 from the Masonic in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Tech World 2016. Brought to you by Lenovo. Now, here are your hosts. Stu Miniman and John Walls. And welcome back to the Masonic Auditorium here in San Francisco on top of Nob Hill overlooking this gorgeous city out here in California where Lenovo Tech World continue our coverage. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman. And it is a pleasure to welcome you to theCUBE. First timer on theCUBE, Cameron Amini who is the GM of Server Business Unit at Lenovo. And Cameron, welcome to theCUBE. Glad to be here. Good to have you, sir. Tell us a little bit first off about your core responsibilities. Introduce a little bit of yourself to our audience at home and give us an idea of what you're up to these days. Sure, so I've been in the industry for about 20 years in enterprise. Started at IBM and was part of the X86 business, the SystemX business, which of course was acquired by Lenovo over 19 months ago. And today I'm running the entire server business globally for Lenovo. So we sort of try to drive the best of class offerings that we've had legacy heritage from IBM. If you look at what we've done in the past around being first to market with the one-use servers that are today everywhere in the data center to all the way to driving scalability and memory, large memory expansion units to all the way where we have our warm water cool solutions with next scale. But build to the foundation of server technology which also leverages with other parts of our business around hyper-converge and converge and moving toward software-defined storage and software-defined data center. You've heard a lot of announcements today and I know in your world you've got a couple of things to talk about on the X6 side. You've made some pretty big strides there. Absolutely, so just this week we announced two new products. One was actually a refresh of our X6 platform, our mission critical scalable server. This was the third generation CPU we refreshed that product on with the E7 8800 and 4400 V4 from Intel. And we also introduced and expanded our dense optimized portfolio. So today we always have had our next scale server system that was really focused around density and HPC. We expanded that portfolio by introducing our SD350 platform which is trying to move toward not only building a higher dense platform but also leverage as a platform as we build our software-defined and hyper-converged offerings as Lenovo. Well let's go back to X6, if we can. I mean just talk about what does that mean bottom line you think to customers as they look at two choices that you're giving them now that capacity's a little bit different processing speed about the same. So ultimately what does that mean to me as an end user? Sure, so if earlier you heard BK from Intel mentioned Lenovo has, you know, last three years has shipped the most amount of MP systems which leverage the E7 processors. And that's contributed to the benefit and the value we bring in from our architecture. Most of these customers looking for that environment looking for mission critical applications that require maximum uptime, the highest reliability while still delivering maximum performance. So with X6, when we designed X6 originally and introduced it in 2014, we declared it's going to support three architectures, refreshers from Intel CPU. So this is the third that we're doing today with V4. So what it does is for clients that have already purchased X6 in the past they have an easy upgrade. The design of X6 was a modular design. It's a, you could put it inside your rack and you never take it out. And we have these concepts around modular compute books for the front. So you could replace a compute book and put the next gen CPU in it and be now up and running with more performance for your environment. And that's really what we announced which is the benefit for clients that are already bought. For clients that are looking for as a first-time buyer of X6 is it's one of the leading platforms for mission critical applications. We run, if you look at our SAP HANA which we own greater than 50% of market share in the industry, they're all leveraging our X architecture platforms today. And I think it provides the flexibility to be able to buy something knowing it will deliver on the value of reliability, performance and the longevity that they require. Kevin, can you talk about some of the user segments that you put your products into? Specifically, we want to understand kind of the hyperscale environments and you guys have a legacy in the kind of the HPC marketplace. You know, what are you seeing as the changes and how do you meet those customers' requirements? So if you look at that from a server standpoint there's different environments that drive different needs of servers. There's what we consider as a general purpose environment and Lenovo provides a variety of different flavors because our philosophy is one form factor or size is to meet every client workloads and price points that they require. So from our general purpose portfolio we support anywhere from single socket servers, racks and towers, all the way to what we consider our mainstream two socket rack and tower, all the way to the mission critical that scale up to eight socket and also blade form factors and then dense optimize with our next scale and the recently announced SD350 platform. So that's really targeted around what we consider a general purpose. Now of course there's the HPC segment that requires high performance, high frequency requirements. They require GPU accelerators. They require the right thermals. And we offer for example our next scale platform leading in that space. But that doesn't mean that other platforms do not play in the HPC space. We have customers that are buying our X6 platform as a HPC workload environment. At the same time there's a whole new era of you think about the internet companies, the large internet companies that are driving thousands of purchase of servers. That's the hyperscale business. And the hyperscale business is really a different model of engagement in my view, right? It's some uniqueness in the server technology, some tweaks per client needs, but it's really engineering engagement with a client to define what they really need and the scale that they want to purchase. And that's where I think Lenovo has positioned very well from our supply chain and the capabilities we have in-house from engineering to be able to not only meet the general purpose environment, but also the hyperscales of the clients and HPC. I mean, their rise of kind of the ODMs, the Qantas and Acron to the world, can Lenovo compete on them with both the kind of the talent and the price? Absolutely, so I think one of the challenges I think a lot of customers that I want to consider to the hyperscale is, they're expanding, right? They're not in one geography or location anymore. So as you're building data centers globally, you need to have a company that could provide you support, supply chain and fulfillment across the world. And what we're finding out is that Lenovo's pushing very well against that. Whereas some of the Qantas and those guys cannot provide services and supply chain and warranty globally. So I think we're very well positioned in a space to be successful. And today we are very successful in the Asia with the Alibaba, Tencent and Badu where we have the market leadership in that segment. And our hyperscale business is driving growth in the Western world and U.S. majority to drive growth in that business also. Okay, I'll switch gears on you a little bit. When the system X got acquired, I know the one that I had that the hardest time understanding was flex systems. Because flex systems, there's storage in there. You know, there's the compute, there's the networking, there's packaging. IBM had spent a lot of work in kind of the redesign on that. But Lenovo got the X86 flex system. So can you give us the update on where that sits in your portfolio? How, you know, traction in the market is going? Absolutely. So actually at IBM I did run, I introduced flex system. Flex system was part of my portfolio at the Blade Center. The heritage we had in the blade is, we've actually had Blade now for 13 years. We introduced it in 2002. Leader in that space. We're just ending life in the product today, this year in June. So you can imagine that product. When we launched flex system, we said it's going to be a 10-year platform. And we're going to be able to provide networking, storage solution, expansion, and also servers for the life of that 10-year investment clients are making. And we're going to continue doing that. Today we have our flex system. You're going to see in 2017 with the NextGen Intel architecture, we'll be offering new servers plugging into existing environment and new networking solutions. So we're heavily invested in continuing to support that blade environment because as you think about convergence, Blade was the natural convergence that happened with server and networking all come together in one package. Yeah, so I actually, I was at the launch of that system in New York City. The article I wrote is it's like, basically it's the death of the blade server because here is the next generation architecture. It's beyond the blade. Can you kind of compare that transition? Where are we with blades? And what about hyper-converged? I mean, where do you see that transition going? I think what's happening in the traditional blade market and you'll see the industry sometimes calling blade something else where it's actually truly a blade. It's evolving because part of the challenge is I think as customers are looking at economics, they want to have a more economic starting point. And I think that's where you're seeing what we're announcing, for example, the SD350, which is almost looked like a blade, is a two-U4 node platform, but it gives people a better economic starting point. But I think for clients that are looking for high-end virtualization in their environment, they're looking for a single point of management of their infrastructure, they're still relying on that blade environment because the blade part with the integrated networking, servers, and the management domain we have, for example, with our X-Clarity software, it provides a very easy to manage and deploy a virtualized environment. And you're not deploying small quantities, you're deploying very large quantities. Yeah, a couple of your competitors, I believe it's called Composable Architecture, is what they, how do you compare, contrast? What do you see as the real need in the marketplace and how do you fit that requirement? Yeah, so if you look in the market, I think we quickly realized that our blade center was running out of gas, right? And when we looked at how do we continue to provide a value, a differential solution for our clients, that's where FlexSystem was born, right? To be able to provide the foundation that we could not only support today's technology, but as you think about networking, moving to 100 gigabit, how do you support that in that one platform, right? I think what's happening is in the industry, a lot of people's blades are basically running out of gas and they're coming up with new solutions and unfortunately I think they're calling it different things like converging synergies, one offering, I think if you look at it, it looks like a blade, it is a blade, but it's not called the follow-on to their product. So I think Composable Infrastructure, it's really trying to figure out how you leverage a legacy kind of traditional IT model that you deploy bare metal, but also in line to where we see software defined moving to and be able to leverage both ITs as you're growing your environment. Yeah, I was having an off-camera conversation with Radica and I said it's an interesting dichotomy we have. From a software standpoint, everything is going to a very distributed architecture, but from a hardware standpoint, we try to find things down to a small and converged as possible and those are not opposed, those kind of go together, it's the shift between where hardware and software sit. I think what's happening now is there's more reliance on having the right reliability and uptime on your server because as you move to a software-defined storage, a hyper-converged, or even eventually a software-defined data center, the maximum uptime of your system is important. That's one thing we're proud of by ITIC ranking us as one of the highest reliable servers in the industry three years in a row. You need that because now it's not, depending on the resiliency of hardware anymore from a multiple nodes, you're now looking for that single node that is running your software-defined or storage, for example, to be very reliable and maximum uptime. So we're trying to almost bring that joke around, mainframe class of reliability and economics of X86 for our clients. While we're transitioning to all these new consumable, new consumption models around software-defined storage and software-defined data center and hyper-convergence. You were just talking about cost being one of the factors on the SD350, somebody looking at that, maybe a more economic entry point. Who is the customer based on need, based on use? So the SD350, the target audience is for clients that are looking as a transition point of consolidation of their IT. So you could basically reduce, if you look at the old previous generation to moving to a SD350, we see you could take 12 servers and consolidate a single SD350 platform, actually N400, four servers to 12 previous one. That cuts down a lot of footprint and a lot of power consumption. One of the things I think people don't realize, a lot of customers are still faced challenges with power and cooling, right? It was a huge buzzword many years ago, but when people are looking at the economics of the data centers, the end user concept from their end clients are driving huge demands. Unfortunately, the footprint in the data center is not changing. So now you have to be more smart about what you deploy in the data center and how can you drive more business out of the existing infrastructure you have from a footprint perspective. So cooling and thermal is one thing. So consolidation of servers is a leading play. Second place is we see the SD350 being an ideal platform for hyperconvergence, right? Where you can now bring in software-defined stores potentially, a software-defined server and create a hyperconverge managed in a small footprint that gives you a great entry price point. And if you want to grow it, you can scale that environment. So Cameron, what about the changing applications that we're seeing in the environments? Containers is a hot technology. How's that going to impact your portfolio? I think as we look at, so one of the other things outside of just pure server business, we have an organization that drives solutions. And we believe everything's tied to a workload and that's why we have flavors of servers. It's really focused on the workload and then figure out what aligns with the right server technology to deliver best optimized performance of that application. So that organization is also driving around containers, around cloud, around analytics and big data and how that stuff around Hadoop is going to influence because we're seeing in the past there was big data and analytics. They're coming together now. If you look at everything that's happening in industry to drive a better, smarter way of doing business from leveraging both kind of software technologies. So for our perspective, I think we're going to be established in a way to be able to deliver the right solution for our clients. And the other focus is how do you deliver an engineer solution, right? Where you're actually engineered to drive better performance of the application, not just the me too in the industry. Before we let you take off, I just want to give you a chance to tell us what's lighten your fire these days. You have all these new products, right? You're providing great choice, maximum use, versatility or utility, all those things. But what's really getting you going about where you're headed? So it's exciting because our customers are transforming. We're seeing multiple industries and verticals transform based on how they want to drive growth. And the positive trend, it's all falls on the back of the data center to transform. And that's why it's exciting. It's, you know, enterprise is a constant evolving thing. You know, it's, you saw virtualization happen many years ago. You know, now you're looking at software defined. You're looking at hyperconvergence. It's a always constant evolving thing. And for me, it's exciting because we're trying to figure out how we can help our clients. And our clients' needs are changing and evolving. So it's exciting to keep me on my toes to make sure we're delivering the right solution for our clients, to deliver better business outcome on their end, which will benefit us, you know, ultimately. Hard to predict the next wave because you know it's going to be a big one, right? Absolutely, yeah. But the foundation of everything is a server, which I love. All right, Cameron. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Nice to have you. Thank you guys. Cameron Amini from Lenovo. Back with more from San Francisco here on theCUBE is just a bit.