HPE NonStop Corner

As June came to an end it was HPE Discover Virtual Experience that dominated all conversations related to HPE. Spanning three days, if you include all the pre-event briefings, what truly stood out was the accessibility of the HPE leadership who not only gave presentations, but also (in most cases), sat through the Q and A sessions that so often followed each presentation. It was obvious to all that in the virtual world where we find events lately, those providing presentation are doing so out of their remote office that even for the most senior of leaders are oftentimes their homes.

This was definitely the situation for HPE CEO Antonio Neri who only a matter of days before this biggest of all HPE events informed all and sundry that he had been diagnosed with COVID-19. Talking to us all he made it very clear that he was suffering only the mildest of symptoms but nevertheless it brought home the seriousness of this global epidemic and reinforced the message that this virus has no respect for individuals or the posts that they happen to occupy.

The picture above is a screen shot provided by HPE’s Laura Mackey who did a fabulous job organizing the agenda to cater for the needs of the press, industry and financial analysts and yes, the influencer and blogging community. “Hope I don’t get in trouble for the screenshot but I am just so proud of our leadership at HPE. They are engaged, optimistic and approachable,” tweeted Laura. “And they gave a shout-out to the #HPEInfluencer and #HPEIAC groups for the amazing impact at #HPEDiscover!”

If you have ever wondered who the HPE leadership team includes or have wondered what they might look like, then just take a look at the screenshot. This team was just introduced a matter of a few weeks before HPE Discover kicked off, but if you want to know roles and responsibilities, then here’s the scoop:

• Tom Black, head of HPE’s storage portfolio
• Pradeep Kumar, head of the Pointnext Technology Services business group
• Neil MacDonald, head of HPE’s compute business
• Keerti Melkote, head of HPE’s Intelligent Edge business group
• Irv Rothman, head of HPE Financial Services
• Pete Ungaro, head of high performance computing (HPC) and mission critical solutions
• Keith White, head of the new GreenLake Cloud Services business group

But with HPE Discover, one more executive has been added to the team (and it’s a very important addition and was given a substantial amount of presentation time):

• Kumar Sreekanti, CTO and head of HPE software

There is also a second group who make up the “go-forward Executive Committee,” according to the HPE press team and it includes the following five global function leaders:

• Jim Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
• Alan May, Chief People Officer
• Tarek Robbiati, Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
• John Schultz, Chief Legal and Administrative Officer and Head of HPE’s Transformation Office;
• Jennifer Temple, Chief Communications Officer (CCO)

For completeness there are two other executives who remain important members of the HPE executive team –

• Heiko Meyer, head of sales (CSO)
• Pat Collins, head of global operations (supply chain)

But remember, for a corporation as large as HPE, this current arrangement is subject to change and needs to be watched.

“Welcome to the age of insight,” began Neri as his keynote. “More information doesn’t mean more intelligence.” HPE believes that there is a need for a new playbook in these times of disruption and even as we may be awash in data, we lack the connectivity and insight needed to make the right judgement calls. “Unconnected pools of data that cannot be brought together and actioned for the betterment of our future. The age of insight is all about making the next phase of digital transformation a reality.” With the emergence of the age of insight, HPE is now addressing data gravity; “In the current Enterprise Data Analytics context, as datasets grow larger and larger, they become harder and harder to move (CIO, Jan 2019).”

Given that this was just the introduction, what followed had attendees talking for the remainder of the event. Big changes to GreenLake and the introduction of Ezmeral! For more on this it’s probably best to leave it to the journalists who reported on the event. As reported in The Register June 23, 2020, HPE’s GreenLake remade with fresh set of cloud services as biz starts move to aaS future – ‘Ezmeral’ brand added to container platform and machine learning stuff:

“The GreenLake augmentation brings customers an expanded set of menu items from the self-service HPE GreenLake Central platform, which provides a point-and-click interface for deploying machine learning tasks, containers, VMs, storage, compute, data protection, and networking options, as well as options for learning about pricing and making service trial requests.

“‘What we’re providing is basically 17 pre-integrated configurations that are all workload optimized that are available for these services from the factory direct for HPE GreenLake,’ (Keith White, general manager of HPE’s GreenLake Cloud Services) said, likening the components to Lego bricks or T-shirt sizes.

“White told us the announcements represent a significant milestone for HPE. ‘Last year, Antonio Neri, our CEO, announced that we were going to move all of our offerings to as-a-service in the next three years,’ he explained. ‘And so this is really sort of that first implementation, first instantiation of a new generation of cloud services for GreenLake.’

“The refurbishment brings with it a new software brand, HPE Ezmeral, which describes a suite of software for running, managing, and securing customers’ applications and data. The new name means that the HPE Container Platform will now be known as the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE ML Ops becomes HPE Ezmeral ML Ops.”

Got it? Confused? One explanation I recently gave to an interested party is to think of Pointnext as your automobile leasing company and GreenLake as the reporting agent once you have signed the lease with only a certain number of miles to be driven per year. As for Ezmeral, it’s the brand of the drive train that connects everything to propel the automobile and can include everything from a regular car engine to a number of electric motors to any number of elements to carry the propulsion generated back to the wheels. Note: this is very much a work in progress as I come to terms with all the moving parts HPE introduced at the event!

Perhaps an even more compelling story line came from CRN magazine’s Steven Burke as he reported on the presentation provided by HPE CTO Kumar Sreekanti, giving his article the impressive headline of HPE Ezmeral Is ‘Undisputed Leader’ In AI Battle With AWS, VMware, Red Hat: Kumar Sreekanti

“Sreekanti—who sometimes is referred to as the ‘professor’ inside HPE, this week unveiled HPE’s Ezmeral software platform, which essentially provides the IaaS {Infrastructure-as-a-Service] and PaaS platforms for partners and customers to build a new generation of intelligent applications that take advantage of the platform’s robust AI and machine-learning capabilities.

“Among HPE’s big advantages with Ezmeral is the BlueData AI machine-learning software that Sreekanti delivered to customers at BlueData. That software is designed to run both stateful and stateless workloads—essentially allowing HPE to provide the same cloud experience in a cloud-native or on-premises workload in the data center or even in real time at the edge.

“The way to think about is there are two stacks, one stack is a runtime stack, which is cloud-native. That is the BlueData–MapR open- source Kubernetes and it is differentiated from what is out there in the marketplace. The second is the GreenLake stack, which is the fleet software, which makes your application automated, elastic, scalable, and secure. Those are the two pieces of this. We are announcing the new brand called HPE Ezmeral, which is the runtime stack.”

Good to see we have cleared this all up! Good grief, Charlie Brown … But it is super important for us all to get our heads around it all as it is very much the future of HPE and in that future lies the future of NonStop. When it comes to key takeaways, there are two very important considerations to remember:

• Delivering everything as a service is a goal but it’s not exclusive; HPE Executives made a point of reminding us all that there are other aspects of the company that will remain focused on building systems and the HPC / MCS organization plays a very important role in this regard.
• Building out infrastructure that is software defined and where there is greater flexibility indeed opportunity to be more aggressive when it comes to choice of platform / service NonStop applications will likely participate; it’s a shame that HPE walked back early work done on NonStop including GuardianAngel (and even Infrasoft’s maRunga) as these were headed in the same direction that HPE is now pursuing.

As with our need to be cautious about the HPE executive team and the roles being played, so too is it with a note of caution that we watch all that transpires within HPE as we witness its digital transformation to a software and services company. So, yes, stay tuned as this is very much only the beginning given that we are just one year into a three year program suggests – there is far more news to come!

Once again, please take time to check out the HPE web site for more on the Q2 Financial Results as news, commentaries and posts continue to be added on a regular basis.

You can always reach me via email at:
Richard@pyalla-technologies.com

All opinions and observations expressed hereare those of Pyalla Technologies, LLC,and unless otherwise expressly identified, are not provided by HPE employees.