>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office
in Boston Massachusetts, it's the theCUBE.
Now here's your host, Dave Velllante
(electronic music)
>> Hi everybody.
Welcome to the special CUBE conversation
sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
This is part of our partner series.
You know the partner business has changed
quite dramatically over the years.
It used to be you could make a lot of money
pushing hardware and get some pretty good margins there.
But increasingly,
partners are becoming system integrators.
They're becoming much more specialized
in helping organizations transform,
supporting their digital transformations,
their infrastructure modernization, moving to the cloud,
hybrid cloud, security.
It really runs the gamut.
And here to talk to me about that is Tim Ferris,
who's a solutions architect at GreenPages.
Tim, good to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
>> Great to be here.
Thank you.
>> So tell me a little bit about GreenPages.
It's kind of a cool name.
Where did that come from?
And what are you guys all about?
>> Oh God, I'm going to be killed
for not knowing the history here.
But, I think back in the old days,
we used to hand out a neon green catalog.
So we couldn't, back when we were doing cold calls,
you'd probably get a lot of okay, we shipped you a catalog.
Did you get that?
Oh, I'm not quite sure.
It may be buried under there.
Neon green catalog, you could not lose.
(laughs)
I think we do our invoices on neon green paper now.
>> That's good, green, the color of money.
So tell us about your role as a solutions architect.
What does that entail?
And what's your background?
>> Sure.
So I'm a solutions architect.
We have a number of different solutions architects
at GreenPages who have a number of different specialties.
My specialty is storage, disaster recovery
and data management and protection and DR automation.
And that's where it computes hyperconvergence,
infrastructure and hybrid cloud.
So specialization, a little bit wide,
but we have other architects who are very deep
in networking and hybrid cloud networking
and that sort of thing as well.
>> So let's get into some of that.
Looking at your website, you guys are into everything.
You've got software defined.
You got cloud.
You got security.
You got DevOps and really runs the gamut.
Well sometimes in this industry,
we suffer from acronym soup.
The reality is that things are changing quite dramatically.
I mean it used to be you'd build an infrastructure
to support a single application.
You'd harden that infrastructure and that was it.
It became a silo and people don't want that anymore.
They want their data to be shared.
They want it out of the silos, but at the same time
it has to be protected.
So what are some of the big trends that you're seeing
in the marketplace and let's get into it.
>> Sure.
So yeah, many years ago that one app, one server,
one application thing went the way of the dodo.
You just got back from VM world.
I paid my dues during the Wave One virtualization boom.
When people were transforming racks and racks of servers
into virtual machines.
And so it used to be so easy to impress a customer.
You show them a vMotion and it was like magic.
You move the server from this server to that server
without missing a beat.
Now people are looking at hybrid cloud.
So not just cloud, but hybrid cloud.
Everybody we're talking to, we hear some people say
that this is the last major hardware purchase
that I want to make.
Now I don't know the reality is that.
That's debatable, right?
But I think people want to have a roadmap
to move their infrastructure to cloud or cloud services.
Not just infrastructure as a service.
You know, lift and shift.
Software is a service and take advantage of that.
So helping our customers manage that hybrid cloud journey
is a big part of what GreenPages does.
>> And of course, what the customer is really telling you
is we don't want to spend a lot of time provisioning
LUNs anymore because it doesn't add value to our business.
We want to focus on building new apps
or our digital transformation, etc.
So and I think you're right.
It's sort of aspirational that okay,
we're not going to buy anymore hardware anymore.
To me the key is, can the industry, through R & D,
simplify what's on-prem
and you know, lets face it, those mission critical apps
you don't just want to throw them into the cloud.
I mean, they're working.
You don't want to have to refactor them and migrate.
That's sort of an evil word.
So to the extent that the industry can deliver
that cloud-like experience on-prem,
you can start to see this hybrid cloud vision evolve.
What are your thoughts on that?
>> Sure.
So I think, in H it's fortuitous that we're here with HPE.
I think they're doing a couple of things
with some of their products and services
that help push that.
So it used to be that storage was relatively complicated.
There were a lot of knobs and dials on storage
that you could push
and rotate in order to increase performance.
You could have a number of different RAID levels.
You know the 3PAR chunklets,
and this sort of thing.
There was a lot of customization you could do,
you could use as a customer
in order to properly set up your array for your workloads.
People appreciate that level of detail
that you can put into that but they want it easier.
So I'm seeing a trend toward less customization
and more ready just set it and forget it arrays.
Nimble, the 3PAR array was highly available.
Very good, very good array, very fast,
but a little bit higher end to operate.
Nimble with HPE's acquisition of Nimble,
they've taken that operational complexity
down significantly.
Not only with operating the array, provisioning LUNs
but managing it, maintaining it
and performing predictive analytics through Infosite
and that sort of thing.
So at the storage level I think Nimble, in that paradigm
is transforming storage.
And HPE's GreenLake technologies,
that is very much an answer to the private cloud.
Having that hyperscale feel, that ability to expand
elastically and get out of the hardware maintenance business
by using the GreenLake service.
>> So actually, a little bit of history here.
So 3PAR was actually, the company was formed
in the early 2000s before the term cloud computing
really came out.
They used, I think utility computing
in their S-1 registration.
But what 3PAR did is,
it really simplified that high end.
And then 3PAR reached escape velocity by going after
the high end EMC base and did very well
and of course famously got acquired by Hewlett Packard.
At the time HP then became HPE.
Nimble now is bringing sort of a new level
where you're talking about intelligent automation
and AI managing infrastructure, predictive analytics
and that drives more automation which I think, Tim
has really got to be a theme of hybrid cloud.
I mean cloud is all about automation
so hybrid cloud, on-prem, and public
some kind of interconnection
has to be highly automated, doesn't it?
>> It absolutely does and people don't have time
to turn the dials and to optimize their storage.
They need systems that will do that for them.
And there's the level one, the level two support
that you get through those predictive analytics
of Infosite are critical to customers.
They don't, you know a lot of customers don't have time
for full time storage admins anymore.
And these technologies
are what's freeing up those resources,
those people resources
to do other strategic things for the business.
>> Especially in small and mid-sized businesses.
>> Absolutely.
>> Where they're generalist really,
not really specialists at one thing.
I want to come back to the hybrid cloud.
You know thinking about data governance
and management and security.
Are we at the point where you can start to see
sort of a consistent framework across clouds?
You're smiling.
(laughs)
So what's the journey there?
How are we going to get there?
I mean (mumbling)
(laughs)
>> Yeah, I would say we're certainly early days there.
I think you know customers need to be much more cognizant
of the tools that they use and buy.
They can't be necessarily proprietary on-prem tools.
The best use of your money is to buy tools,
that can be used to manage hybrid
and secure hybrid infrastructures.
So that should be a main qualifier for what people
are looking for for security technologies
and that sort of thing.
It's not quite the wild west, though we still see,
you know there's that shared governance model.
That shared responsibility in the cloud.
I think there are still some who haven't woken up
to that basic concept.
That just because I moved the workload to the cloud
doesn't mean it's no longer my responsibility
to secure that data.
Though we're still talking with people today
who may be under that misimpression.
>> You're right, Tim.
I mean that is not well understood
and people think if I move in the cloud, I'm good.
But there is shared responsibility model
whether it's for security or governance, etc.
And when you talk to chief information security officers
they'll tell you, yeah, you know the cloud vendor
might secure the storage device,
but its' really our responsibility to do everything else.
And the list of everything else is still quite long.
>> Absolutely, you know rights, roles and responsibilities.
Those sorts of things, firewall rules.
They provide the firewall.
They make sure the firewall is up to date on it's firmware.
But you're setting the rules.
You're setting the ingress, egress.
So, yes it's very much still a shared responsibility.
And yeah, it's eye opening still to some.
>> Let's talk about your partnership with HPE.
We talked about some of the products,
but what do you look for in a partner?
Obviously as I said before,
you know used to be you sell in boxes.
You want margin and I'm sure you still want margin.
But there's got to be more, right?
>> Well yeah, I mean we've known for quite a while.
I mean we've seen the writing on the wall
that, I remember the glory, I don't know glory days,
the old days back when people
could make a fortune selling memory,
back before the turn of the century,
turn of the century.
(laughs)
I'm dating myself.
But it's true you could make quite a bit of money
selling memory back then.
But today and certainly over the past 20 years,
people, our clients are choosing partners
that they can't, not just the cheapest price,
but people who can talk to them about a solution.
Not just a product.
Hear their business problems
and turn that into technology solutions
that help them address those problems.
So that's what I would look for as a partner,
if I were, we look to HPE for the same thing.
Not just pushing product, where to sell product,
but to solve business problems.
And I think that HPE is listening,
they're hearing their clients.
They were listening to them
with the acquisition of HPE Nimble.
They're listening to them, how they're expanding Infosite
from just a Nimble platform, the 3PAR and Prolient
and other things and expanding some of those things.
>> Yeah, the pendulum has swung after the dot.com boom
it became cut, cut, cut.
Everyone was concerned about budgets.
You know IT doesn't matter anymore.
We heard all that >> crosstalk
>> and that's totally changed.
IT's driving revenue.
It's driving top line.
Of course budgets are still critical
and we've talked a lot about simplification
which is a lot about attacking the IT labor problem.
But right now the sentiment
with the booming economy we're in.
This tenth, ninth year of a run on a bull market,
obviously in the late cycles,
but the sentiment is much more toward
how do I enable the business with technology?
>> Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So how does IT add value back to the business?
They can do that through AI, through analytics
and through digital transformation in general.
I think we've seen a,
you know there's always been this upward curve
to storage growth.
But it's dramatically increased I think.
It's upward, predicted to be upward of 40 zettabytes,
or something like that by the year 2022.
And that's because more and more businesses
are using this data more creatively.
They're saving it more and not only is that growing,
the usable data, but they need to retain it for longer.
You've got to retain it, you've got to protect it
and we've still got data protection problems.
Not just storing it
and providing the right performance level for it.
But it's really difficult.
And then you've got to secure all that extra data, as well.
>> Well, I think you're right too.
The curve is getting non-linear.
I mean it used to be, I've said this often on the theCUBE
that we for decades,
we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law.
But now the innovation sandwich, if you will,
it's about applying machine intelligence
to data and then automating,
whether it's public cloud or on-prem cloud-like,
it's being able to scale.
>> Right.
>> And it's those three pieces of the sandwich
that are now driving innovation.
No longer the doubling of transistors every 18 months.
>> Yeah, so do people want to scale on-prem?
Do they want to scale to the cloud
and the cloud market itself
as it's very elastic, very easy to grow
and shrink and contrast?
Or can you do some of those types of things on-prem?
You know with GreenLake and with some other programs
that let you have your on-prem security blanket
and your on-prem performance
with the hands-off operational paradigm
and the elastic growth that you have in cloud.
I think that's the best of both worlds for some.
>> Let's end with a call to action.
So what advice would you give to practitioners,
clients that are looking to modernize their infrastructure?
They're trying to support their digital transformation.
They want to get from point A to point B.
They don't want to spend a billion dollars doing it.
They got to go on a journey.
How do they get there?
What's your advice?
>> My advice is to certainly, I'm jaded here,
but I would say engage professionals
who have done this many many times.
Don't learn on the job here.
You can make some expensive mistakes
moving workloads to the cloud.
And we've seen anecdotal evidence,
and in-person evidence of people
moving to the cloud, doing it the wrong way
and then having to migrate that back.
That's a costly mistake.
So make sure you do your planning.
Migrate in phases.
Move your data there in phases.
Bite off some smaller chunks first
to make sure if you have growing pain, teething pains
that that happens with a non-critical application.
Build your knowledge base
and then make some better decisions.
Engage people like GreenPages
to help you roadmap your journey, your hybrid cloud journey.
And don't go in with a preconceived notion
of where you need to end, right?
The applications, their performance requirements
and that assessment work up front
should dictate where the best place is for those workloads.
>> Great advice.
Tim Ferris from GreenPages.
Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
It's great to have you.
>> Thank you.
>> And thank you for watching everybody.
We'll see you next time.
This is Dave Vellante.
We're out.
(electronic music)