 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this preview of HPE's Discover Madrid storage news. We're going to unpack that. My name is Dave Vellante. And Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a six months cadence of shows. They have one in the June timeframe in Las Vegas and then one in Europe this year. Again, it's in Madrid. And you always see them announce products and innovations of coinciding with those big user shows. With me here is Patrick Osborne, who's the vice president and general manager of big data and secondary storage at HPE. Patrick, great to see you again. Great to be here. Love theCUBE, thanks for having us. Oh, you're very welcome. So let's unpack some of these announcements you guys. As I said, you're on those six month cadence. You've got sort of three big themes that you're vectoring into. Maybe you could start there. Yeah, so within HPE storage and big data, where our point of view is around intelligent storage and intelligent data management. And underneath that, we've kind of vectorated on three pillars that you talked about. AI driven. And so essentially bringing the intelligence, self managing, self healing to all of our storage platforms and big data platforms built for the cloud. We've got a lot of use cases and user stories. And you've seen from an HPE perspective, hybrid cloud is a big investment we're making in addition to the edge. And the last is delivering all of our capabilities from product perspective, solutions and services as a service. So GreenLake is something that we started a few years ago and being able to provide that type of elastic purchasing experience for our customers is gonna weave itself in further products and solutions that we announced. So I like your strategy around AI. Of course it gets a lot of buzz these days. You guys are taking a practical approach. The Nimble acquisition gave you some capabilities there in predictive maintenance. You've pushed it into your automation capabilities. So let's talk about the hard news specifically around InfoSight. Yeah, so InfoSight is an incredible platform. And what you see is that we've been not only giving customers richer experiences on top of InfoSight that go further up into the stack. So we're providing recommendation engines. So we've got this whole concept of cross stack analytics that go from your app and your virtualization layer through the physical infrastructure. So we've had a number of pieces of that that we're announcing to give very rich AI driven guidance to customers to fix specific problems. We're also extending it to more platforms. We just announced last week the ability to run InfoSight on our server platforms. So we're starting off in a journey of providing that which we're doing at the storage and networking layer weaving in our server platforms. So essentially platforms like ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo, all of our value compute platforms. So we're doing some really cool stuff not only providing the experience on new platforms but richer experiences certainly around performance bottlenecks on three par. So we're getting deeper AI driven recommendation engines as well as what we call an AI driven resource planner for Nimble. So if you take a look at it from a tops down view this isn't AI marketing. We're actually applying these techniques and machine learning within our install base in our fleet which is growing larger as we extend support from our platforms that actually make people's lives easier from a storage administration perspective. And that was a big part of the acquisition that IP that machine intelligence IP obviously had to evaluate that and the complexity of bringing it across the portfolio who live in this API driven world Nimble was a very modern platform. So that facilitated that injection of that intelligence across the platform and that's what we're seeing now. Yeah, absolutely. And you go from essentially tooling up these platforms for this very rich telemetry really delivering a differentiated support experience that takes a lot of the manual interactions and interventions from a human perspective out of it. And now we're moving in with these three announces that we've made into things that are doing predictive analytics, recommendations and automation at the end of the day. So we're really trying to make people's lives easier from an admin perspective and giving them time back to work on higher value activities. Well, let's talk about cloud. HP doesn't have a public cloud like at Amazon or in Azure you partner with those guys but you have cloud volumes which is cloud like it's actually cloud from a business model perspective explain what cloud volumes is and what's the news here. Yeah, so we've got a great service that's called HPE cloud volumes and you'll see throughout the year us extending more user stories and experiences for hybrid cloud, right? So we have cloud bank which is focused on secondary storage, cloud volumes is for primary storage users. So it is a public cloud adjacent storage as a service and it allows you to go into the portal, enter your credentials, you can enter in your credit card number and essentially get storage as a service as an adjacent or replacement data service for example, EBS from Amazon. So you're able to stand up storage as a service within a co-location facility that we manage and it's completely delivered as a service and then our announcement for that is that so what we've done in the Americas is you can essentially apply compute instances from the public cloud to that storage. So it's in a co-location facility that's very close from a latency standpoint to the public cloud. Now we're gonna be extending that service into Europe so UK, Ireland and for the AMIA users as well as now we can also support persistent storage workloads for Docker and Kubernetes and this is a big win for a lot of customers that want to do continuous improvement, continuous development and use those containerized frameworks and then you can essentially integrate with your on-prem storage to your off-prem and then pull in the compute from the cloud. Okay, so you got that right once run anywhere sort of model I was gonna ask you why would I do this instead of EBS? I think you just answered that question is because you now can do that anywhere. Hybrid is a key theme here, right? Yeah, also too from a resiliency perspective, performance and durability perspective, the service that we provide is certainly six nines, very high performance from a latency perspective. We've been in the enterprise storage game for quite some time so we feel we've got a really good service just from the technology perspective as well. And the European piece, I presume a lot of that as well, of course GDPR, the fines went into effect in May of 2018. There's a lot of discussion about okay, data can't leave a particular locality. It's especially onerous in Europe but probably other places as well. So there's a data locality, governance, compliance angle here too. Yeah, absolutely and for us, if you take a specific industry like healthcare, for example, so you have to have a pretty clear line of sight for your data provenance so it allows us to provide the service in these locations for a healthcare customer or a healthcare ISV, SaaS provider to be able to essentially point to where that data is. And so for us it's going to be an entrance into that vertical for hybrid cloud use cases. All right, so again, you've got the AI driven piece, the cloud piece, I see as a service which is the third piece, the cloud is one and as a service is one A. It's almost like a feature of cloud but so let's unpack that a little bit. What are you announcing in as a service and what's your position there? Yeah, so our vision is to be able to provide an as a service experience for almost everything we have that we provide our customers, whether it's an individual product, whether it's a solution or actually like a segment. So in the space that I work in big data and secondary storage backup as a service, for example, is something that customers want. They don't want to be able to manage that on their own by piece parts, architect the whole thing. So what we're able to do is provide your primary storage, your secondary storage, your backup ISV. So in this case, we're going to be providing backup as a service through GreenLake with Veeam. And then we even can bring in your cloud capacity. So for example, Azure Blob Storage which would be your tertiary storage from an archive perspective. So for us, it really allows us to provide customers and it's an experience that is more of an, it's an experienced cloud as a destination. We're providing a multi-cloud hybrid cloud experience not only from a technology perspective but also from a purchasing flex up, flex down, flex out experience. And we're going to keep on doing that over and over for the next foreseeable future. So you've been doing GreenLake for a while. Yeah, absolutely. So how's that going and what's new here? Yeah, so that's been going great. We have well over, I think at this point, 500 petabytes under management under GreenLake. And so the service is, it's interesting when you think about it, when we were designing this, we thought just like the public cloud, the compute as a service would take off but from our perspective, I think one of the biggest pain points for customers is managing data, storage and big data. So storage as a service has grown very rapidly. So these services are very popular and we'll keep on iterating on them to create maximum velocity. One of the other things that's interesting about some of these accounting rules that have taken place is that customers seed to us the ability to do architecture. So we're essentially creating no snowflakes for our customers and they get better outcomes from a business perspective. So we help them with the architecture, we help them with planning and architecture of the actual equipment and then they get a very defined business outcome in SLA that they pay for as a service, right? So it's a win-win across the board, it's really good. Okay, so no snowflakes as in not everything's custom. Absolutely. And then so that lowers, not only your cost, it lowers the customer's cost. So let's take an example like that. Let's take backup as a service, which is part of GreenLake. How does that work? If I want to engage with you on backup as a service. Yeah, so we have a team of folks in point next that can engage like very far up in the front end, right? So to say, hey, listen, I know that I need to do a major re-architecture for my secondary storage. Can HPE, can you help me out? So we provide advisory services, we have well-known architectures, that fit a set of well-known mission-critical, business-critical applications at a typical customer site. So we can drive that all the way from the inception of that project to implementation. We can take more customized view or a roadmap approach to customers where they want to bite off a little bit of the time and use things like flex capacity and then weave in a full GreenLake implementation. So it's very flexible in terms of the way we can implement it. So we can go soup to nuts or we can get down to very small, granular pieces of infrastructure. Just sticking on data protection for a second, I saw a stat the other day. It's a fairly well-popular, often quoted stat, which is Gartner, I think, is 50% of customers are going to change their backup platform by like 20, 23 or something. And you think about, by the way, I think that's legitimate stat. And when you talk to customers about why, well, things are changing, cloud, multi-cloud, things like GDPR, ransomware, digital transformation. I want to get more out of my data than just insurance, my backup than just insurance. I want to do analytics. So there's all these other sort of evolving things. I presume your backup as a service is evolving with that. What are you seeing there? Yeah, we're definitely seeing that the secondary storage market is very dynamic in terms of the expectations from customers are changing and changing very rapidly. And so not only are providing things like GreenLake and backup as a service, we're also seeking new partners in the space. So one of the big announcements that we'll make at Discover is we are doing a pretty big amplification of our partnership in an OEM relationship with Cohesity. So a lot of customers are looking for a secondary platform from a consolidation standpoint. So being able to run a number of very different and disparate workloads from a secondary storage perspective and make them work. So it's a great platform, scale out. It's going to run on a number of our HPE platforms. So we're going to be able to provide customers that whole solution from HPE, partnering with Cohesity. Just so in general, this secondary storage market's hot and we're making some bets in our ecosystem right now. You also have big data in your title. So you're responsible for that portfolio. I know Apollo in the HPC world has been, I had a foothold there. There's a lot of synergies between high performance computing and big data. What's going on in the big data world? Yeah, so big data is one of our fastest growing segments within HPE. It's a big data analytics and some of the things that are going on with AI in commercial high performance applications. So for us, we have a new platform that we're announcing, our Gen 10 version of Apollo 4200. It's definitely the workhorse of our Apollo server line for applications like Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR. We see Apache Spark, Kafka, a number of these, as well as some of these newer workloads around HPC. So TensorFlow, CAFE, H2O. And so that platform allows us with really good compute memory and storage mix from a footprint perspective and it certainly scales into rack level infrastructure. That part of the business for us is growing very quickly. I think a lot of customers are using these big data analytics techniques to transform their business. And as we go along and help them, certainly it's been a really cool ride to see all this implemented at customer sites. You know, with all this talk about sort of big data and analytics and cloud and AI, you sort of get lost, the infrastructure kind of gets lost, but the plumbing still matters. And so underneath this, so we saw the flash trend and that really had a major impact on certainly the storage business specifically, but generally the overall marketplace. I mean, you really be hard to support a lot of these emerging workloads without flash and that stack continues to evolve, that pyramid if you will. So you've got flash memory now replacing much of the spinning disk space. You've got DRAM, which obviously is the most expensive highest performance and there seems to be this layer emerging in the middle, the storage class memory layer. What are you guys doing there? Is there anything new there? Yeah, so we've got a couple of things cooking in that space. In general, like when you talk about the infrastructure, it is important, right? And we're trying to help customers not only by providing really good product in scalable infrastructure, things like Apollo, our systems Nimble, 3PAR, we're also trying to provide experience around that too. So combining things like InfoSight, InfoSight on storage, InfoSight on servers and Apollo for big data workloads is something that we're gonna be delivering in the future. The platforms really matter. So we're gonna be introducing NVMe and storage class memory into our, what we feel is the industry leading portfolio for flash storage. So between Nimble and 3PAR, we'll have those platforms will be, they're NVMe ready and we'll be making some product announcements on the availability of that type of media. So if you think about using it in a platform like 3PAR, industry leading from a performance perspective, allow us to get sub 200 millisecond performance for very mission critical latency intolerant applications. And it's a great architecture. It scales in parallel, active, active, active, right? So you can get quite a bit of performance from a very, a large 3PAR system. And we're gonna be introducing NVMe into that equation as a part of this announcement. So we see this as critical. For years, of course in the storage business, we would talk about how storage is growing, storage is growing, storage is growing, and we would show the charts up to the right. And, but it was always like, yeah, and somehow you got to store it, you got to manage it, and I might have to move it, it's a real pain. The whole equation is changing now because of things like flash, things like GPU, storage class memory, NVMe, now you're seeing, and of course all this ML and deep learning tech. And now you're seeing things that you're able to do with the data that you've never been able to do before, new emerging use cases. And so it's not just lots of data, it's completely new use cases, and it's driving new demands for infrastructure, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, there's some macroeconomic tailwinds that we had this year, but HPE had a phenomenal year this year. And we're looking at some pretty good outlooks into next year as well. So yeah, from our perspective, the requirement for customers for latency improvements, improvements, bandwidth improvements, and total addressable capacity improvements is never stops, right? So it's always going on. And it's the data pipeline is getting longer. The amount of services and experiences that you're tying on to existing applications keeps on augmenting, right? So for us, there's always new capabilities, always new ways that we can improve our products. We use, for things like InfoSight and a lot of the predictive analytics, we're using those techniques for ourselves to improve our customers' experience with our products. So it's been, it's a very virtuous cycle in the industry right now. Well, Patrick, thanks for coming in to theCUBE and unpacking these announcements at Discover Madrid. You're doing a great job sort of executing on the storage plan. Every time I see you, there's new announcements, new innovations, you guys are hitting all your marks, so congratulations on that. HPE, intelligent storage, intelligent data management. So if you guys have data needs, you know where to come to. All right, thanks again, Patrick. Great, thank you so much. Talk to you soon. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. We'll see you next time.