HPE’s Hybrid Cloud Strategy & Portfolio Overview

I am Brad Parks. So now with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, my last, I don't know, five, I need a punch card from Steven, I think on how many field days I've done. I think it's, it's up to five or six.

Um, so it was with Morpheus data prior to the acquisition LA last year, or I guess the end of 2024. Um, so first time back under the HPE umbrella, I think. So that's exciting.

We'll see if the marketing guys slapped my hand for, uh, going off brand or maybe using, uh, using graphics. I'm not supposed to. The rules are a little different in big company.

So, um, today, uh, we're gonna break this into a, a few different chunks, but first off, I just wanna set the, set the stage kinda level set on hybrid cloud from HPE, from a portfolio point of view, and then we'll, we'll go deeper on the tech probably in the next few sessions. So to, to start off, we're talking a lot about today, uh, getting to the cloud operating model. And Alistair was even just talking about AI field day coming up.

And one of the things we see is certainly the, the AI ambitions that people have are less successful if they're not already operating, you know, and in a cloud operating model, right? In terms of velocity, uh, in terms of agility, uh, in terms of efficiency. And I am not working on my clicker, so we're just gonna do this manually.

Um, so when we think about the cloud operating model, right? I go back to, I'm old, I go back to nist, right? It's elastic, it's meter based, it's available over network, it's on shared infrastructure, it's got self-service.

These are the, the attributes that make a cloud a cloud. And as you know, as I was coming up on the Morpheus side, doing cloud field day, we were very hyper fixated on self-service. 'cause that is the, the core use case for Morpheus.

One of the exciting things now being part of the HPE family is the, the level of assets that we have to bring to bear on the total landscape of getting companies to a cloud operating model. Now, the, the challenge, the real issue that, that I've seen over the years working primarily with large enterprises as well as service providers is the, the mountain of technical debt and complexity that is standing in the way of this, right? We all know it's public cloud, nice proprietary stack, fully automated end to end behind a nice, gooey, a unified Terraform provider.

It gets very ugly when we look at the complexity of an increasingly heterogeneous enterprise, right? If we think about our, our core stakeholders for it, right? Data analysts, product teams inside the enterprise development teams, the people asking for resources from it, right?

They're gonna say, Hey, I, I need my thing. Could be via gui, could be a build from a pipeline they could be using, a Terraform provider might be going through ServiceNow. Somehow they're initiating that request.

Then what we usually see is it goes into some holding pin of, of security or process or control, right? Does this person have the rights to provision that? Do we have it set up right?

Is there anything we need to do from a security perspective? And the infrastructure team has to navigate all of the complexities of, is this going OnPrem or in the public cloud? Do I have enough space on the cluster?

What's the storage capacity? What's the performance spec for this? All of those planning issues for it before we even get to day two, right?

Do I need a data protection job on this? Is the observability agent installed? How am I thinking about remediation?

If I have an issue, performance metrics, am I doing all the things I need day two? Then lastly, somebody has to pay for it. All right?

Does finance have the data they need to define the value of a given project, right? The cost modeling, are there licensing or services uplift? That end-to-end map of of work is the day in, day out work of it.

And that's continuing to be a challenge as we wade through big enterprises, and it's not any easier as runtimes are getting more heterogeneous, right? We've got people looking at alternative hypervisors. We've got obviously shifts between VMs and containers, and oftentimes the platform of choice for virtualization is not the same vendor platform of choice for Kubernetes.

We've got different teams using different clouds for different reasons. Um, you know, as an industry, we talk about repatriation, we talk about kind of cloud lock-in. I've seen over the years, you know, hybrid is an inevitability and teams have an affinity for certain stacks for good reason.

But there are certain problems that need to be addressed at kinda a forest level. Oftentimes, I'll talk about leaves, trees, and forests, right? There are stacks that make sense for a given application for a given team, for given skillset.

But things like provisioning, governance, security policy, finops, these are challenges that transcend individual tech stacks. So that's the problem that we're trying to address as HPE. Now, I was joking with Ken, uh, before we started, I have done a movie reference, uh, every hook on every field day, and I may have played fast and loose with some copyright laws over the years as a standalone startup.

I gotta be on my best behavior now as part of a big company. So I'm not gonna not gonna take any, uh, any open domain movie posters from the, uh, the inner webs. So I was thinking about my hook, right?

I've done fantasy riffs on Princess Bride. Uh, it's usually a all my favorite, uh, pop culture movies, uh, the Top Gun one year. I think I've done Labyrinth, um, as a team sport though right now, Morpheus part of HPE, we've got other assets to bring to bear, as I mentioned.

Fantastic Four comes to mind, right? Fantastic. Four, everybody knows.

Got that compelling leader, right? Very elastic, hanging everybody together with the hot shot human torch, right? Speeding things up, invisible woman, making sure everything's protected, keeping an eye out.

And lastly, we got the Big Rock guy, right? Keeping everybody safe. We'd look at that as my movie hook.

I'm gonna deconstruct some of the portfolio that we're gonna dig into over the, the rest of the field day today. So first and foremost, GreenLake, right? Uh, HP GreenLake is something that we started back in 2015.

Um, originally early generation of things like GreenLake Apex, the other programs from OEM vendors we're very focused on helping to provide an opex based consumption experience for customers, for physical infrastructure. That's where a lot of these programs started. I think where HPE has done significant investments over the year though, is it is a true platform that we're hooking all of the different services from HPE into.

So things like physical element management. So Aruba central compute ops manager managing fleets of tens of thousands of edge networking devices, all happening through the GreenLake platform, single sign-on, single RAC model, single unified Terraform providers. It's a place to go and launch and consume all of the services from HPE and from an engineering perspective, it gives us leverage internally to all leverage a set of shared services.

It's also where we get customers to come in to visualize the different consumption that they're getting from hp. So all their solutions in one place, all their dashboards, that's really where GreenLake fits. One of the things though, that we launched earlier this year that we'll probably have to come back on a future field day, maybe AI field day.

We look at the dozens of services that exist inside the platform. We've got agentic interfaces into all of those now and being able to string those together under something we're calling GreenLake intelligence. And just as an example, use case, I think we highlighted back at Discover the ability to, you know, via chat, Hey, I need, I need my database deployed.

Have it go ping a finops agent, see what the best cost profile is, check some different specs around different clusters. Call Morpheus from a provisioning perspective, all things like ops ramp for observability, and doing that all in a very natural way without having to jump through different tools. That's, it's really where we're taking all of these services tied into the platform.

So that was our, our unifying leader, GreenLake being kind of the core pillar of, uh, of the portfolio. Now, if we go to the rest of the characters in the Fantastic four, something we launched earlier this year was the cloud ops suite. So if we think about the software control plan that gets us to that cloud operating model, there's a few natural things that have to happen.

And, and first and foremost, kind of day zero, right? I am provisioning an app. Back to my NIST definition, if I need self-service to provision my workloads, whether those are VMs, containers, cloud native workloads on-prem, public cloud in a colo, this is where Morpheus has lived and briefed forever, right?

Being able to orchestrate and automate the end-to-end revisioning and lifecycle management of application services consistently into any cloud. Second key pillar observability, right? Day two, right?

Once my app's up and running, I've got telemetry data from my application stack, my infrastructure stack, I need to be able to find the signal in the noise, monitor those applications and that infrastructure for issues, reduce my meantime to resolution. And that's, that's really where ops ramp comes in. Third pillar, back to my, uh, my rock solid protector is Zerto, right?

Being able to handle cyber resiliency data recovery with these three products all now under the cloud ops suite, we really are able to handle the life cycle of application workloads from day zero all the way to n across any cloud, any hypervisor, any Kubernetes cluster, any hardware profile really is HPE putting its money where its mouth is in terms of investments over the last couple of years to get to a true hybrid cloud platform. We're gonna double click into these in some of later sessions. Do a little demo, just wanted to set the table on a portfolio perspective, kinda those four key elements.

GreenLake, Morpheus, ops, ramp, and Zerto. Um, but big fan of the Marvel movies, right? We have, uh, other characters.

Think there's a new Avengers coming up where, uh, I dunno, the fantastic four we're gonna meet, uh, meet the rest of the squad. Um, we take that software stack and one of the things we've, uh, we've rolled out, we're gonna talk about in, uh, one of the future sessions is the private cloud portfolio. So this is taking that software control plane and rolling out in an easy, very easy to consume way.

So we've got a couple of flavors of private cloud and we've got pre-engineered turnkey systems, so private cloud business edition, a private cloud ai, things we're gonna talk about here in a little bit. But we also have the flex portfolio. So this is being able to take, you know, any of the hardware in the stack, any of the runtimes, including our own built-in runtime.

We're gonna dig into, um, under the VM essentials umbrella as well as third party and wrap that in a, in an easy to consume way. So that's, that's kinda the portfolio at a glance. Some of the topics we're gonna click into today, wanna make sure you had the level set and, and really our goal at the end of all this from a customer outcome perspective is making sure that we're helping helping teams get to that cloud operating model in a more modern way, get outta their own way, be more efficient, more effective, have access to all their data coming back on storage field day.

But I know Ed's gonna talk a little bit about, uh, a little bit about the X 10,000 and of our approach around block and file in a unified way. We've got the data fabric, the ability to knit together pockets of data across these different environments. But then lastly, it's really about acceleration, getting time to value, whether that's for traditional workloads or more and more AI workloads.

So with that, we're gonna do I think, take some questions if you have on the strategy as a whole, but then I want to, you know, get into the tech part of Tech Field day and then do a little show and tell on a demo here in a minute. But any questions just outta the gate? Yeah.

Yeah. So I mean, lots of investments going into broadening the set of capabilities in the portfolio. Naturally we've been seeing what are the plans with regards to integrations between these to reduce friction and actually leveraging all these capabilities.

Love It. I have been on the other side of half dozen acquisitions over the years. Um, I think I first met half of you guys when, you know, when HP bought three par back, uh, a long time ago.

Kimberly, I've known since the left hand days. Um, acquisitions look great on paper, right? Uh, the strategy office says, man, look at the white space.

This'll just puzzle pieces will fall into place and then the real hard work happens. Mm-hmm. I the first to admit, um, you know, they don't all go stellar, right?

Um, acquisitions are hard, whether you're HPE, Dell, any of 'em, one of the nice things coming into this Morpheus and ops ramp as an example, all of the tier one OEM hardware providers, most of the tier one GSI providers globally, were already using Morpheus and Ops ramp to build hybrid cloud practices, uh, themselves over the last four or five years. And we already had loose integration Zerto, Morpheus automatically provision Zerto replication jobs at provision time. We already have integration there.

HP's been building some of the products inside the GreenLake portfolio using Morpheus and Ops ramp pre-acquisition. So we're already pretty far down the road, so being able to hit the ground running, that's something we'll talk a little bit in the demo and maybe do a little future casting of where we're taking it. But, you know, outta the gate, a lot of these are already loosely integrated and we're just gonna do more from there.

That, that AgTech example I mentioned already. Live works great. Um, you know, so we are, we're already starting to put meat on the bones.

Um, Kimberly Bates, um, one of the questions I've had, it's been curious is why you got provision and observed there and then you have protect in my logical brain, protect belongs over with the storage group. I know that's kind of where, why is protect part of cloud ops suite? It's Good, good Question.

As opposed to the storage Place. If I look at the attributes, it is definitely still a storage play. I mean, in terms of who we're talking to inside the enterprise, um, who in our field is, is having conversations around data protection, absolutely.

Talking about, you know, backup, talking about replication. Those are very storage centric concepts. But if you think about what we're protecting, right?

It's the workloads that we're protecting. Where, where do those workloads live? They live on prem, they live in the public cloud of R VMs.

Some are containers, right? Those are not HPE block storage specific or HPE file storage specific. They transcend technology type, technology location, right?

And so if we think about the software assets, um, I'll pick on, um, you know, Broadcom, VMware, not in a bad way, but if you look at their portfolio, right? You've got Aria Automation, right? The automation stack, you've got vROps, right?

You've got observability logging, log Insight Manager, you've got SRM for data protection. So we have a software stack that is hybrid cloud, um, that we've put under CloudOps. But certainly on an individual basis, if I'm talking about Morpheus, oftentimes I'm talking with an app dev team, right?

We're talking to people trying to be more provisioning centric. Go from release per per month to per week to per day. Talking about observability.

It might be a different cast of characters talking about storage. Yeah, it might be the storage team. But in aggregate the outcomes that they're trying to achieve, um, do make sense laterally, um, to think about the software suite together.