UPDATED 16:46 EDT / JUNE 20 2014

Discover Conference’s message: HP is back

HP Discover 2012 Frankfurt GermanyHP Enterprise Group EVP Bill Veghte kicked off the first day of the company’s Discover conference in Las Vegas last week by crowing, “HP is back.”

Three days later, Wikibon Chief Analyst and theCUBE co-anchor David Vellante summed up his impressions of the conference by agreeing. “I’m excited about HP,” he said.

HP’s culture of invention, which has been muted as the company has wrestled with two years of layoffs, executive turmoil and re-positioning and two consecutive quarters of 1 percent year-to-year revenue decreases, was back in the form of innovations ranging from its new Apollo water-cooled high-performance computing (HPC) engine to The Machine, a futuristic supercomputer under development in HP labs that’s based on a high performance computer-on-a-chip, Memristor storage and photonic networking.

HP also showed off a flash storage array priced at a level that approaches that of traditional spinning-disk technology. The 3PAR StoreServ 7450 flash storage array scales to 1.92 petabytes at $2 per usable gigabyte, according to HP. The company also positioned Helion, HP’s new cloud platform based on OpenStack and CloudFoundry, as a single unified cloud stack across the firewall for hybrid clouds.

The message HP executives repeated throughout the conference and in interviews with theCUBE, was that the company is back and is innovating. “We are investing more than ever in innovation,” said Scott Weller, VP and general manager for technology and support at HP in an interview on theCUBE.

Here are some of the technology highlights of the conference.

The flash storage tipping point

 

The StoreServ 7450 is a tipping point in the storage industry, said David Scott, SVP and general manager of HP Storage on theCUBE. He said the all-flash array is called “less expensive than disk” with inline deduplication, “true enterprise scalability” and six 9’s reliability, all of it backed by a five-year warranty. HP customers also don’t have to adopt a new storage stack because the 7450 runs alongside existing 3PAR storage arrays.

Helion cloud

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cloud-HP-entreprisesHP’s is placing its bets on hybrid clouds. Customers are saying, “we will always want more than we can do on site,” said Weller, so HP’s strategy is to provide Helion both as a behind-the-firewall stack and the foundation for public clouds from HP and its partners. The goal is to provide a single hybrid environment.

HP Services is aligning itself with Helion. “We are building an approach that’s more friendly and suitable for DevOps,” said HP VP of Technology Services and Support Seamus Dunne, on theCUBE. That means security, privacy, quality-of-service and other important settings, including those needed for compliance audits, will be “substantially the same” between the internal and external parts of the hybrid cloud.

Fostering a startup mentality

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HP executives said the company is also organizing along business opportunity lines. One of the first of these is HP NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), a group focused on virtualizing the infrastructures of the major U.S. carriers. In an interview on theCUBE, Bethany Mayer, SVP and general manager of NFV, said carriers are being left behind as the market shifts to the cloud and new competitors like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud emerge. (See video below.)

“New cloud services are the difference between them making and losing money, and they cannot create those services on their present architecture,” she said. “They need to virtualize.”

HP has partnered with Alcaltel-Lucent, NEC and Brocade to create new solutions to sell to these voice carriers. The platform is built on a software-defined, converged infrastructure and OpenStack and is available now, Mayer said. She estimated that HP NFV could be a $24 billion business over the next 10 years.

Apollo

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Speaking on theCUBE, Veghte said high-performance computing a is moving out of traditional niche markets in government and research and into the mainstream.

“We are seeing a business-model shift to an outcome-based focus versus the traditional capital-versus-operational expense” metric he said. Companies do not want a pure public-cloud strategy. Despite the trend to move some compute loads to public cloud companies, significant computing will remain in-house that will require HPC-level performance. “They say that a lot of data will reside in-house for regulatory reasons, national-defense reasons, and because that is how they have to run their businesses.”

Best-of-breed components are no longer sufficient. Customers, he said, need converged systems designed to accomplish high-end tasks, and that’s what Apollo  is about. As an example, he said HP delivered “the highest performance HANA system on the market,” at the SAP Sapphire conference in early June.

“HPC is going mainstream,” said Alain Andreoli, VP and general manager for Density Optimized Service Providers in an interview on theCUBE.  “There is a revolution in computing coming – hyperscale – and it is driving a new generation of data centers.”

The high-end Apollo system features warm water cooling with a design that keeps the water pipes away from the electronics, so a leak doesn’t cause a short. One early user is getting double cuty from the water, using the hot water coming out of the system to heat its sidewalks in winter.

The Machine

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HP The Machine timelineThe Machine, which HP CTO Martin Frink presented during Discover’s second day general session, is a futuristic project to rethink computing with advanced technologies like specialized processors, HP’s Memristor solid-state storage, photonics and a new operating system optimized for solid state storage. None of this exists today, but most of it is being developed in HP labs, and HP hopes to stimulate new research into operating systems at universities worldwide.

The basic concept is “electrons compute, photonics communicate, ions store,” Frink said. He showed a palm-sized “computer on a chip” that would be the heart of the new system, holding the specialized processors at its core. Memristor will use oxygen ions to store data at the atomic level and will be based on 3PAR, so HP storage users will not have to change their storage architectures to use it. Components will be connected through fiber optics rather than copper, supporting 6 Tbytes/second transmission while reducing energy use by three orders of magnitude.

The new operating system will be designed for the characteristics of the memory pool. “Ninety percent of what an operating system does is shuffle data back and forth between on-chip cache, main memory, and storage,” he said. “We are throwing out that hierarchy and putting all the mass data for the entire Machine into a universal memory store based on Memristor.” The result should be a  much faster operating system.

Frink cautioned that The Machine isn’t a “big bang”. Each technology will proceed at its own pace and be introduced when it’s ready. Whether or not The Machine ever becomes a practical reality, it’s clear that HP is formulating its own vision of the future of computing. “HP is back for the long term, we are innovating and focusing on problems customers have today,” said Antonio Neri, SVP and general manager for HP Servers and Networking on theCUBE, “

Graphics courtesy HP Corp.


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