The next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator podcast series explores the latest developments in hybrid IT and datacenter composability.
Bringing higher levels of
automation to data center infrastructure has long been a priority for IT
operators, but it's only been in the past few years that they have actually
enjoyed truly workable solutions for composability.
The growing complexities, from
hybrid cloud and the pressing need for conservation of IT spend -- as well as the
need to find high-level IT skills -- means there is no going back. Indeed, there
is little time for even a plateau on innovation around composability.
Stay with us now as we explore
how pervasive increasingly intelligent IT automation and composability can be with Gary
Thome, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Composable
Cloud at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Gary,
what are the top drivers making composability top-of-mind and something we’re
going to see more of?
Thome: It’s
the same drivers for businesses as a whole, and certainly for IT. First, almost
every
business is going through some sort of digital transformation. And that
digital transformation is really about transforming to leverage IT to connect
with their customers and make IT the primary way they interact with customers and
make revenue.
Digital transformation drives composability
 |
| Thome |
With
that, there’s a desire to go very fast, of rapidly getting connections to
customers much faster and for adding features faster via software for your
customers.
The whole idea of digital
transformation and becoming a digital business is driving a whole new set
of behaviors in the way enterprises run – and as a result – in the way that IT
needs to support them.
From the IT standpoint, there
is this huge driver to say, “Okay, I need to be able to go faster to keep up
with the speed of the business.” That is a huge motivator.
But at the same time, there’s
the constant desire to keep IT cost in line, which requires higher levels of
automation. That automation -- along with a desire to flexibly align with the
needs of the business -- drives what we call composability.
It combines the flexibility of being able to configure and choose what you need
to meet the business needs -- and ultimately customer needs -- and do it in a highly
automated manner.
Gardner: Has the
adoption of cloud computing models changed the understanding of how innovation
takes place in an IT organization? There used to be long periods between upgrades
or a new revision. Cloud has given us constant iterative improvements. Does
composability help support that in more ways?
Thome: Yes,
it does. There has been a general change in the way of thinking, of shifting
from occasional, large changes to frequent, smaller changes. This came out of
an Agile
mindset and a DevOps
environment. Interestingly enough, it’s permeated to lots of other places
outside of IT. More companies are looking at how to behave that way in general.
Gardner: At
the same time, businesses are seeking economic benefits via reducing unutilized
IT capacity. It’s become about “fit-for-purpose” and “minimum viable” infrastructure.
Does composability fit into that, making an economic efficiency play?
Thome: Absolutely.
Along with the small, iterative changes – of changing just what you need when
you need it – comes a new mindset with how you approach capacity. Rather than
buying massive amounts of capacity in bulk and then consuming it over time, you
use capacity as you need it. No longer are there large amounts of stranded
capacity.
Composability is key to this because
it allows you through technical means to gain an environment that gets the desired
economic result. You are simply using what you need when you need it, and then
releasing it when it’s not needed -- versus pre-purchasing large amounts of
capacity upfront.
Innovation building blocks
Gardner: As an
innovator yourself, Gary, you must have had to rethink a lot of foundational
premises when it comes to designing these systems. How did you change your
thinking as an innovator to create new systems that accommodate these new and
difficult requirements?
Thome: Anyone
in an innovation role has to always challenge their own thinking, and say, “Okay,
how do I want to think differently about this?” You can't necessarily look to
the normal sources for inspiration because that's exactly where you don't want
to be. You want to be somewhere else.
For myself it may mean looking
at any other walk of life – from what I do, read, and learn as possible sources
of inspiration for rethinking the problem.
Interestingly enough, there is
a parallel in the IT world of taking applications and decomposing them into
smaller chunks. We talk about microservices that can
be quickly assembled into larger applications -- or composed, if you want to
think of it that way. And now we’re able to disaggregate the infrastructure
into elements, too, and then rapidly compose them into what's needed.
Those are really parallel
ideas, going after the same goal. How do I just use what I need when I need it --
not more, not less? And then automate the connections between all of those services.
That, in turn, requires an interface
that makes it very easy to assemble and disassemble things together -- and therefore
very easy to produce the results you want.
When you look at things
outside of the IT world, you can see patterns of it being easy to assemble and
disassemble things, like children's building blocks. Before, IT tended to be
too complex. How do you make the IT building blocks easier to assemble and
disassemble such that it can be done more rapidly and more reliably?
Gardner: It
sounds as if innovations from 30 years ago are finding their way into IT. Things
such as simultaneous
engineering, fit-for-purpose design and manufacturing, even sustainability
issues of using no more than you need. Were any of those inspirations to you?
Cultivate the Agile mindset
Thome: There
are a variety of sources, everything from engineering practices, to art, to
business practices. They all start swiveling around in your head. How do I look
at the patterns in other places and say, “Is that the right kind of pattern
that we need to apply to an IT problem or not?”
The historical IT perspective of
elongated steps and long development cycles led to the end-place of very
complex integrations to get all the piece-parts put together. Now, the different,
Agile mindset says, “Why don’t you create what you need iteratively but make
sure it integrates together rapidly?”
Can you imagine trying to
write a symphony and have 20 different people develop their own parts? There’s separate
trombone, or timpani, or violin. And then you just say, “Okay, play it together
once, and we will start debugging when it doesn’t sound right.” Well, of course
that would be a disaster. If you don’t think about it upfront, do you want to
develop it as-you-go?
The same thing needs to go
into how we develop IT -- with both the infrastructure and applications. That’s
where the Agile and the DevOps mindsets have evolved to. It’s also very much
the mindset we have in how we develop composability within HPE.
Gardner: At
HPE, you began bringing composability to servers and the data center stack,
trying to make hardware behave more like software, essentially. But it’s grown
past that. Could you give us a level-set of where we are right now when it
comes to the capability to compose the support for doing digital business?
Intelligent, rapid, template-driven assembly
Thome: Within
the general category of composablity,
we have this new thing called Composable Infrastructure, and we have a
product called HPE Synergy.
Rather than treat the physical data resources in the data center as discrete
servers, storage arrays, switches, it looks at them as pools of compute
capacity, storage capacity, fabric capacity, and even software capacity or
images of what you want to use.
Each of those things can be
assembled rapidly through what we call software-defined
intelligence. It knows how to assemble the building blocks – compute,
storage, and networking -- into something interesting. And that is
template-driven. You have a template, which is a description of what you want
the end-state to look like, what you want your infrastructure look like, when
you are done.
And the templates say, “Well,
I need a compute of this big block or size. This much storage, or this kind of
network.” Whatever you want. “And then, by the way, I want this software loaded
on it.” And so forth. You describe the whole thing as a template and then we
can assemble it based on that description.
That approach is one we’ve
innovated on in a lab from the infrastructure’s standpoint. But what’s very
interesting about it is, if you look at a modern cloud made up of applications,
it uses a very similar philosophical approach to the assembling. In fact, just
like with modern applications, you say, “Well, I’m assembling a group of
services or elements. I am going to create it all via APIs.”
Well, guess what? Our hardware is driven by APIs also. It’s an API-level
assembly of the hardware to compose the hardware into whatever you want. It’s
the same idea of composing that applies everywhere.
Millennials lead the way
Gardner: The
timing for this is auspicious on many levels. Just as you’re making crafting of
hardware solutions possible, we’re dealing with an IT labor shortage. If, like
many Millennials, you
are of a cloud-first
mentality you will find kinship with composability -- even though you’re
not necessarily composing a cloud. Is that right?
Thome:
Absolutely. That cloud mindset, or service’s mindset, or asset-service mindset
-- whatever you want to think of it as – is one where this is a natural way of
thinking. The younger people may have grown up with this mindset. It wouldn’t
occur to them to think any differently. And others may have to shift to a new
way of thinking.
This is one of the challenges
for organizations. How do they shift -- not just the technologies or the tools --
but the mindset within the culture in a different direction?
It’s a challenge for any
company doing transformation, but it’s also true for innovation -- shifting the
mindset.
Gardner: The
wide applicability of composability is impressive. You could take this composable
mindset, use these methods and tools, and you could compose a bare-metal,
traditional, on-premises data center. You could compose a highly virtualized
on-premises data center. You could compose a hybrid cloud, where you take
advantage of private cloud and public cloud resources. You can compose across
multiple types of private and public clouds.
Cross-cloud composability
Thome: We
think composability is a very broad, useful idea. When we talk to customers
they are like, “Okay, well, I’ll have my own kind of legacy estate, my legacy
applications. Then I have my new applications, and new way of thinking that are
being developed. How do I apply principles and technologies that are universal
across them?”
The idea of being able to say,
“Well, I
can compose the infrastructure for my legacy apps and also compose my new cloud-native
apps, and I get the right infrastructure underneath.” That is a very
appealing idea.
But we also take the same
ideas of composability and say, “Well, I would even want to compose
ultimately across multiple clouds.” So more-and-more enterprises are
leveraging clouds in various shapes and forms. They are increasing the number
of clouds they use. We are trending to hybrid cloud, where there are people
using different clouds for different reasons. They may actually have a single
application that’s spanning multiple clouds, including on-premises clouds.
When you get to that level,
you start thinking, “Well, how do I compose my environment or my applications
across all of those areas?” Not everybody is necessarily thinking about it that
way yet, but we certainly are. It’s definitely something that’s coming.
You
start thinking, "How do I compose my environment or my applications
across all areas?" Not everyone is thinking about it yet that way, but
we certainly are. It's definitely coming.
Gardner: Providers
are telling people that they can find automation and simplicity but the quid
pro quo is that you have to do it all within a single stack, or you have to
line up behind one particular technology or framework. Or, you have to put it
all into one particular public cloud.
It seems to me that you may want
to keep all of your options open and be future-proof in terms of what might be
coming in a couple of years. What is it about composability that helps keep
one’s options open?
Thome: With automation,
there’s two extremes that people wind up with. One is a great automation
framework that promises you can automate anything. The most important thing is
that you can; meaning, we don’t do it, but you can, if you
are willing to invest all of the hard work into it. That’s one approach. The good
news is that there are multiple vendors with actual parts of the automation-technology
total. But it can be a very large amount of work to develop and maintain systems
across that kind of environment.
On the other hand, there are automation
environments where, “Hey, it works great. It’s really simple. Oh, by the way,
you have to completely stay within our environment.” And so you are stuck
within the confines of their rules for doing things.
Both of these approaches, obviously,
have a very significant downside because any one particular environment is not
going to be the sum of everything that you do as a business. We see both of them
as wrong.
Real composability shines when
it spans the best of both of those extremes. On the one hand, composability
makes it very easy to automate the composable infrastructure, and it also automates
everything within it.
In the case of HPE Synergy, composable
management (HPE OneView) makes it easy to automate the compute, storage, and
networking -- and even the software stacks that run on it -- through a
trivial interface. And at the same time, you want to integrate into the broader,
multivendor automation environments so you can automate across all things.
You need that because, guaranteed, no one vendor is going to provide everything you want, which is the failing of the second approach I mentioned. Instead, what you want is to have a very easy way to integrate into all of those automation environments and automation frameworks without throwing a whole lot of work to the customer to do.
We see composability strength
in being API-driven.
It makes it easy to integrate into automation frameworks, but secondly, it
completely automates the things that are underneath that composable environment.
You don't have to do a lot of work to get things operating.
So we see that as the best of
those two extremes that have historically been pushed on the market by various
vendors.
Gardner: Gary,
you have innovated and created broad composability. In a market full of other
innovators, have there been surprises in what people have done with
composability? Has there been follow-on innovation in how people use
composability that is worth mentioning and was impressive to you?
Success stories
Thome: One
of my goals for composability was that, in the end, people would use it in ways
I never imagined. I figured, “If you do it right, if you create a great idea and
a great toolset, then people can do things with it you can't imagine.” That was
the exciting thing for me.
One customer created an
environment where they used the HPE composable API in the Terraform environment. They were able to
rapidly span a variety of different environments based on self-service
mechanisms. Their scientist users actually created the IT environments they
needed nearly instantly.
It was cool because it was not
something that we set out specifically to do. Yet they were saying it solves
business needs and their researchers’ needs in a very rapid manner.
Another customer recently said,
“Well, we just need to roll out really large virtualization clusters.” In their
case, it's a 36-node cluster. It used to take them 21 days. But when they shifted
to HPE composability, they got it down to just six hours.
When I hear those kinds of
stories come back from customers -- directly or through other people -- it's
really exciting. It says that we are bringing real value to people to help them
solve both their IT needs and their business needs.
Gardner: You
know you’re doing composable right when you have non-IT people able to create
the environments they need to support their requirements, their apps, and their
data. That's really impressive.
Gary, what else did you learn
in the field from how people are employing composability? Any insights that you
could share?
Thome: It's
in varying degrees. Some people get very creative
in doing things that we never dreamed of. For others, the mindset shift can
be challenging, and they are just not ready to shift to a different way of
thinking, for whatever reasons.
Gardner: Is it
possible to consume composability in different ways? Can you buy into this at a
tactical level and a strategic level?
Thome: That's
one of the beautiful things about the HPE composability approach. The answer is
absolutely, “Yes.” You can start by saying, “I’m going to use composability to
do what I always did before.” And the great news is it's easier than what you
had done before. We built it with the idea of assembling things together very
easily. That's exactly what you needed.
Then, maybe later, some of the
more creative things that you may want to do with composability come to mind. The
great news is it's a way to get started, even if you haven’t yet shifted your
thinking. It still gives you a platform to grow from should you need to in the
future.
Gardner: We
have often seen that those proof-points tactically can start the process to
change peoples' mindsets, which allows for larger, strategic value to come
about.
Thome:
Absolutely. Exactly right. Yes.
Gardner: There’s
also now at HPE, and with others, a shift in thinking about how to buy and pay
for IT. The older ways of IT, with longer revisions and forklift upgrades meant
paying was capital-intensive.
What is it about the new IT economics,
such as HPE
GreenLake Flex Capacity purchasing, that align well with composability in
terms of making it predictable and able to spread out costs as operating
expenses?
Thome: These
two approaches are perfect together; they really are. They are hand-in-glove
and best buddies. You can move to the new mindset of, “Let me just use what I
need and then stop using it when I don't need it.”
That mindset -- and being able
to do rapid, small changes in capacity or code or whatever you are doing, it doesn’t
matter – also allows a new economic perspective. And that is, “I only pay for
what I need, when I need it; and I don't pay for the things I am not using.”
Our HPE GreenLake
Flex Capacity service brings that mindset to the economic side as well. We
see many customers choose composability technology and then marry it with
GreenLake Flex Capacity as the economic model. They can bring together that
mindset of making minor changes when needed, and only consuming what is needed,
to both the technical and the economic side.
We see this as a very
compelling and complementary set of capabilities -- and our customers do as
well.
Gardner: We are
also mindful nowadays, Gary, about the edge computing and the Internet of
Things (IoT), with more data points and more sensors. We also are thinking
about how to make better architectural decisions about edge-to-core
relationships. How do we position the right amount of workload in the right
place for the right requirements?
How does composability fit
into the edge? Can there also be an intelligent fabric network impact here? Unpack
for us how the edge and the intelligent network foster more composability.
Composability on the fly, give it a try
Thome: I
will start with the fabric. So the fabric wants to be composable. From a
technology side, you want a fabric that allows you to say, “Okay, I want to
very dynamically and easily assemble the network connections I want and the
bandwidth I want between two endpoints -- when I want them. And then I want to reconfigure
or compose, if you will, on the fly.”
We have put this technology together,
and we
call it Composable Fabric. I find this super exciting
because you can create a mesh simply by connecting the endpoints together.
After that, you can reconfigure it on the fly, and the network meets the needs
of the applications the instant you need them.
Now, the edge is also interesting
because we have been talking about conserving resources. There are even fewer
resources at the edge, so conservation can be even more important. You only want
to use what you need, when you need it. Being able to make those changes
incrementally, when you need them, is the same idea as the composability we
have been talking about. It applies to the edge as well. We see the edge as ultimately
an important part of what we do from a composable standpoint.
Gardner: For those folks interested in exploring more about composability, methodologies, technologies, and getting some APIs to experiment with -- what advise do you have for them? What are some good ways to unpack this and move into a proof-of-concept project?
Thome: We
have a lot of information
on our website, obviously, about composability. There is a lot you can read
up on, and we encourage anybody to learn about composability through those
materials.
They can also try
composability because it is completely software-defined and API-driven. You can
go in and play with the composable concepts through software. We suggest people
try directly. But they can also go and connect it to their automation tools and
see how they can compose things via the automation tools they might already be
using for other purposes. It can then extend into all things composable as
well.
I definitely encourage people
to learn more, but specially to move into the “doing phase.” Just try it out,
see how easy it is to get things done.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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