 We're live here in Frankfurt, Germany. This is HP Discover. This is the second part of our HP Discover tour, first in Las Vegas, now here in Europe. This is SiliconANGLE.com's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, just to see them from the noise, and we have a CUBE alumni who's been here many times on theCUBE, sometimes controversial. Always entertaining, very knowledgeable. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, as John said. Jim Gontier is back in the house at theCUBE. Jim, welcome. Thank you. You know I couldn't like come out here and not talk to you guys. It's good to see you. Great setup, good conference coming on. You guys reach almost 20,000 people between here and Las Vegas. I was going to say, not only has, as you can probably tell by all the signal-to-noise ratio, a lot of folks here asking a lot of questions, but just the amount of innovations, the number of launches has gotten us buzz everywhere. Yeah, I mean, we were actually pretty bullish on the future for HP. A lot of people down in the company right now, but Meg, I thought, did a really good job of, she really stressed, especially the financial stability of the company, you know? You can't really do it without a strong balance sheet and she's really focused on that, so we see good things ahead. Well, not just the strong balance sheet, because as Meg articulated, we've also got a clear vision. We've also made promises that we started to keep and as you can tell by all of the innovations, whether the things you heard on storage, whether it's the things you heard about big data, Converge Cloud, or even the Converge infrastructure aspects, plenty of really great stuff going on. Well, you know, we've been critical. I've been critical on my blog over the past couple years with some of the turmoil, but we've always at the same time been very loyal and supportive of HP because we've always recognized that the people of the company, the customers are active. It's not like the ship is sinking. It's not, it's like if you come here, if you've been here at HP Discover, you get people who've been here 25, 30 years, you've got new employees, you have real products. Not a lot of hype. In fact, HP kind of downplays. They don't really hype themselves up enough, in my opinion. So it's really exciting and we're reporting all this and autonomy conversation is about products and innovation. Not the other walls, you guys aren't going to lead through that conversation. But the folks who don't know, autonomy's blending in. It's native now. Autonomy is a great product that you're seeing start to show up in multiple classes of platforms. You heard the storage team say that they actually have it pretty much in their new StoreX. So whether it's StoreAll or StoreOnce. You heard some of the things that we started to do and you guys actually have helped us with this. Some of the appliances that we're building with autonomy. So if anybody hasn't seen it, it is a phenomenal product with functionality that nobody else can touch. So give us an update because we're really excited. I mean, Dave and I did some great, long day, yes, some great interviews, but our summary at the end of the day, our wrap up was the themes here are obviously big data, and software-led infrastructure, a term that we coined, and Wikibon just put out the first ground-breaking research on what we call in software-led infrastructure, which is the first report ever by an analyst firm that modernizes the converged infrastructure definition because two things have happened. Flash and software is now a big part of it, always has been, but Dave Donatelli was up there and he said, we have all three. Software-defined networking, software-defined storage, and software-defined servers. So it's a triple threat. You have it today and everyone else is kind of groping. So I want to drill in. Give us the update. Where's the software-defined coming from? Really easy question. So let me give you a couple that are near and dear to my heart and we'll start with servers and then we'll talk about what we've done in storage. So most of you have heard about Project Moonshot, right? Yeah, we've covered it. Okay, well, you guys helped us, that's correct. So the net is, is that, you know, whether you're looking at Project Moonshot where we said we're going to forever redefine the way that people look at both the energy in servers, the world of power consumes, how we're going to also look at the space consumed, and then also the fact of, unlike a lot of other products, most people will start with, look, you know, here's the architecture, here are the components, I'm going to put them down on the board and I'm going to put third-party software wrap on top. We took a fundamentally different approach. With Moonshot, we said, what are those workloads? What are those web-type things that people are doing? And then how can we actually put the right amount of compute, IO, storage in order to go match that? So the beauty of the Moonshot program is, it's a, and I'm going to use a term from our storage folks, a polymorphic-type scenario whereby you will get the best possible performance and we're going to redefine the way that people look at those servers because today you can get maybe 100 servers in a rack. In the future, very shortly by the way, we're going to be able to show people how you can get thousands of servers in a rack. That's on the server side. On the storage side, you heard the conversation today about, or actually Monday and yesterday, on how we're taking a lot of the infrastructure and the innovations, both from a combination of the store-serve 7,000 products, which now, by the way, most people tend to think of, hey, in order to get the simple, efficient, agile architectures for three-part, it used to be at a very high price point. Now folks can get that at 20,000 euros. So that's one particular scenario and unlike everybody else, so you know, whether it's servers or storage, everybody has multiple architectures. Everybody has multiple OSs. What we decided to do is we said, why couldn't we come up with one architecture, converged in its format, and when you do that, forever redefine the way that people have to pay, the amount of space it takes up, the power that it burns, and the amount of management that you have to take from an admin perspective. Without locking people out of the workload demands flexibility. Correct. Big data is different than something else. Big data is dramatically different. So flexibility is a huge deal. So how did you guys get around the flexibility? Because most architectures, when you go single architecture, lock in. So one of the ways you do that, and it goes all the way back to a converged infrastructure principle of ours, is you create common modular architectures. So I gave you the moonshot example, I gave you the store serve example. The, so on the SL4500, what we're able to do there is the fact that we did the same thing. We basically said, look, the way that you do Hadoop is different than the way you do Exchange. It's different than the way you do object store. I like to joke when you have one architecture, one approach in terms of like one box, one size fits none. So what we did is back to the whole converged infrastructure value prop. If I have a common modular architecture that I can quickly flip back and forth depending on the workload, performance and the requirements, now you have your choice. I can have one type of SL4500 that has a quarter of a petabyte of storage. That's great for object store. But if I want to run Hadoop, and by the way it has one server. I need RAM. Yeah, there you go. But if I want to run Hadoop, what I can end up doing there is I can have three servers, and I can have 45 drives, or 45 drives, or almost like 100 to 150 terabytes of data. So in that entire rack, I can now put one, well let's see, 2.1 petabytes of information. That gentleman is how you help transform an industry. You can't approach it with the old fashioned ways, you can't approach it with the way that everybody else is doing it. It's got to be converged infrastructure. It's got to have cloud optics, and it has to have software defined. How is that changing your sales model? You think of traditional enterprise sales and the way in which you approach the customer. A lot of it was belly to belly, and you think about hyperscale, and how you might be selling that. How do those two sales models differ? How is your sales model changing? Not only hyperscale, but also converged infrastructure. So the good news is, and I'll answer the change question first, but the good news is from a leverage perspective, most of the customer problems are the same. They're being told they have to do more with less. They're being told that they have to figure out a way to lower their expenses, whether it's their power and cooling bill, whether it's making their admins more effective and efficient, and they have to do it all within the budget constraints they have while trying to drive differentiation of the business. The good news is all the problems are the same. The way that it slightly changes it is the touch level in terms of those kind of sales. So if you look at like a hyperscale sale versus a traditional enterprise scale, yes, there might be somebody who is a lot closer to the account. There might be somebody actually embedded in the account because when you have one of those sales, it's not just what's the product. It's also the logistics. It's also the support and services. It's even down to the point of, and I won't name who the customer is. When I talk about the way the logistics are different, you need to deliver that performance optimized data center class product on my lot between 330 and 430, because that's the only time that I can actually take down the old one, put the new one in. So to answer your points succinctly, it's not just it changes the product slightly, the touch model, the services, the support, the logistics and everything else. Now, the great news is, if you look at the most recent data, all of the, and I'm going to use the word high density market share, if you look at some of the great product lines, and by the way, when I say the hyperscale piece, we're not only accelerating those spaces. All right, so I'll name the names. You've seen a lot of them before. You've heard us talk about what we've done with Microsoft. You've heard us talk about what we've done with three out of the four big social media firms. All of them are seeing the innovations around Gen 8. All of them are taking advantage of it, and we're accelerating in terms of bringing more and more of those hyperscale type customers in, because our growth rates was double digits last quarter. Okay, and so can you share with us how, what impact that's having in terms of the goals of Gen 8, right? They were to attack, you know, the larger problem. Oh no, Gen 8 is doing really, really well. And you know, when last time we spoke about Gen 8, which I think we were in Vegas, we had just launched it, we've had two new members of the family. We've announced our MP product line, which I didn't get a chance to see you guys, because the launch was in Beijing, China. But the net is... It's a long cube gig. It's a long cube gig. But the net is with our MP product line, we again did that transformational redefinition thing. The way most people approach the most demanding workloads, pick your favorite, whether it's a database, or whether it's even, you know, FAA type stuff, you have two choices. You can either go by really expensive, competitive 4P product, or you can try to cobble together a 2P2U class product. We found that you could not only get the right performance, you could get a better density, and you wouldn't have to trade efficiency or economics, and that's our new BL660 and our 560 product. But then on top of that, we announced Argos, sorry, SL4500, lovingly known as Argos. And with that particular platform, both of those products have all the Gen 8 features, have all the Gen 8 uniqueness. So things you guys would know and love, like Inside Online, our smart update manager, and our intelligent infrastructure, all pre-built, doing really, really well. As a matter of fact, we were joking about this, the staff and I, two nights ago at dinner, our biggest issue is just keeping up with demand. So you mentioned some customers, and I know you're not afraid to talk about the competition in the past, we've talked about Cisco, you can talk about them too as well, but how do you see the ODMs fitting in? Are they sort of tucking in under the tent, if you will, and stealing sheer, particularly cloud service providers? Are you seeing that sort of white box approach? So let's actually dissect that, because I don't want to throw everybody into one big bucket. So there are some ODMs that we work with that are very good and loyal ODMs. There's one or two who have decided they'd like to get into this space, but all of us have been in this industry for quite a while. Well, but here's the fun part. That's great, you might land the first one, but as you start to get more, can you really keep up the innovation and support? I mean, you've seen all the innovation here, you've seen all the collaboration between the various groups, and I'll pick on the server side. Just plopping in a server that meets somebody's spec, that's not going to get you to the next level of helping admins be more effective and efficient, lowering the power, keeping the density down while delivering performance. So these ODMs had better be ready to invest and invest consistently over time. The second thing is some of these ODMs that are starting to show up, what happens when you have a problem? We're in 170 countries around the world. We have a common experience, whether you buy server storage or networking. Most of them can't do that. So I won't cite the name, but let's just say that there's a large gaming company that you know, and the reason why they really love the DL360 product is because of not just the Gen 8 innovations, which all of those quants have proven to be true, the 30 days of admin time back, the double their compute per watt, and also the fact that we can also give them the insight online, find faster. But here's the fun part. When they ran into a problem with this ODM, it hurt them and hurt them pretty bad. Well, it's trust. So John, our dashboard, the server vertical, the number one topic. Server fail. Server down. Yeah, number one. Which was one of the things that we went after hard. That's good lead Gen 8 there. So my question for you is the competition, Dell's making a comeback or they're back, but they're shifting. Michael Dell's kind of more active in the company. So they're, you know, that VM world, they were really talking about enterprise and getting more services and kind of like integrating in on that end. That sounds like converged infrastructure. Something we came up with like 2009, maybe three years ago, welcome to the party lake. Okay, so now I know how you feel about Dell. Of course you guys love Dell at HP. It's always been a battle since, you know, back in the nineties when Dell really made their move and they did a good job. But now the world's changed. So what do you think of Dell's position? Honestly, I know you just, your sentiment is, is want to catch up, but you know, compare HP to Dell. Right, and what don't they have that you have? Let's do a couple of things. So in our case, we have the capability of not only saying that we're number one in every market we're in. The second item is we have a three almost going now on four year head start on converged infrastructure. Not only have we done the converged infrastructure piece and you're seeing all of those innovations around you, whether you talk to, you know, myself on the server side, Tom Joyce on the storage side or Mike Bannock on the networking, but also Antonia, which I don't know if he's on your list from a services and experience perspective. We're now moving on to cloud. And when I say moving on to cloud, yes, we're going to keep doing all the converged infrastructure and wonderfulness that you've heard, but now we have our converged cloud strategy. That's where you start to bring in the rest of HP, what we're doing with the software team, what we're doing with our enterprise services group. Customers don't want to buy piece parts. They want to buy end to end solutions and we're rapidly going to put that in place. And then the third thing is, and I'm going to make a big prediction, I bet you, you know, like we talked about the very first conversations, converged infrastructure become industry term, software defined data centers will become one also and we fully intend to lead there. Yeah, and that's absolutely what we've been talking about at VMworld and VMware wants that too. VMware has Nacir, that set up a chain of events which I think is great positioning. You know, my comments around storage announcement was very clear, like, look it, you got lightning in a bottle. Yeah. You know, polymorphics are good, but really it's just software defined, that's what everyone wants. They should relate to that. But here's the fun part about that. And you mentioned VMware, who by the way happened to be really good partners of ours. It doesn't have to be a zero sum game. So one of the things that separates us from everybody else, pick your favorite, Dell, Cisco, whoever, is that we actually partner with VMware and with Microsoft. And so when you think about the key things inside a data center, server storage, networking, yeah, sure. Management and power and cooling, on the management front, we actually work with them and we work with them. So if you want to deploy a physical or virtual server, it's done best on our platform. If you want to use their interface, we give you that choice. If you want to use Microsoft's, we give you that choice too. But if you want to use Insight, we give you that and all of their information gets passed up. So it's not a zero sum loss. Well, you know, we've been, we're big fans of Converged Infrastructure. So we just kicked off SiliconANGLE, Wikibon partnership, just kicked off our research pillar of software led infrastructure, which we'll send you a copy of. You might have seen it. Some of your people have already looked at it, but so that's kind of a build on Converged. We already in have big data nailing down that one. So we feel really good about that. That's exciting for us. But the software led infrastructure really is important because you guys did something with Converged Infrastructure. That was awesome, which was you led it, you did it, you're working it, you're shipping product. But there's a modernization that needs to be addressed. And that is when you guys started the journey on Converged Infrastructure, you mentioned software defined, which is the end game now, but it's just an extension. So a lot's changed. So I want you to tell me in your own view, what is the new modern definition of Converged Infrastructure? What's changed that's been different on the past going back to the original definition? So I'll give you the before and after, which is probably the best way to define it. So the original before is, we talked about the things such as a common modular architecture. We talked about the fact of helping to split the, or flip the 70-30 maintenance ratio to innovation ratio. And we also talked about this resource pool concept. We're now taking that resource pool concept, which we're going to continue to do, and we're moving it one step further. You saw us incrementalize that with cloud system, and with cloud system, the entire data center is seen as a resource pool. You also saw us talk about how we can orchestrate faster, how we can automate faster, and how it can actually get you great reports. With software defined, now instead of having those parts of hardware, and then having a management construct on top, everything pretty much becomes a software defined or management like, if I want to go and stanchate a bunch of nicks, then guess what? I'm going to go to a console, and I'm going to stanchate them there. If I need more storage, great. I'm going to go and stanchate them there, and if I need more server or compute, I can go do that without having to split them. So I'm going to basically, or the team and I, are going to help split the control plane from the actual management construct, and now life will get faster, easier, and more cost-effective. So talk about SSD impact, solid state. So where does that fit into the whole hardware equation in terms of across the product lines? Great question. So there's a couple of things. One is that if you're interested in SSD at the basic platform, we've got all the HP IO accelerators. So now whether you want to look at rotating media, SaaS, SATA, or SSDs, we have that in all of our platforms. But what I'm really excited about, getting back to the converged infrastructure and the software defined piece, is that just look at some of the partnerships that we've been able to do with a converged infrastructure optic, which separates us. You guys remember the industry's first flat sand, right? So instead of having to spend another $200,000 to get your storage to talk to your servers, because we've got components on both end, you now have four cables and we can, you know, have a large number of servers and storage set up. The other thing that we're starting to do is that as you start to look at what we refer to as collaborative storage or collaborative caching. Okay, great. There's storage on the back end of the data center. There's storage in the server. Wouldn't it be great, whether it's disk or SSD. Now you treat that all as a resource pool. That's kind of what you're going to start to see us do more and more of. You saw the very first one with first flat sand. You're going to see that trend accelerate. So my final question to kind of end the segment because this is kind of a more of a great question in your wheelhouse. And this is a pivot off of Dave Donatelli's conversation was, we're seeing a major inflection point. Transformation at the beginning of the first inning of a massive shift. Correct, you know, we've taught and we were ahead of the curve with SiliconANGLE. You guys were too. Yeah. Cloud mobile and social. We all saw it coming. But right now it's happening. Game on. Yep. Mainframes, client servers and now this disinflection point. So what Donatelli said was up until this point, best of breed was the core thing. Correct. That's great. Yeah, you improve the speeds and feeds, do all that stuff, improve innovative conversion structure, lay it all out. Now we're in a transformative game changer. Correct. So my question to you is from your view, what is the most transformative element of your world right now that you see? You can point to the one thing that says, this is going to change the game from to take it from best of breed to moving the ball down the field. So I'm going to answer that in like two clicks because I can tell you the server one very easily, right? And there's one that's coming up very shortly, which you all know as Moonshot, the fact that we're going to be able to have cartridges defined for particular workloads. And we're going to be able to do it at densities and power levels and management level that nobody else can touch. But it's not just what we're going to be able to do on the server side itself. It's what happens when we partner that server, that storage and that networking. So without going into too much, what you're going to start to see is, more and more in terms of how we start treating that data center pool, not our individual piece parts back to Dave's transformation, but the larger data center, how do we treat that as one? How do we treat that as back to the Gen 8 piece? Put in enough intelligence and enough automation that when I need something, I can pull it from the resource pool and I can release it back into the resource pool. From a customer benefits perspective, that's a huge advantage for them. And then last but not least, and this is the third click, when we start looking at that not just above server storage and networking, but when we start looking at things like Vertica, when we start looking at things like autonomy, when we start looking at all of those additional software components and now wrapping it with the industry's best services experience, that's a transformation that people are going to go, wow, I didn't know data centers could do that. And you're talking about expanding that sphere of control that you have today, which is generally within a server domain, broader into the storage and the network piece. Is it correct to assume that the logical place to do that is the server? Because you can't manage fast servers from slow storage, right? Well, so what you're going to start to see is today there are silos. We've started to tear down those silos with First Flat Sand. You're going to start to see us move more and more to that pool perspective where regardless of where it sits, whether it's a true enterprise class sand storage or whether it happens to be the drives on your server, it's the storage pool. It's the compute pool. It's the networking and the fabric pool. And so those lines will continue to blur. What's going to help separate us is how you manage it, how we bring in additional assets. I mean, we're talking about big data earlier. And then how do we wrap a services experience that no matter what the platform, no matter what the market is, because you asked about hyperscale, you have the industry's best services experience and basically you get to go do what you're focused on and HP is the power or the wind beneath your wings. That's awesome. Okay, Jim Gantie inside theCUBE, data center operating system, this is my translation, data center operating system and big data. Software led infrastructure meets big data. Awesome, congratulations on all your success. I just tweeted out the Gen 8 post that I wrote in January or February and happening now. And we want a moonshot box. We got to get one of those boxes. Can we get on the list? Well, we'll come talk to you about that. I mean, one of the nice problems we have is just, let's just say I have more beta and IUR requests than we can imagine, that's a good problem. We'll give you free banner ad sites all over our site. We don't have banner ads yet. We'll talk afterwards. This is theCUBE, having a great time here at HP Discover, extracting all the signal from the noise, Jim Gantie leading the charge and converging the structure within HP. Great to have you as always, CUBE alumni and a great presenter, great knowledge, great content. We'll be right back with our next guest for this short break. Thank you.