Ok, we're back with the Cube'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 or Chris Schin, the founder of Cloud Physics and a senior director of
HPE Cloud Physics and Sandeep Singh who's the Vice President of Storage
Marketing Agents. 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 fast for a line of businesses
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 state, especially with
HPE GreenLake extra cloud platform and we're doing that with empowering
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 our customers asking about in terms of how to optimize those
workloads and when you think about what customers are purchasing
infrastructure to support their app workloads, today, it's still in the dark
ages. They're operating on heuristics or 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-Prem or in the public cloud and or what's that 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 tribal knowledge. Well Kenny would know
how to do that but Kenny doesn't work here anymore. So you've announced Cloud
Physics, tell us more about what that is, what impact it's going to have for
customers. Sure. So just as Sandeep said basically what 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, looking at new technologies, 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 inadequately
equipped partner. Cloud Physics 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 candy that they really
need some help and it's got to be repeatable. It's got to be consistent
so how our partners reacting to this? Very very strongly, over the course of
the four or five years that Cloud Physics has been doing
this in the 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 Cloud Physics to help speed up and speed up the sales process but also
create better and more satisfied customers. You guys made good? Well I
was just going to chime into that when you think about partners with HPE Cloud
Physics 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
customers environment. So now they can really have a tailored conversation as
well as offer tailored solutions designed specifically for the areas
where help is needed. Well, I think it, it builds an affinity with the customer
as well because if the partners is a trusted advisor, if you give a customer
some advice and it's kind of the wrong advice. Hey, we gotta go back and re
configure that workload. We won't charge that much for it, you're paying
twice like when account makes a mistake on your tax return, you've got to pay for
that again. But so you guys acquired Cloud Physics in February of this year.
What can you tell us about what's transpired since then? How many, you
know, engagements you've done, what kind of metrics can you share? Yeah,
Chris, do you want to wade in with that? Sure,
sure. The start of it really has been to create
a bunch of customized analytics on the Cloud Physics 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 Electro Series 6000, 9000 in tandem with that Cloud Physics 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 of that, how much
firepower they would need from one or the other of those solutions. Similarly,
we have a bunch of 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 helps 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, you know, we save whatever 10% versus what the way we
used to do it or more or less, I mean just even gut feel metrics. So I'll
start that one Dave, so there's sort of 2 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 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,
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 Cloud Physics brings along over 200 metrics across
the spectrum of virtual machines and guest OS's as well as the overall
CPU and RAM utilization overall infrastructure analysis and built in
cloud simulators. So net net, what customers were 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, see they're able to just right up to
right size, the underlying infrastructure across the board.
Chris, I was gonna 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? Cloud Physics is earlier in the talk track with the customer.
It's, 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 problems. 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 I've said and we've said on the
Cube is that the cloud, the definition of cloud is changing. It's expanding,
it's not just public cloud anymore, some remote set of services.
It's coming On-Prem there's a hybrid connection, we're going across clouds
are going out to the Edge, so can Cloud Physics help with that complexity?
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 of 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 GreenLake Solution when contrasted with some of those
other clouds, that scenario. So really work to give a lot of... It's not static at all.
And David, you were mentioning earlier in terms of just proven
Cloud physics now has operated on trillions of data points over millions
of virtual machines with, 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. There's benchmarks,
but it's more than that. Benchmarks tend to be static. Okay, we can do rule
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 will evolve. Absolutely.
And the partners who have, who work with their customers on a regular basis
over cloud physics 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 of lost popularity, how other
ones have gained and they really can become a much better solution provider
to that customer. The longer club gives your partner is a competitive advantage,
it's much like sticking to your model because the customer's gonna 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 gonna go back to the partner that set us up and they keep
getting better and better and better each time we 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 operational
experience for data and for customers that experience starts with a cloud
consult where they can essentially discover services consumed services,
that overall operational and support experience is transformed with HPE
InfoSight and now we're transforming this experience where there yeah, the
any organization out there that's looking to get data driven insights
into what should they do next, where should the 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 Cloud Physics bringing these data driven insights for smarter IT
decision making. I like this a lot because a lot of cloud is trial and
error and when you, 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. Helping them apply technology to solve your business problems.
Guys, thanks so much for coming to the Cube, 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 were
seeing HPE on a regular basis, push out new innovations.
Keep it right there for more.
It's up to you.