Hewlett-Packard Co. is expanding in all directions under the leadership of CEO Meg Whitman, from the OpenStack community through the bleeding edge of electronic component design to, most recently, the high-performance computing market. But amid its aggressive pursuit of new growth opportunities, HP isn’t losing sight of its core server business.

Ric Lew and Paul Durzan, the vice president and product development leads for HP’s Server Solutions group, respectively, hopped into SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at HP Discover to share the insider’s perspective on the compute piece of the data center puzzle with host Dave Vellante. They immediately pinned customer choice as the top item on the company’s agenda.

Choice through overlap

The division’s guiding philosophy is to provide “the right compute for the right workload at the right economics”, according to Lew, which means different things for different organizations. An enterprise with a legacy investment to sustain may stick to the Itanium-based Unix series it has been using for the last few decades, he explained, while another trying to push through with a new web-scale project will most likely opt for an x86 platform running on Linux. Either way, Lew said, Hewlett-Packard tries to provide the best tool for the job, a continuous effort that resulted in the sprawling portfolio of products the company boasts today.

HP’s all-encompassing approach to the server market had produced the side effect of creating a great deal of overlap in its  lineup, but Durzan said that only translates into more choice for customers. Since practically no large organization relies on a single compute platform for all of its workloads anymore, providing such variety is an important differentiator for the hardware maker, which offers to save CIOs the hassle of dealing with multiple vendors.

“What we find is that a lot of larger customers want that choice,” Durzan detailed. “They may not deploy just one type of compute platform; they may deploy multiple, and they’re looking for a vendor that can provide that whole portfolio.”

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The different facets of the enterprise stack

HP is working to extend that centralization to IT operations with OneView, a management platform it introduced last year with the goal of providing a single point of visibility and control over its entire hardware portfolio. The starting point is the BladeSystem family. Durzan said that bringing the series under the OneView umbrella allowed his firm to enable the same kind of centralized administration afforded by the traditional hierarchical model of provisioning blades minus the management overhead.

The BladeSystem was recently augmented with a new iteration of the complementary Virtual Connect  Module that packs a 20Gbps downlink, an industry first which Durzan called an industry first and which enables customers to converge their 8Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet ports without having to compromise on bandwidth. “What that allows you to do is start to get the bandwidth you need because we’re seeing, in virtual environments, need for large bandwidth in east and west traffic,” he explained. “So we’re seeing this acceleration of the size of fabrics and Ethernet, and as people converge they want to make sure they don’t sacrifice performance.”

In conjunction with the debut of the module, HP extended the functionality of OneView to its 3PAR storage portfolio, making it possible for admins to configure zones and volumes directly from within the platform. The update further underscores the growing industry focus on convergence, which has created new challenges for to stay on top of the transition without cannibalizing core product lines. Lew said that isn’t a problem, though.

Integration “really only enhances the value of our products. They’re better together,” he said.

image via Hewlett-Packard