>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, this is the Cube special presentation of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with The Cube, my co-host Dave Vellante for the next three days with wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas. Our next guess is Tom Lattin, Vice President and General Manager of HPE Server Options which is all the good stuff that wrap around the servers. And certainly the big news here at HP is the Gen10, the continuation of the, the generation of servers which is all the rage these days. People are talkin' about servers, are we buying more or buying less? Still a lot of private cloud going on. Nothing really changing in the premise world. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> Alright, so what's the big news? I mean, to me the, the thing that I've always been watching is the Gen8 stuff, Gen10 now is the new announcement platform for servers. >> Certainly. >> A lot of stuff happening around, a lot of innovations. Give us a quick update on the key things happening around Gen10 and the options. >> Well certainly with Gen10, we've got a whole new level of security that is a big part of the Gen10 story. And with the server options in the memory SEP system and the storage SEP system and the networking SEP system, all of those technologies contribute to building up those layers of security in Gen10. So that's a key part of what we're doing this week at discover. The second thing in the options space, the server options space, is persistent memory. So we introduced persistent memory on Gen9 servers last year with the MB DIMM, an eight gigabyte MB DIMM. We're extending that portfolio this year with the Gen10 servers and increasing the MB DIMM capacity to 16 gigabytes. But the really big news in the persistent memory offering is scalable persistent memory. >> I just saw a great article on the CRN, Computer Reseller News or CRN, really giving you guys some props on this. "Persistent memory combines the performance of D RAM with the persistent of traditional SSDs or spinning disk. So, essentially a huge performance gain, and, which is always good, HP has that, always has some good mojo when it comes to, you know, high quality products and performance. But talk about the impact because one of things that's going on right now is storage has to be invisible but applications now have, going beyond virtual machines. You've got containers, you've got all kinds of cloud things happening with the apps. So the data, the state of the data, the performance of the data is really critical to customers. What's the impact of this to that trend? >> This is, persistent memory unleashes an incredible amount of performance for the server, for the application running on the server. At it's most fundamental level, persistent memory and MB DIMM or a scalable persistent memory implementation can replace a layer of flash storage. And we're seein' performance benefits on the order of doubling the performance of the application just by swapping out an SSD for persistent memory or an MB DIMM. When the applications, when the architects actually modify the applications to take advantage of the fact that there's a persistent memory layer in there, we see performance benefits as small as four times improvement, but in many cases we're seeing 20, 25, 27x performance improvements because the architects of the applications now can dive right into the memory sub-system without going through layers and layers of code and moving data around to get to storage. >> Love, love the options comps that you guys are running because I think one of the things that we here is, you know, flexibility is key and it's kind like goin' to the store and, like, getting some accessories for your suit. Not one size fits all, you need to have a lot of options given the environment. So I got to ask you the competitive question. How do you guys compare vis-a-vis the competition with the persistent memory stuff, for instance? You mentioned the performance, how does that compare with some of your competitors? >> I think persistent memory is a good example of where we're way out ahead of where our competition is right now. It's, you can't just drop in a piece of hardware in the server and get all of the benefit out of it. You've got to be able to integrate that piece of hardware with the system software, the bios in the system, and then work with software application partners especially to go modify, or to optimize their applications to work best with that component that you put in there. >> And you guys do that? >> We do that extensively. >> Not the customer, the customer just, what? Just installs it? >> The customer gets it. It just works. >> So, what's the typical sort of anatomy of a life cycle of a server these days? And, and, I mean, it used to be, in the old days it was called peripherals and peripherals made up probably 60 to 70% of the market so it was very huge, you know, quite a huge opportunity. So how does it work from a customer standpoint? Does, do they, what's their starting point? How do they plan this out? Or is it more reactive? I wonder if you could sort of bring us up to date on that dynamic, Tom. >> I think that's, part of what we bring to the market is a set of server platforms that have an incredible breadth of capability and that breadth comes from the configuration choices that customer can make through the server options portfolios. So, generally, they're, a customer will standardize on a few different platform types and then deploy those servers for a variety of different workloads. And so it's through those configuration choices, storage capacity, memory capacity, the performance of different layers in the memory and storage hierarchy that allow them to be able to fine-tune a small set of servers, really, for a much broader set of workloads. >> So we've commented for a number of years now on The Cube that the pendulum is swinging. Storage is, and servers are coming, and computer coming closer together. >> Absolutely. >> You certainly saw that with Flash and PCIe. Sort of, those trends brought storage and compute together and now you're accelerating that even further with, with persistent memory. >> Tom: Yes. >> So, as that happens, one of the big challenges is data sharing, right? Now you hear things like, you know, NVMe over Fabric and other technologies to, to link these capabilities, these nodes if you will. What's, I mean it sounds like The Machine, so. >> Tom: Exactly. >> What's happening there and help us sort of squint through those two big trends. >> Yeah, I think that as we evolve architectures to focus on the data and recognize that the data really is where the value resides, we're moving from a world where, first of all, sharing the data on storage makes a lot of sense to enable that. If you look at some of the demonstrations that we've done recently with the machine and with memory driven computing, it's about taking that shared presence of the data or shared instance of the data to an entirely new level where the processors, processing capability can get directly at it and operate it and work on that really as a shared body of information, shared body of knowledge. So yes, started in the storage sub-system but absolutely where we're headed is a memory-driven computing world where it's in the memory sub-systems. >> And that is The Machine, but, and which is a, you know, big R&D project that's kind of comin' out of HP Labs, and, you know, Martin Fink showing it off a couple years ago and giving us the roadmap, but now we're seein' it sort of evolve. But as well, I would think your ecosystem can kind of build it's own pseudo-machine, you know? With compute power and all this persistent memory and you know, architecting, I mean, do you see those as two separate vectors that, you know, let's see what happens in the channel? Or, or do you see those two worlds coming together? >> Fundamentally, we are a partnering business, right? We work extensively with the ecosystem of software providers, partners in the industry. So what we're demonstrating with The Machine, necessarily we've done a lot of those parts ourselves to show the capability. But absolutely this memory-centric computing vision and that we're beginning to realize with some of the products that we're releasing today, persistent memory is a great example of that, is all about enabling the industry, the ecosystem in the industry to bring that value for, ultimately for all of our customers. >> And has heading up the sort of options business, if you will, how do you, one of the things we've talked about a lot is this notion of true private cloud which is substantially mimicking public cloud on PRIM because the world is hybrid as we all sort of point out. How do you create that experience for customers? That, that cloud-like experience? >> I think it, well with the simplicity and the agility of what we're doing with the HPE compute experience now is very focused on creating that cloud-like experience in a hybrid cloud world, right? On premises for example. And so that's, a lot of that is about being able to scale up and down the computing capability, to incorporate new financial models so that you can buy compute, rent compute at your, kind of, depending on what your strategic corporate objectives are. So the options themselves then give you that ability to, for example, scalable persistent memory uses the base system in the server and one day you may say, "Hey, I need to use a "portion of that as persistent "because of the workload that I'm running." And then later that night, that same system could translate over to run a completely different workload and change the profile of the persistent memory that's being used because it's a configuration setting of the base system memory. So making the system itself very flexible to adapt to the changing needs of workloads, either overtime or very realtime like that in the course of a day. >> Tom I want to get your thoughts on the trends that we're covering, and certainly the industry's covering. So you have an industry scope and you have, obviously, partners which are going to be critical in getting things certified and or working so the customer just plugs, plugs stuff in, like the memory. >> Tom: Yes. >> Obviously the market place says, well, "Oh server ships are down," but the cloud's happening, servers are actually growing no matter how you look at. But there's more realtime stuff goin' on. There's more processing happening. How do you guys look at the marketplace trends because there is more need, at The Edge for instance, we had Bill Philbin on just earlier before you came on talkin' about how storage and compute are comin' together. This is kind of the, the options world you're in. You're in the middle of all this action so people actually cobbling together and composing solutions, whether it's on PRIM or working with similar architectures in the cloud, same code bases moving back and forth. So this whole world is really not declining. Maybe shifting how it was before, that transformation you're in the middle of, how do you guys look at that and how you do talk to the customers who are like, "I was buying servers and options before, "I still got to do that but I got to "transform and be prepared for realtime analytics, "using multiple clouds, all these kinds of, "these, these important items for the future"? >> Yeah, it's a bit of an architectural revolution if you will, right? As we move to a memory-centric computing world, as we move to a world where everything is cloud-based, cloud architecture-based, whether it's out in a public cloud somewhere or on an on-prep as kind of hybrid IT model, it really is a completely different architectural model. And so to capitalize on that, what we work with customers on is things like the composable capability of synergy. Things like persistent memory and making that scalable to move to a memory-driven computing model. Things like our all-Flash array business and our product offerings to be able to accelerate that storage sub-system well beyond what's been done before. >> It's performance driven too, you got to eek out performance more and more. >> Yes. That's kind of the mandate. Another interesting thing I wanted to get your thoughts on, and, you know, I'm old in the industry these days relative to the average age of most people in the big the big companies, like hyper-scalers are like 28 to 30-something. The trend is systems. I mean, you're seeing, if you look at what the cloud ' doing in the revolution at the architectural level, it's almost a complete crossover to a systems mindset. Systems meaning operating systems or, you know, core systems. So a lot of the people that are really doing well in the industry, who are radically transforming it, are older guys. James Gosling was at, just joined Amazon Web Services. You got guys who are in their 50s who are leading major architectural shifts. This kind of puts HP in an interesting position because you guys have so much experience with systems, servers, you know, just on an isolated basis. But now, as that looks out over the landscape, it's even more important to look at it from a holistic perspective. Your thoughts on this trend? >> Well absolutely, it's a huge trend and by taking the expertise that we've got at a systems level and coupling that with our strategic imperative to partner with other industry leaders in the industry revolution, I think those two together position not just HPE well, but the ecosystem of HPE and our software industry partners to really help advance that, that architectural-- >> I was talking to James Governor last who's the, with Red Monk and one of the research firms we like and I said to him, "It's open bar and open source," was my kind of headline story I was tryin', we were collaborating on and what I mean by that is that, you know, as open source evolves, we saw some of the stuff goin' on with The Machine in mem-store, a lot of that stuffs going to be open source at the core at the system level. So open source is growing, but when I say open bar, it's like there is more goodness being contributed to open source than ever before. You're seeing great machine learning libraries being, you know, given in to collaboration. You're seeing open source being a great recruiting environment. So if you're a young gun in the marketplace right now, you're getting all this contribution so with that kind of as a context, what's the open source strategy that you see? 'Cause you're in kind of a glue layer with options. You're kind of creating some flexibility for customers. At the same time, you've got a glue kind of concept goin' on with software. What do you guys do with open source? Is there a trend there that you'd like to share? I mean, I'm interested to know what your position is vis-a-vis contribution programs and whatnot. >> Yeah, I think, certainly at the hardware layers, right, of what we're doing with server options, it's about enabling new capabilities. And so we work with quite a few open source partners to enable those. So say, for example, Red Hat, they're taking our persistent memory offerings and optimizing those so that they get, certainly the immediate benefit of a layer of high-performance storage but the more radical performance improvements that they can get when they address directly a layer of persistent memory. So it's not so much that we're creating a whole new, at least in the option space, kind of a whole new open source plane. >> But you're intersecting. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, one other thing is networking is hot right now. Certainly, SDM we see that. A lot of the open source projects, and even in Linux foundation you're seeing the network stack just kind of being, kind of decomposed. So a very interesting opportunity. >> Yes. >> Well, and the same thing with storage, right? And you mentioned Flash a couple of times right? You're seeing the whole storage stack just completely morphing and changing. >> Tom: Yeah. >> So you guys are in the center of that, how does a customer engage? Does it happen typically through the channel, do they go to hpe.com, how does that happen? >> For server option kind of products, yeah, certainly. Through our direct sales force, through our partners' sales forces, 'cause, as we said, it's an ecosystem that brings us value forward. So in many cases, it's not us in, even in explaining something like persistent memory. It's Microsoft or it's Red Hat or it's SUSE, or partners there, VMware. We've got a, actually a lot of presence with VMware and some interesting things they're going to be talking about in one of our sessions here later today at Discover. So that's one path. Or two paths. Our sales force, their sales force and then, absolutely, the channel. We've got a very rich channel program and a lot of engagement with them to bring them up on networking technologies, storage technologies, memory, persistent memory technologies so that they can-- >> John: So it's ecosystem is really the key. >> They can effectively engage customers, yeah. >> Alright, Tom Lattin is the Vice President and General Manager at HP Server Options. My final question for you to end the segment here is what should customers know about Gen10 and server options if you had a chance to look right into the camera and say, "Hey, new game in town," or, "Think differently around architecture," what would be, what would be your words? In your words, what should customers know about the world you're building? >> Certainly with Gen10, the server options portfolio unleashes or helps support the overall security capabilities of Gen10, number one. But if I can have a second one. >> John: Of course. >> I've got to play persistent memory high because we've got a terabyte-scale persistent memory capability in the Gen10 platforms which is, opens up a whole new world of opportunity for applications, as I said, early on to develop or increase performance, in many cases, 20, 25, 27 times the capabilities today. >> That's awesome, I mean I think the memories awesome. Dave and I have been talkin' for years that memory used to be the resource that was constrained and unlimited storage, now it's the other way around, people want memory, application developers and programmers. This is The Cube bringing you great content you can put to memory, Flash memory. HPE Discover, I'm John Fullier with Dave Vellante, we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.