There’s been a lot of talk at HP Discover this week about converged architectures and moving to the cloud. But for Mike McNerny, there will always be a need for the high-end, mission critical computing monsters like HP Superdome.

“There’s some places in the enterprise where I still need better than general purpose I need higher levels of reliability,” said McNerny, Director of Server Planning and Marketing, Business Critical Systems at HP.

McNerny’s high-performance machines power some of the largest IT installations in the world. From global manufacturers to giant telecom providers, these enterprises rely on Superdome and other HP mission critical machines to keep their operations running.

“These are real dollars we’re talking about,” McNerny said.

Speaking to SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier live inside theCube from the floor of HP Discover 2011 in Las Vegas, McNerny also discussed his take on virtualizing mission critical systems like the ones he oversees.

“UNIX systems have been virtualizing workloads since the beginning of time. We used to call this time-sharing. So virtualization is definitely alive and well in the mission critical environment,” McNerny said. But virtualization takes on a different flavor in mission-critical environments.

“We will do things like electrically isolated partitions,” McNerny explained. “So what this means is I have virtualized the system, I have sliced it up, and nothing that happens in the system down through you putting a bullet through it is going to impact the blade sitting next to it.”

As for Big Data – a hot topic in Silicon Valley these days – McNerny pointed out that without powerful cores capable of scaling to meet the needs of large data volumes, Big Data wouldn’t be feasible.

“Its great to have these new capabilities like big data, being able to do analysis where you never could before, but a lot of times you’re still going to be pinging on those core systems, you’re still dependent on those core systems,” McNerny said.

“So as an IT manager how do you make sure those aren’t going to become the bottleneck? How am I going to make sure that core is going to scale when I need it to meet all these tremendous opportunities out there,” McNerny asked hypothetically.

The answer? You guessed it: Highly available, highly scalable mission-critical cores from HP.

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