Can Pied Piper Really Afford HPE’s Composable Infrastructure?

With Starbucks and Apple logos so common in movies and TV shows that they’re practically unnoticeable, product placement for enterprise technology is the hot marketing challenge of the day.

As we ROFLed watching the season-three finale of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, it was hard not to notice the gigantic black rack bearing a green rectangle sitting in the cluttered garage of the Pied Piper/Bachmanity headquarters that doubles as the startup’s data center and triples as Jared’s bedroom.

HBO’s brilliant satirical take on the San Francisco Bay Area tech scene is where converged infrastructure vendors have found their perfect place for product placement.

But compared to the subtle appearances of SimpliVity’s OmniCube on the show – that’s what the much dreaded “box” Pied Piper was forced to build by its promptly ousted CEO Jack Barker was based on – the appearance Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Synergy on the season finale is a rather clunky feat of enterprise product placement.

More on HPE Synergy: HPE Rethinks Enterprise Computing

The show generally gets things right about tech, the business and the technology. As we’ve pointed out before, it has been fairly spot-on on the data center side of things too, so it was puzzling to see HPE’s latest and greatest in data center gear, its composable infrastructure machine, sitting among the more fitting mess of servers, cables, milk crates, and tool shelves Gilfoyle had concocted to support the startup’s IT requirements earlier.

Pied Piper is out of money at this point, and it’s hard to believe it can afford HPE’s latest iteration on converged infrastructure, let alone one whose official shipping date is unclear at the moment. Besides, hasn't Pied Piper already migrated to the cloud?

You can see the HPE Synergy rack briefly in the beginning of this promo clip for the season finale:

See also: Data Centers Offer HBO's Silicon Valley Much to Laugh About