On day two of HPE Discover 2016, Patrick Osborne, senior director of Product Management and Marketing, HPE Storage Division, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Co. (HPE), and Michael Lindsey, systems architect at Republic National Distributing Co. (RNDC), announced their successful partnership. 

The project is simple enough: upgrade all of RNDC’s physical servers with faster and more efficient hardware and software. The reality is moving to all-flash, 242-HC servers and applications that RNDC’s small IT staff can easily manage. RNDC has a contract with Oracle for EVS (Elastic Virtual Switch) as well.  Osborne is working toward making core IT all-flash in an effort to reduce costs.

Osborne and Lindsey talked with Dave Vellante (@devellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at HPE Discover 2016 in Las Vegas. In regards to networking, RNDC is “investigating software-defined everything.” The company is already running HPE Virtual Connect, which connects servers to networks and storage.

Lindsey’s major concerns moving forward are working with a smaller staff and all the back-end work required to get things running.

The hyper-converged data center

HPE has answered some of the staffing concerns with appliance models that deploy in 15 minutes or less. RNDC is a collection of small offices with data centers in Atlanta, GA, and Houston, TX. Osborne discussed the process of moving away from traditional IT applications and upgrading to all-flash.

Osborne seemed particularly intrigued by hyper-convergence in the data center and “taking that to rack style.” He noted, “You don’t see anyone else able to pull that off.” Osborne called HPE’s recent success with hyper-convergence a “great realization of strategy” years in the making.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE