 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're going to be talking about the GreenLake solution. Of course, this managed services from Kulit Packard Enterprise, happy to welcome to the program, Vice President of GreenLake Scott Yao with HPE. Thanks so much for joining us. Stu, thanks for having me, super excited to be here, and hello to all of you in the audience, and welcome to the Discover Virtual Experience. All right, so Scott, give us a little bit of your background and the purview that you have in your role. Yeah, absolutely, so we've been very busy in the factory over the last couple of years, really bringing together experts from across the company to build out our portfolio of IP for Hybrid Cloud. I lead the development effort for HPE GreenLake, and we have a number of exciting announcements that we're making during Discover, and we can talk a little bit about that later on in the conversation, but think about GreenLake is our answer to a consumption-driven Hybrid Cloud experience. And Scott, Hybrid is a word I think back to, gosh, a dozen years ago when cloud and public and private, we had this term for Hybrid Cloud, but it feels to me like we've really defined it and understood it and matured it over the last couple of years. So HPE has partnerships with a lot of companies, so maybe just clarify for our audience, when you say Hybrid, what that means, and some of those key partnerships that you're delivering these solutions for customers with? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, look, as you point out, Hybrid Cloud is a bit of a loaded term, and there are a number of companies out there that are building out alternative Hybrid Cloud strategies, and maybe I'll sort of comment on a few of them and talk a little bit about how what we're doing is different. Of course, it's hard to have a conversation about cloud without thinking about what AWS is doing, and of course, about a year ago, a little over a year ago, they announced Outpost, which is really their answer to the Hybrid Cloud challenge, right? And if we think about an Outpost, fundamentally what AWS is doing is taking a rack of equipment that sits in their public cloud facilities today, replicating that and dropping it inside the four walls, right, of a customer's data center. And then that has some interesting pros and cons. Obviously, benefit to that is to have a very congruent AWS experience inside your own corporate data center. I think the challenge to that is you're still sort of vertically integrated into that AWS architecture, and it's really a wall garden that sits inside your on-prem environment. It doesn't seamlessly connect to all of your existing IT. Now, of course, Dell VMware, they have their answer to Hybrid Cloud, which is almost the exact opposite of what the Outpost does. Let's take a rack of architecture, that technology stack for VMware, and replicate that in a public cloud, right? And that has a different set of benefits, right? The benefit there is that now you have a VMware environment, right, on-prem, that you can burst into capacity that sits in, in this case, AWS, right? But that has the opposite challenge in that that VMware environment that's sitting inside AWS, right? It's a walled garden that doesn't give you full access to all of the benefits that the public cloud brings to the table, right? AWS is serverless technologies, and so on and so forth. With GreenLake, we think that there is an alternative approach, a third approach to thinking about Hybrid, which is rather than create vertically integrated stacks that span multiple different data centers, to create an environment where we can seamlessly connect to all of the native services that sit in Azure, in Google, in AWS, because Hybrid is not just about on-prem and off-prem, it's about multi-cloud, but also connect all of those richness of public cloud services on-prem as well, and make the on-prem environment available to a multiple set of cloud technologies, whether it be containers, virtual machines, or bare metal. And with GreenLake and GreenLake Central, we provide the ability to control and manage workloads in a very congruent fashion across that entire state. So we think that the approach we bring to the table is a bit board-looking, acknowledging that Hybrid doesn't just mean multiple different on-prem, off-prem environments, but it means multiple public cloud providers, and potentially multiple different on-prem environments as well. And it very much a partner focus, my understanding of this, Scott, if I understand right, you can connect to the public clouds out there, and then in your on-premises solution, which is a managed offering, you have a few different stack options depending on what management layer out there. So Microsoft, VMware, Nutanix, some of the flavors that you've got, do I have that right? Exactly. So of course, we've, HPEs had a rich, deep partnership with Microsoft for a number of years. Azure is an extension of that, so we're partnering with Azure, we're partnering with AWS, Google, and then on-prem you probably have heard about, and you actually mentioned the work we're doing with Nutanix, we also have work we're doing with Google there, and of course, we have a long-standing partnership with VMware, so all of these technologies are part of the GreenLake experience, but increasingly, we're also embedding a lot more of our own IP, right? So we will have an opinionated technology stack that we will make as an available option for GreenLake that embeds the HPE container platform that we announced in, I think it was January, as well as MapR for a data fabric and our own Kubernetes distribution, so a lot of different options that are going to be made available there, one of which is going to be our own vertically integrated stack that provides the hardware, the Kubernetes environment, and the storage fabric as an option for GreenLake as well. Excellent, and you mentioned, here at Discover, there's some additional updates, why don't you share with us the news? Yeah, absolutely, so super excited about some of the announcements we're making this week at Discover. One, it really revolves around AI and ML, and it's an ML Ops as a service, machine learning ops as a service, and if we think about what does ML Ops as a service mean, the easiest way to think about it is that it's DevOps or AI and ML workloads, and one of the challenges that we've heard from customers is that data scientists are amazingly skilled at being able to define models, understanding how to train them and that whole art of the life cycle, but they're not necessarily good DevOps engineers, right? So what we bring to the table with GreenLake is a curated environment that takes our Kubernetes distribution, right? It takes, you know, that came from BlueData. It takes our high performance hardware, our Apollo hardware, which is some of the highest performance machines available in the industry today, and we offer that entire pipeline of ML Ops tool sets. Think about things like Ensor Flow, Spark, High Torch, Cafe, et cetera. We manage that entire DevOps pipeline for all those tools, and we make them available for a DevOps, excuse me, a data scientist so that they can focus on building the models, training the models, not having to run the underlying pipeline. So that entire stack is gonna be made available for GreenLake. We're excited about that. And we're also making available private cloud as a service. So essentially what this solution for GreenLake does is it brings the cloud experience inside the data center. We provide all of the infrastructure automation through GreenLake Central to be able to provision workloads, manage them, operate them in the same way as public cloud. We allow the ability to import existing images and workloads, right? Whether they're, you know, AMIs or from VMware and so on and so forth. And we provide a set of toolkits like Terraform, for example, that brings the same way to manage those workloads on-prem as they are today in the public cloud. So really thinking about how, from a hybrid perspective, bringing that cloud experience to the data center and allowing our customers to operate, manage it and really enable digital transformation inside the data center. Yeah, so Scott, digital transformation is something we've been talking about for a number of years and there's been a real spotlight on it, you know, this year in 2020 with the global pandemic. So of course, you know, companies that have already gone through transformation, hopefully they're getting the agility and they're being able to respond faster. But, you know, it's one of those things that many people we've heard anecdotally, you know, are accelerating or needing to have the results of digital transformation today. So I'm curious what you've been seeing from your customer base with everything that's been happening for the last few months. Well, you know, it's been really a benefit for us. We have over a thousand customers, you know, on GreenLite today. So we have the opportunity to obviously solicit, you know, a fair bit of feedback. And, you know, one of the, if we kind of think about the growth in data, right? And the desire, if we just think about the pandemic in general, you know, the ability to run training models, to be able to test out new types of drugs, to understand what the options are available to move forward, to help address both from a prevention perspective, right? As well as a treating perspective. The ability to use the right high performance hardware and put it in a place where the data already exists, drastically accelerates, right? The time to result. If you think about, for example, the ML Ops workflow that I talked about, you know, this, the data likely already exists inside a customer data center and we can bring the tools to the data, right? Bring the cloud to the data, which allows a very quick turn up of being able to use those services, as opposed to having to move all of that data into a different facility before you can run these training models and tools on them. So there's a lot of different examples that we have. You know, there's also examples around things like clients. When we think about a hybrid environment and particularly now with a pandemic, you know, we may have data that's fragmented across multiple different data centers across the globe, being able to understand who is accessing what data, right, from what location and making sure that that hybrid IT environment is compliant with things like HIPAA or in the financial industry, GDPR or maybe a compliance frameworks like ISO. Green Lake Central is constantly monitoring thousands of parameters and looking at how data is accessed and where it's flowing. And we provide a dashboard that helps our customers understand if there are areas that they need to look at if they're in compliant or not. So as we think about hybrid, it's not necessarily just the provisioning of all of the workloads and the operation and management, but it's also the governance aspect as well. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up governance. That kind of leads me, Scott, to what about security? So, you know, we understand, you know, cloud in general has gone through some maturation when it comes to security for, you know, early parts of the year it was, I might not want to do it before security. Now cloud gives me the opportunity to think about rethink my security. And these days, it really is a discussion of, you know, it's a shared responsibility model. So with a managed service, what's the interaction between what you're doing with Green Lake and how the customer handles security? What is that interaction? And, you know, security, I think it's a good point that most of our customer, pretty much all of our customers are going to have a group dedicated to looking at what that particular enterprise or business requires from a security perspective, and they're going to have various different frameworks. So one of the things that we've done within Green Lake is to make it flexible to adopt and embed existing security profiles into Green Lake. So for example, many times there are versions of an operating system that have special security patches. There may be kernel extensions or different certified golden images, if you will, that are compliant with existing security parameters and profiles that an organization may have. We can embed those natively. So we don't necessarily provide any barrier to utilizing the existing frameworks that already exist. So I think that's one piece. The second piece is when we think about the delivery of the Green Lake solution, HP has taken security very seriously. And for a number of years now, we've been embedding security technology straight into our hardware. So enabling, for example, a Silicon root of trust, having a very, very vertically integrated security profile and monitoring set of technologies that we can embed to make sure that we prevent against malware, insertion and things of that nature. So all of those are happening and over the next number of months, you're going to probably see some new announcements about what we're doing to increase the level of security that's embedded right into our systems. And of course, when we deliver those as part of Green Lake, the technology that we're building leverages all of that embedded security technology that's built into the hardware as well. All right, so Scott, you mentioned that you've now got a thousand customers on Green Lake. What visibility can you share as to the adoption of it? How important what you're doing with Green Lake is for HPE customers? So, as I said, did you mention, I mentioned we have about a thousand customers on Green Lake today. And I will tell you our experience with these customers has been overwhelmingly positive. And I can tell you we have over a 99.9 actually percent renewal rate on Green Lake. And typically those customers, one or two of them that have moved off of Green Lake has been because they had the ability to move back to a CAPEX model. They had additional funding and finances available to move from consumption back to a CAPEX model. But Green Lake's been deployed across a number of industries. We have financial, retail, oil and gas, research, pharmaceuticals. Take your pick, we have Green Lake probably deployed in that particular vertical. And what we found is that, you know, the bulk of these deployments, many times customers just being able to take the Green Lake technology and look at what's being deployed where, what they're spending, having the ability to understand what would it cost me to deploy this workload in a public cloud versus my Green Lake environment. It actually facilitates a significant amount of growth. As a matter of fact, we had one customer that started with about a hundred virtual machines. They're running 4,500 virtual machines on Green Lake today. So we get it in there, the experiences tends to be overwhelmingly positive. With Green Lake, we bring the best of what HPE has to offer, right? The premium hardware that we build, right? The support and deployment services. We have a dedicated Green Lake delivery engineer that works with our customers to understand what workloads they have to be able to run on Green Lake, what the growth and scalability for those workloads look like. And we work proactively to make sure that that Green Lake environment is curated for that customer. So it's been overwhelmingly positive. And I think it really showcases the best of what as a company between hardware, software and services we can bring into the solution. Excellent, well Scott, I'll give you the final word. Obviously a lot of sessions happening this week at the Discover Virtual Experience. What do you want people to, what do you recommend that they dig into and what do you want them to take away from this week when it comes to your solution set? So there's a lot of great additional sessions as well. By the way, Keith White has a good session. I would encourage you to see that. If you're interested more to learn about Green Lake Central and some of our technology stack, I have a few sessions on that as well as Eric Bogo, my colleague. But I guess I would sort of leave it with this thought that when we think about digital transformation and we think about modernizing the way we build, operate, manage workloads, the traditional destination has been to use public cloud. And with Green Lake, we aim to bring that cloud experience to the data center. Green Lake not only enables a pay-as-you-go IT service offer, but it brings the digital transformation technologies to your data center and allows you to build, operate and manage in a modern way without having to move your data to public cloud. So we think that's a very, very powerful message and we think that it really has the ability to transform the way IT gets deployed, scaled and operated from now into the future. All right, well, Scott really appreciate the updates. Congratulations on the progress. Appreciate the time, Stu. All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage for theCUBE at HPE Discover, the virtual experience. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.