Okay, we're back!
You're watching theCUBE’s continuous coverage of HPE’s GreenLake announcement.
One of the things that we said on theCUBE, when we first saw GreenLake,
was let's watch the pace at which HPE delivers new services.
What's that cadence like, because that's a real signal as to the extent
that the company is leading in the cloud.
Today, we're covering that continued expansion.
We're here with Tom Black, who is the General Manager of HPE Storage
and Omer Asad who is the Storage Platform Lead for Cloud Data Services
at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome.
- It's good to see you. - Thanks, Dave.
Thanks for having us today. Good to see you.
Happy to be here, Dave.
So, I mean, obviously, a lot has changed globally, but when you think of things
like cyber threats, ransomware,
the acceleration of business transformation--these are new things.
A lot of it is unknown. A lot of it was forced upon us, Tom.
What are you guys doing to address these trends?
How are you helping customers?
Sure, thanks for the question.
So, if you think back to what we launched, in early May,
kind of the initial cloud transformation
of what was our traditional storage business,
we really focused on one key theme, very customer driven theme, that,
the cloud operational model has won.
Customers want that operational model,
whether they're operating their workload in the cloud,
or whether they're operating that workload in their own facility,
or in a co-lo; kind of, the same thing.
That was kind of our true north and that's what we launched out of the gate in May.
But we did allude in May to the fact that we would have an ongoing series
of new services coming out on the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform,
and just really excited today
to be talking about what that expansion looks like.
We will continue through this month and through the quarters ahead
to really add more and more services in that vein of focusing on
bringing that true cloud services model to our customer.
So, we're really excited today to unveil kind of--
we've entered the data protection as-a-Service market with HPE GreenLake.
This is really our expansion into a very top of mind topic
and set of problems and solutions, or headaches and aspirins,
to quote an old friend, that CIOs face as they think about
how to manage data through its lifecycle in their organization.
When I talked to CIOs during the pandemic, not that we're out yet,
but really in the throes of it and asked them about things like business resilience,
they said, “We really had to rethink our disaster recovery strategy.
It was sort of geared toward a fire or a hurricane
and we just didn't even imagine this type of disaster, if you will.
So, we really needed to rethink it.”
So when I see your disaster recovery as a service and capabilities like that,
is that the Zerto acquisition?
Yes, Dave, thanks.
Yeah, so we're super happy to have the Zerto team, now, as part of our family,
just a brilliant team of well respected technology,
it's kind of a blue chip set of customers and partners that really appreciate
what Zerto has to offer.
As we looked at the data protection as a service market,
one of the hardest problems is really in that disaster recovery space.
I think Omer is going to talk a little bit more about that today.
But Zerto really does bring the leading industry
what's called Continuous Data Protection capability into our GreenLake platform.
We've just recently closed the acquisition.
We're working on kind of the integration plan as we speak now
that we can actually talk to each other post close.
But you'll continue to see some really exciting milestones each and every quarter
as we march forward with Zerto, now, as part of the family.
We all talk about how data is so important.
We certainly learned, during the pandemic,
that if you weren't a digital business,
you were out of business, and a digital business is a data business.
So, things like backup or data protection as a service become increasingly critical.
I know you have some capabilities there; maybe you could share with us.
Absolutely, Dave!
So, one of the things that we noticed was, as we took the storage business
through its transformation, and we started to convert with the launch
of the Alletra 9000 and the 6000 platform,
we really, really brought the cloud operational model to our customers.
So, one of the feedback that was coming loud and clear to us is
that as we look at the storage portfolio-- where we look at file, block,
and object which are now being transformed into a cloud operational experience,
data protection, disaster recovery, coming back into business after a disaster,
snapshot management, all of those capabilities--
we still had to rely on our partner technologies in order to do that.
Now, it's not bad that we have great partners in the data protection world,
but what we really focused on is that cloud operational model
and cloud operational experience end-to-end, as Tom mentioned,
through the data management lifecycle.
So as a result of that, we talked to a lot of our customers,
we talked to a bunch of partners, and one of the things
that was coming back was that,
yes, there are many data protection backup offerings on the market
but that true as-a-Service experience,
that is completely integrated to the services experience of the storage
that the customers is experiencing, that is not there.
So, what we looked at was, especially to the largest ecosystem,
which is the VMware ecosystem.
So, we are launching Data Protection as-a-Service or Backup as-a-Service
for our VMware customers offered from Data Services Cloud Console as a SaaS portal.
100% SaaS Service, nothing to install, no media servers,
no application servers, no catalog servers, no backup targets,
no patching, no expansion, no capacity planning; none of that is needed.
All that's needed is sign-on, click, give your vCenter credentials, and off you go.
That's it! That is it.
Three clicks and you’re in business.
So, currently, in our analysis, we offer 5x faster recovery
from any of the competitive offerings that are there.
Three-and-a-half better dedupe ratio.
But for our customers, it is as simple as, this VM is protected
as this many dollars per gig per month.
That's it! No backup target, no media server, no catalog server, nothing;
nothing to manage, total turnkey off of the portal.
So, that's the cadence of services that we promise and this is one of the first ones
when it comes to data management that is coming out into the open.
You may have just answered this question, but I want to pose it and get you,
maybe, to summarize it, because Tom was talking earlier about the customer mandate
for cloud in a cloud operational model.
So, I want you to explain to the audience how you're making that real?
Actually, can I start that one?
Yeah, yeah! Sure. Absolutely!
The test was Monday morning, getting ready for this chat with you, Dave,
they got me on console.
And I'm not kidding, three clicks, I got backup up and running off
the lab VMware instance. So I'll pass it off to you for the real answer,
but if I can do in three clicks, we’re in pretty good shape.
As a convenience of this service, even Tom can do your backup.
I might be able to deal with this.
So, again, a very important question, Dave.
When you look at the cloud operational model, as you abstract the hardware
and take the management model up into a SaaS service,
it gives our customers access to that continuous delivery access that we have.
We're going to continue to make the service model better in the cloud model,
and automatically, customers get the value of it without even reinstalling
or going through a patch cycle or an upgrade cycle.
But as we get into this cloud operational model,
one of the things that was missing was, if you start to talk about applications,
how are application workloads going to be deployed,
how are they going to be protected, and how are they going to be expanded?
So, what we did was, we expanded our InfoSight offerings by merging them
into the Data Services Cloud Console,
and we're releasing a new service called App Insights.
It is going to be available to our customers at the end of the month.
It is--nothing has to change.
They don't have to install any sort of agents
or host modifications; nothing like that.
If they're customers of Alletra, Nimble, Primera boxes
and they're using InfoSight and Data Services Cloud Console,
they will automatically get App Insights.
What App Insights does is it really teases apart all that data
that we have been collecting with InfoSight, and now with the acquisition
of HPE Cloud Physics, we're merging them together
and re-layering the operational stack top to bottom.
So, discovering all the way from your application usage, network usage,
storage usage, IOP usage, VMware usage, cross collaborating them,
and presenting that to a customer from an app or an outcome perspective,
all in the Data Services Cloud Console.
So, what this does for our customers is, it really, really transforms not only
their operational experience, but also buying experience.
Because if you remember,
in one of the earlier releases of Data Services Cloud Console,
we released this application called Intelligent Intent Based Provisioning,
in which you just describe your workload and we go ahead and we provision that.
App Insights and InfoSight feed that information directly into that,
and Cloud Physics generates end results and displays those analytics back to us,
to your partner of record, and to HPE, so we can all come together
on a common data-driven discussion point with our customers
to continue to make their journey better.
Tom, where's all the boxes?
Traditional storage is changing.
I've actually been waiting for this day for a long, long time.
We've certainly seen glimpses of it from the cloud players,
but they don't have super rich portfolio, storage portfolios.
They're growing now, but this is a really good strong example of a company
with a large storage portfolio that's--
I mean, I haven't heard the word 3PAR once today.
And so, that says to me, that's an indication that you're thinking
like a cloud player, can you maybe talk to that?
Sure, yeah.
We were just tremendously excited about this transformation
and really the reception we've got in the market from analysts,
from partners, from customers,
because you're right, you haven't heard us talk about a box at all today.
It's really about a block service, a file service, an object service,
a backup and recovery service, disaster recovery service.
That is the language, if you will, the business problems of our customers,
not, do they need to pick this widget or that widget
and how many apps can I get here and there
and what should the HA Cage Protection Scheme be?
That is our job to manage underneath our true north,
which is the cloud operational model.
So, that's going to be really how we've set our course
and how we will deliver products, solutions, offers into the market
underneath that umbrella, ultimately, getting our customers
wherever their data is, Dave, to be able to interact at that service level
instead of at that infrastructure box level.
Alright, you’ve got my attention.
Wherever the data-- so that's the North Star here--
this is--you're not done today, obviously--but you've got a vision
to bring that to the cloud, across clouds, on-prem, out to the edge,
that's the abstraction layer that you're going to build.
You're hiding all that complexity--
That's correct!
and that's cloud.
The definition of cloud is changing.
- Yeah, it’s -- - It's no longer, sorry,
it's no longer a remote set of services somewhere up in the cloud.
It's expanding on-prem, hybrid, across clouds, edge, everywhere.
You're exactly right Dave.
Cloud is more about the experience and the outcome it gives the customer
than actually where the compute or storage is.
We've chosen to take a very customer and agnostic position of
whether it's data in your premise, data in your cloud,
we're going to help you manage that data,
and deliver that data to workloads and analytics
wherever the compute needs to be, wherever the data needs to be.
Again, technologies like Zerto, giving us the ability to move data across clouds,
from facilities to clouds, back and forth.
So, it's a really exciting new day for HPE GreenLake.
We're just so super happy to bring these technologies out
and really continue to follow on the course of doing what we said we would do.
It's a new mindset.
It starts there, I guess.
It's obviously new-- certainly new technologies.
You're talking about Machine Intelligence.
This is a metadata challenge--
Absolutely!
big time, long term, that North Star that we talked about--
and applying that Machine Intelligence, all the experience that you’ve got
like data that you're gathering is,
I think, ultimately how customers want you to solve this problem?
In the in the middle of InfoSight, Data Services Cloud Console,
and the instrumentation that is already shipping on our appliances,
both in edge appliances and the data center appliances.
We're collecting more than a trillion data points
over the period of a quarter at the end of the day.
So, it's harnessing that at the back-end to cross relate
and then using the Cloud Physics acquisition.
What we're doing is, we can now simulate these things
on behalf of our customers into the future timeline.
So, at the end of the day, it's really about listening to the customer
and what outcomes that they want to achieve with their data.
Storage is there.
We provide excellent persistence layers
where customers can store their data safely, but at the end of the day,
it's customer's choice.
They can store their data out of the edge in compute servers,
commodity servers, x86 servers.
They can have their data in the data center, which they have privately owned,
or their data can be in a service provider, or it can be in a Hyperscale.
The infrastructure or the persistence layer is independent
from the Data Services Cloud Console.
Data Services Cloud Console provides our customers with a SaaS-based industry
leading, metadata-rich management experience,
which then allows you to draw conclusions.
So, services like Cloud Physics, services like InfoSight, provide the analytics
and richness of the metadata. Backup and recovery service allows us
to index our customers’ data and add a rich metadata to that,
and then combine that with Zerto, which is our Disaster Recovery
as-a-Service offering [that we're] going to start over here,
that gives the customer a very simple slider as to where they want
their protection levels to be.
They want their protection to be instant
or they want their protection to be lazy, eight-hours window.
But the thing is, at the end of the day,
it's about choice. Without managing the complexities--
- Which is key. - of the hardware underneath.
Because it’s programmable.
Completely!
I come in--what I'm hearing is file object blocks are your multiprotocol,
I’ve got a full stack, so data reduction,
my snaps, my replicate, whatever I need, it's in there as-a-Service.
I can access latency-sensitive storage if I need to--
- Absolutely! - or I can push it out to cheaper storage.
I could push it out to the cloud, presumably.
I air gap it, and it's all done as infrastructure as code
and then different protection levels.
Where I see this going, it really gets exciting is, you're now a data company,
and you're bringing AI, machine intelligence,
and driving data products, data services for your customers
who are going to monetize that at their end of the value chain.
That's right, safely and securely, keeping in mind that with Zerto’s technology,
we can give you small-second recovery points to protect against ransomware.
So, all of that operational elegance, all those insights and intelligence
to help you build a more agile
workload-centric organization,
but then to do it safely and securely against ransomware.
That's kind of the storm, if you will, that's brewing,
and we're just really excited to be at the eye of it.
I'm excited too.
I've been waiting for this day for a long time
and we're not talking about NVMe and atomic rights.
I love that stuff, by the way.
I'm sure it's all under the covers,
but that's not what drives business value.
Guys, thanks so much for coming on TheCUBE.
- Hey, Dave, thanks for having us. - It's been great to be here.
- Thank you Dave, appreciate it. - All right, we’re seeing...
the transformation all through the stack and keep it right there.
This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE
in our coverage of HPE’s GreenLake announcements.
We'll be right back.