>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas,
it's The Cube covering HPE Discover 2017
brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
>> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas,
this is the Cube special presentation of
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, HPE Discover 2017.
I'm John Furrier with The Cube,
my co-host Dave Vellante for the next three days
with wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas.
Our next guess is Tom Lattin,
Vice President and General Manager of
HPE Server Options which is all the good stuff that
wrap around the servers.
And certainly the big news here at HP is the
Gen10, the continuation of the,
the generation of servers which is all the rage these days.
People are talkin' about servers,
are we buying more or buying less?
Still a lot of private cloud going on.
Nothing really changing in the premise world.
Welcome to The Cube.
>> Thank you, good to be here.
>> Alright, so what's the big news?
I mean, to me the, the thing that I've always been watching
is the Gen8 stuff, Gen10 now is the
new announcement platform for servers.
>> Certainly.
>> A lot of stuff happening around,
a lot of innovations.
Give us a quick update on the key things happening around
Gen10 and the options.
>> Well certainly with Gen10,
we've got a whole new level of security
that is a big part of the Gen10 story.
And with the server options in the
memory SEP system and the storage SEP system
and the networking SEP system, all of those technologies
contribute to building up those
layers of security in Gen10.
So that's a key part of
what we're doing this week at discover.
The second thing in the options space,
the server options space, is persistent memory.
So we introduced persistent memory on
Gen9 servers last year with the MB DIMM,
an eight gigabyte MB DIMM.
We're extending that portfolio this year
with the Gen10 servers
and increasing the MB DIMM capacity to 16 gigabytes.
But the really big news in the persistent memory offering
is scalable persistent memory.
>> I just saw a great article on the CRN,
Computer Reseller News or CRN,
really giving you guys some props on this.
"Persistent memory combines the performance of D RAM
with the persistent of traditional SSDs or spinning disk.
So, essentially a huge performance gain, and,
which is always good, HP has that,
always has some good mojo when it comes to, you know,
high quality products and performance.
But talk about the impact
because one of things that's going on right now is
storage has to be invisible
but applications now have, going beyond virtual machines.
You've got containers, you've got all kinds of
cloud things happening with the apps.
So the data, the state of the data,
the performance of the data is really critical to customers.
What's the impact of this to that trend?
>> This is, persistent memory unleashes an
incredible amount of performance for the server,
for the application running on the server.
At it's most fundamental level,
persistent memory and MB DIMM
or a scalable persistent memory implementation
can replace a layer of flash storage.
And we're seein' performance benefits
on the order of doubling the performance of the application
just by swapping out an SSD for
persistent memory or an MB DIMM.
When the applications, when the architects actually
modify the applications to take advantage of the fact that
there's a persistent memory layer in there,
we see performance benefits as small as
four times improvement,
but in many cases we're seeing 20, 25, 27x
performance improvements because the architects of the
applications now can dive right into the
memory sub-system without going through
layers and layers of code
and moving data around to get to storage.
>> Love, love the options comps that you guys are running
because I think one of the things that we here is, you know,
flexibility is key and it's kind like goin' to the store
and, like, getting some accessories for your suit.
Not one size fits all, you need to have a lot of options
given the environment.
So I got to ask you the competitive question.
How do you guys compare vis-a-vis the competition
with the persistent memory stuff, for instance?
You mentioned the performance,
how does that compare with some of your competitors?
>> I think persistent memory is a good example of where we're
way out ahead of where our competition is right now.
It's, you can't just drop in a
piece of hardware in the server and get
all of the benefit out of it.
You've got to be able to integrate that piece of hardware
with the system software, the bios in the system,
and then work with software application partners especially
to go modify, or to optimize their applications
to work best with that component that you put in there.
>> And you guys do that?
>> We do that extensively.
>> Not the customer, the customer just, what?
Just installs it? >> The customer gets it.
It just works.
>> So, what's the typical sort of anatomy of a life cycle
of a server these days?
And, and, I mean, it used to be, in the old days
it was called peripherals and peripherals made up
probably 60 to 70% of the market
so it was very huge, you know, quite a huge opportunity.
So how does it work from a customer standpoint?
Does, do they, what's their starting point?
How do they plan this out?
Or is it more reactive?
I wonder if you could sort of
bring us up to date on that dynamic, Tom.
>> I think that's, part of what we bring to the market is
a set of server platforms that have an incredible
breadth of capability and that breadth comes from
the configuration choices that customer can make
through the server options portfolios.
So, generally, they're, a customer will standardize
on a few different platform types
and then deploy those servers for a
variety of different workloads.
And so it's through those configuration choices,
storage capacity, memory capacity,
the performance of different layers
in the memory and storage hierarchy that
allow them to be able to fine-tune a small set of servers,
really, for a much broader set of workloads.
>> So we've commented for a number of years now
on The Cube that the pendulum is swinging.
Storage is, and servers are coming,
and computer coming closer together.
>> Absolutely.
>> You certainly saw that with Flash and PCIe.
Sort of, those trends brought storage and compute together
and now you're accelerating that even further
with, with persistent memory.
>> Tom: Yes.
>> So, as that happens, one of the big challenges is
data sharing, right?
Now you hear things like, you know, NVMe over Fabric
and other technologies to, to link these capabilities,
these nodes if you will.
What's, I mean it sounds like The Machine, so.
>> Tom: Exactly.
>> What's happening there and help us sort of
squint through those two big trends.
>> Yeah, I think that as we evolve architectures
to focus on the data and recognize that the data
really is where the value resides,
we're moving from a world where, first of all,
sharing the data on storage makes a lot of sense
to enable that.
If you look at some of the
demonstrations that we've done recently with the
machine and with memory driven computing,
it's about taking that shared presence of the data
or shared instance of the data
to an entirely new level where the processors,
processing capability can get directly at it
and operate it and work on that really as a
shared body of information, shared body of knowledge.
So yes, started in the storage sub-system
but absolutely where we're headed is
a memory-driven computing world where it's
in the memory sub-systems.
>> And that is The Machine, but,
and which is a, you know, big R&D project
that's kind of comin' out of HP Labs,
and, you know, Martin Fink showing it off a couple years ago
and giving us the roadmap, but now we're seein' it
sort of evolve.
But as well, I would think your ecosystem
can kind of build it's own pseudo-machine, you know?
With compute power and all this persistent memory
and you know, architecting, I mean,
do you see those as two separate vectors that,
you know, let's see what happens in the channel?
Or, or do you see those two worlds coming together?
>> Fundamentally, we are a partnering business, right?
We work extensively with the ecosystem of
software providers, partners in the industry.
So what we're demonstrating with The Machine,
necessarily we've done a lot of those parts ourselves
to show the capability.
But absolutely this memory-centric computing vision
and that we're beginning to realize
with some of the products that we're releasing today,
persistent memory is a great example of that,
is all about enabling the industry,
the ecosystem in the industry
to bring that value for, ultimately for
all of our customers.
>> And has heading up the sort of options business,
if you will, how do you, one of the things
we've talked about a lot is this notion of
true private cloud which is substantially mimicking
public cloud on PRIM because the world is hybrid
as we all sort of point out.
How do you create that experience for customers?
That, that cloud-like experience?
>> I think it, well with the simplicity
and the agility of what we're doing with the
HPE compute experience now is very focused on
creating that cloud-like experience
in a hybrid cloud world, right?
On premises for example.
And so that's, a lot of that is about being able to
scale up and down the computing capability,
to incorporate new financial models
so that you can buy compute, rent compute at your, kind of,
depending on what your strategic corporate objectives are.
So the options themselves then give you that ability to,
for example, scalable persistent memory
uses the base system in the server
and one day you may say, "Hey, I need to use a
"portion of that as persistent
"because of the workload that I'm running."
And then later that night,
that same system could translate over to run a
completely different workload
and change the profile of the persistent memory
that's being used because it's a configuration setting
of the base system memory.
So making the system itself very flexible to adapt to the
changing needs of workloads,
either overtime or very realtime like that
in the course of a day.
>> Tom I want to get your thoughts on
the trends that we're covering,
and certainly the industry's covering.
So you have an industry scope and you have,
obviously, partners which are going to be critical
in getting things certified and or working
so the customer just plugs, plugs stuff in, like the memory.
>> Tom: Yes.
>> Obviously the market place says, well,
"Oh server ships are down,"
but the cloud's happening, servers are actually growing
no matter how you look at.
But there's more realtime stuff goin' on.
There's more processing happening.
How do you guys look at the marketplace trends
because there is more need, at The Edge for instance,
we had Bill Philbin on just earlier before you came on
talkin' about how storage and compute are comin' together.
This is kind of the, the options world you're in.
You're in the middle of all this action
so people actually cobbling together
and composing solutions, whether it's on PRIM
or working with similar architectures in the cloud,
same code bases moving back and forth.
So this whole world is really not declining.
Maybe shifting how it was before,
that transformation you're in the middle of,
how do you guys look at that
and how you do talk to the customers who are like,
"I was buying servers and options before,
"I still got to do that but I got to
"transform and be prepared for realtime analytics,
"using multiple clouds, all these kinds of,
"these, these important items for the future"?
>> Yeah, it's a bit of an architectural revolution
if you will, right?
As we move to a memory-centric computing world,
as we move to a world where everything is cloud-based,
cloud architecture-based,
whether it's out in a public cloud somewhere
or on an on-prep as kind of hybrid IT model,
it really is a completely different architectural model.
And so to capitalize on that,
what we work with customers on is things like the
composable capability of synergy.
Things like persistent memory and making that scalable
to move to a memory-driven computing model.
Things like our all-Flash array business
and our product offerings to be able to
accelerate that storage sub-system
well beyond what's been done before.
>> It's performance driven too, you got to eek out performance
more and more. >> Yes.
That's kind of the mandate.
Another interesting thing I wanted to get your thoughts on,
and, you know, I'm old in the industry these days
relative to the average age of most people
in the big the big companies,
like hyper-scalers are like 28 to 30-something.
The trend is systems.
I mean, you're seeing, if you look at what the
cloud ' doing in the revolution at the architectural level,
it's almost a complete crossover to a systems mindset.
Systems meaning operating systems or,
you know, core systems.
So a lot of the people that are really doing well
in the industry, who are radically transforming it,
are older guys.
James Gosling was at, just joined Amazon Web Services.
You got guys who are in their 50s
who are leading major architectural shifts.
This kind of puts HP in an interesting position
because you guys have so much experience
with systems, servers, you know, just on an isolated basis.
But now, as that looks out over the landscape,
it's even more important to
look at it from a holistic perspective.
Your thoughts on this trend?
>> Well absolutely, it's a huge trend
and by taking the expertise that we've got
at a systems level and coupling that with our
strategic imperative to partner with
other industry leaders in the industry revolution,
I think those two together position
not just HPE well, but the ecosystem of HPE
and our software industry partners
to really help advance that, that architectural--
>> I was talking to James Governor last
who's the, with Red Monk and one of the
research firms we like and I said to him,
"It's open bar and open source,"
was my kind of headline story I was tryin',
we were collaborating on and what I mean by that is that,
you know, as open source evolves,
we saw some of the stuff goin' on with
The Machine in mem-store,
a lot of that stuffs going to be open source
at the core at the system level.
So open source is growing, but when I say open bar,
it's like there is more goodness being contributed to
open source than ever before.
You're seeing great machine learning libraries being,
you know, given in to collaboration.
You're seeing open source being a
great recruiting environment.
So if you're a young gun in the marketplace right now,
you're getting all this contribution
so with that kind of as a context,
what's the open source strategy that you see?
'Cause you're in kind of a glue layer with options.
You're kind of creating some flexibility for customers.
At the same time, you've got a glue kind of concept
goin' on with software.
What do you guys do with open source?
Is there a trend there that you'd like to share?
I mean, I'm interested to know what your position is
vis-a-vis contribution programs and whatnot.
>> Yeah, I think, certainly at the hardware layers, right,
of what we're doing with server options,
it's about enabling new capabilities.
And so we work with quite a few open source partners
to enable those.
So say, for example, Red Hat, they're taking our
persistent memory offerings and optimizing those
so that they get, certainly the immediate benefit of
a layer of high-performance storage
but the more radical performance improvements
that they can get when they address directly
a layer of persistent memory.
So it's not so much that we're creating a whole new,
at least in the option space,
kind of a whole new open source plane.
>> But you're intersecting. >> Absolutely.
>> I mean, one other thing is networking is hot right now.
Certainly, SDM we see that.
A lot of the open source projects,
and even in Linux foundation you're seeing
the network stack just kind of being,
kind of decomposed.
So a very interesting opportunity.
>> Yes.
>> Well, and the same thing with storage, right?
And you mentioned Flash a couple of times right?
You're seeing the whole storage stack
just completely morphing and changing.
>> Tom: Yeah.
>> So you guys are in the center of that,
how does a customer engage?
Does it happen typically through the channel,
do they go to hpe.com, how does that happen?
>> For server option kind of products, yeah, certainly.
Through our direct sales force,
through our partners' sales forces,
'cause, as we said, it's an ecosystem that
brings us value forward.
So in many cases, it's not us in,
even in explaining something like persistent memory.
It's Microsoft or it's Red Hat or it's SUSE,
or partners there, VMware.
We've got a, actually a lot of presence with VMware
and some interesting things they're going to be talking about
in one of our sessions here later today at Discover.
So that's one path.
Or two paths.
Our sales force, their sales force
and then, absolutely, the channel.
We've got a very rich channel program
and a lot of engagement with them
to bring them up on networking technologies,
storage technologies, memory,
persistent memory technologies so that they can--
>> John: So it's ecosystem is really the key.
>> They can effectively engage customers, yeah.
>> Alright, Tom Lattin is the Vice President
and General Manager at HP Server Options.
My final question for you to end the segment here is
what should customers know about Gen10 and server options
if you had a chance to look right into the camera and say,
"Hey, new game in town," or,
"Think differently around architecture,"
what would be, what would be your words?
In your words, what should customers know about the
world you're building?
>> Certainly with Gen10, the server options portfolio
unleashes or helps support the overall security capabilities
of Gen10, number one.
But if I can have a second one.
>> John: Of course.
>> I've got to play persistent memory high
because we've got a terabyte-scale
persistent memory capability in the Gen10 platforms
which is, opens up a whole new world of opportunity for
applications, as I said, early on to
develop or increase performance, in many cases,
20, 25, 27 times the capabilities today.
>> That's awesome, I mean I think the memories awesome.
Dave and I have been talkin' for years that
memory used to be the resource that was constrained
and unlimited storage, now it's the other way around,
people want memory, application developers and programmers.
This is The Cube bringing you great content you can
put to memory, Flash memory.
HPE Discover, I'm John Fullier with Dave Vellante,
we'll be back with more live coverage after this
short break.