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[Michelle] I'm being joined by JB and I wanted to talk to you a little
bit about what the HPE solution is for Azure stack.
[James] So this focus on Azure stack it's based on the HPEProLiant DL380 server and
what we typically do is install factory install up to anywhere from four to
sixteen servers in one cabinet and we call that an appliance so and
essentially we ship that to the customer and install it into your data center to
form a private cloud. So on top of that software is the Azure Stack
software so that's from Microsoft in where the leading OEM in North America.
So again we do factory integration we do have to do on the
customer we do install it there and then we have the support contract for up to
three years.
[Michelle] Okay so it's an integrated system. I know I talked with a lot of
customers and they're wanting to just download run Azure Stack on whatever
server they may have in them in in their closets. Yeah you're not able to do that?
[James] Yeah yeah so there is a developer kit for Azure Stack where the customer could
download that and install it for just testing purposes it wouldn't have any
redundancy and it wouldn't be useful for production purposes so for a production
solution it would be a minimum of four servers and then that's that rack and
include up to 16 servers. [Michelle] Okay so a turnkey integrated solution?
[James] Yeah, turnkey. We install the whole thing. You know it's a little tricky to install
right now and therefore Microsoft and HPE you want to make sure that we have a
successful deployment so that's why we do the factory installation and the
on-site deployment to make sure it works. [Michelle] So we recently launched the Gen 10 solution
so HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack Gen 10 it's a mouthful.
Can you talk a little bit about what makes the Gen 10 solution unique and
different from Gen 9?
[James] Yeah sure so the Gen 10 is our net latest generation of
the HPE ProLiant line even though that shipped last year we just now certified
it with Microsoft so that it's now available for Azure Stack. Roughly, we
double the memory footprint we double the amount of storage and CPU so the big
takeaway here is that it's roughly a little bit more than double the size per
server that we had in our Gen 9 solution so we can basically fit more workloads
in one cabinet now. [Michelle] And what about security?
[James] So yeah so a couple new features in our gen 10 that is now available for Azure stack one is
most popular is that we call Silicon Root of Trust. So essentially what we're
doing now is during boot up and that as we run the operations the server can
constantly monitor to make sure it has not had a attempt to hack the server
either remotely or inside the data center.They can literally go in there [the data center]
and people can hack it. So it actually considerably continuously monitors that
ensures it hasn't been hacked and if it does sense anything's wrong and to
literally go back and automatically revert back to a previous firmware if it
detects something's wrong.
[Michelle] okay and that's unique HPE ?
[James] That's very unique to HPE.
[Michelle] Great. Last question for you is around use cases. So in my previous
segment we talked about use cases a little bit kind of the traditional ones
but as in your role chief technologists you talk with customers all the time so
what are you seeing as unique use cases? [James] Yeah so our common use case for Azure
Stack - and I use the words 'Azure Stack' as it's a private cloud instance of
Azure public so it's on your data center well I was talking to customers today
and they're they're from Canada but they're in the oil in energy business so
they have a lot of fracking stations and are deployed out in middle of deserts.
They've got only oil drilling rigs and mining situations so they want to
basically take Azure Stack and do real-time analytics of the data on-site
it's so much data that they couldn't pipe it to the cloud and process it and
bring it back down so they have to process it on-site in real-time and then
they use the public cloud as the transmission of the answers but that
real-time data is a really good case and we call it an 'edge' or 'connected item' at
the very edge of the cloud here in their case, which would be at an oil rig in
their case.
[Michelle] Okay great well thank you for joining me today I appreciate your time
and we'll be talking soon okay thank you