UPDATED 11:15 EDT / APRIL 23 2021

BIG DATA

Antonio Neri and Pat Gelsinger banter on compute trends, share use cases for post-isolation economy

Recent research is beginning to offer a clearer picture of what a post-pandemic world might look like, confirming what many might expect. Entire sectors of the economy and social life are being transformed virtually overnight, unleashing a new set of expectations from technology service providers.

A new Harvard Business School survey found that more than half of workers who have worked remotely since the pandemic began would prefer to continue that arrangement permanently in a hybrid office/home model.

Another survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center documented a significant increase of interest among students in healthcare jobs and opportunities in IT. And a study released by the McKinsey Global Institute finds that online grocery shopping and virtual healthcare appointments will continue to rise even as the pandemic recedes.

Major technology vendors, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., are assessing pandemic impact on customers and finding the accelerated pace of change will certainly impact what organizations expect from IT solutions providers.

“The pandemic has really accelerated the need for transformation in businesses of all sizes,” said Neil MacDonald, senior vice president and general manager of Compute at HPE. “More than three quarters of CIOs report that the crisis has forced them to accelerate their strategic agendas. Our customers are on this journey, and they need a partner for not just the compute technology, but also the expertise and economics.”

MacDonald spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE, as part of HPE’s Accelerating Next: Workload Optimized Solutions With An As-A-Service Experience event, which also featured appearances by Antonio Neri (pictured, left), president and chief executive officer of HPE, and Pat Gelsinger (right), chief executive officer of Intel.

Roel Sijstermans, head of IT at the Netherlands Cancer Institute; Alan Jensen, chief information officer and senior vice president at Salling Group; and Jim Brickmeier, chief product and marketing officer at Velocix Ltd., were also interviewed separately by Vellante during the event. They discussed how a renowned cancer institute has managed its significant data growth, the demands placed on a major retailer in Denmark to process thousands of daily reports, and the impact of high-volume streaming traffic on a leading video technology provider. (* Disclosure below.)

Hybrid will drive transformation

During the event, Neri and Gelsinger shared their perspectives on the state of digital transformation in the enterprise world, as well as on the confluence of technologies driving hybrid compute models.

For Neri, HPE expects to play a central role in providing the compute power to drive the rapidly evolving needs of business.

“I’m proud of the amazing innovation we’re bringing to support our customers, especially as they respond to new data-centric workloads like artificial intelligence and analytics that are critical to digital transformation,” Neri said. “These new requirements create a need for compute that’s workload-optimized for performance, security, ease of use and the economics of business. Now more than ever, compute matters. It is the foundation for this next wave of digital transformation.”

HPE has designed its portfolio of products to support enterprises seeking the flexibility to run workloads in the cloud, at the edge or on-premises. Intel intends to support this model with HPE and others, according to Gelsinger.

“With this optimization for hybrid, we can jointly provide a strong foundation to take on the growth of data-centric workloads for data analytics and AI to build and deploy models faster, to accelerate insights that will deliver additional transformation for organizations of all types,” Gelsinger said. “Proliferation of the hybrid cloud is delivering new levels of efficiency and scale.”

Accessible and reusable data

As HPE has positioned itself to become an edge-to-cloud to datacenter service platform, the company is taking its customers along a similar journey. This has been greatly accelerated over the past year as many industry segments were caught up in a wave of digital transformation.

Three of the business sectors that have felt significant impact from the pandemic are healthcare, retail and video streaming. In the medical field, RBC Capital Markets estimates 30% of the world’s data volume is being generated by the healthcare industry and this trend has only accelerated over the past year due to the pandemic.

At the Netherlands Cancer Institute, IT administrators are grappling with the need to manage large volumes of data for use by doctors and nurses at one of the top 10 comprehensive cancer centers in the world.

“We produce terabytes a day and have stored more than one petabyte of data at this moment,” Sijstermans said. “We have a lot of medical systems all producing this data, and how do we combine them and get the data ‘fair’ — findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable — for research purposes? The challenge is to reuse the data optimal for research and to share it with other institutions.”

The institute turned to HPE for help in creating a system that would provide the flexibility necessary to balance the data management needs of a wide range of users in a demanding and complex field.

“What we wanted to build was something that would meet the needs of doctors and nurses but also the researchers,” Sijstermans said. “We wanted to create one infrastructure because we wanted to make the connection between the hospital and research. We developed a software defined datacenter and then a virtual workplace for our researchers and doctors based on HPE infrastructure.”

Retailer turns to HPE GreenLake

In the retail sector, the global pandemic has dramatically reshaped consumer buying habits, from in-store purchases to more online shopping and home delivery.

This has forced retailers to rely more heavily on data to determine customer buying patterns and adjust promotional campaigns accordingly. A 2021 Gartner CIO survey found that 63% of retailers plan to spend more on business intelligence and data analytics.

Salling Group is Denmark’s largest retail organization and serves 11 million customers per week, with 1,500 stores in three different countries. The company relies heavily on data and its IT structure to provide critical information on a daily basis.

“Data is everything when you are in retail — retail is detail,” Jensen explained. “For a company like ours, we need to be updated every day. We have 8,000 reports going out every day before 6 o’clock in the morning.”

The retailer was not prepared to move all of its operations into the cloud, so it turned to HPE’s GreenLake solution, which offered a hybrid platform in an as-a-service model.

“We saw GreenLake as a solution for getting close to the cloud but still being on-prem,” Jensen said. “It could deliver what we needed to have fast performance on data but still with the high quality and security of what we needed to run.”

Growth in streaming traffic

While data demands in the medical and retail sectors are significant, they don’t compare in scale to the mammoth online world of video streaming. In 2021, video streaming will comprise 82% of global consumer internet traffic, according to one company study.

Velocix is a leading provider of carrier-grade video streaming and advertising technology, and the company witnessed a sea change in video demand last year as the pandemic forced people worldwide to remain in their homes.

“While it was tragic to have a pandemic and have people locked down, when people returned to their homes, they turned on their television, they watched on their mobile devices and we saw a substantial increase in the amount of video streaming traffic over service provider networks,” Brickmeier noted. “What we saw was on the order of a 30% to 50% increase in the amount of data that was traversing those networks. We focused our energy on carrying that traffic as efficiently as possible.”

That efficiency is highly dependent on being able to maximize the streams based on a mix of HPE-supplied solutions and Velocix technology.

“What we’re trying to do is get as many streams as possible out of each individual piece of hardware infrastructure so we can maximize the efficiency of that device,” Brickmeier said. “We’ve had a longstanding partnership with HPE, and we work very closely with them to identify the specific types of hardware that are ideal for the type of applications we run. As you get to millions and millions of streams and what we’re delivering on a daily basis, you have to be able to scale those platforms out in a cost-effective way and make sure that it’s highly resilient as well.”

From the medical field to retail and the high volume world of video streaming, there is no question that events of the past year have transformed these and other major industries. The journey looks different now than it did at the end of 2019 for HPE and its global customer base as timetables and agendas accelerate to meet a changed world.

“The new requirements are really about what customers are trying to achieve,” said HPE’s MacDonald. “Organizations need to be able to develop and deliver new apps and services to service customers in a different way or drive new revenue streams. It’s about taking out the guesswork and uncertainty in delivering on these changes that they have to deploy as part of the transformation.”

There’s more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE’s Accelerating Next: Workload Optimized Solutions With An As-A-Service Experience event. (* Disclosure: HPE sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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