Two of our interviews yesterday on theCube illuminated HP’s long term goals for the Gen8 line of servers: the one with Dave Donatelli and the one with Gary Thome. Both executives talked about the role of big data and the cloud for HP’s future.

Donatelli emphasized that there are multiple stakeholders in this, from HP’s partners to the new market of webscale companies such as Zynga to the more traditional enterprise and SMB customers. Donatelli explains that although the Gen8 line is focused on solving long standing problems for HP’s traditional customers (and Thome mentions that HP talked to over 100,000 customers while designing the new servers), the servers are ready to meet the needs of the next generation of companies.

Thome said that the current server model, with its high maintenance costs, is unsustainable as companies begin to migrate to the cloud. Although reducing maintenance costs is probably one of the big motivators that companies have for moving to the public cloud, many companies are still focusing on private and hybrid clouds for now.

The Gen8 servers are very much “big data ready.” I’ve written before about how big data necessitates DevOps. The growing volumes of unstructured data require new tools, such as Apache Hadoop, for analysis. That means building clusters of servers, and often means writing new applications for scratch. Data center operations teams will need to take advantage of automation tools to deploy, configure and maintain all the servers that make up these new clusters, and will need to work closely with developers and data scientists to ensure smooth operation. The ServicesAngle team recently discussed what this is going to mean for organizations that haven’t historically been engineering focused in a recent editorial call.

The Gen8 servers will, hopefully, ease this transition by providing capacity for solid-state drives, automating much of the work of managing servers and optimizing the allocation of energy and cooling resources. Thome emphasizes that it’s not just that the servers are becoming more automated, but that more intelligence is being embedded into each of the servers. When every server is aware of its location within the data center, the optimization of its services become much easier and efficient. I expect many vendors to follow HP’s lead on this.

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Most companies are only just beginning to plan cloud migrations. HP’s partners, and HP itself, are only just beginning to roll out public cloud services. The components for a real big data cloud are still falling into place. Security is still a huge issue.

This is the third in a series of projects from HP to revitalize its server line: the first was Project Moonshot, which was followed by Project Odyssey. Donatelli hints that security will be very important for HP in the near future, saying that many people haven’t fully grasped what it means that companies are now facing not teenagers “trying to have fun with corporate America” but state-sponsored teams of highly trained professionals seeking to find vulnerabilities in a companies architecture. Perhaps the next project unveiled by HP will involve security?