Understand HPE GreenLake Lighthouse - CTO Advisor Road Trip interview with Chris Eidler
Transcript
(upbeat music plays) >> Hey, how's it going? it's Keith Townsend, the principal and the CTO advisor and this beautiful location I've been in before is HPE's, I want to say San Jose HQ because HPE is moving to Houston, and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. We'll we'll we'll we weren't using it. We want it to visit the campus and using this also beautiful, but you'll hear all kind of cool background noises because we're still 2021 and we would love to have done this and the beautiful EBC.
If you're ever invited to check out the EBC in the San Jose HQ office, it is beautiful. But in this sponsored interview I have with me, Chris Isler, GM VP, or VP and GM of HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, the HPE brand for lease will be very happy that I said that correctly. >> Yes. Thank you, Keith. >> Chris, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. Great to be with you. >> So, you know, we're going to dive right into this whole GreenLake Lighthouse conversation because I've been following GreenLake for a long time.
>> Yep. >> And GreenLake has always been, you know, pretty kind of cloud adoptable. This pay as you go model HPE service as a everything. And the Lighthouse brand kind of threw me for a curve. If I got to be honest, if I, if I'm an HPE customer and I have HPE customers who bought GreenLake last year, now look at light Lighthouse and I'm asking, you know, Chris, what the heck did I buy the wrong thing? >> Well, first keep you never buy the wrong thing from HPE.
So there's no way we're going to put our customers in that situation. The, the HPE GreenLake Lighthouse is an evolution really of our approach toward GreenLake and GreenLake services for our customers. The, you know, we've had a lot of success with, with GreenLake so far. You know, sort of established the market for a consumption-based stability for on-prem infrastructure. We've used it as a way to really provide a lot of flexibility in customers and enterprises, finding way to solve their problems that aren't compatible with just putting it in a public cloud circumstance.
>> Right. >> But they're also not interested in doing things exactly the way they always have. You know, progress, progress, progress, right? So what, what the HPE GreenLake Lighthouse is, is an evolution of infrastructure from combinations and permutations, always different per customer to a true HPE infrastructure platform that hosts GreenLake services, especially private cloud services going forward. So what we found talking to customers, but first, if you read the research and I'm sure, I mean, you are the research, right? But, and when you read the research public cloud, tremendously, hyperscale tremendously successful, obviously.
>> Right. >> Right, but they're still on the order of 70% of enterprise workloads have stayed put, right. And, and there's reasons for that, but we still find customers thinking I only have two choices, you know, do things the way I've always done things which were improving GreenLake, right. >> Right. >> Right, Or do I have to go hyperscale, you know, and make some of the trade-offs of uniformity and, and so forth with. With Lighthouse, we're able to sort of reject that false choice and say, you have an opportunity for, and it's not just HPE GreenLake Lighthouse.
It's HPE GreenLake cloud services hosted on HPE GreenLake Lighthouse. And now you have the power of a platform, meaning you can host multiple services simultaneously on a, on a HPE infrastructure platform, but we've engineered it to be able to host multiple services simultaneously to have it be expandable by API, from HPE GreenLake services. You know, it's, it's a platform underneath our platform. >> All right. S,o as I look at the list of service cloud services offered by GreenLake and some of these things, I have customers consuming SAP, HANA, VDI, etc.
They've worked with HPE hand in hand to kind of design that underlying infrastructure. Then get that offered as GreenLake as a service. Lighthouse takes a different approach. What is that? So when I buy Lighthouse or I subscribed to Lighthouse, what am I getting on premises, exactly? >> You're getting, you're still getting HPE infrastructure on premises, right? You're getting HPE storage, HPE networking, HPE compute, uh, rack cabled managed by GreenLake running GreenLake services on top. If you're buying container-based services, we've got Esmerald packed inside.
And I like to think of it, Keith, as a sort of a greatest hits package of, of HPE infrastructure, but we're making it so that it's consumed just a little bit differently than you may have traditionally consumed. So when you're configuring in GreenLake Lighthouse, you're, you're, you start by configuring your service. You know, I, I want the VMs as a service. Okay. How many? I need 5,000, 3000 of them are going to be for, for virtual desktop maybe. Right?
>> So a general purpose spot, like. Would I >> Well, general purpose is dangerous, but yes. Right. Cause nobody, because there's no such thing. >> There's no such thing as general purpose. Right. And enterprise, we liked this. We like general purpose. We like high, you know, high CPU, high memory. >> There you go. There you go, right. So, so as our, you know, consultants work with our clients on configuring their services, the, you, you end up sizing your Lighthouse, right.
So if you need 5,000 VMs and you just say general purpose. Okay. You know, but, but usually there's a deeper conversation that goes on, like what I need, I need about a thousand. I'm not sure what they're going to be, but I need, you know, like I said, maybe 3000 desktops supported, so we'll figure out, okay, what kind of VDI configuration do you want to run on your GreenLake services? You know, or, you know, and it could, you know. >> So >> It could be any word loss there.
>> I want to pause there for a second here because you're, you know, I think cloud, when you offer me the vision of Lighthouse, but when you're talking about this consultant engagement, now I'm thinking, well now do I have to spin up my it infrastructure guys, to figure out how much ram, >> No. >> How many spindles, etc, >> No. am I getting back into managing infrastructure? >> That's exactly what we're trying to eliminate the need to do, right? We're we're still using the world's, you know, world famous HPE infrastructure, but you're configuring it based on the workload you want to run.
And, depending on the nature of the conversation, the business outcome that you're in pursuit of. Right? So I, I'm in, you know, maybe, maybe it's a workload conversation about VDI, or maybe it's a more targeted workload conversation that says, I need to support 5,000 users, 20% less expensively than I have in the past or all my, you know, my goodness, no one's coming back to work yet. >> So this is always something that can throw a business analyst at. So let's say that, you know, let's take the VDI and says, I've done VDI before.
And, and VDI is like this generically deceptive type thing. Like, is it, is it 1000 cat users, or is it 1000 office users, or is it just 1000 users that are connecting to an SAP instance via green-screen. >> And do they all come to work at the same time? You know, because then all their systems turn on at the same time, or do they come to work at different times of the day? Yeah, it's very, it's, it's deceptively complex. >> So from my perspective, as a CIO, I can give a business analyst of this thing.
My, my engineer that's figuring now CICD for cloud native infrastructure could continue to focus on that while I'm dedicating the business analyst to the engagement with HPE GreenLake Lighthouse. >> And then our well, in GreenLake cloud services writ large powered by, if you will GreenLake HPE GreenLake Lighthouse. So, so the idea is, you know, this might sound a little odd as the leader of the HPE GreenLake Lighthouse team, but it's okay with me if the conversation with the customer is not about Lighthouse.
It's okay with me if the conversations about the VDI requirement or the database requirement or the general purpose virtual machines, or I need Kubernetes spun up and I need, uh, 17 clusters and a growth pattern of, of X or Y. If the conversation can be about what the customer wants to use their infrastructure for, and if we can give them a cloud experience alternative. (plane engine roaring) So being able to have a conversation with the customer that brings the DNA of HPE and enterprise to a conversation that is about a cloud enablement of their IT department in support of a workload or a business outcome, this is our objective, right?
So it's not, I want to sell you Lighthouses. We want to talk to you about HPE GreenLake services in support of your business outcomes so your workload needs and then what happens is we end up sizing the Lighthouse and the Lighthouse consists of modules. So you can have a general purpose compute module or a memory-centric compute module, storage, high-performance, high-performance storage module, a scale-out storage module. You know, we have a lot of assets that we can know, there's a greatest hits package inside this thing.
>> Yeah, you, as an infrastructure guy you're getting me excited, but let's, let's, let's keep the conversation focused. >> But, but Keith, if you're a CIO, do you get excited anymore talking about which Nick? >> No, I don't. >> Right. >> They're cool. >> But I don't get excited. >> Right And, and and, if you and I were having a, a sales conversation right now, or, or a consultant conversation about solving your business problem, if you wanted to know, tell me what Nick you're using, we would still tell you.
Man, we are rockstars when it comes to building servers, especially for the enterprise, right? We're just packaging it in a way that gives you that cloud experience without having to sacrifice that enterprise-centric design center. >> All right, Chris, one last question, and this is a sensitive topic, so I'm warning, but at the CTO visor, and we asked the questions that CTO CIO is one of the old, this is not a new endeavor for HPE. Like I've remembered similar stories, maybe not as much at the business level, but there were HPE cloud solutions that I could put on premises.
Those went away. Now we're talking about GreenLake Lighthouse and HPE GreenLake cloud services via Lighthouse. What's the difference? Like what, what have you guys learned over the years? >> Keith, cloud has been around for what? 10, 15 years. >> Yep. Yeah, it's a baby. >> Show me, show me a company that hasn't, you know, that's on the exact same path that they were 15 years ago. You know, of course evolution is happening in every vendor's offering in the, and in, and in terms of what customers require from their cloud environments.
>> What I built 10 Years ago is now technical debt. >> Yeah, yeah. Yes, it is. And same here. So I think that that any vendor can look at their journey and we're proud of ours, right? And we've moved with our customer from step to step. Right now, what you see in HPE, And it starts at the top with Antonio Neri, our CEO is a complete and utter commitment by this company to the GreenLake experience for our customers. Period, end of story.
We continue to conduct business the way we have and the way we always have with our customers. But we are listening to, to our install base. " And GreenLake is, is, is what we're all in on right now. So I don't know what to say, except we're confident that we've got this measure. >> Chris, I appreciate you taking the time out to answer some tough questions. This is a tough problem. And I think it's fair to say HPE is moving at the speed of the enterprise ITCIO.
I think I was pretty tough, but if you don't think I asked Chris the right questions, you can DM me on Twitter. DMS are open at CTO advisor. Talk to you next CTO dose.
