 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE's Discover 2020, the virtual experience theCUBE. theCUBE has been virtualized, we like to say. I'm very happy to welcome in Neil McDonald. He's the general manager for Compute at HPE. Great to see you again, Neil. I wish it were face-to-face, but this'll have to do. Yeah, well, it's great to see you, Dave. Next time, next time we'll do this face-to-face. Next time, hopefully next year, we'll see. We'll see how things are going. But I hope you're safe and your family's all good and they say it's good to talk to you. We've talked before, many times, it's interesting just to know the whole parlance in our industry is changing, even Compute in your title. In no long do we think about it as just servers or a box, you guys are moving to this as a service notion. Really, it's kind of fundamental or poignant that we see this really entering this next decade. It's not going to be the same as last decade, is it? No, I think our customers are increasingly looking at delivering outcomes to their customers and their lines of business. And Compute can take many forms to do that. And it's exciting to see the evolution in the technologies that we're delivering and the consumption models that our customers are increasingly taking advantage of, such as GreenLake. Yes, so Antonio obviously and his keynote made a big deal and has in previous keynotes about GreenLake. A lot of themes on the cloud economy and as a service. I wonder if you could share with our audience, what are the critical aspects that we should know really around GreenLake? Well, GreenLake is growing tremendously for us. We have around 1,000 customers delivering infrastructure through the GreenLake offerings. And that's backed by 5,000 people in the company around the world who are tuning and optimizing and taking care of that infrastructure for those customers. There's billions of dollars of total contract value under GreenLake now and it's accelerating in the current climate because really what GreenLake's all about is flexibility. The flexibility to scale up, to scale down, the ability to pay as you use the infrastructure which in the current environment is incredibly helpful for conserving cash and boosting both operational flexibility with the technology but also financial flexibility in our customers operations. The other big advantage of course at GreenLake is it frees up talent. Most companies around the world have challenges in freeing up their talent to work on really impactful business transformation initiatives. We've seen in the last couple of quarters even greater acceleration of digital transformation work for example, and if all of your talent is tied up in managing the existing infrastructure then that's a drain on your ability to transform and in some industries even survive right now. So GreenLake can help with all of those elements and with all of the pressure from COVID it's actually becoming even more consumed by more and more and more customers around the world. It's- Yeah, right. I mean, that definitely ties into the whole as a service conversation as well. I mean, to your point, digital transformation in the last couple of years is really accelerated but I feel like in the last 90 days it's accelerated more than it has in the last three years because if you weren't digital you really had no way to do business and as a service has really played into that. So I wonder if you could talk about your as a service posture and thinking. Well, you're absolutely right Dave. Organizations that had not already embarked on a digital transformation have rapidly learned in our current situation that it's not an optional activity. Those that were already on that path are having to move faster and those that weren't are having to develop those strategies very, very rapidly in order to transform their business and to survive. And the really neat thing about GreenLake and the as a service offerings that we provide in that context is how it can accelerate the deployment. Many companies, for example, have had to deal with VDI deployments in order to enable many, many, many more of their workforce to be productive when they can't be in the office or in the facility. And a solution like GreenLake can really help enable very, very rapid deployment and build out, but not just VDI. Many, many other workloads in high performance compute or in SAP HANA, for example, are all areas that we're bringing value to customers through that kind of as a service offering. Yeah, a couple of examples. Nokia software is using GreenLake to accelerate their research and development as they drive the leadership in the 5G revolution and they're doing that at a fraction of the cost of the public cloud. We've got Xenuity, which has built a private cloud for artificial intelligence and HPC that's been used to develop the next generation of autonomous software for cars. And finally, we've got Salsa Portia Informatic who have built a fully managed hybrid cloud environment to accelerate all their application development without having to bear the traditional costs of an over provisioned CAPEX infrastructure. So all of our customers are relying on that because compute and innovation is just at the core of the digital transformations that everybody is embarked on as they modernize their businesses right now. And it's exciting to be able to be part of that and to be able to be there to help. So of course in the tech business innovation is the main spring of growth and change, which is constant in our industry. And I have a panel this week with Dr. Go talking about swarm learning and AI and that's some organic innovation that HPE is doing. But as well, you've done some M&A as well. Recently you guys announced, and we covered it, pretty major investment in Pensando systems. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that means to the compute business specifically in HPE customers generally. So our partnership with Pensando is really, really exciting and it's great to see the momentum that it's building in delivering value to our customers. At the end of the day, we've been successful with Pensando in building that momentum in very highly regulated industries. And the value that is really intrinsic to Pensando is the simplifying of the network architecture. Traditionally, when you would manage an enterprise network environment, you would create centralized devices for services like load balancing or floral walls and other security functionality. And all the traffic in the data center would be going back and forth, back and forth, tromboning across the infrastructure as you sought to secure your underlying compute. The beauty of the Pensando technology is that we actually push that functionality all the way out to the edge at the server. So whether those servers are in a data center, whether they're in a colocation facility, whether in the edge, we can deliver all of that security service that would traditionally be required in centralized, expensive, complex, unique devices that were specific to each individual purpose and essentially make that a software-defined set of services running in each node of your infrastructure, which means that as you scale your infrastructure, you don't have a bottleneck. You're just scaling that security capability with the scaling of your computer infrastructure. It takes traffic off your core networks, which gives you some benefits there, but fundamentally it's about a much more scalable, responsive, cost-efficient approach to managing the security of the traffic in your networks and securing the compute endpoints within your infrastructure. And it's really exciting to see that being picked up in financial services and healthcare and other segments that have very high standards with respect to security and infrastructure management, which is a great compliment to the technology from Pensando and the partnership that we have with Pensando and HPE. And it's compact too, we should share with our audience. It's basically the card that you stick inside of a server, correct Neil? That's exactly right. At Pensando's PCIe card together with HPE servers puts that security functionality in the server exactly where your data is being processed. And the power of that is several fold. It avoids the tromboning that we talked about back across the whole network every time you've got to go to a centralized security appliance. It eliminates those complex single purpose appliances from the infrastructure. And that of course means that the failure domain is much, much smaller because your failure domain is a single server. But it also means that as you scale your infrastructure, your security infrastructure scales with the servers. So you have a much, much simpler network architecture. And as I say, that's been delivered in environments with very high standards for security, which is really a great endorsement of the Pensando technology and the partnership that HPE and Pensando have in bringing that technology to market for our customers. So if I understand it correctly, the Pensando is qualified for ProLiant, Apollo, and Edge Alliance. My question is, so if I'm one of those customers today, what's in it for me? Are they sort of hopping on this for existing infrastructure? Or is it part of sort of new digital initiatives? I wonder if you could explain. So if you were looking to build out infrastructure for the future, then you would ask yourself, why would you continue to carry forward legacy architectures in your network with these very expensive custom appliances for each security function? Why not embrace a software defined approach that pushes that to the edge of your network, whether the edge are in colos or actually out on the edge or in your data centers? You can have that security functionality embedded within your computer infrastructure taking advantage of Pensando's technologies. So obviously things have changed, it's specifically in the security space. People are talking about this work from home and this remote access being a permanent or even a quasi permanent situation. So I wonder if we could talk about the Edge and specifically where Ruba fits in the Edge, how Pensando complements that. What's HPE's vision with regard to how this evolves and maybe how it's been supercharged with the COVID pandemic. So we're very fortunate to have the Ruba Intelligent Edge technology in the HPE portfolio. And the power of that technology is its focus on the analysis of data and the development of solutions at the site where the data is generated. Increasingly, the data volumes are such that they're gonna have to be dealt with at the Edge. And given that, you need to be building Edge infrastructure that is capable enough and secure enough for that to be the case. And so we've got a great complement between the Intelligent Edge technology within the Ruba portfolio with all of the incredible management capabilities that are in those platforms combined with technologies like Pensando and our HPE compute platforms bring the ability to build a very cohesive, secure, scalable infrastructure that tackles the challenges of having to do this compute at the Edge, but still being able to do it in both a secure and easily managed way. And that's the power of the combination of a Ruba HPE compute and Pensando. Well, with the expanded threat surface with people working from home, organizations are obviously very concerned about compliance and being able to enforce consistent policies across this sort of new network. So I think what you're talking about is very important that you have a cohesive system from a security standpoint, you're not just bolting on some solution at the tail end in your comments. Well, security always depends on all the links in the chain and one of the most critical links in the chain is the security of the actual compute itself. And within the HPE Proline platforms, we've done a lot of work to build very differentiated and exclusive capability with our hardware, our silicon root of trust which is built directly into silicon. And that enables us to ensure the integrity of the entire boot chain and the security of the platform rounds up in ways that can't be done with some of the other hardware approaches that are prevalent in the industry. And that's actually brought some benefit in financial terms to our customers because of the certifications that are enabled in the cyber catalyst designations that we've earned for the platforms. So we also know from listening to your announcements with Pensando and just observing security in general that this notion of micro segmentation is very important. Being able to have increased granularity as opposed to kind of a blob, maybe you could explain why that's important, the so what behind micro segmentation as well. Well, it's all about minimizing the threat perimeter on any given device. And if you can minimize the vectors through which your infrastructure will interact on the network, then you can provide additional layers of security. And that's the power of having your security functionality right down at the edge because you can have that security processor sitting right in the server and providing great, great security at the node level. You're no longer relying on the network management getting all of that right. And you also have much, much greater flexibility because you can easily in a software defined environment push the policies that are relevant for the individual pieces of infrastructure in an automated policy driven way rather than having to rely on someone in network security getting the manual configuration of that infrastructure correct to protect the individual nodes. And if you take that kind of approach and you embed that kind of technology in servers which are fundamentally robust in terms of the security because of the Silicon root of trust that we've embedded across our platform portfolio whether that's ProLiant or Synergy or Blade System or Edgeline, you get a tremendous combination as a result of these technologies. And as I mentioned, the cyber catalyst designation is a proof point of that. Last year there were over 150 security products put forward for the cyber catalyst designation and only a handful were actually awarded, I think 17 of which two were HPE compute and Aruba. And the power of that is that many organizations are now having to deal with insurance for cyber security events. And the catalyst designation can actually lead to lower premiums where the choice of the infrastructure that you've made such as HPE compute has actually enabled you to have a lower cost of ensuring your organization against cyber security issues because infrastructure matters and the choice of infrastructure with the right innovation in it is a really critical choice for organizations moving forwards in security and in so many other ways. Yeah, you mentioned a lot of things there. So for defined that's going to enable automation and scale, you talked about the perimeter of the traditional moat around the castle. That's gone to the perimeter. There is no perimeter anymore. It's everywhere. So that whole, you know, weakest link in the chain and the chain of events. And then the other thing you talked about was layers, you know, very, very important when you talk to security practitioners, you know, building layers in. So all of this really is factoring in security in particular, it's factoring into customer buying decisions, isn't it? Well, security is incredibly important for so many of our customers across many, many industries. And having the ability to meet those security needs head on is really, really critical. We've been very successful in leveraging these technologies for many customers in many different industries. You know, one example is we've recently won multiple deals with the Defense Intelligence Systems Agency who you will imagine have very high standards for security worth hundreds of millions of dollars of that infrastructure. So there's a great endorsement from the customers that who are taking advantage of these technologies and finding that they deliver great benefits for them in the operational security of their infrastructure. Yeah, I wonder if I could ask you a question on the edge. I mean, as somebody who is, you know, with a company that is really at the heart of technology and I'm sure you're constantly looking at, you know, new companies, M&A, you know, et cetera, you know, inventing tech tech, but I want to ask you about the architectures for the edge and just in thinking about a lot of data at the edge, not all the data is going to come back to the data center or the cloud. There's going to be a lot of AI inferencing going on in real time or near real time. Do you guys see different architectures emerging to support that edge? I mean, from a compute standpoint, or is it going to be traditional architectures that support that? It's clearly an evolving architectural approach because for the longest time, infrastructure was built with some kind of hub, you know, whether that's a data center or in the cloud and all of the devices at the edge would be essentially calling on. So edge devices historically have been very focused on connectivity, on acquisition of data and then sending that data back for some kind of processing and action at some centralized location. And the reality is that given the amount of data being generated at the edge and now giving the capability even of the most modern networks, it's simply not possible to be moving those kinds of data volumes all the way back to some remote processing environment and then communicating a decision for action all the way back out to the edge. First of all, the networks can handle the volume of data is involved if every device in the world was doing that and secondly, the latencies are too slow. They're not fast enough in order to be able to take the action needed at the edge. So that means that you have to countenance systems at the edge that are now actually storing data, that are now actually computing upon data. And in a lot of edge systems historically, they would evolve from very proprietary, very vertically integrated systems to perhaps PC controller based systems with some form of IP connectivity back to some central processing environment. And the reality is that if you build your infrastructure that way, you finish up with a very unmanageable fleet. You finish up with a very fragmented disjointed infrastructure. And our perspective is that companies that are gonna be successful in the future have to think of themselves as an edge to cloud approach. They have to be pursuing this in a way that views the edge, the data center and the cloud as part of an integrated continuum, which enables the movement of data when needed. You heard about the swarm learning that you talked about with my colleague Dr. Go where there's a balance of what is computed where in the infrastructure. And so many other examples, but you need to be able to move compute to where the data is and you need to be able to do that efficiently with a unified approach to the architecture. And that's where assets like the HP data fabric come into play, which enable that kind of unification across the different locations of equipment. It also means you need to think differently about the actual building blocks themselves. In a lot of edge environments, if you take a classic 19 inch rack mount compute device that was originally designed for the data center, it's simply not the right kind of infrastructure. So that's why we have offerings like the edge line portfolio in the HPE products set because they're designed to operate in those environments with different environmental than you find in the data center with different interfaces to systems of action and systems of control than you'd typically find in the data center environment, yet still bringing many of the security benefits and the manageability benefits that we've talked about earlier in our conversation today, Dave. So it's definitely going to be an evolving and new architectural approach at the edge and companies that are thoughtful about their choice of infrastructure are going to be much, much more successful than those that take a more incremental approach. And we're excited to be there to help our customers on that journey. Yeah, Neil, it's a very exciting time. I mean, you know, much of the innovation in the last decade was find inside the data center and in your world, a lot of times, you know, inside the server itself what you're describing is this end to end system across the network and that system's view and there's going to be a ton of innovation there. And we're very excited for you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you again. It's great to be here and we're just excited to be here to help our customers and giving them the best value for the workloads, whether that's taking advantage of GreenLake, taking advantage of the innovative security technologies that we've talked about or being the edge to cloud platform as a service company that can help our customers transform in this distributed world from the edge to the data center to the cloud. Thanks for having me, Dave. You're very welcome. Awesome summary and always good to see you, Neil. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, our coverage of the HPE Discover 2020 Virtual Experience but right back for this short break.