>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube. We're here with Omar assad is the vice president GM of H P S H C I and primary storage and data management business. And Sandeep Singh was the vice president of marketing for HP storage division. Welcome gents. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. Dave, >>It's a pleasure to be here today. >>Hey, so uh, last month you guys, you made a big announcement and and now you're, you know, shining the spotlight on that here at discover Cindy. Maybe you can give us a quick recap, what do we need to know? >>Yeah, Dave. We announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake by transforming HB storage to a cloud native software defined data services business. We unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates data, dream of transformation for our customers. Uh and it introduced a and we introduced the data services platform that consists of two game changing innovations are first announcement was Data services cloud console. It's a SAS based console that delivers the cut operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud data services. Our 2nd announcement is HPE. Electra. It's cloud native data infrastructure to power your data edge to cloud. And it's managed natively with data services cloud console to bring that cloud operational model to our customers wherever their data lives together with the data services platform. Hp Green Green Lake brings that cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on premises environment and lays the foundation for our customers to shift from managing storage to managing data. >>Well, I think it lays the foundation for the next decade. You know, when we entered this past decade, we we were Ricky bobby's terms like software led that that sort of morphed into. So the software defined data center containers with kubernetes, Let's zoom out for a minute. If we can homer maybe you could describe the problems that you're trying to address with this announcement. >>Thanks dave. It's always a pleasure talking to you on these topics. So in my role as general manager for primary storage, I speak with the hundreds of customers across the board and I consistently hear that data is at the heart of what our customers are doing and they're looking for a data driven transformative approach to their business. But as they engage on these things, there are two challenges that they consistently faced. The first one is that managing storage at scale Is rife with complexity. So while storage has gotten faster in the last 20 years, managing a single array or maybe two or three arrays has gotten simpler over time. But managing storage at scale when you deploy fleet. So storage as customers continue to gather, store and lifecycle that data. This process is extremely frustrating for customers. Still I. T. Administrators are firefighting, they're unable to innovate for their business because now data spans all the way from edge to corridor cloud. And then with the advent of public cloud there's another dimension of multi cloud that has been added to their data sprawl. And then secondly what what we what we consistently hear is that idea administrators need to shift from managing storage to managing data. What this basically means is that I. D. Has a desire to mobilize, protect and provision data seamlessly across its lifecycle and across the locations that it is stored at. Uh This ensures that I. D. Leaders uh and also people within the organization understand the context of the data that they store and they operate upon. Yet data management is an extremely big challenge and it is a web of fragmented data silos across processes across infrastructure all the way from test and dev to administration uh to production uh to back up to lifecycle data management. Uh And so up till now data management was tied up with storage management and this needs to change for our customers especially with the diversity of the application workloads as they're growing and as customers are expanding their footprint across a multi cloud environment >>just to add to almost uh response there. We recently conducted a survey that was actually done by E. S. She. Um and that was a survey of IT. decision makers. And it's interesting what it showcased, 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management complexity is impeding their digital transformation. 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them and 94% want to bring the cloud experience on premises, >>you know, al china. And I think as you guys move to the sort of software world and container world affinity to developers homer, you talked about, you know, things like data protection and we talk about security being bolted on all the time. Now. It's designed in it's it's done at sort of the point of creation, not as an afterthought. And that's a big change that we see coming. Uh But let's talk about, you know, what also needs to change as customers make the move from this idea of managing storage to to managing data or maybe you can take that one. >>That's a that's a that's a very interesting problem. Right. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to move into this new data management model? So, dave one of the things that the public cloud got right is the cloud operational model uh which sets the standard for agility and a fast pace for our customers in a classic I. T. On prime model, if you ever wanted to stand up an application or if you were thinking about standing up a particular workload, uh you're going to file a series of I. T. Tickets and then you're at the mercy of whatever complex processes exist within organization and and depending on what the level of approvals are within a particular organization, standing up a workload can take days, weeks or even months in certain cases. So what cloud did was they brought that level of simplicity for someone that wanted to instead she ate an app. This means that the provisioning of underlying infrastructure that makes that workload possible needs to be reduced to minutes from days and weeks. But so what we are intending to do over here is to bring the best of both worlds together so that the cloud experience can be experienced everywhere with ease and simplicity and the customers don't need to change their operating model. So it's blending the two together. And that's what we are trying to usher in into this new era where we start to differentiate between data management and storage management as two independent things. >>Great, thank you for that. Omer sometimes I wonder if you could share with the audience, you know, the vision that you guys unveiled, What does it look like? How are you making it actually substantive and and real? >>Yeah. Dave. That's also great question. Um across the board it's time to reimagine data management. Everything that homer shared. Those challenges are leading to customers needing to break down the silos and complexity that plagues these distributed data environments. And our vision is to deliver a new data experience that helps customers unleash the power of data. We call this vision unified data jobs, Unified Data Ops integrates data centric policies to streamline data management, cloud native control to bring the cloud operational model to where customers data labs and a I driven insights to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a new data experience to simplify and bring that agility of cloud to data infrastructure. Streamline data management and help customers innovate faster than ever before. We're making the promise of Unified Data Ops Real by transforming Hve storage to a cloud native software defined data services business and introducing a data services platform that expands Hve Green Lake. >>I mean, you know, you talk about the complexity, I see, I look at it as you kind of almost embracing the complexity saying, look, it's gonna keep getting more complex as the cloud expands to the edge on prem Cross cloud, it gets more complex underneath. What you're doing is you're almost embracing that complexity and putting a layer over it and hiding that complexity from from the end customer that and so they can spend their time doing other things over. I wonder if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the data services console, Is it sort of another software layer to manage infrastructure? What exactly is it? >>It's a lot more than that, Dave and you're you're 100% right. It's basically we're attempting in this release to attack that complexity head on. So simply put data services. Cloud console is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational model and cloud operational agility uh to our customers. It unifies data operations through a series of cloud data services that are delivered on top of this console to our customers in a continuous innovation stream. Uh And what we have done is going back to the point that I made earlier separating storage and data management and putting the strong suites of each of those together into the SAS delivered console for our customers. So what we have done is we have separated data and infrastructure management away from physical hardware to provide a comprehensive and a unified approach to managing data and infrastructure wherever it lives. From a customer's perspective, it could be at the edge, it could be in a coal. Oh, it could be in their data center or it could be a bunch of data services that are deployed within the public cloud. So now our customers with data services. Cloud console can manage the entire life cycle of their data from all the way from deployment, upgrading and optimizing it uh from a single console from anywhere in the world. Uh This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud data services that enable access to data. It allows for policy-based data protection, it allows for an organizational wide search on top of your storage assets. And we deliver basically a 360° visibility to all your data from a single console that the customer can experience from anywhere. So, so if you look at the journey the way we're deciding to deliver this. So the first, in its first incarnation, uh Data services, Cloud console gives you infrastructure and cloud data services to start to do data management along with that. But this is that foundation that we are placing in front of our customers, the SAS console, through which we get touch our customers on a daily basis. And now as our customers get access to the SAAS platform on the back end, we will continue to roll in additional services throughout the years on a true SAS based innovation base for our customers. And and these services can will be will be ranging all the way from data protection to multiple out data management, all the way to visibility all the way to understanding the context of your data as it's stored across your enterprise. And in addition to that, we're offering a consistent revised unified Api which allows for our customers to build automation against their storage infrastructure. Without ever worrying about that. As infrastructure changes, uh, the A. P I proof points are going to break for them. That is never going to happen because they are going to be programming to a single SAS based aPI interface from now on. >>Right. And that brings in this idea of infrastructure as code because you talk about as a service to talk about Green Lake and and my question is always okay. Tell me what's behind that. And if and if and if and if you're talking about boxes and and widgets, that's a it's a problem. And you're not, you're talking about services and A P. I. S and microservices and that's really the future model and infrastructure is code and ultimately data as code is really part of that. So, All right. So you guys, I know some of your branding folks, you guys give deep thought to this. So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands and deep maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >>Sure. Ultimately delivering the cloud operational model requires cognitive data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from the cloud. And that's why we have also introduced H. P. E. Electra. Omar, Can you perhaps described HB electro even more. >>Absolutely. Thank you. Sandy. Uh, so with with HB Electoral we're launching a new brand of cloud native hardware infrastructure to power our customers data all the way from edge to the core to the cloud. The releases are smaller models for the edge then at the same time having models for the data center and then expanding those services into the public cloud as well. Right. All these hardware devices, Electoral hardware devices are cloud native and powered by our data services. Cloud Council, we're announcing two models with this launch H. P. E Electoral 9000. Uh, this is for our mission critical workloads. It has its history and bases in H P E. Primera. It comes with 100% availability guarantee. Uh It's the first of its type in the industry. It comes with standard support contract, no special verb is required. And then we're also launching HB Electoral 6000. Uh These are based in our history of uh nimble storage systems. Uh These these are for business critical applications, especially for that mid range of the storage market, optimizing price, performance and efficiency. Both of these systems are full envy any storage powered by our timeless capabilities with data in place upgrades. And then they both deliver a unified infrastructure and data management experience through the data services, cloud console. Uh And and and at the back end unified Ai Ops experience with H P. E. Info site is seamlessly blended in along with the offering for our >>customers. So this is what I was talking about before. It's sort of not your grandfather's storage business anymore. This is this is this is something that is part of that, that unified vision, that layer that I talked about, the A. P. I. Is the program ability. So you're you're reaching into new territory here. Maybe you can give us an example of how the customers experience what that looks like. >>Excellent. Love to Dave. So essentially what we're doing is we're changing the storage experience to a true cloud operational model for our customers. These recent announcements that we just went through along with, indeed they expand the cloud experience that our customers get with storage as a service with HP Green Lake. So a couple of examples to make this real. So the first of all is simplified deployment. Uh So I t no longer has to go through complex startup and deployment processes. Now all you need to do is these systems shipped and delivered to the customer's data center. Operational staff just need to rack and stack and then leave connect the power cable, connect the network cable. And the job is done. From that point onwards, data services console takes over where you can onboard these systems, you can provision these systems if you have a pre existing organization wide security as well as standard profile setup in data services console, we can automatically apply those on your behalf and bring these systems online. From a customer's perspective, they can be anywhere in the world to onboard these systems, they could be driving in a car, they could be sitting on a beach. Uh And and you know, these systems are automatically on boarded through this cloud operational model which is delivered through the SAAS application for our customers. Another big example. All that I'd like to shed light on is intent based provisioning. Uh So Dave typically provisioning a workload within a data center is an extremely spreadsheet driven trial and error kind of a task. Which system do I land it on? Uh Is my existing sl is going to be affected which systems that loaded which systems are loaded enough that I put this additional workload on it and the performance doesn't take. All of these decisions are trial and error on a constant basis with cloud Data services console along with the electron new systems that are constantly in a loop back information feeding uh Typical analytics to the console. All you need to do is to describe the type of the workload and the intent of the workload in terms of block size S. L. A. That you would like to experience at that point. Data services console consults with intra site at the back end. We run through thousands of data points that are constantly being given to us by your fleet and we come back with a few recommendations. You can accept the recommendation and at that time we go ahead and fully deploy this workload on your behalf or you can specify a particular system and then people try to enforce the S. L. A. On that system. So it completely eliminates the guesswork and the planning that you have to do in this regard. Uh And last but not the least. Uh You know, one of the most important things is, you know, upgrades has been a huge problem for our customers. Uh And typically oftentimes when you're not in this constant, you know, loop back communication with your customers. It often is a big challenge to identify which release or which bug fix or which update goes on to which particular machine, all of that has been completely taken away from our customers and fully automated. Uh We run thousands of signatures across are installed base. We identify which upgrades need to be curated for which machines in a fleet for a particular customer. And then if it applies to that customer we presented, and if the customer accepts it, we automatically go ahead and upgrade the system and and and last, but not the least from a global management perspective. Now, a customer has an independent data view of their data estate, independent from a storage estate and data services. Council can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view or the data view. >>It's kind of the holy Grail. I mean I've been in this business a long time and I think I. T. People have dreamt about you know this kind of capability for for a long long time. I wonder if we could sort of stay on the customers for a moment here and and talk about what's enabled. Now. Everybody's talking digital transformation. I joke about the joke. Not funny. The force marched to digital with Covid. Uh and we really wasn't planned for but the customers really want to drive now that digital transfer some of them are on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. What are the outcomes that are that are enabled here? Omar. >>Excellent. So so on on a typical basis for a traditional I. T. Customer this cloud operational model means that you know information technology staff can move a lot faster and they can be a lot more productive on the things that are directly relevant to their business. They can get up to 99% of the savings back to spend more time on strategic projects or best of all spend time with their families rather than managing and upgrading infrastructure and fleets of infrastructure. Right for line of business owners, the new experience means that their data infrastructure can be presented can be provision where the self service on demand type of capability. Uh They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Capacity management, performance management, all of that is died in and presented to them wherever they are easy to consume. SaS based models and especially for data innovators, whether it's D B A s, whether it's data analysts, they can start to consume infrastructure and ultimately data as a code to speed up their app development because again, the context that we're bringing forward is the context of data decoupling it from. Actually, storage management, storage management and data management are now two separate domains that can be presented through a single console to tie the end to end picture for a customer. But at the end of the day, what we have felt is that customers really, really want to rely and move forward with the data management and leave infrastructure management to machine oriented task, which we have completely automated on their behalf. >>So I'm sure you've heard you got the memo about, you know, H H p going all in on as a service. Uh it is clear that the companies all in. How does this announcement fit in to that overall mission? Cindy >>dave We believe the future is edge to cloud and our mission is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company and as as HB transforms HP Green Lake is our unified cloud platform. Hp Green Link is how we deliver cloud services and agile cloud experiences to customers applications and data across the edge to cloud. With the storage announcement that we made recently, we announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake with as a service transformation of the HPV storage business to a cloud native software defined data services business. And this expands storage as a service, delivering full cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on prem environment across the board were committed to being a strategic partner for every one of our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's where the puck is going guys. Hey as always great conversation with with our friends from HP storage. Thanks so much for the collaboration and congratulations on the announcements and and I know you're not done yet. >>Thanks. Dave. Thanks. Dave. >>Thanks. Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for being with us for hp. You discovered 2021 you're watching the cube, the leader digital check coverage. Keep it right there, but right back. >>Yeah. Yeah.