certainly we're going to be following so keep in touch and share with us that information. Absolutely. This is the CUBE Conversations from Intel Forecast 2012 in New York City at the Cloud Expo. I'm John Furrier, SiliconAngle.com Thanks for watching.