The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator podcast discussion explores the latest insights into hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) strategies.
Speed to business value and
simplicity in deployments have been top drivers of the steady growth around HCI
solutions. IT operators are now looking to increased automation, built-in
intelligence, and robust security as they seek such turnkey appliance approaches
for both cloud and traditional workloads.
Stay with us now as we examine
the rapidly evolving HCI innovation landscape, which is being shaped just as
much by composability, partnerships, and economics, as it is new technology.
Here to help us learn more
about the next chapter of automated and integrated IT infrastructure solutions
is Thomas Goepel, Chief
Technologist for Hyperconverged Infrastructure at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The discussion 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:
Thomas, what are the top drivers now for HCI as a business tool? What’s driving
the market now, and how has that changed from a few years ago?
 |
| Goepel |
Goepel: HCI has
gone through a really big transformation in the last few years. When I look at
how it originally started, it was literally people looking for a better
way of building virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. They wanted
to combine servers and storage in a single device and make it easier to operate.
What I am seeing now is HCI
spreading throughout datacenters and becoming one of the core elements of a lot
of the datacenters around the world. The use cases have significantly been expanded.
It started out with VDI, but now people are running all kinds of business
applications on HCI -- all the way to critical databases like
SAP HANA.
Gardner: People
are using HCI in new ways. They are innovating in the market, and that often
means they do things with HCI that were not necessarily anticipated. Do you see
that happening with HCI?
Ease of use encourages HCI expansion
Goepel: Yes, it’s
happened with HCI quite a bit. The original use cases were very much focused on
VDI and end-user computing. It was just a convenient way of having a platform for
all of your virtual desktops and an easy way of managing them.
But people saw that ease of
management can actually be expanded into other use cases. They then began to
bring in some core business applications, such as Microsoft
Exchange or SharePoint,
logged onto the platform and saw there are more and more things they can put on
there, and gain the entire simplicity that hyperconverged brings to operating in
this environment.
You no longer had to build a
separate server farm, separate storage farm, or even manage your network
independently. You could now do all of that from a single interface, a single-entry
point, and gain a single point of management. Then people said, “Well, this
ease makes it so beneficial for me, why don’t we bring the other things in here?”
And then we saw it spread out in the data centers.
What we now have is people saying, “Hey, let me take this a step further. If I have remote offices, branch offices, or edge use-cases where I also need compute resources, why not try to take HCI there? Because typically on the edge I don’t even have system administrators, so I can take this entire simplicity down to this point, too.”
And the
nice thing with hyperconvergence is that -- at least in the HPE version of
hyperconvergence, which is HPE
SimpliVity -- it’s not only simple to manage, it has also built in all of the
enterprise features such as high availability and data efficiency, so it makes
it really a robust solution. It has come a very long way on this journey.
Gardner:
Thomas, you mentioned the role of HCI at the edge gaining traction and innovation.
What’s a typical use case for this sort of micro datacenter at the edge? How does
that work?
Losing weight with HCI wins the race
Goepel: Let
me give you a really good example of a super-fast-paced industry: Formula One car racing. It really
illustrates how edge is having an impact -- and also how this has a business
impact.
One of our customers, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing,
has been very successful in Formula One racing. The rules of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), the governing
board of Formula One racing, say that each race team can only bring a certain
amount of weight to a racetrack during the races.
This is obviously a high-tech
race. They are adjusting the car during the race, lap by lap, making
adjustments based on the real-time performance of the car to get the last inch
possible out of the car to win that race. All of these cars are very close to
each other from a performance perspective.
Traditionally, they shipped
racks and racks of IT gear to the racetrack to calculate the performance of the
car and make adjustments during the race. They have now replaced all of these
racks with HPE SimpliVity HCI gear and significantly reduced the amount of
gear. It means having significantly less weight to bring to the racetrack.
There
are two benefits. First, reducing the weight of the IT gear allows them to bring
additional things to the racetrack because what counts is the total weight –
and that includes the car, spare parts, people, equipment -- everything. There
is a certain mandated limit.
By taking that weight out, having
less IT equipment on the racetrack, the HCI allows them to bring extra personnel
and spare parts. They can perform better in the races.
The other benefit is that HCI
performs significantly better than traditional IT infrastructure. They can now make
adjustments within one lap of the race versus before, when it took them three
laps before they could make adjustments to the car.
This is a huge competitive
advantage. When you look at the results, they are doing great when it comes to
Formula One racing, especially for being a smaller team compared to the big
teams out there.
From that perspective, at the edge,
HCI is making some big improvements, not only in a high-end industry like
Formula One racing, but in all kinds of other industries, including manufacturing
and retail. They are seeing similar benefits.
Gardner: I
wrote a research paper about four years ago, Thomas, that laid out the case that
HCI will become a popular on-ramp to private clouds and ultimately hybrid
cloud. Was I ahead of my time?
HCI on-ramp to the clouds
Goepel: Yes,
I think you were a little bit ahead of your time. But you were also a visionary
to lay out that groundwork. When you look at the industry, hyperconvergence is a
fast-growing industry segment. When it comes to server and data center
infrastructure, HCI has the highest growth rate across the entire IT industry.
I
don't see an end anytime soon. HCI continues to grow as people discover
new use cases. The edge is one new element, but we are just scratching
the surface.
What you were foreseeing four
years ago is exactly what we now have, and I don’t see an end anytime soon. HCI
continues to grow as people discover new use cases. The edge is one new element,
but we are just scratching the surface.
Edge use cases are a
fascinating new world in general -- from such distributed environments as smart
cities and smart manufacturing. We are just starting to get into this world.
There’s a huge opportunity for innovation and this will become an attractive
area for hyperconvergence.
Gardner: How
does HCI innovation align with other innovations at HPE around automation,
composability, and intelligence derived to make IT behave as total solutions?
Is there a sense that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
HCI innovations prevent problems
Goepel:
Absolutely there is. We have leveraged a lot of innovation in the broader HPE
ecosystem, including the latest generation of the ProLiant
DL380 Server, the most secure server in the industry. All of these elements
flew into the HPE SimpliVity HCI platform, too.
But we are not stopping there.
A lot of other innovations in the HPE ecosystem are being brought into
hyperconvergence. A perfect example is HPE InfoSight, a
management platform that allows
you to operate your infrastructure better by understanding what’s going on in
a very efficient way. It uses artificial intelligence
(AI) to detect when something is going wrong
in your IT environment so you can proactively take action and don’t end up with
a disaster.
HPE InfoSight originally
started out in storage, but we are now taking it into the full HPE SimpliVity HCI
ecosystem. It’s not just a support portal, it gives you intelligence to
understand what’s going on before you run into problems. Those problems can be
solved so your environment keeps running at top performance. You’ll have what
you need to run any mission-critical business on HCI.
More and more of these
innovations in our ecosystem will be brought into the hyperconverged world. Another
example is around composability.
We have been developing a lot of platform
capabilities around composability and we are
now bringing HPE SimpliVity and composability together. This allows customers to
actually change the infrastructure’s personality depending on the workload,
including bringing on HPE SimpliVity. You can get the best of these two worlds.
Gardner: You
are also opening up that HCI ecosystem with new partners. Tell us how innovation
around hyperconverged is broadening and making it more ecumenical for the IT
operations consumer.
Welcome to the hybrid world
Goepel: HPE
has always been an open player. We never believed in locking down an environment
or making it proprietary and basically locking out everyone else. We have
always been a company that listens to what our customers want, what our
customers need, and then give them the best solution.
Now, customers are looking to run
their HCI environment on HPE equipment and infrastructure because they know
that this is reliable infrastructure. It is working, and they feel comfortable
with it, and they trust it. But we also have customers who say, “Hey, you know,
I want to run this piece of software or that solution on this HPE environment.
Can you make sure this runs and works perfectly?”
We are in a hybrid world. And in a hybrid world there is not a single vendor that can cover the entire hybrid market. We need to innovate in such a way that we allow an ecosystem of partners to all come together and work collaboratively and jointly to provide new solutions.
We have recently announced new
partnerships with other software vendors, and that includes HPE GreenLake
Flex Capacity. With that, instead of doing big, upfront investments on
equipment, you can do it in a more innovative way financially. It brings about the
solution that solves the customers’ real problems, rather than locking the
customer into some certain infrastructure.
Flexibility improves performance
Gardner: You
are broadening the idea of making something consumable when you innovate, not
only around the technology and the partnerships, but also the economic model,
the consumption model. Tell us more about how HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity and acquiring
a turnkey HPE SimpliVity HCI solution can accelerate value when you consume it,
not as a capital expense, but as an operating cost affair.
Goepel: No
industry is 100 percent predictable, at least I haven’t seen it, and I haven’t
found it. Not even the most conservative government institution that has a five-year
plan is predictable. There are always factors that will disrupt that
predictability plan, and you have to react to that.
That is a lot of capital you
are investing into something that just sits there and has no value, no use, and
just basically stands around, and you take off of your books in the financial
perspective.
Now, HPE GreenLake gives you a
flexible-capacity model. You only pay literally for what you consume. If you
grow faster than you anticipated, you just use more. If you grow slower, you
use less. If you have an extremely successful business -- but then something in
the economic model changes and your business doesn’t perform as you have
anticipated -- then you can reduce your spending. That flexibility better supports
your business.
IT
shouldn't be a burden that slows you down, it should be an accelerator.
By having a flexible financial model, you get exactly that.You can
scale up and down based on your business needs.
We are ultimately doing IT to help our businesses to perform better. IT shouldn't be a burden that slows you down, it should be an accelerator. By having a flexible financial model, you get exactly that. HPE GreenLake allows you to scale up and scale down your environment based on your business needs with the right financial benefits behind it.
Gardner: There
is such a thing as too much of a good thing. And I suppose that also applies to
innovation. If you are doing so many new and interesting things -- allowing for
hybrid models to accelerate and employing new economic models -- sometimes
things can spin out of control.
But you can also innovate around
management to prevent that from happening. How does management innovation fit
into these other aspects of a solution, to keep it from getting out of control?
Checks and balances extend manageability
Goepel: You
bring up a really good point. One of the things we have learned as an industry
is that things can spin out of control very quickly. And for me, the best
example is when I go back two years when people said, “I need to go to the
cloud because that is going to save my world. It’s going to reduce my costs,
and it's going to be the perfect solution for me.”
What happened is people went
all-in for the cloud and every developer and IT person heard, “Hey, if you need
a virtual machine just get it on whatever your favorite cloud provider is. Go
for it.” People very quickly learned that this means exploding their costs. There
was no control, no checks and balances.
On both the HCI and general IT
side, we have learned from that initial mistake in the public cloud and have
put the right checks and balances in place. HPE OneView
is our infrastructure management platform that allows the system administrator
to operate the infrastructure from a single-entry point or single point of
view.
You need to have a common way
of managing checks and balances in any environment. You don't want the end user
or every developer to go in there and just randomly create virtual machines,
because then your HCI environment quickly runs out of resources, too. You need
to have the right access controls so that only people that have the right
justification can do that, but it still needs to happen quickly. We are in a
world where a developer doesn’t want to wait three days to get a virtual
machine. If he is working on something, he needs the virtual machine now -- not
in a week or in two days.
Similarly, when it comes to a
hybrid environment -- when we bring together the private cloud and the public
cloud -- we want a consistent view across both worlds. So this is where HPE OneSphere
comes in. HPE OneSphere is a cloud management platform that manages hybrid
clouds, so private and public clouds.
Gardner: From
all of these advancements, Thomas, have you made any personal observations
about the nature of innovation? What is it about innovation that works? What do
you need to put in place to prevent it from becoming a negative? What is it
about innovation that is a force-multiplier from your vantage point?
Faster is better
Goepel: The
biggest observation I have is that innovation is happening faster and faster.
In the past, it took quite a while to get innovation out there. Now it is
happening so fast that one innovation comes, then the next one just basically runs
over it, and we are taking advantage of it, too. This is just the nature of the
world we are living in; everything is moving much faster.
There are obviously some
really great benefits from the innovation we are seeing. We have talked about a
few of them, like AI and how HCI is being used in edge use-cases. In
manufacturing, hospitals, and these kinds of environments, you can now do
things in better and more efficient ways. That's also helping on the business
side.
But there’s
also the human factor, because innovation makes things easier for us or makes
it better for us to operate. A perfect
example is in hospitals, where we can provide the right compute power and
intelligence to make sure patients get the right medication. It is controlled
in a good way, rather than just somebody writing on a piece of paper and hoping
the next person can read it. You can now do all of these things electronically,
with the right digital intelligence to ensure that you are actually curing the patient.
I think we will see more and
more of these types of examples happening and bringing compute power to the
edge. That is a huge opportunity, and there is a lot of innovation in the next
two to three years, specifically in this segment, and that will impact
everyone’s life in a positive way.
Gardner: Speaking
of impacting people's lives, I have observed that the IT operator is being
greatly impacted by innovation. The very nature of their job is changing. For
example, I recently
spoke with Gary Thome, CTO for Composable
Cloud at HPE, and he said that composability allows for the actual
consumers of applications to compose their own supporting infrastructure.
Because of ease, automation,
and intelligence, we don’t necessarily need to go to IT to say, “Set up XYZ
infrastructure with these requirements.” Using composablity, we can move
innovation to the very people who are in the most advantageous position to define
what it is they need.
Thomas, how do you see
innovation impacting the very definition of what IT people do?
No more mundane tasks
Goepel: This is
a very positive impact, and I will give you a really good example. I spend a
lot of time talking to customers and to a lot of IT people out there. And I
have never encountered a single systems administrator in this industry who
comes to work in the morning and says, “You know, I am so happy that I am here
this morning so I can do a backup of my environment. It’s going to take me four
hours, and I am going to be the happiest person in the world if the backup goes
through.” Nobody wants to do this.
Nobody goes to work in the
morning and says, “You know, I really hope I get a hard problem to solve, like my
network crashes and I am going to be the hero in solving the problem, or by making
a configuration change in my virtual environment.”
These
are boring tasks that nobody is looking for, but we have to do it because we don't
have the right automation in our environments. We don't have the right
management tools in our environment. We put a lot of boring tasks to our
administrators and let them do them. They are mundane and they don't really
look forward to them.
Innovation takes these burdens
away from the systems administrator and frees up their time to do things that are
not only more interesting, but also add to the bottom line of the company. They
can better help drive the businesses and spend IT resources on something that
makes the difference for the company’s bottom line.
Ultimately, you don’t want to
be the one watching backups going through or restoring files. You want this to
be automatic, with a couple of clicks, and then you spend your time on
something more interesting.
Every systems administrator I
talk to really likes the new ways. I haven't seen anyone coming back to me and
saying, “Hey, can you take this automation away and all this hyperconvergence
away? I want to go back to the old way and do things manually so I know how to
spend my eight hours of the day.” People have much more to do with the hours
they have. This is just freeing them up to focus on the things that add value.
HCI to make IT life easier and easier
Gardner:
Before we close out, Thomas, how about some forward-looking thoughts about what
innovation is going to bring next to HCI? We talked about the edge and
intelligence, but is there more? What are we going to be talking about when it
comes to innovation in two years in the HCI space?
Goepel: I touched on the edge. I think there will be a lot of things happening across the entire edge space, where HCI will clearly be able to make a difference. We will take advantage of the capabilities that HCI brings in all these segments -- and it will actually drive innovation outside of the hyperconverged world, but by being enabled by HCI.
But there are a couple of other
things to look at. Self-healing using AI in IT troubleshooting, I think, will
become a big innovation point in the HCI industry. What we are doing with HPE InfoSight
is a start, but there is much more to come. This will continue to make the life
of the systems administrator easier.
We
want HCI as a platform to be almost invisible to the end user because
they shouldn't care about the infrastructure. It will behave like a
cloud, but just be on-premises and private, and in a better, more
controlled way.
Ideally, we want HCI as a platform to be almost invisible to the end user because they shouldn't care about the infrastructure. It will behave like a cloud, but just be on-premises and private, and in a better, more controlled way.
The next element of innovation
you will see is HCI acting very similar to a cloud environment. And some of the
first steps with that are
what we are doing around composability. This will drive forward to where
you change the personality of the infrastructure depending on the workload needed.
It becomes a huge pool of resources. And if you need to look like a bare-metal
server, or a virtual server -- a big one or a small one -- you can just change
it and this will be all software controlled. I think that innovation element
will then enable a lot of other innovations on top of it.
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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