(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back with theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE's latest GreenLake announcement, the continuous cadence that we're seeing here. You know, when you're trying to figure out how to optimize workloads, it's getting more and more complex. Data-driven workloads are coming in to the scene, and so how do you know, with confidence, how to configure your systems, keep your costs down, and get the best performance and value for that? So we're going to talk about that. With me are Chris Shin, who is the founder of CloudPhysics and the senior director of HPE CloudPhysics, and Sandeep Singh, who's the vice-president of Storage Marketing. Gents, great to see you. Welcome. >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So let's talk about the problem first, Sandeep, if we could. what are you guys trying to solve? What are you hearing from customers when they talk to you about their workloads and optimizing their workloads? >> Yeah, Dave, that's a great question. Overall, what customers are asking for is just to simplify their world. They want to be able to go faster. A lot of business is asking IT, let's go faster. One of the things that cloud got right is that overall cloud operational experience, that's bringing agility to organizations. We've been on this journey of bringing this cloud operational agility to customers for their data states, especially with HPE GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud platform. >> Dave: Right. >> And we're doing that with, you know, powering that with data-driven intelligence. Across the board, we've been transforming that operational support experience with HPE InfoSight. And what's incredibly exciting is now we're talking about how we can transform that experience in that upfront IT procurement portion of the process. You asked me what are customers asking about in terms of how to optimize those workloads. And when you think about when customers are purchasing infrastructure to support their app workloads, today it's still in the dark ages. They're operating on heuristics, or a gut feel. The data-driven insights are just missing. And with this incredible complexity across the full stack, how do you figure out where should I be placing my apps, whether on Prim or in the public cloud, and/or what's the right size infrastructure built upon what's actually being consumed in terms of resource utilization across the board. That's where we see a tremendous opportunity to continue to transform the experience for customers now with data-driven insights for smarter IT decisions. >> You know, Chris, Sandeep's right. It's like, it's like tribal knowledge. Well, Kenny would know how to do that, but Kenny doesn't work here anymore. So you've announced CloudPhysics. Tell us more about what that is, what impact it's going to have for customers. >> Sure. So just as Sandeep said, basically the problem that exists in IT today is you've got a bunch of customers that are getting overwhelmed with more and more options to solve their business problems. They're looking at cloud options, they're looking at new technologies, they're looking at new sub-technologies and the level at which people are competing for infrastructure sales is down at the very, very, you know, splitting hairs level in terms of features. And they don't know how much of these they need to acquire. Then on the other side, you've got partners and vendors who are trying to package up solutions and products to serve these people's needs. And while the IT industry has, for decades, done a good job of automating problems out of other technology spaces, hasn't done a good job of automating their own problems in terms of what does this customer need? How do I best service them? So you've got an unsatisfied customer and an inadequately equipped partner. CloudPhysics brings those two together in a common data platform, so that both those customers and their partners can look at the same set of data that came out of their data center and pick the solutions that will solve their problems most efficiently. >> So talk more about the partner angle, because it sounds like, you know, if they don't have a Kenny, they really need some help, and it's got to be repeatable. It's got to be consistent. So how have partners reacting to this? >> Very, very strongly. Over the course of the four or five years that that CloudPhysics has been doing this in market, we've had thousands and thousands of VARs, SIs and others, as well as many of the biggest technology providers in the market today, use CloudPhysics to help speed up the sales process, but also create better and more satisfied customers. >> So you guys made... Oh, go ahead, please. >> Well, I was just going to chime into that. When you think about partners that with HPE CloudPhysics, where it supports heterogeneous data center environments, partners all of a sudden get this opportunity to be much more strategic to their customers. They're operating on real world insights that are specific to that customer's environment. So now they can really have a tailored conversation as well as offer tailored solutions designed specifically for the areas, you know, where help is needed. >> Well, I think it builds an affinity with the customer as well, because if the partners that trust advisor, if you give a customer some advice and it's kind of the wrong advice, "Hey, we got to go back and reconfigure that workload. We won't charge you that much for it". You're now paying twice. Like when an accountant makes a mistake on your tax return, you got to pay for that again. But so, you guys acquired CloudPhysics in February of this year. What can you tell us about what's transpired since then? How many engagements that you've done? What kind of metrics can you share? >> Yeah. Chris, do you want to weigh in for that? >> Sure, sure. The start of it really has been to create a bunch of customized analytics on the CloudPhysics platform to target specific sales motions that are relevant to HPE partners. So what do I mean by that? You'll remember that in May, we announced the Alletra Series 6,000 and 9,000. In tandem with that, CloudPhysics released a new set of analytics that help someone who's interested in those technologies figure out what model might be best for them and how much firepower they would need from one or the other of those solutions. Similarly, we have a bunch solutions and a market strength in the HCI world, hyper converged, and that's both SimpliVity and dHCI. And we've set up some analytics that specifically help someone who's interested in that form factor to accelerate, and again, pick the right solutions that will serve their exact applications needs. >> When you talk to customers, are they able to give you a sense as to the cost impacts? I mean, even if it's subjective, "Hey, we think we, you know, we save 10% versus the way we used to do it", or more or less. I mean, just even gut feel metrics. >> So I'll start that one, Sandeep. So there's sort of two ways to look at it. One thing is, because we know everything that's currently running in the data center - we discovered that - we have a pretty good cost of what it is costing them today to run their workloads. So anything that we compare that to, whether it's a transition to public cloud or a transition to a hosted VMware solution, or a set of new infrastructure, we can compare their current costs to the specific solutions that are available to them. But on the more practical side of things, oftentimes customers know intuitively this is a set of servers I bought four years ago, or this is an old array that I know is loose. It's not keeping up anymore. So they typically have some fairly specific places to start, which gives that partner a quick win, solving a specific customer problem. And then it can often boil out into the rest of the data center, and continual optimization can occur. >> How unique is this? I mean, is it, you know, can you give us a little glimpse of the secret sauce behind it? Is this kind of table stakes for the industry? >> Yeah. I mean, look, it's unique in the sense that CloudPhysics brings along over 200 metrics across the spectrum of virtual machines and guest OSs, as well as the overall CPU and RAM utilization, overall infrastructure analysis, and built in cloud simulators. So what customers are able to do is basically, in real time, be able to: A - be aware of exactly what their environment looks like; B - be able to simulate if they were going to move and give an application workload to the cloud; C - they're able to just right-size the underlying infrastructure across the board. Chris? >> Well, I was going to say, yeah, along the same lines, there have been similar technology approaches to different problems. Most notably in the current HPE portfolio, InfoSight. Best in class, data lake driven, very highly analytical machine learning, geared predominantly toward an optimization model, right? CloudPhysics is earlier in the talk track with the customer. We're going to analyze your environment where HPE may not even have a footprint today. And then we're going to give you ideas of what products might help you based on very similar techniques, but approaching a very different problem. >> So you've got data, you've got experience, you know what best practice looks like. You get a sense as to the envelope as to what's achievable, right? And that is just going to get better and better and better over time. One of the things that that I've said, and we've said on theCUBE, is that the definition of cloud is changing. It's expanding, it's not just public cloud anymore. It's a remote set of services, it's coming on Prim, there's a hybrid connection. We're going across clouds, we're going out to the edge. So can CloudPhysics help with that complexity? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have a set of analytics in the cloud world that range from we're going to price your on-premise IT. We also have the ability to simulate a transition, a set of workloads to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. We also have the ability to translate to VMware based solutions on many of those public clouds. And we're increasingly spreading our umbrella over GreenLake as well, and showing the optimization opportunities for a GreenLake solution when contrasted with some of those other clouds. So there's not a lot of... >> So it's not static. >> It's not static at all. And Dave, you were mentioning earlier in terms such as proven. CloudPhysics now has operated on trillions of data points over millions of virtual machines across thousands of overall data assessments. So there's a lot of proven learnings through that as well as actual optimizations that customers have benefited from. >> Yes. I mean, there's benchmarks, but it's more than that because benchmarks tend to be static, okay. We consider rules of thumb. We're living in an age with a lot more data, a lot more machine intelligence. And so this is organic, it'll evolve. >> Sandeep: Absolutely. >> And the partners who work with their customers on a regular basis over at CloudPhysics, and then build up a history over time of what's changing in their data center can even provide better service. They can look back over a year, if we've been collecting, and they can see what the operating system landscape has changed, how different workloads have lost popularity, how other ones have gained. And they really can become a much better solution provider to that customer the longer CloudPhysics is used. >> Yeah, it gives your partners a competitive advantage, it's a much stickier model because the customer is going to trust your partner more if they get it right. So we're not going to change horses in the middle of the street. We're going to go back to the partner that set us up, and they keep getting better and better and better each time, we've got a good cadence going. All right. Sandeep, bring us home. What's your sort of summary? How should we think about this going forward? >> Well, I'll bring us right back to the way I started is, and to end, we're looking at how we continue to deliver best in class cloud operational experience for customers across the board with HPE GreenLake. And earlier this year, we unveiled this cloud operation experience for data, and for customers, that experience starts with a cloud consult where they can essentially discover services, consume services, that overall operational and support experience is transformed with HPE InfoSight. And now we're transforming this experience where any organization out there that's looking to get data-driven insights into what should they do next? Where should they place their workloads? How to right-size the infrastructure? And in the process, be able to transform how they are working and collaborating with their partners. They're able to do that now with HPE CloudPhysics, bringing these data driven insights for smarter IT decision-making. >> I like this a lot, because a lot of the cloud is trial and error. And when you try and you make a mistake, you're paying each time. So this is a great innovation to really help clients focus on the things that matter, you know, helping them apply technology to solve their business problems. Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Dave, always a pleasure. >> Thanks very much for having us. >> And keep it right there. We got more content from HPE's GreenLake announcements. Look for the cadence. One of the hallmarks of cloud is the cadence of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a regular basis, push out new innovations. Keep it right there for more. (bright upbeat music begins) (bright upbeat music ends)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover the Virtual Experience. I'm your host Stu Miniman. And we are now excited to be able to go beyond the hype of hyper convergence. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our regulars, even though he has a new title, Patrick Osborne is the vice president and general manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hyperconverged Infrastructure, or HPE HCI as we could abbreviate. Patrick, good to see you. Thanks for much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Absolutely Stu, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> All right. So, you know, HCI, obviously has had a dramatic impact on the storage industry, you know, HPE has, you know, acquisitions like SimpliVity, Nimble has a play there, you've got partnerships with some solutions including with GreenLake. Why don't you give us just kind of the update, you've been with HPE for quite a while, what really, you know, excited you about taking this job and then we'll begin on the latest in the portfolio. >> Well, I think, so what's exciting about this market is it's a growth market. HCI is certainly a great solution for a whole swath of customer segments. So we thought, you know, about these HCI solutions from everyone, from our largest enterprise customers all the way down to our smallest SMB customers, and it really fits the bill not only for what you think about a standard HCI, where you're collapsing workloads and you're collapsing infrastructure, but also I think one of the interesting things that we've been able to deliver, especially with products like the HCI is around delivering dHCI experience for three tiers of architecture. And, you know, I think that's really exciting for customers that you know, certainly are moving more towards generalists, away from specialists and, you know, you're going to get really get that HCI experience in addition to a lot of other things we bring to the table here at HPE, that you know, we've talked about before, especially around AI ops and InfoSight and the ability to do a ton of things around predictive analytics. So it's an exciting space and it serves almost our entire customer base. >> Excellent. Now your group you did some announcements, a little bit ahead of Discover, why don't you give us the latest on the news and lay out how the portfolio fits. >> Yeah, so back in May we made some significant announcements on, in the HCI portfolio. So both on HCI SimpliVity as well as our Nimble dHCI offerings. One of the things we brought to market was around VDI specifically and we launched a new platform called the SimpliVity 325 and based on some new technology with our partner AMD are able to, you know, significantly lower the cost and increase the performance for the number of remote users that were, you know, that we're able to support with the platform and also bring together a solution you know, so, you know, what you also partner with folks like Citrix and CTERA and a whole a number of folks so we can have a full vertically oriented solution stack for customers that are doing, you know, they're significantly expanding their footprint around remote workers. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to cut in half, you can say 50% savings on your, you know per remote worker for desktop. So some significant savings there, and we've seen a huge amount of uptick for that platform in the last two months, even since we announced it. And then secondly, on the dHCI side, we made a number of announcements around simplicity, adding that a platform to our GreenLake consumption model, which is really cool, and then adding a whole set of new building blocks on the compute side based on AMD technology that allows, you know, folks to apply different types of compute per workload for our dHCI solution. So we made a pretty, pretty big announcement back in May around our portfolio for HCI solutions and the customers are definitely impacted super positively for both announcements. >> Yeah, it's funny. I remember a few years back, everybody kind of rolled their eyes a little bit. It was like, Oh, you know, VDI talked about it to death. And of course with the global pandemic, now of course remote work so critically important, I've talked to a number of CIOs that have had HCI solutions and it's like, Hey, I need to dramatically increase my services, I need to be able to scale things up and if I didn't have these solutions, I wouldn't be able to react as fast as I need. You said you you've seen an uptick, any particularly anecdotes or, you know, customer stories as to how they've been able to react fast in today's climate. >> Yeah, so especially for knowledge workers that are working remote, I mean, I can tell you that, almost 98 or 99% of my staff and the folks at HPE are working remotely and they're doing a fantastic job. So, you know, when we're able to service, you know, very small customers that are just, you know, embarking on their journey for remote workers to some of the largest corporations out there that our partners and customers of HPE, we've been able to, you know, produce a, you know, a really good outcome for them in addition to, you know, working with our partners, our reseller partners, to put this is another solution building block in their bag of tricks for their customers. >> All right. The other thing, what I want to talk a bit about is, you know, HCI is a managed service, so GreenLake, I've talked to some of your team, it has about a thousand customers HCI, so you know, one of the main options that they're offering there. Why don't you bring us inside a little bit as to, you know, why customers are choosing choosing GreenLake and you know, what that means for your product set? >> So this, from a strategic perspective, HPE, we've stated this publicly is that we want to offer all of our products and solutions as a service from a consumption perspective over the next couple of years. And so, you know, one of those key things that we want to offer from a workload perspective is certainly HCI as a service, so VMs as a service and as well as, you know, higher level type of applications, like VDI as a service. And so one of the announcements that we made was including both of our portfolios, HCI and dHCI in GreenLake so you can, essentially as a customer, you can start off very small and you are paying for the solution in metered increments, and we have lots of flexibility, you can do it at the workload level, you can do it at the CPU consumption level, you can do it at storage consumption level and so that gives a lot of flexibility and that's great for our larger customers that want to move from a CAPEX to an OPEX model. And, but it also really helps a lot of our small and medium sized customers who are, you know, in this environment, they are, you know, one of the top things in their mind is maintaining liquidity and so they can move that to an OPEX model and we actually have some really great offers that we announced with HPE financial services in conjunction with GreenLake on making this a very flexible, very cost effective manner to consume infrastructure and provide solutions for their customers and their end users. >> Excellent. You mentioned before a little bit about AI ops, give us a little bit as to how you see the, really the next generation of HCI taking advantage of, you know, automation intelligence and the like. >> Yes, so you know, as we've a talk on theCUBE before, one of the, I think one of the key solutions that we have and experiences that we bring to our customers in addition to the consumption level is this ability to do AI ops, global learning, predictive analytics for our workloads, for our customers, and essentially really really cut down on the costs in people that it takes to maintain these solutions and then you can, you know, essentially use the global learning and global aspect of, you know, a giant fleet in our entire install base and that gets applied to HCI. So SimpliVity HCI has been plugged into info site for over about a year now. Nimble obviously, Nimble dHCI, it's a core from the product offering and it's the best offering in the market for AI ops. And so our ability to do these things and provide predictive analytics, memory pressure, black listing, and white listing, the install base for problems, being able to reach out to customers before issues happen, noisy neighbors, VM consumption, storage consumption, all these things, you know, really cut down and provide a really awesome support automation experience for customers and essentially have a seamless experience for managing all of our systems. And when you think about HCI 2.O being able to do that, not only on a compressed infrastructure like HCI, but being able to do it on dHCI, which is desegregated hyperconverged so you can scale storage and networking and compute separately and you provide that same HCI experience from a management perspective and the AI ops around it is a game changer for, you know, some of the most, you know, business and mission critical applications that our customers are running. >> Alright. Well, one of the big themes that we're hearing across HPE Discover this year is about it's solutions. Traditionally I think of HCI really as helping collapse and simplify the data center, really that cloud operating model almost in the data center, where do these things connect? How does the edge fit in to this whole discussion? >> Yeah, so one of the beauties of HCI and specifically SimpliVity is our ability to be hyper efficient not only in the just the storage of the data. So, you know, from day one, everything is de-duped, everything is compressed and that's across both your on prem copies, as well as your DR copies, as well as your backup copies. And one of the things that we're seeing is that, sure HCI is great to collapse workloads in the data center and, but what we're seeing now is the ability to go serve as workloads that are running outside of the data center and when we talk about edge, we have some fantastic assets and a lot of customers, you know, running our edge compute solutions, our edge networking solution, specifically wireless and Aruba and what we're able to do is we're bringing those services, so compute, networking, and storage closer to the end user, but outside the data center and so there are some challenges to that like, so how do you federate the management of hundreds, if not thousands of clusters of these workloads running that could be anywhere from, you can think about a small, like a micro data center to a closet to even just, you know, small form factor that could be in a half of a rack and being able to manage those effectively but then also be able to pull the workloads and the data back. So being able to do edge, to core to cloud from a data mobility perspective. It's something that we provide and our customers are certainly deploying our solutions because of that. So a lot of stuff going on in the edge and I think one of the other things too that we see is people are running virtualized workloads, so VMs, and then also starting to incorporate containers. So microservices for, you know, industry specific things like vision and video and, you know, a whole bunch of things that happen around AI and ML at the edge. So it's very exciting place. >> Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, obviously one of the things that we're hearing a lot of interest from the community when it comes to virtualization is, you know, what is happening with that, really application modernization and containerization a big piece of that, of course, VMware with vSphere 7 are really helping to bring Kubernetes together to the virtualization environment. How do you see all of these playing together? You know, being a bare mental virtualization, containers, you know, edge, core, cloud, it's a complicated environment and, you know, the goal of HCI was always to help simplify this but we know IT is a bit messy and additive. >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you know, there are some basic services that customers want to run at the end of the day. They want to be able to deploy a workload on infrastructure that can be managed remotely, that could be managed at scale that provides, resiliency, it provides performance and it provides data mobility and HCI provides all of those capabilities whether it's, you know, through the HPE SimpliVity portfolio or Nimble dHCI and so you have a number of different building blocks that you can build. But on top of that is a set of data services in cloud consumption like experience that allows you to place those workloads on the infrastructure that you need and where you need it. And so if it's running at the edge, this commingling of VMs and containers, you know, we have a pretty unique platform out there, especially for things like AI and ML workloads in our HPE container platform and so you can run that for example, on something like HPE SimpliVity or dHCI, whether that's in the data center or whether you're running that on the edge and being able to service those customers, that's not an all or nothing proposition. At this point, you know, a number of our customers are running workloads that are virtualized and that are side by side to provide essentially good to customers, their customers at the end of the day. >> Excellent. Patrick, I'll give you the final word, takeaways if you want, that your customers want to have from HPE Discovery's week. >> Yeah, HPE Discover Virtual Experience has been great and you know, I think everyone participating in this, you know, we'd love to provide you as (mumble) as possible. There are a number of announcements around HCI, both our HCI platform was SimpliVity, to dHCI, we made some really great announcements recently around our primary storage and then we're going to continue at HPE Discover around some of our cloud data services. So when you think about someone who's going to provide, you know, you're going to partner with, from a costumer perspective on your most valuable workloads, whether it's workloads that exist today, or workloads that are fuel your digital transformation, HPE really is a partner that's providing, you know the infrastructure, the workloads and the cloud like experience both from a management perspective as well as from a consumption perspective that's going to service as these workloads from edge to core to cloud. So we're pretty excited about HPE discover now. >> Excellent. Thanks so much, Patrick and we'll be right back with lots more coverage from HPE Discover, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.