Podcast Archive - StorageReview.com - Podcast #140: Inside HPE SimpliVity with Morpheus VM Essentials

Episode Date: September 27, 2025

HPE integrates Simplivity Hyperconverged HCI plus Morpheus VM Essentials stack. Get the details in… The post Podcast #140: Inside HPE SimpliVity with Morpheus VM Essentials appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Hey guys, Brian Beeler from Storage of View. Welcome to the podcast. We've got a special one today because we're on site in Spring, Texas, with my friend Vinay. We'll get into his background with HPE and where he came from before, which is interesting and germane to this conversation. But we're talking about Simplivity, HCI. We're talking about Morpius VM Essentials, and there's so much going on with HPE and HCI

and the vertical, vertically integrated stack. You've got a lot going on. Vinay, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on and doing this. Thanks a lot for coming over to Houston. I came all the way down here. That's right. That is a good point.

I came down to see you. All you had to do is show up to work today. Yeah, exactly. So, Vinay, introduce yourself for the audience and what you do in the context of HPE. Yeah, so hello, everyone. I'm Vinay Janakuti. I lead product management for simplicity

and to Brian's previous cost. I actually came to H.P. through the H.P. Simpletity acquisition, you know, about eight years now. So it's been a long journey. It's been, yeah. Which means that when I first visited you in Westboro, it must have been maybe right before that eight or nine years ago. Yeah, yeah, right around that time. Oh my gosh. Well, that was, you know, for people that remember Simplivity from the early days, that was right during the height of Silicon Valley, the TV show. That's right. You guys were involved in that. Yes, yes. The Pied Piper T-shirts and everything, yes. How did that come to be?

I mean, let's do a little TV history, because I think that's what everyone's here for, right? Yeah. So, you know, the Silicon Valley, all the startups had a server rack in that they were looking for ways to put something there. And I think we had a great marketing team, which partnered with the Silicon Valley team. And Simplity had a bezel, which was very unique,

And we took the bezel and converted that to look like a Pied Piper bezel, which was basically what was used in the TV show. So, you know, I actually still have the T-shirt from those good old days. Is there anything in TV and movies that's done wrong and more consistently than the way they depict data centers and servers? Have you ever seen one that's accurate? I mean, it's always got the blinky lights, which is true, but they're dead silent. I don't know how that works.

And no one's sweating in there. and there's, you know, cables strong all across the thing? Yeah, it's all, you know, most TV shows have it in, like, a disaster scenario where somebody's looking at a data center and nobody knows what they're doing, but at least it helps us position ourselves. I haven't seen one like that. All right, maybe let's get back to Simplivity then. So you've been with this team for a long time with Simplivity and now with HPE.

And, you know, as far as things go, the focus here seems to, to be back on HPE's solutions, HPE's IP, the vertically integrated solutions. What is it about simplicity right now that makes it as hot as it's ever been within the organization? Yeah, I think from a simplicity standpoint, we're really at a pivotal moment. We have been in the market for a long time. We have had huge success with a lot of customers using simplicity. We have around 60,000 simplicity nodes, 15,000 to 16,000 simplicity customers.

Right. Right. With the change in dynamics across the industry, people are looking for an alternative our options. I think HP is at a very pivotal position right now because we recently announced our HP-Morphous VM essentials. Now, from a simplicity standpoint, the team has been really working hard and we delivered a solution which is taking the best of simplicity, integrating with HP-Morphous VM essentials as an alternative

hypervisor, bringing both of them together while providing a great value to our customers. Now, simply thrived on, you know, core principles that we were very efficient, very reliable, and scalable architecture. Now, we're bringing that with our own hypervisor. So think about it, right? Soup to nuts. Everything is built by HP, supported by HPE. So from a customer standpoint, he just has to call HP and we take care of everything for them.

So you probably don't want to get into a whole big competitive analysis in this conversation and we don't need to. But you highlight an important point that we all know that VMware has gotten more expensive over the years and will continue to as companies get the renewals that may not have felt that yet. There's certain sectors that feel like they're getting hit. When I look at Reddit and see school systems, for instance, instance, small government entities, where they're showing the renewals, 10X where they were, that's a problem in their budgets, even if they wanted to pay, even if they saw the value, SLED specifically, that's a really hard pill to swallow, or maybe one that they can't at all.

Mix that in with hardware refresh cycles, and now there's kind of like this double whammy of software that needs to be paid for that's more expensive than ever, and then hardware that needs to be refresh, which maybe they budgeted for, maybe not. But when you look at the world of alternatives, you could pay your licenses if you can, and a lot of enterprises will do that. So I think we should start thinking about where the big value in VMware is going to play,

and I think it's still going to be there for the enterprise. But they're looking at solutions like ProxMox, which has a lot of the VMware feature set, but the support is an issue. There's not a great organization for that. They're looking at things, like Nutanics, which is viable, but it's not inexpensive compared to VMware.

Azure Locals a possibility. There's, I don't know, Data Corps and some other guys that are running around out there. But there's no one that really has a fully integrated solution. And as you talk about it between the servers, the networking, the hypervisor, this is really unique offering that hasn't existed in this way, and maybe since Dell owned VMware, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

So I think that really makes us very unique in the way we are able to offer a completely integrated solution to our customers, because we actually have the full end-to-end stack. From a simplicity standpoint, the core principles continue to be delivered on this new hypervisor alternative that we have, along with the control. plane, which is provided by Morpheus. So we acquired a company called Morpheus, which enables us as HP to manage a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Now, the VM Essentials is basically a subset of features that the full Morpheus provides.

Now, from a customer standpoint, he can start leveraging the core benefits of simplicity, integrated data production, hyper-efficiency, ability to have two-node high availability, and manage all that infrastructure from a single pane of glass, which was we centered before and we'll continue to support our VMware customers because it's a very strong install base and want to continue supporting those. But a customer who's looking at a fully integrated stack, we have the capability with a very powerful control plane that can extend to anybody's imagination because the full Morpheus suit has all the capabilities that are customers to manage their full hybrid cloud infrastructure. Yeah, and they came to HP with a bunch of customers

and the scope of what Morpheus Enterprise covers is dramatic. I wasn't aware until we really tore into it, how much is there and how much customization can be there to really make the Morpheus Enterprise solution fit just any organization that's wanting to automate these processes. Yeah, and to that point, right, even for us as a company which has all the building blocks, it's easier for us to integrate each of them

in a much efficient manner. For example, you know, from a simplicity standpoint, we are actually automating the whole deployment and upgrade experience right into the HPVM Essentials Manager console itself. So from a customer standpoint, he can, you know, do his day-zero operations, day-to operations, and upgrade his infrastructure in a much seamless manner than ever before. So this is going to be a real game-changer for us

to help customers manage their infrastructure, orchestrated the infrastructure better than ever before. Well, we talk about it all the time. So I brought up sled budgets, but even in the enterprise, the having specialized IT staff or specialized problems, I guess still exists, but I think we've all seen that to be on the decline where you need more generalists, more people that can pick up these tools and just go solve problems.

Or deploy things and get things quickly out to their internal constituents' hands so that they can go and do their jobs and be effective. you know, whether it's a VDI instance or some AI thing, like the world between those is pretty far apart, but you need the same types of skills to put those to work. With VM essentials, you're really simplifying that whole motion of management. Absolutely. You have seen it first-hand in your own experience,

you know, playing with the infrastructure that we have given you access and, you know, you spending time here this week. And, you know, we have got a very good feedback. from our customers, we did a beta, we have some initial customers, where the feedback has been resonatingly positive, where they like the whole Morpheus management experience, but also they can see the potential what they can do in the future. Now going back to the cost part of it, right?

From a simplicity, because of the hyper-efficiency and the integrated data production, we are already providing a huge TCO savings to our customers. With the licensing, the way the, The way the HP-Morphis VMS is licensed is per socket. So customers don't have to pay per core and the more number of course, more price. It's per socket pricing, much more cost-effective solution overall. And it gives an opportunity for sled and retail and oil and gas

where they're constrained on space, price. You can really look at a simplicity as a fully integrated solution that they can deploy and scale as their demands grow. And it's important, though, I think that even though you were talking a little bit about price and simplicity, that doesn't take away from functionality. Yeah. Because the fact that there's a migration tool to bring your VMs in from wherever they were, there's backup is built into the simplicity software. I mean, it's just there. So that as you're creating new VMs and instances, that's built in.

And then backups become very quick because of the compression. and the data efficiency on the back end, there's a whole set of operational benefits that are pretty critical to. Absolutely. I think the core functionalities that simply thrived on are going to be available day one for our customers, right? Hyper-efficiency where data is duplicated

at inception for the whole time that it lives on the cluster or across multiple clusters. We have our integrated backups where you can, you know, backup locally or remotely, just with a set of backup policies and rules. So all that, good features that customers like are available day one. And we'll continue to enhance the product and bring it in parity with all the other features that we support on VMware.

But I think a customer can get up and running today with what they like, and then we'll continue to add more features and functionalities. So you mentioned also the two node bit. This is one of the few, one of the only HCI solutions that's available in a two node. There's a little, if you do a two node, there's a little Linux witness just to maintain the same. which is normal, but many of your competitors when you're looking at HCI need many more nodes to meet a validated configuration. Yeah, that is a core to the simplicity architecture, right?

We support a single node. You can have it in a remote edge side as a single node, but two-node high availability is very unique to simplicity. And the way we are able to do that is the way we write data. We always maintain two copies of data between two nodes in a cluster. It actually provides high availability, so even if you have done, drive failures on one node, there's no impact to performance or availability. Even if one node is down and a drive is down on the second node, your VMs are up and

running no impact. And we also always had peak and predictable performance because performance is not compromised even when there is some drive failure or node failure. So it helps with cost significantly instead of paying like three or four nodes, the hardware cost, the hypervisor cost, it helps with performance, it also helps with availability. So the critical things that a customer need are available, and that same thing will be available with the HP-Morphia's VMS initials as well. So I was at HPE Discover a few weeks ago,

and one thing that stood out for me is that whether it's a one, two, or four-node, Simplivity Cluster, that HP's really got more focus on where simplicity fits now. Because I think when you were there in the early days, you guys were fighting in the Wild West back then, and there were, gosh, the list of HCI vendors and all flashed, storage startups. I mean, at one point, there had to be 15 of them in running around California, right? Now, you're much more focused, upscale from simplicity, still using VM essentials if you want. You've got the disaggregated solution with proliant switching and

B10K, right, the electric storage, which is interesting. And then the other, you know, traditional tiered storage on the way up. But talk a little bit about the focus. I mean, we've hit it a little bit, but HP is really tight on this Simplivity solution. It feels like to me. Yeah, so to start with, we really want to focus on the core principles of Simplity where it will be a great fit, right? It fits perfectly in edge use cases where customers want to scale to 2 to 4 nodes in a cluster. It can work as an enterprise solution as well where customers want to have multi-site, but a core data center where they want to back up to.

So it depends on the type of use case. Now, Simplity will continue to scale to higher node counts in future releases, but think about it, right? If somebody is looking for a solution from a HP standpoint, we have the PCB solution which has, you know, the B-10,000 array, which is 100% available, with a fully integrated solution with our proliant systems, with the management experience similar to the simplicity experience, it's a choice that we want to provide from a HP standpoint. Customers can come to us with their needs, and we have choice which best fits their needs as well. So that actually gets to another interesting point. So for all the assets, all the IP that's within HP, and I think actually when I was walking around downstairs,

there's a big display board, they had like an IP search on it and has by year and all the patents and by whatever. But with all the technologies in here, some of the ones you mentioned, but Zerto, there's all the operations, operational software, too, that you have. One of the challenges has got to be, how do we figure out what to put in there next? Because once you hit tens of thousands of nodes out there, 10,000 plus customers, the needs are going to start to get a little more fragmented.

How do you prioritize what to do next? And what does the release cadence look like for simplicity and VME? And how tight is that? Yeah. So Simplity in VME is very tight. Now, you know, we're all one company. We're all working together actively. VME, because of the way the hypervisor is being built,

and the adoption that we are seeing in the market, they're actually going on regular cadence of every month, month and half. We're having a new release of the Morpheus VM essential software. Simplicity will also have a very regular cadence moving forward. We plan to do it, you know, multiple releases every year, taking the benefits of the VM Essentials software and adding more features and functionalities,

adding more support for newer hardware in the future. And to be honest, I think from a HP standpoint and a hybrid cloud infrastructure management, we have all the tools that HP needs to deliver a perfect solution. Today, and we also have our HP Green Lake Cloud platform where it helps customers to manage their infrastructure in a much more easier, seamless way, things like OpsRAM, Morpheus, everything will provide that unified experience and

observability and automation and orchestration. So simplicity will be an integral part to make sure that the edge use cases, distributed enterprise use cases, where customers want to manage their infrastructure, but get the benefits of all of the features and functionalities that we have in the portfolio, we will start integrating simplicity there as well. Well, I think it's also interesting to understand that while this is a vertically integrated solution, you've got visions of openness, right, as part of the underlying direction. And I don't know what that looks like in the future.

Maybe it's too early to prognosticate that, but you're not trying to lock down either. You're offering customers or will what they want in the way they want to consume. Yeah, so we definitely want to offer choice. Today we support HP Simplity on the 380 and the 325 platform. These are some of the most popular and fast-selling systems. But every day we have other requests to support additional platforms. So we are actively working on supporting additional platforms in the future. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

And it's a good path forward. I mean, I think as you continue to see the use cases grow and then, you know, IT people. They've got opinions on things, right? So they're going to want to see their favorite things to show up in the stack as well. And let's not forget, right, like from a HP standpoint, the proliant is such a powerful platform, well-liked by our customers, very reliable. And the pro-liant platform, every year it's coming out with

newer versions of ILO, newer hardware platforms, and we want to be able to support the newer platforms, whether it's like a DL-145 or other platforms that provide that robustness that can be used in other use cases, we want to be exploring the possibility of how Simplity integrates there and provide the solution to meet the customer needs. Well, it's nice, though, too, because in the early days of Simplivity, you had to put the software on a bunch of

different platforms, right? And support varying levels of quality on the third-party servers. With Prolient, as you said, one of the most robust server platforms out there, and they're already embracing whatever is next, the higher speed NVME interfaces, the larger drives, the faster CPUs, faster DRAM, all the NICs in the back. By the time they've done their vetting on the server side, you're getting a platform that's pretty well done. And it's actually interesting. And one of the big benefits of the MP10,000 platform is that it's really gotten to the point where embracing the new technology.

technology has become much easier from a storage standpoint. If we look at purpose-built storage arrays historically and what you guys moved off of with MP, it's a lot of technology that's older because they weren't able to adapt quite as quickly or a lot of accelerator cards that are built into the platforms, which simplicity had and no longer does. That's an important point that you move towards simplicity but also more rapid adoption of what's new from hardware perspective. Absolutely. So just on the Elektra MP, B-10,000, right?

It's 100% available platform. I'm also the product manager for Electra MP for the software-defined storage, where we took the Elektra-M-P software, and now it's available to our customers both on AWS and Azure. So we have a software-defined strategy there, and the possibility is there for us to extend the simplicity software to extend to other platforms and future opportunities ahead of us. Yeah, well, so what does the cloud play look like typically for the Simplivity and HPE use cases? You know, in retail, for instance, I know Cloud has sort of contracted a little bit over the last year or two in terms of talk tracks and popularity. The consumption's still there, though, clearly.

I mean, those data centers are still springing up, and Amazon's doing okay with their cloud. But is that still a relevant angle for things like retail or places where you think Simplivity is going to go? Yeah, so the good thing is the Morpheus control plane can integrate any underlying hypervisor or a public cloud platform. At the end of the day, from a customer who is hybrid cloud, and we truly believe that the world is hybrid, the Green Lake platform or the Morpheus enterprise have the capabilities for a customer to onboard their simplicity on the edge site, onboard their public cloud infrastructure, manage all of that from a seamless, you know, unified experience. So we provide the capabilities from a HP standpoint. Right.

Yeah. And that's that insight, I think, of being able to have visibility through the whole estate is pretty critical. Absolutely. And it's actually something I think that a variety of vendors have tried to figure out and peel back that onion a couple times. But I don't know with how successful that's been. It still feels like it's been pretty siloed in many cases. You know, I give credit to Antonio and our company, right? In the last four or five years, we've always said the world is hybrid, edge to code to cloud.

And I think we are realizing that vision now, with the various acquisitions, the integrations, and the capabilities that we're delivering as a company, think about, now the green light cloud platform is powerful. Now we have the Morpheus and we have opsram from an observability, all of them powered by our pro-liant platforms from a compute standpoint. So we have the whole portfolio to deliver what our customers need. Yeah, I mean, the edge core cloud messaging has been one that HB has been using for some time. And I don't know that the over-rotation of the cloud took place with you guys, which is good.

But it's funny, I think I told you earlier at Discover. I was talking in the Q&A with Antonio, and I said, you know, it's pretty fun to hear you talking about hardware so much this year. And he said, he started smiling, he laughed a little bit. And he said, yeah, hardware is sexy again. Yeah, something like that. It was pretty funny. But, I mean, fundamentally, it comes back to hardware. The data's got to live somewhere.

And that's pretty core to it. And data gravity is real, right? Think about the explosion with AI and stuff where customers have so much data. They need to process it. You would rather have that in real time that you can process, analyze, and give insights. You know, all the stuff that has happened.

around AI is use cases that HP is really positioned to support our customers. Well, even something small like a two-node simplicity, I mean, you talk about pushing that to retail, and AI is happening in these stores. And the infrastructure and the locations, I mean, we've all seen the examples from some of the big, like Home Depot and Lowe's, and I'm in Cincinnati, so Macy's and Kroger's, that we see this of shopper intent, of restocking, of security, of loss prevention, of touchless shopping, self-checkout, all these things.

They're all placing demands on infrastructure. And really, if you want to do AI at the edge and put like a little L4 or something in a cluster and have an analytics or an AI VM out there, they could take real-time streaming data from your registers or from whatever is going on in the store and give you insights that minute, not for tomorrow or the next week, that's going to be game-changing

for, and I, gosh, I can't believe I said that word because it aggravates me so much because it's overused. But it will, it can fundamentally change your retail success, I think. Yeah, and Simplity has actually done a great job in the retail business. We actually have a couple of retail customers who have standardized on Simpity on all their stores. And I think with the VM Essential software with Simplity or natively with Simplicity alone, because of the way we do backups, the Prolion system support NVIDIA cards, We have customers using some of the video analytics, video monitoring software on top of simplicity. So there's a huge potential ahead for us to be able to provide that resiliency availability in data production

while helping you analyze your data, protecting your data, and giving you insights that can help you to meet and understand what needs to be done in real time instead of having to wait for donations to come back. Well, there's a big opportunity there, I think, for simplicity. and the big retailers have it figured out, but the more we can democratize these tools and help the smaller retailers figure it out and take advantage of all these tools, there's so much out there from Nvidia and AMD

and Intel and everyone that's working on these problems, but the more you can sort of bundle that and help customers figure out, okay, well, how do I deploy an LLM and use that against my data in this safe environment versus a public environment? There's lots of great opportunity there. Definitely.

So there are a couple of ISVs that we're already working with to bring those joint solutions together, whether it's in the healthcare or in retail or manufacturing, because everything has a different use case. And there are certain type of applications that are focused on a particular use case. So we want to partner with those ISVs and come to the market with those integrated solutions and a proof to say that, hey, these are use cases that you can. leverage and how simplicity as a platform with a control plane will help you solve that problem. Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

And either upstairs or downstairs from us, you've got that customer briefing center where you can show off all these technologies, which is pretty fun. I haven't popped in there yet today, but every time I'm by here, I want to get in there. First of all, look at the race car again, look at the garage door that folds up where all the technology is on display. But then you've got those little pods set up too where you can show this off to customer. And there is a rack full of HP hard. which we all love, and in the middle of it, there is a simplicity node as well.

Even better. So customers can come to Spring and Houston to see this stuff, but by the time we drop this podcast, you'll be shipping this product now, this integrated solution. What's the best path for customers that want to learn about it to see it, to get a better feel for what's going on with simplicity and VM Essentials? Yeah, so we'll have a lot of collateral that is published online, and then we'll also have a lot of videos that we're creating to help you understand how the product works, how easy it is to deploy, how easy it is to manage, and we'll have a lot of information

that you can leverage, and feel free to reach out to any of your HP partners or HP field to get more information. Yeah, and if you don't have a partner, just email us and I'll give you Vene's phone number, and that'll be the easiest way to get right to the head of the line, right? Yeah, we're happy to help.

Happy to help. And we've got a deep dive, on all the technical bits and how this comes together. We'll put that link in the description, and the lights went out again. So close. I know. We almost made it to the end.

Vince will probably leave all that in, too, with the lights going out. If you want to learn more on the technical side, we've got a video. We'll link to that in the description that shows how all of this comes together from the lab to the GUI to a deep dive on all of what's new

with the integrated solution. And we've got a paper too. So we'll put a book. bunch of links in the description, but this has been great. Happy to be back in Texas again. I could have come back in October when it was a little bit cooler, but it's warm out there, but we're still pleased to be here. Thanks a lot for coming over, Brian. It was pleasure talking to you. Good to see you again, Mary. I see you in Westboro and Houston, so we don't know where the world. Where's next? Maybe Idaho. Until next time, thanks for tuning into the podcast.

Thank you.