As companies embrace the digital transformation, they’ve got to balance two things: the needs of the business to innovate and keep up with the rapid technological advancement, as well as the cost efficiency and security of information technology to respond to the increasing needs of the business.

And the only way to achieve this, according to some industry experts, is to build a software-defined infrastructure — in other words, a composable infrastructure.

“The old approaches to managing infrastructure artisanally just can’t scale and can’t deliver those benefits,” said Neil MacDonald (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of HPE Synergy and HPE BladeSystem at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. “You need to be embracing an architecture that’s software-defined to have those kind of flexibilities that you need in order to embrace that transformation.”

MacDonald and John Gilmartin (pictured, left), general manager and vice president of the Integrated Systems Business Unit at VMware Inc., spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the idea behind a composable infrastructure and the technologies at both of their companies that are driving this software-defined approach. (* Disclosure below.)

Creating a composable infrastructure

What companies are thinking about right now is how IT can change the way the business operates, according to Gilmartin, and VMware is asking those same questions.

“It’s about how do you create new experiences? How do you enable employees to be more productive?” Gilmartin asked. “And so a lot of what [VMware is] focused on is how do you transform traditional data centers and go build an infrastructure that is dynamic, that can provide the agility and the elasticity in the things that the developers need to be able to go build new stuff?”

These questions have continued to lead the relationship between VMware and HPE. As businesses crave consistent operations and consistent infrastructure throughout their growth, a composable infrastructure with its ability to define on-demand hardware resources — which is something that the HPE Synergy composable platform brings to the table — fits very well with the software capabilities of the VMware Cloud Foundation, which is making it easy to run a hybrid cloud, according to Gilmartin.

“Automation is critical at every layer,” Gilmartin noted. “And so this [is a] great fit between Synergy, where you can automate the composing of the infrastructure itself, and then Cloud Foundation can automate how you actually lay down and deploy and automate things like NSX and vSAN and the software-defined storage on top.”

And while more competitors are catching on to the idea of a composable infrastructure, HPE has been talking about it for many years, according to MacDonald. “You see others in the industry really embracing this notion that physical infrastructure has to become composable, which is … great news for the customer base in general,” MacDonald concluded. “And we’re really looking forward to building on all the success and the ecosystem that we have with VMware and dozens of other partners we’ve integrated with.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE