Last month I was able to attend the HPE Discover 2022 event in Las Vegas. I cannot express how much I was looking forward to my first in person conference since the pandemic began. I had attended many virtual conferences, but the networking with my peers and the human face to face interaction are much more enjoyable in my opinion.
Keynote
Because of some family vacation time, I had to fly in early Tuesday morning. I was concerned that I would not make it in time for the Keynote by Antonio Neri. I had to find somewhere to store my bag, get my registration and badge, and rush to the keynote but I did arrive in time and I was able to hear the speech. Antonio spoke quite a bit about what was to be the most prevalent portion of the whole conference. HPE GreenLake. It was clear to see that HPE is taking the multi-cloud or hybrid cloud very seriously. Previously, they had announced that all their portfolio would be available in GreenLake to give the cloud experience to your company whether it was on public cloud, private cloud, or anything in between. There were new products and offerings discussed. One of them was the Compute Ops Manager which I was a beta tester on. I will discuss this offering in more detail in a later section. The HPE GreenLake for Data Protection offering that protects your data wherever it exists in the cloud or on premises. And HPE’s continuing commitment to products like Ezmeral to provide automated deployment of workloads both cloud and not cloud, containerized or non-containerized to whichever public or private cloud you wish. It was somewhat disappointing to not see any new hardware announcements from a hardware vendor though. There was quite a bit made of the Frontier Supercomputer for the Oakridge National Laboratory. It is the #1 supercomputer on the top 500. At 1.1 exaflops, it is faster than the next 7 systems combined. So, it is good to see they are still innovating. Work is continuing with the Spaceborne Computer. And let’s not forget their work with Disney on the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park. All in all, it was a good keynote to kick off the conference.
Compute Ops Manager
I was one of the beta testers for the new Compute Ops Manager service that HPE is offering. The idea for the service is it will permit the scheduling and hands off performance on firmware upgrades on you on premises HPE servers. In order to compete with the experience of using one of the large cloud providers, the ease of use and fully hands off remote performance of things like upgrading the firmware will need to be made easier. While the idea is good, HPE has always had the ability to use software to upgrade your firmware hands free and on a scheduled basis. Currently this software is known as HPE OneView. I have used OneView for many years with my customers to manage their environments and it is a fully capable software package that does permit scheduling and hands-free upgrades. The Compute Ops Manager offering from GreenLake, in my opinion, lacks many of the enterprise ready requirements it would need to be useable. The most important of these is that while OneView will work with your virtualization software like VMware to use maintenance mode and rolling or series deployments of the firmware allowing you to do the upgrades without an outage, the Compute Ops Manager does not. You can choose to upgrade the firmware to individual machines or to a server group. But, when you do the upgrade, you will take an outage of the hosts you are upgrading which means you cannot do a firmware upgrade to a server group unless you shutdown all virtualization workloads. It also will not put your hosts in maintenance mode and vacate the workloads, so you will need to do this yourself. This does not meet the requirement for hands-free automated upgrades in my opinion. I have it on good authority that this capability is being added in later releases, so I will hold on recommending Compute Ops Manager at this time. Stick with the OneView product that is working and reliable.
Zero Trust
One of my favorite breakout sessions I attended was Zero Trust, The Hype, the Reality, and What is the Next Big Thing in Cybersecurity. HPE assembled a panel of leaders which included Bobby Ford, SVP and Chief Security Officer for HPE, Phil Vachon, the head of Identity Architecture at Bloomberg, Teresa Tonthat the Vice President of IT and Chief Information Security Office for Texas Children’s Hospital, and finally Theresa Payton, the first female Whitehouse CIO and founder of Fortalice Solutions. It was very enlightening to hear from these leaders in their fields as they discussed what zero trust meant to them and if they even liked the term or not. I highly recommend watching the video linked above as it was very informative. I also really appreciated Mr. Ford’s efforts in enabling people who have a desire or passion to learn cybersecurity to get in the door and learn. He is pioneering these efforts with a program that helps those with the desire to learn the skills needed to work in Cybersecurity. The program can be found here: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/about/jobs/global-security.html
Hands-On Labs
I also enjoyed the opportunity to work with several hands-on labs while on site. These labs help those of us in the IT world to keep our skills relevant with access to new equipment or software we have not had the chance to work with, or may need to work with in the future. I like to say I don’t truly trust a new technology until I get “elbows deep” in the software or hardware and I am able to really test it out. Think of a test drive that lasts a month. Once I am comfortable with how it works, I can feel confident to recommend it to other people and my customers. I was glad to be able to work in some time in the labs to check out those areas I was not familiar with.
HPE Proliant RL 300 Gen11
The one big announcement that was made in the new hardware category was the release of the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen 11, the first of the Gen 11 servers and the first of it’s kind server running the Ampere processors which are power and compute optimized for cloud based workloads. It is available with either the Ampere Altra which has 80 cores or the Ampere Altra Max which offers 128 cores on a single processor. It gives predictable performance with high power efficiency making it the first compute server designed for Cloud Native workloads. It is an interesting idea and one I was glad to be there to see the launch of.
Discover Showcase
I was glad to have gotten to attend the HPE Discover conference. I am very thankful to Ingram Micro, my employer Conversant Group, and Experts Exchange for making it possible for me to attend. I had been a speaker at the last in person HPE Discover in 2019 and I was very glad to be physically attending conferences once again. I was able to meet up with and have conversations with some friends and colleagues I had not seen since before the pandemic. And it is always nice to be at the Venetian and Polazzo. If you have never attended an HPE Discover conference, I highly recommend you make plans to attend next year.