HPE storage exec dishes on AI, cyber, VMware migrations

With AI, among other elements that IT executives must consider, the market has an abundance of offerings. So how can enterprises sift through the noise and figure out the right approach?

"It's really important to have a data strategy, to really understand what your data is, and also to think about the use cases and the problems you're trying to solve," said Jim O'Dorisio, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage. "It's not really about model training so much. It's becoming much more about inferencing. … It's settling out a little bit as to what customers really need to do to extract value from their data."

In an interview with TechTarget at the HPE Discover conference last month, O'Dorisio noted AI and cyber-protection -- and sometimes a combination of the two -- as the most top-of-mind issues for customers.

"Agents are going to do things that they shouldn't do," O'Dorisio said. "And our agents now can see something that occurred that shouldn't have, and can then recover the environment back to a point in time."

In this Q&A, O'Dorisio details some of the challenges customers have with AI and cyberthreats, how they're tackling those issues and what VMware users are doing in the face of cost increases from Broadcom.

Editor's note: This interview was condensed and edited for clarity. 

What are the biggest storage trends you heard about from customers?

Jim O'Dorisio: When you think about not only storage, but all across hybrid cloud, customers are really concerned about dealing with the VMware challenges that they have.

Obviously, AI continues to be top of mind for customers, and everybody's in a different place on their journey. Increasingly, we started coming around to the idea that the biggest challenge [for customers] with activating AI was not understanding the data. It was not having a data strategy, not having understanding of data lineage and governance. And so if they did stand up an infrastructure, are they sending data to it that they shouldn't be sending to it?

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware was a considerable amount of time ago -- closing in 2023. Why do you think a lot of these migrations are happening now? Is it that a lot of the contracts are winding down?

O'Dorisio: It's timing. Broadcom took some different licensing approaches with different-sized customers, and it definitely made licensing costs much more expensive for certain customer segments. Everybody's renewals come up at different times, but it's hard to find anybody who's not at least evaluating options, whether that's our hypervisor or somebody else's. 

What are enterprise executives most in need of right now? What are the top concerns you're hearing?

O'Dorisio: Probably the two most obvious board-level kinds of conversations that are happening right now are around cyber and AI.

With cyber, it's 'How do we stay out of the newspaper? How do we stay out of the news? How do we keep our businesses running? And if we do get impacted, how do we recover very quickly so we don't impact our operations?'

And the other one is AI, because you need an AI strategy. You're either trying to use AI internally to drive operational efficiencies and automate routine tasks, or you're doing things that actually give you some competitive advantage externally. 

So I think a lot of customers are saying, 'Hey, how do I have a really operationally efficient infrastructure, so that I can save money in one place and spend it somewhere else?'

Is storage for AI something that customers have thought about enough at this point?

O'Dorisio: A lot of customers are. Some of the more advanced customers have already started building three-tier architectures -- they bought networks and they have compute with GPUs in them. What they're looking for is highly scalable, intelligent storage layers to support what they're doing.

On the cyber trend, at conferences a few years back, ransomware was the word of the moment, like AI is now. Is it still top of mind for customers?

O'Dorisio: I believe it is. We do these ransomware workshops, and they're always packed. The thing that's changed over the last few years is people thought that they could prevent a ransomware attack before -- that you have this perimeter, you can just prevent everything from coming in. While a lot of progress has been made there, now people are beyond 'I can prevent it from happening.' It's not an 'if,' it's more 'when' it's going to happen. And when it happens, how do you stay operational? How do you recover quickly?

So it's having air-gapped environments, having very quick recovery operations in place, detecting the event as quickly as you can, so that you can then recover back to a point in time without disrupting your operation.

Paul Crocetti is editorial director of Informa TechTarget's Infrastructure sites, which include SearchStorage, SearchDataCenter and SearchITOperations. Since starting at then-TechTarget in 2015, he has also served as editor on the SearchStorage, SearchDataBackup and SearchDisasterRecovery sites. You can reach him at [email protected] and on LinkedIn.