First converged infrastructure simplified data centers with server-storage-network sandwich appliances. Then hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, commodified the hardware and slapped differentiating software-defined storage on top. Now, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is combining elements of both with composable infrastructure.

“We innovated around the best of converged and hyperconveged and put them together into a new category of infrastructure called composable,” said Leslie Maher (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of North America enterprise servers and converged systems at HPE.

Composable infrastructure is fully software-defined; it also allows users to scale compute and storage independently, which provides the flexibility that modern applications demand, she explained.

Maher and Satya Vardharajan (pictured, left), senior director of strategic alliances, ISV partners, at HPE, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below.)

VMware-HPE insta-cloud mix

HPE’s flagship composable offering, Synergy, stretches both forwards to modern cloud-native applications and containers and backwards to bare metal, Maher explained.

“We can support lots of workloads, different kinds of storage in the environment and fabric so you have a real range of opportunity,” she said. To reign it all in, VMware Inc.’s vSAN software-defined storage manages the stack.

Composability and management enable customers to make the hybrid information technology journey without veering into overwhelming complexity, according to Vardharajan.

“They need to move to the hybrid IT model, and that’s the kind of the mandate that’s coming,” he said.  “But they also want to do it in a very cost-effective manner; they want to do it in a very scalable, efficient and automated manner, and that’s when customers look to HPE and VMware to solve the problem for them.”

Synergy also integrates with VMware’s Cloud Foundation software-defined infrastructure. Through this combination, customers can set up a private cloud in just minutes, Vardharajan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE