HPE Discover Barcelona 2024: All the news and updates live

Neri's keynote will kick off at 1.30pm CET, but ahead of that you can read our predictions of what we can expect to hear about this afternoon.

It's a very breezy day in Barcelona with a few branches coming off trees immediately in front of the Fira north entrance. Inside it's bustling with people picking up coffee and finding their way around the conference center as the main conference day starts to get underway.

There's just over an hour until Antonio Neri's keynote starts. In the meantime, why not check out one of the company's other announcements from this week – El Capitan. The supercomputer, which was built by HPE using AMD chips, has come online and immediately been crowned the world's fastest by Top500.

The wait is almost over. Antonio Neri will shortly be on the stage and the keynote theatre is filling up with delegates. But first, we have some FC Barcelona fans (or performers playing Barcelona fans) coming through the crowd and on stage.

FC Barcelona is one of the headline customers at this year's European Discover – the opening VT is talking up the company's pedigree in data analysis in sport (this also includes other sports like motor racing).

Neri is now on stage and talking up again the relationship with FC Barcelona – HPE is now the club's official technology partner.

The Miriam Ferrando, CIO of FC Barcelona, has joined Neri on stage and is explaining the partnership. "Our vision is to fully immerse fans during their entire visit and deliver fast, stable and secure, customized experience," she says.

The football segment (or soccer, depending on where you are) is over and we're now onto HPE itself. Neri compares HPE to FC Barcelona: "An organization with a storied history, engineering roots and deep technical expertise and with the inspiration to transform our capabilities."

The company is not looking back, however, but instead is focused on "where the world is going".

In line with the company's own branding and strategy of late, as well as the way the technology hype winds are blowing, this is of course AI.

Neri points out that while it took the telephone 75 years to reach 50 million users and mobile phones 12 years to do the same, for generative AI it took less than a year.

"This is not just rapid growth, it's a major paradigm shift, profound transformation unlike anything we have ever seen," he says. "AI is not just enhancing technology, it is enabling new worlds of interaction capabilities, redefining what is possible in our lifetimes. It's transforming every sector, every line of business, and creating opportunities we couldn't even imagine 18 months ago."

He touches on another key HPE talking point – one we may hear an increasing amount about over the coming years – which is "responsible" AI. This includes elements like privacy (more on that shortly...), as well as sustainable technology development, and "human focused".

Now we're onto HPE's involvement in high performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing. El Capitan gets a mention, but Neri also points out that the company has built the top three fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Top500.

"In football terms, I call that a hat trick," he says.

Time for some announcements. First up, HPE VM Essentials.

HPE announced it was developing its own virtual machines at Las Vegas, and this is an evolution of that. It incorporates technology from the company's most recent acquisition, Morpheus.

Neri makes a not-so-oblique reference to the controversy around VMware licensing changes since it was acquired by Broadcomm.

" I speak to customers, a lot – more than 50% of my time I spend with customers and partner –, and what they tell me is that the virtualization landscape is shifting due to recent changes in various contracts and licensing terms. Many customers tell me their costs have increased three to five times," he says.

"For that reason, many customers are re evaluating their options and looking to create the right mix of run times across the hybrid cloud operating model."

In response, the company is releasing HPE VM Essintials

"HPE VM Essentials provides a unified VM management experience, which means you can manage existing VMware war notes or the new HP VM essentials hypervisor with a simplified experience across both stacks," says Neri.

Feedback from the beta test has been very positive, says Neri, and it will be generally available as a standalone solution from next month.

Some new AI announcements as well. The company has taken the opportunity of being in Europe, where privacy and data security regulations tend to be stricter, to announce some new air-gapped versions of its products.

First up, HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected.

"Many of you have asked us for the same HPE Green Lake cloud native experience, but not connected to the Internet or outside the cloud," says Neri. "In response to that, today, we are introducing the option for disconnected management for HPE private cloud solutions for a fully air gaps management option for you, for the building or our disconnected management capability."

The second air-gapped product is HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected. This is an on-premises, fully disconnected block storage option.

"This new solution provides customers in highly regulated environments the ability to manage with stringent privacy and security requirements for the most efficient mission critical databases," said Neri.

There's a new member of the Alletra storage family as well, the X10,000 all-flash object storage device that has been optimized, Neri says, for high speed data lakes and rapid store for backup and recovery.

"It will offer up to six times faster object storage performance compared to our competitors," Neri claims

Neri is joined by two guests, HPE CTO Fidelma Russo and Neil MacDonald, EVP and GM of compute, HPC and AI.

This is a wide ranging conversation, starting off with the fact that AI isn't new – it's what MacDonald studied at university some years ago. However, newer forms of AI – even preceding generative AI – are quite different from the AI of old.

"In traditional terms, artificial intelligence didn't rely on massive amounts of data and computation. It was about hand crafted rules and expert knowledge being encoded," he says. "Since then, we saw a more modern subset of AI emerge with machine learning, and then later deep learning, which allowed computers to make predictions without being explicitly programmed with that knowledge."

MacDonald says that despite these differences, ML and deep learning are both about learning patterns, which is what classical AI has always been about.

"Generative AI is a key shift, because ... it's no longer about labeling things, but it's generating things," MacDonald says. "It's radically different."

Generative AI, he says, has "enormous potential to fundamentally transform human productivity".

While the three are very much talking up the technology, they do address one of the key problems with increased AI adoption – energy consumption.

This is something that was touched on in June at Discover Las Vegas, and which we've discussed in the ITPro Podcast as well.

Neri is now joined on stage by Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks.

HPE announced its intention to acquire Juniper Networks earlier this year and, for now, it's still a pending acquisition. In that respect there's not an awful lot of news to report, but the conversation did illuminate a bit more how Juniper's technologies will be used.

According to Rahim: "It's about more than just combining (our) strengths to create the best networking business on the planet.

"I think it's about transforming what networks can do for those that use them, from delivering better experienced with traditional applications to meeting the growing demands of AI workloads."

Rahim and Neri talk up Juniper Networks' heritage in AI, which goes back almost 10 years, Rahim says.

In short, Juniper's technology will build on what HPE has in place already with Aruba and help bolster the company's AI strategy, the CEOs say.

And with that the keynote is over, as is this live blog.

For more from HPE Discover Barcelona 2024 as it happens, and our archive content from June, catch up on all our HPE Discover coverage, click here.