 Live from the FIA Barcelona Grand Villar Compensator in Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube at HP Discover Barcelona 2014 brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Barcelona for HP Discover 2014. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Brent Allen, Group Manager at HP Converge Systems. Welcome back to The Cube. Hey, thanks much. It's always great to be in here with you guys. You guys obviously converge. We've heard the keynote from Antonio Neri. He's a Master Cube alumni. He's been on since Gen 8, launched in 20, and I think they were 2011. Master Cube alumni, I love that. Another impact, Kelsinger. But he, you know, he, you know, he says something really awesome on the keynote, which was, you know, HP made a bet on Converged. And it's paying off. And then, obviously, the remote broadcast here with David Scott. Pretty impressive. So, what's new? What's going on for you guys? Obviously, it's mainstream. Good call with the Converged. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Well, I mean, you know, about every six months, we have some pretty major stuff coming out of our organization. There was some great stuff back in June, but here, you know, December, out at Discover, we've got some really big stuff. We've got the Converged System 200, Hyper Converged with Store Virtual. They just launched. We actually have two of those platforms. Two different configurations, one all hard drive, one with SSD, and, you know, regular spending media as well. We also have an update to our Converged System 700 platform. So, that's our version two of that. That's coming out with Gen 9 servers. It's coming out with the new storage arrays from the three-par sign. We've got option on the top-of-brack switching if customers want it and need it to have Cisco, you know, so you got some flexibility in there that we didn't have of work. More than double size, tons of different, you know, options and features across the portfolio. And then all of that, not only in virtualization, but extended to cloud as well. So, we're putting the HP Cloud Stack on there with HP Helion Cloud System. And then, you know, we also have the opportunity to drive and partner, you know, enable environments as well. So, Cloud Stack as in the Cloud Stack alternative to Open Stack? So, what I mean by that is that HP Helion Open Stack. Not Cloud Stack, Cloud Stack. Exactly. Not the Citrus Cloud Stack. No, no. The Stack, which we could actually put that on as well. It was still around. I guess, but, yeah, no, that's a great, great point, no. You know, we right now we have... Cloud Stack as in Cloud Stack software. There's a stack of software that is... Cloud friendly stack. Cloud enabled stack. There you go. So, you got the HP Helion Open Stack side, right, from our distro there. And then you've also got the Enterprise Ready Cloud System side of the house. And, you know, we see those things continuing to come more and more together. And it really rolls into a great package. It's pretty simple. So, I want to ask you. So, you've got virtualization, right? And you've got... Let's talk in the context of infrastructure as a sort of... Sure. So, you've got virtualization, you've got cloud. Here's where I was. Here's where I wanted to go. Right. Maybe I'm there. Maybe I'm not. So, what has to happen in between to get from here to here? What's the difference of what has to happen in between and what HP is doing about it? I think that that's a great question because a lot of customers see the opportunity available through greater and greater levels of orchestration and automation. But all too often, not enough attention is being paid to the actual infrastructure stack supporting the software. And it is a complete environment. You have to have both pieces of that. And you're only as good as you're, you know, wherever your bottleneck is, right? And so, what we're doing and have been doing for a while is creating standardized infrastructure stacks that have everything together in that ecosystem that it's all balanced into a block, right? And that can be hyper-converged. It can be, you know, as small as 2U with all of the elements baked in. Or it could be like our 700 platform that can scale to many, many racks inside of just a single system, right? And, you know, so either way, you have those balanced building blocks and then you can start looking at layering on the software that you need as far as orchestration and automation capabilities to take you. Whether it's just basic service portal or you're actually wanting to get to the point where you're doing real-time charge-back in your environment. What do you think are the headwinds to automation for customers? You talk to customers, yeah, yeah, automation. Love to do that. But either we're not there yet, just don't have the resources, maybe the products aren't there. Talk about the headwinds, the barriers and how you're breaking those down. So I think that it's a natural evolution for a lot of customers. Now the end state's going to be different depending on who the customer is. Sometimes that has to do with the industry that they're in and maybe certain barriers that they have as far as legal barriers or security elements that they have to contend with. And I think that people are right to, you know, be cautious about that. But the other side of it is quite often customers, especially since most of our customers are virtualizing, if not, you know, 80, 90%, a good chunk of what they're doing. They're already starting to bring automation into some level in their environment. So it's not that they're not automating, it's a matter of what level of automation are they at. And the same thing is true with how they're doing the management of their infrastructure. And so we believe that by simplifying all those pieces, by taking more and more of the brunt of that work onto the HP shoulders versus putting it onto the customer, we're able to help and ease that transition. Now it does take time. It takes migration, it takes pathway to get there. And customers are going to stop at various points along the way. That's why it's a journey, not just a destination. And I don't think that in the end, anybody's ever going to get to the point where they say, oh, Eureka, I have now implemented my nirvana cloud and I'm done. I'm good. I got all the IT stuff done. I'm good. That's never going to happen. And so it is a progressive job. But I mean, it's one of those things where it's a progressive motion. And so you can see what we've done with OneView, making that whole management of the infrastructure simpler. They tie in from that to what we're doing with our cloud software, right, cloud system in that stack. It just, it helps that whole process. So for example, a customer can take a ConvertSystem 700. And even if they're not virtualizing today, we have a foundation version that doesn't even have a hardened virtualization stack in it, right? So they can start with that. They can go from that to a virtualized platform. They can go from a virtualized platform up into cloud system all in the same environment. There's a seamless pathway to get them there, right? So as they need additional steps and features, as they become more mature, right, they can take on those various pieces that can help to further quicken them. And that's what it's really all about, is agility. Driving agility and, you know, bringing in that new style of IT, helping customers end in more of a consultative manner. So I want to come back to the hyperconverged. Sure, comment. You mentioned hyperconverged. Stu's always asking me to ask guys at HP, you know, what's a hyperconverged strategy? So what is hyperconverged to HP? Let's start there. Well, I mean, let's look at the very rudimentary nuts and bolts of what hyperconverged really is. So it's, convergence in general is bringing all the elements of a system, right, server storage, networking together, and a type package. Hyperconvergence is doing that to the extreme, because you're looking at all of those pieces coming together in the form of, typically a single box. The systems that we're driving are, it's a 2U chassis with four server nodes in it. Right? We had a hyperconverged offering, or we have a hyperconverged offering that's a little bit bigger, that's the CS300 platform as well. Those are individual elements, but, you know, the storage is baked in, so you're looking at data storage. Somehow, software has been added into the environment to create something that looks like an array, a shared storage pool across that that can be used by all of those workloads, right? And then it's scalable. It has to be scalable, it needs to be able to scale out. One of the reasons that people are looking at these chunks is because they can start planning their budget and how they monetize things around smaller and smaller bricks in the environment. So, you know, stacking one at a time is a whole lot easier proposition to take a bite out of, if you will, than buying, you know, a big million-dollar system. So, you know, they can scale this out. So scalability is very important. Management of that whole stack is very important. The initial startup time. Because what we're seeing is that we're having two different main customer sets that are going after this space. One, small shops that couldn't normally afford something like a ConvertSystem 700, but they can in a 200. And they may not have the requirements or the needs to support as many VMs as some of the larger enterprise customers, but they still have, you know, enterprise-type needs around availability and things like that. So those customers are coming in with smaller stacks of implementations. And then we see large enterprise customers that are looking to do things like get away and get away from an old array, replace that with something else. They want scalable structure, and they want to be able to vastly scale this out across the dataset. And, you know, both of those customer segments have to be, you know, served. And they're being served quite effectively in this hyper-converged era, but we're still very, very young. I mean, this space is just starting out. You talked about the ties, the store together. Right. So you're talking simple storage tasks, but you've got complicated software to manage that as a pool. What is that software for you guys? What's the number of things? So inside of our ConvertSystem 200 line, we've got a partnership with VMware around Evo Rail. And I think, you know, a lot of people may already know about that from our announcements on that platform. That'll be coming out in early 15. And so that's based on the vSAN stack. That's based on all of the goodness from VMware all the way through log insight. So it's a very tight-knit package that they've created and that we've actually worked on a number of things with them around the automation of that stack and the deployment of it. They've got a simple GUI to get it stood up and whatnot and deploy. On the other side, we've got a platform that we actually launched out here. So it is, you know, we can start taking orders today. Our CS200 or ConvertSystem 200 HC store virtual platform. And we've got two different ones. We've got a 240 and a 242. The software stack on that is based on store virtual VSA. So we're taking a, you know, software defined storage product that's been around for a while has continued to evolve and mature over time, but is by far the longest, you know, lasting product that's been in the market as far as, you know, it's got history, it's got, you know, reliability. And we've proven that over time. So there's a good 60 plus percent of the market that's doing software defined storage that's actually using VSA today. So there's a pretty good install base. So that's on the HP sort of virtual platform. That's also got VMware on it though. So the former solution was an Evil Rail, VSAN, Convo. Largely VMware software, even though you made some contributions there. And then the alternative is the store virtual 240 and 242. Talk about those, right? Because everybody talks about VSAN and Evil Rail and say, oh, that's competition for the traditional guys. Now you're partnering with them. And it is competition in a way. We lovingly call it co-opetition. So it's co-opetition. I'm presuming there's some advantages to the HP solution and one is it's not just VMware, right? But talk about how you position. Well, so we've got some additional configurations with that platform. The Evil Rail platform is a great platform. So I'm certainly not going to say anything negative about it at all. And there are a lot of customers that are going to love that platform. Well, you can't buy it. It will be soon. So the store virtual one can be added to stocking stoppers for anybody out there. Right? But one of the other advantages of that platform is the fact that we do have a couple of different configurations. So in some ways we're targeting more customer segments in different application packages. You know, we've got like I mentioned with just the history and legacy that that already has out there in the marketplace. We're going to innovate on top of it. I think that customers may find that just on the sheer looking at it there may be some pricing advantages and some things like that. But both platforms are really great and we do believe very strongly that it's an opportunity for customers to vote with their dollars. And we're happy to provide them with an awesome platform whether it's Evil Rail or whether it's Walmart. Or better example maybe it's Microsoft Oracle. They've always put storage function into their stack because they want to commoditize the hardware and if they see an opportunity to grab function from the hardware and put it into the stack they'll do it and that's a good thing for customers. And the storage industry has always been able to find a way to add value. That's never going to happen. Does that change? Why or why not? No, I don't think it changes at all but I think that as we're bringing these elements together while we may be thinking about the pieces differently if you look at for example how HP is set up traditionally it's been servers, storage networking, discrete groups doing innovation when we started bringing in this idea of converged infrastructure that we've been talking about for so long I really set us on a new course in trajectory where all those R&D groups started working more together and I can tell you having been in HP for nine years I have seen over time that of ball and it's an amazing thing to see. Now it means that we're innovating in different ways than we did before and we're looking at that total ecosystem so the software is always going to be there but it's got to sit on top of something. You can't run software on nothing and we have the ability now to take advantage of various things that those other vendors are exposing so Microsoft or VMware tie in very closely on the management the management of the infrastructure especially in our converged environments is critical it's absolutely critical it's the lifeblood for that environment and it's what keeps the customer up and running and gives them pre-failure alerts and notifications all those things that allow them to really have and run a high availability fault tolerant environment inside of their data center so will that go away now? Not at all. You see tons of innovation here on the floor with various features specific to the actual hardware that the abstraction doesn't get rid of. It's interesting what you're saying about the organization in terms of working together from an R&D perspective the storage networking and server guys report separately in? They do. They report into their own business unit but I'll tell you this. So what makes it work together? I think that it's just the trajectory that we're on you kind of have to it's the marketplace in the world that we're living in has been like a forcing function and a prime example of this is our converged system the hyper-converged store virtual so that's a partnership between converged systems and HBSD or HB Storage Division. So we have joint engineering, we have joint marketing joint product management across that platform. Co-funded co-developed in the end and you know it's been awesome. And if you can get to the point where you have that dynamic of everybody growing in the same direction, it's just incredible what you can get accomplished. And I think that's probably true with any organization HP or other companies. Okay so, been at HP nine years you see this whole converged infrastructure thing take shape. You're seeing enterprises essentially trying to replicate the capabilities of public cloud on-prem. Right. And that's a big part of what you guys are providing. You're seeing service providers pick up so they can compete with public cloud guys. Right. So that's where we are today. Where do you see this going? What's the sort of summary of you know, what the future vision is for your group? Well, you know, okay, that's a great question. I think that we're going to see more and more co-mingling between the hardware and the software elements. So I think that's kind of a given. Those things are going to get closer and closer together. We're going to see continued evolution of the management side. We're going to stop looking at individual pieces as we're managing the environment. It's going to start representing as an identifiable instance inside of the overall data center and you'll be able to kind of pick and figure out where each thing is, move around resources more on the fly than currently is available today in active technology. But I think you know, I don't have a crystal ball. I wish I did. You know, this industry moves so fast. I think we're just on this continual evolution track and hyper-converged is a prime example of it. Yeah, that came out of nowhere. Well, it evolved out of actually, it's not totally true, you know, because we've had VSA around for a while. I know you guys probably know Left Team Networks was a company we acquired. Well, back years ago we acquired that. I was working in ISS or industry standard servers as a product manager and I launched a product called the DL180 and 185. Well, one of my biggest customers at the time was Left Team Networks who was developing the software stack to take Dan's storage and turn it into a standard. I remember talking to people about this and having, you know, tons of people say, oh my goodness, storage virtualization, what is that? That doesn't even make sense. Virtualization is a compute only thing, right? You know, it's just we continue to innovate and find new things. And I think it's very cyclical. We just keep reinventing, you know, higher performance processors, cores, cheaper memory, flash storage, it all comes together. Those are really catalysts for the whole hypercatalyst trend. I'm just wondering if I can get a word in. I was just checking my e-mail, doing some proud chat. I was just telling Dave Fox and the CEO, Ben Payne, has a new job at Yahoo. There's all the news out there, Breaking. Oh, there you go, it hates. Cube alumni, friend of the cube. Perhaps the ribbon to box to Yahoo now? Great guys. They're really making me want a beer. The other guy's a Facebook friend also, but he's being charged with fraud with Netflix, but hold on to the story. I don't know him. Speaking of Yahoo and Netflix, Hyperscale's huge. How do companies like the enterprises, that's where conversion really makes sense, right? Oh, I think conversion makes sense everywhere, honestly. We have tons of independent papers and whatnot that can explain the benefits of it. Some of that just deals with the amount of time and money that it takes to initially deploy and set things up. People spend way too much money on consulting and trying to get it in and up and running into the production environment. Not good for everyone. But for those guys, no, I hear you. A lot of times though, the ones that are really successful in the public cloud space are still buying Hyperscale, not necessarily at this point, hyperconverged. Because they already got that mindset of buying, ripping, replacing, when it breaks doesn't really have that issue of refresh. We are starting to see more posters that are turning it around though and saying, actually it does cost me money to rip that thing out and I have to go send somebody in to do it. So if you can give me something that's not only cost-effective but relatively self-healing or whatever, then I'm not looking at ripping things out and chunking it and having to recycle and whatnot. So Dave and myself as Stu Miniman were talking about this specific point. I think it was Stu who made the comment about storage admins really getting a job because it used to be this guy did that, server guy did the server thing, network guy does their thing. With hyperconverged essentially they had to manage a different set of new processes now or skill sets. Not so a skill set but they got to port to a new way of managing. Oh yeah, absolutely. So I'm seeing customers in general. Now, most of the customers that I talk to are far away from actually achieving the vision there. There is a big movement towards the IT admin generalist. Not only reducing having a server storage or networking admin and then you've got the virtualization admin and the cloud admin. People want a bunch of resources that they can move around and it can shift over time with the needs of the business. There is that. I think that that really started to take hold with converged in general. When you get to hyperconverged it's another catalyst. It's another catalyst that's pushing this stuff forward. So if you pick that up now really you have kind of gone around having to have a dedicated storage admin and some of those things you're getting to the point where it's simple enough to manage that you get somebody with a broad skill set that doesn't have to be super deep and anything like that. My final question is obviously it's a sea change for people. There's benefits. I'll see tons of research, you know, paying rent later for all that data or share at the end. But I want to get to the impact. So pretend I'm a customer for a second. I'm a CIO or I'm a key mucky muck at a big enterprise. Of course small and medium size enterprise. Give me a picture for the kind of change that it gives me. Am I going to see cost reductions revenue increases, staff turnover, augmentation what kind of impact are you looking at? We've been talking for a long time with Converged Infrastructure that there's this sort of 60-40 or 70-30 dynamic of the amount of time, energy and resources that are applied to maintaining current data center environments. We've been talking about flipping that dynamic we've been talking about it for a long time. With being able to bring in Converged Systems we've actually been able to see that happen in customers' environments. Actually flipped the number from 60-40 to 70-30 depending on who's math you use. Yeah, it's sort of general. That kind of order of magnitude. But a big order of magnitude. I mean enough to make people fall out of their chair. Enough that we've had customers that come to places like Discover and get up on stage at various things and talk about their successes. Some very complex cloud environments that have been deployed with our Converged Systems environments. Specifically the Converged Systems 700X platform. Awesome. We're still on the track of what we were talking about before with what we call 2020 or 2030 which is 20 minutes to be able to place an order in 20 days or 30 days to get it depending on the platform. There is a reduction in the amount of time that it takes to get up and running. The bigger thing I think is the reduction in cost of implementation of run and then over time that TCO bring that TCO down as much as possible. I've always said time for creative solutions, managing that whole hassle factor you take that away, more business solving problems and building new things. Oh, absolutely. So those resources can then be put to innovation and everybody has got a long laundry list of things that they need to do just to feel like they're keeping up with the next guy. Alright. So, Brands give I'll give you a final word in the last couple seconds, here of the segment. Share with the folks out there what the main focus of the show is where they can find information. Just give the plug. Sure. Yeah. Where you guys can go and look for more information go to hp.com great You'll be able to find all of our new announcements out there. obviously hyper-converged, it's on everybody's lips out here and even before and after I'm sure this show, we're going to be talking a lot about that. Additionally, the 700 V2 as well is getting launched and we have updates with OneView, so OneView 1.2, a plethora of different things to check out, you can find all of the information out there on the website. Okay, we are live in Barcelona, this is theCUBE, we are live here in Europe, HP Discover 2014, I'm John Florey with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back with more continuing coverage here in Spain, we'll be right back here for this short break.