(Intro Music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to this special cube conversation with Matt Burr who is the general manager of FlashBlade at Pure Storage. Matt, how you doing? Good to see you. >> I'm doing great. Nice to see you again, Dave. >> Yeah. You know, welcome back. We're going to be broadcasting this is at accelerate. You guys get big news. Of course, FlashBlade S we're going to dig into it. The famous FlashBlade now has new letter attached to it. Tell us what it is, what it's all about. >> (laughing) >> You know, it's easy to say. It's just the latest and greatest version of the FlashBlade, but obviously it's a lot more than that. We've had a lot of success with FlashBlade kind of across the board in particular with Meta and their research super cluster, which is one of the largest AI super clusters in the world. But, it's not enough to just build on the thing that you had, right? So, with the FlashBlade S, we've increased modularity, we've done things like, building co-design software and hardware and leveraging that into something that increases, or it actually doubles density, performance, power efficiency. On top of that, you can scale independently, storage, networking, and compute, which is pretty big deal because it gives you more flexibility, gives you a little more granularity around performance or capacity, depending on which direction you want to go. And we believe that, kind of the end of this is fundamentally the, I guess, the way to put it is sort of the highest performance and capacity optimization, unstructured data platform on the market today without the need for, kind of, an expensive data tier of cash or expected data cash and tier. So we're pretty excited about, what we've ended up with here. >> Yeah. So I think sometimes people forget, about how much core engineering Meta does. Facebook, you go on Facebook and play around and post things, but yeah, their backend cloud is just amazing. So talk a little bit more about the problem targets for FlashBlade. I mean, it's pretty wide scope and we're going to get into that, but what's the core of that. >> Yeah. We've talked about that extensively in the past, the use cases kind of generally remain the same. I know, we'll probably explore this a little bit more deeply, but you know, really what we're talking about here is performance and scalability. We have written essentially an unlimited Metadata software level, which gives us the ability to expand, we're already starting to think about computing an exabyte scale. Okay. So, the problem that the customer has of, Hey, I've got a Greenfield, object environment, or I've got a file environment and my 10 K and 7,500 RPM disc is just spiraling out of control in my environment. It's an environmental problem. It's a management problem, we have effectively, simplified the process of bringing together highly performant, very large multi petabyte to eventually exabyte scale unstructured data systems. >> So people are obviously trying to inject machine intelligence, AI, ML into applications, bring data into applications, bringing those worlds closer together. Analytics is obviously exploding. You see some other things happening in the news, read somewhere, protection and the like, where does FlashBlade fit in terms of FlashBlade S in some terms of some of these new use cases. >> All those things, we're only going wider and broader. So, we've talked in the past about having a having a horizontal approach to this market. The unstructured data market has often had vertical specificity. You could see successful infrastructure companies in oil and gas that may not play median entertainment, where you see, successful companies that play in media entertainment, but don't play well in financial services, for example. We're sort of playing the long game here with this and we're focused on, bringing an all Q L C architecture that combines our traditional kind of pure DFM with the software that is, now I guess seven years hardened from the original FlashBlade system. And so, when we look at customers and we look at kind of customers in three categories, right, we have customers that sort of fit into a very traditional, more than three, but kind of make bucketized this way, customers that fit into kind of this EDA HPC space, then you have that sort of data protection, which I believe kind of ransomware falls under that as well. The world has changed, right? So customers want their data back faster. Rapid restore is a real thing, right? We have customers that come to us and say, anybody can back up my data, but if I want to get something back fast and I mean in less than a week or a couple days, what do I do? So we can solve that problem. And then as you sort of accurately pointed out where you started, there is the AI ML side of things where the Invidia relationship that we have, right. DGX is are a pretty powerful weapon in that market and solving those problems. But they're not cheap. And keeping those DGX's running all the time requires an extremely efficient underpinning of a flash system. And we believe we have that market as well. >> It's interesting when pure was first coming out as a startup, you obviously had some cool new tech, but you know, your stack wasn't as hard. And now you've got seven years under your belt. The last time you were on the cube, we talked about some of the things that you guys were doing differently. We talked about UFFO, unified fast file and object. How does this new product, FlashBlade S, compare to some previous generations of FlashBlade in terms of solving unstructured data and some of these other trends that we've been talking about? >> Yeah. I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to go a little bit deeper on this concept of modularity. So for those that are familiar with Pure Storage, we have what's called the evergreen storage program. It's not as much a program as it is an engineering philosophy. The belief that everything we build should be modular in nature so that we can have essentially a chassi that has an a 100% modular components inside of it. Such that we can upgrade all of those features, non disruptively from one version to the next, you should think about that as you know, if you have an iPhone, when you go get a new iPhone, what do you do with your old iPhone? You either throw it away or you sell it. Well, imagine if your iPhone just got newer and better each time you renewed your, whatever it is, two year or three year subscription with apple. That's effectively what we have as a core philosophy, core operating engineering philosophy within pure. That is now a completely full and robust program with this instantiation of the FlashBlade S. And so kind of what that means is, for a customer I'm future proofed for X number of years, knowing that we have a run rate of being able to keep customers on the flash array side from the FA 400 all the way through the flash array X and Excel, which is about a 10 year time span. So, that then, and of itself sort of starts to play into customers that have concerns around ESG. Right? Last time I checked power space and cooling, still mattered in data center. So although I have people that tell me all the time, power space clearly doesn't matter anymore, but I know at the end of the day, most customers seem to say that it does, you're not throwing away refrigerator size pieces of equipment that once held spinning disc, something that's a size of a microwave that's populated with DFMs with all LC flash that you can actually upgrade over time. So if you want to scale more performance, we can do that through adding CPU. If you want to scale more capacity, we can do that through adding more And we're in control of those parameters because we're building our own DFM, our direct fabric modules on our own storage notes, if you will. So instead of relying on the consumer packaging of an SSD, we're upgrading our own stuff and growing it as we can. So again, on the ESG side, I think for many customers going into the next decade, it's going to be a huge deal. >> Yeah. Interesting comments, Matt. I mean, I don't know if you guys invented it, but you certainly popularize the idea of, no Fort lift upgrades and sort of set the industry on its head when you guys really drove that evergreen strategy and kind of on that note, you guys talk about simplicity. I remember last accelerate went deep with cause on your philosophy of keeping things simple, keeping things uncomplicated, you guys talk about using better science to do that. And you a lot of talk these days about outcomes. How does FlashBlade S support those claims and what do you guys mean by better science? >> Yeah. You know, better science is kind of a funny term. It was an internal term that I was on a sales call actually. And the customer said, well, I understand the difference between these two, but could you tell me how we got there and I was a little stumped on the answer. And I just said, well, I think we have better scientists and that kind of morphed into better science, a good example of that is our Metadata architecture, right? So our scalable Metadata allows us to avoid having that cashing tier, that other architectures have to rely on in order to anticipate, which files are going to need to be in read cash and read misses become very expensive. Now, a good follow up question there, not to do your job, but it's the question that I always get is, well, when you're designing your own hardware and your own software, what's the real material advantage of that? Well, the real material advantage of that is that you are in control of the combination and the interaction of those two things you don't give up the sort of the general purpose nature, if you will, of the performance characteristics that come along with things like commodity, you get a very specific performance profile. That's tailored to the software that's being married to it. Now in some instances you could say, well, okay, does that really matter? Well, when you start to talking about 20, 40, 50, 100, 500, petabyte data sets, every percentage matters. And so those individual percentages equate to space savings. They equate to power and cooling savings. We believe that we're going to have industry best dollars per lot. We're going to have industry best, kind of dollar PRU. So really the whole kind of game here is a round scale. >> Yeah. I mean, look, there's clearly places for the pure software defined. And then when cloud first came out, everybody said, oh, build the cloud and commodity, they don't build custom art. Now you see all the hyper scalers building custom software, custom hardware and software integration, custom Silicon. So co-innovation between hardware and software. It seems pretty as important, if not more important than ever, especially for some of these new workloads who knows what the edge is going to bring. What's the downside of not having that philosophy in your view? Is it just, you can't scale to the degree that you want, you can't support the new workloads or performance? What should customers be thinking about there? >> I think the downside plays in two ways. First is kind of the future and at scale, as I alluded to earlier around cost and just savings over time. Right? So if you're using a you know a commodity SSD, there's packaging around that SSD that is wasteful both in terms of- It's wasteful in the environmental sense and wasteful in the sort of computing performance sense. So that's kind of one thing. On the second side, it's easier for us to control the controllables around reliability when you can eliminate the number of things that actually sit in that workflow and by workflow, I mean when a right is acknowledged from a host and it gets down to the media, the more control you have over that, the more reliability you have over that piece. >> Yeah. I know. And we talked about ESG earlier. I know you guys, I'm going to talk a little bit about more news from accelerate within Invidia. You've certainly heard Jensen talk about the wasted CPU cycles in the data center. I think he's forecasted, 25 to 30% of the cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offload, or certainly networking and security. So now it sort of confirms your ESG thought, we can do things more efficiently, but as it relates to Invidia and some of the news around AIRI's, what is the AI RI? What's that stand for? What's the high level overview of AIRI. >> So the AIRI has been really successful for both us and Invidia. It's a really great partnership we're appreciative of the partnership. In fact, Tony pack day will be speaking here at accelerate. So, really looking forward to that, Look, there's a couple ways to look at this and I take the macro view on this. I know that there's a equally as good of a micro example, but I think the macro is really kind of where it's at. We don't have data center space anymore, right? There's only so many data centers we can build. There's only so much power we can create. We are going to reach a point in time where municipalities are going to struggle against the businesses that are in their municipalities for power. And now you're essentially bidding big corporations against people who have an electric bill. And that's only going to last so long, you know who doesn't win in that? The big corporation doesn't win in that. Because elected officials will have to find a way to serve the people so that they can get power. No matter how skewed we think that may be. That is the reality. And so, as we look at this transition, that first decade of disc to flash transition was really in the block world. The second decade, which it's really fortunate to have a multi decade company, of course. But the second decade of riding that wave from disk to flash is about improving space, power, efficiency, and density. And we sort of reach that, it's a long way of getting to the point about iMedia where these AI clusters are extremely powerful things. And they're only going to get bigger, right? They're not going to get smaller. It's not like anybody out there saying, oh, it's a Thad, or, this isn't going to be something that's going to yield any results or outcomes. They yield tremendous outcomes in healthcare. They yield tremendous outcomes in financial services. They use tremendous outcome in cancer research, right? These are not things that we as a society are going to give up. And in fact, we're going to want to invest more on them, but they come at a cost and one of the resources that is required is power. And so when you look at what we've done in particular with Invidia. You found something that is extremely power efficient that meets the needs of kind of going back to that macro view of both the community and the business. It's a win-win. >> You know and you're right. It's not going to get smaller. It's just going to continue to in momentum, but it could get increasingly distributed. And you think about, I talked about the edge earlier. You think about AI inferencing at the edge. I think about Bitcoin mining, it's very distributed, but it consumes a lot of power and so we're not exactly sure what the next level architecture is, but we do know that science is going to be behind it. Talk a little bit more about your Invidia relationship, because I think you guys were the first, I might be wrong about this, but I think you were the first storage company to announce a partnership with Invidia several years ago, probably four years ago. How is this new solution with a AIRI slash S building on that partnership? What can we expect with Invidia going forward? >> Yeah. I think what you can expect to see is putting the foot on the gas on kind of where we've been with Invidia. So, as I mentioned earlier Meta is by some measurements, the world's largest research super cluster, they're a huge Invidia customer and built on pure infrastructure. So we see kind of those types of well reference architectures, not that everyone's going to have a Meta scale reference architecture, but the base principles of what they're solving for are the base principles of what we're going to begin to see in the enterprise. I know that begin sounds like a strange word because there's already a big business in DGX. There's already a sizable business in performance, unstructured data. But those are only going to get exponentially bigger from here. So kind of what we see is a deepening and a strengthening of the of the relationship and opportunity for us to talk, jointly to customers that are going to be building these big facilities and big data centers for these types of compute related problems and talking about efficiency, right? DGX are much more efficient and Flash Blades are much more efficient. It's a great pairing. >> Yeah. I mean you're definitely, a lot of AI today is modeling in the cloud, seeing HPC and data just slam together all kinds of new use cases. And these types of partnerships are the only way that we're going to solve the future problems and go after these future opportunities. I'll give you a last word you got to be excited with accelerate, what should people be looking for, add accelerate and beyond. >> You know, look, I am really excited. This is going on my 12th year at Pure Storage, which has to be seven or eight accelerates whenever we started this thing. So it's a great time of the year, maybe take a couple off because of because of COVID, but I love reconnecting in particular with partners and customers and just hearing kind of what they have to say. And this is kind of a nice one. This is four years or five years worth of work for my team who candidly I'm extremely proud of for choosing to take on some of the solutions that they, or excuse me, some of the problems that they chose to take on and find solutions for. So as accelerate roles around, I think we have some pretty interesting evolutions of the evergreen program coming to be announced. We have some exciting announcements in the other product arenas as well, but the big one for this event is FlashBlade. And I think that we will see. Look, no one's going to completely control this transition from disc to flash, right? That's a that's a macro trend. But there are these points in time where individual companies can sort of accelerate the pace at which it's happening. And that happens through cost, it happens through performance. My personal belief is this will be one of the largest points of those types of acceleration in this transformation from disc to flash and unstructured data. This is such a leap. This is essentially the equivalent of us going from the 400 series on the block side to the X, for those that you're familiar with the flash array lines. So it's a huge, huge leap for us. I think it's a huge leap for the market. And look, I think you should be proud of the company you work for. And I am immensely proud of what we've created here. And I think one of the things that is a good joy in life is to be able to talk to customers about things you care about. I've always told people my whole life, inefficiency is the bane of my existence. And I think we've rooted out ton of inefficiency with this product and looking forward to going and reclaiming a bunch of data center space and power without sacrificing any performance. >> Well congratulations on making it into the second decade. And I'm looking forward to the orange and the third decade, Matt Burr, thanks so much for coming back in the cubes. It's good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. Nice to see you as well. We appreciate it. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (outro music)

(funky music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host Peter Burris. Well, as I sit here in our CUBE studios, 2020's fast approaching, and every year as we turn the corner on a new year, we bring in some of our leading thought leaders to ask them what they see the coming year holding in the particular technology domain in which they work. And this one is no different. We've got a great CUBE guest, a frequent CUBE guest, Eric Herzog, the CMO and VP of Global Channels, IBM Storage, and Eric's here to talk about storage in 2020. Eric? >> Peter, thank you. Love being here at theCUBE. Great solutions. You guys do a great job on educating everyone in the marketplace. >> Well, thanks very much. But let's start really quickly, quick update on IBM Storage. >> Well, been a very good year for us. Lots of innovation. We've brought out a new Storwize family in the entry space. Brought out some great solutions for big data and AI solutions with our Elastic Storage System 3000. Support for backup in container environments. We've had persistent storage for containers, but now we can back it up with our award-winning Spectrum Protect and Protect Plus. We've got a great set of solutions for the hybrid multicloud world for big data and AI and the things you need to get cyber resiliency across your enterprise in your storage estate. >> All right, so let's talk about how folks are going to apply those technologies. You've heard me say this a lot. The difference between business and digital business is the role that data plays in a digital business. So let's start with data and work our way down into some of the trends. >> Okay. >> How are, in your conversations with customers, 'cause you talk to a lot of customers, is that notion of data as an asset starting to take hold? >> Most of our clients, whether it be big, medium, or small, and it doesn't matter where they are in the world, realize that data is their most valuable asset. Their customer database, their product databases, what they do for service and support. It doesn't matter what the industry is. Retail, manufacturing. Obviously we support a number of other IT players in the industry that leverage IBM technologies across the board, but they really know that data is the thing that they need to grow, they need to nurture, and they always need to make sure that data's protected or they could be out of business. >> All right, so let's now, starting with that point, in the tech industry, storage has always kind of been the thing you did after you did your server, after you did your network. But there's evidence that as data starts taking more center stage, more enterprises are starting to think more about the data services they need, and that points more directly to storage hardware, storage software. Let's start with that notion of the ascension of storage within the enterprise. >> So with data as their most valuable asset, what that means is storage is the critical foundation. As you know, if the storage makes a mistake, that data's gone. >> Right. >> If you have a malware or ransomware attack, guess what? Storage can help you recover. In fact, we even got some technology in our Spectrum Protect product that can detect anomalous activity and help the backup admin or the storage admins realize they're having a ransomware or malware attack, and then they could take the right corrective action. So storage is that foundation across all their applications, workloads, and use cases that optimizes it, and with data as the end result of those applications, workloads, and use cases, if the storage has a problem, the data has a problem. >> So let's talk about what you see as in that foundation some of the storage services we're going to be talking most about in 2020. >> Eric: So I think one of the big things is-- >> Oh, I'm sorry, data services that we're going to be talking most about in 2020. >> So I think one of the big things is the critical nature of the storage to help protect their data. People when they think of cyber security and resiliency think about keeping the bad guy out, and since it's not an issue of if, it's when, chasing the bad guy down. But I've talked to CIOs and other executives. Sometimes they get the bad guy right away. Other times it takes them weeks. So if you don't have storage with the right cyber resiliency, whether that be data at rest encryption, encrypting data when you send it out transparently to your hybrid multicloud environment, whether malware and ransomware detection, things like air gap, whether it be air gap to tape or air gap to cloud. If you don't think about that as part of your overall security strategy, you're going to leave yourself vulnerable, and that data could be compromised and stolen. So I can almost say that in 2020, we're going to talk more about how the relationship between security and data and storage is going to evolve, almost to the point where we're actually going to start thinking about how security can be, it becomes almost a feature or an attribute of a storage or a data object. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, I mean, think of it as storage infused with cyber resiliency so that when it does happen, the storage helps you be protected until you get the bad guy and track him down. And until you do, you want that storage to resist all attacks. You need that storage to be encrypted so they can't steal it. So that's a thing, when you look at an overarching security strategy, yes, you want to keep the bad guy out. Yes, you want to track the bad guy down. But when they get in, you'd better make sure that what's there is bolted to the wall. You know, it's the jewelry in the floor safe underneath the carpet. They don't even know it's there. So those are the types of things you need to rely on, and your storage can do almost all of that for you once the bad guy's there till you get him. >> So the second thing I want to talk about along this vein is we've talked about the difference between hardware and software, software-defined storage, but still it ends up looking like a silo for most of the players out there. And I've talked to a number of CIOs who say, you know, buying a lot of these software-defined storage systems is just like buying not a piece of hardware, but a piece of software as a separate thing to manage. At what point in time do you think we're going to start talking about a set of technologies that are capable of spanning multiple vendors and delivering a more broad, generalized, but nonetheless high function, highly secure storage infrastructure that brings with it software-defined, cloud-like capabilities. >> So what we see is the capability of A, transparently traversing from on-prem to your hybrid multicloud seamlessly. They can't, it can't be hard to do. It's got to happen very easily. The cloud is a target, and by the way, most mid-size enterprise and up don't use one cloud, they use many, so you've got to be able to traverse those many, move data back and forth transparently. Second thing we see coming this year is taking the overcomplexity of multiple storage platforms coupled with hybrid cloud and merging them across. So you could have an entry system, mid-range system, a high-end system, traversing the cloud with a single API, a single data management platform, performance and price points that vary depending on your application workload and use case. Obviously you use entry storage for certain things, high-end storage for other things. But if you could have one way to manage all that data, and by the way, for certain solutions, we've got this with one of our products called Spectrum Virtualize. We support enterprise-class data service including moving the data out to cloud not only on IBM storage, but over 450 other arrays which are not IBM-logoed. Now, that's taking that seamlessness of entry, mid-range, on-prem enterprise, traversing it to the cloud, doing it not only for IBM storage, but doing it for our competitors, quite honestly. >> Now, once you have that flexibility, now it introduces a lot of conversations about how to match workloads to the right data technologies. How do you see workloads evolving, some of these data-first workloads, AI, ML, and how is that going to drive storage decisions in the next year, year and a half, do you think? >> Well, again, as we talked about already, storage is that critical foundation for all of your data needs. So depending on the data need, you've got multiple price points that we've talked about traversing out to the cloud. The second thing we see is there's different parameters that you can leverage. For example, AI, big data, and analytic workloads are very dependent on bandwidth. So if you can take a scalable infrastructure that scales to exabytes of capacity, can scale to terabytes per second of bandwidth, then that means across a giant global namespace, for example, we've got with our Spectrum Scale solutions and our Elastic Storage System 3000 the capability of racking and stacking two rack U at a time, growing the capacity seamlessly, growing the performance seamlessly, providing that high-performance bandwidth you need for AI, analytic, and big data workloads. And by the way, guess what, you could traverse it out to the cloud when you need to archive it. So looking at AI as a major force in the coming, not just next year, but in the coming years to go, it's here to stay, and the characteristics that IBM sees that we've had in our Spectrum Scale products, we've had for years that have really come out of the supercomputing and the high-performance computing space, those are the similar characteristics to AI workloads, machine workloads, to the big data workloads and analytics. So we've got the right solution. In fact, the two largest supercomputers on this planet have almost an exabyte of IBM storage focused on AI, analytics, and big data. So that's what we see traversing everywhere. And by the way, we also see these AI workloads moving from just the big enterprise guys down into small shops, as well. So that's another trend you're going to see. The easier you make that storage foundation underneath your AI workloads, the more easy it is for the big company, the mid-size company, the small company all to get into AI and get the value. The small companies have to compete with the big guys, so they need something, too, and we can provide that starting with a little simple two rack U unit and scaling up into exabyte-class capabilities. >> So all these new workloads and the simplicity of how you can apply them nonetheless is still driving questions about how the storage hierarchies evolved. Now, this notion of the storage hierarchy's been around for, what, 40, 50 years, or something like that. >> Eric: Right. >> You know, tape and this and, but there's some new entrants here and there are some reasons why some of the old entrants are still going to be around. So I want to talk about two. How do you see tape evolving? Is that, is there still need for that? Let's start there. >> So we see tape as actually very valuable. We've had a real strong uptick the last couple years in tape consumption, and not just in the enterprise accounts. In fact, several of the largest cloud providers use IBM tape solutions. So when you need to provide incredible amounts of data, you need to provide primary, secondary, and I'd say archive workloads, and you're looking at petabytes and petabytes and petabytes and exabytes and exabytes and exabytes and zetabytes and zetabytes, you've got to have a low-cost platform, and tape provides still by far the lowest cost platform. So tape is here to stay as one of those key media choices to help you keep your costs down yet easily go out to the cloud or easily pull data back. >> So tape still is a reasonable, in fact, a necessary entrant in that overall storage hierarchy. One of the new ones that we're starting to hear more about is storage-class memory, the idea of filling in that performance gap between external devices and memory itself so that we can have a persistent store that can service all the new kinds of parallelism that we're introducing into these systems. How do you see storage-class memory playing out in the next couple years? >> Well, we already publicly announced in 2019 that in 2020, in the first half, we'd be shipping storage-class memory. It would not only working some coming systems that we're going to be announcing in the first half of the year, but they would also work on some of our older products such as the FlashSystem 9100 family, the Storwize V7000 gen three will be able to use storage-class memory, as well. So it is a way to also leverage AI-based tiering. So in the old days, flash would tier to disk. You've created a hybrid array. With storage-class memory, it'll be a different type of hybrid array in the future, storage-class memory actually tiering to flash. Now, obviously the storage-class memory is incredibly fast and flash is incredibly fast compared to disk, but it's all relative. In the old days, a hybrid array was faster than an all hard drive array, and that was flash and disk. Now you're going to see hybrid arrays that'll be storage-class memory and with our easy tier function, which is part of our Spectrum Virtualize software, we use AI-based tiering to automatically move the data back and forth when it's hot and when it's cool. Now, obviously flash is still fast, but if flash is that secondary medium in a configuration like that, it's going to be incredibly fast, but it's still going to be lower cost. The other thing in the early years that storage-class memory will be an expensive option from all vendors. It will, of course, over time get cheap, just the way flash did. >> Sure. >> Flash was way more expensive than hard drives. Over time it, you know, now it's basically the same price as what were the old 15,000 RPM hard drives, which have basically gone away. Storage-class over several years will do that, of course, as well, and by the way, it's very traditional in storage, as you, and I've been around so long and I've worked at hard drive companies in the old days. I remember when the fast hard drive was a 5400 RPM drive, then a 7200 RPM drive, then a 10,000 RPM drive. And if you think about it in the hard drive world, there was almost always two to three different spin speeds at different price points. You can do the same thing now with storage-class memory as your fastest tier, and now a still incredibly fast tier with flash. So it'll allow you to do that. And that will grow over time. It's going to be slow to start, but it'll continue to grow. We're there at IBM already publicly announcing. We'll have products in the first half of 2020 that will support storage-class memory. >> All right, so let's hit flash, because there's always been this concern about are we going to have enough flash capacity? You know, is enough going to, enough product going to come online, but also this notion that, you know, since everybody's getting flash from the same place, the flash, there's not going to be a lot of innovation. There's not going to be a lot of differentiation in the flash drives. Now, how do you see that playing out? Is there still room for innovation on the actual drive itself or the actual module itself? >> So when you look at flash, that's what IBM has funded on. We have focused on taking raw flash and creating our own flash modules. Yes, we can use industry standard solid state disks if you want to, but our flash core modules, which have been out since our FlashSystem product line, which is many years old. We just announced a new set in 2018 in the middle of the year that delivered in a four-node cluster up to 15 million IOPS with under 100 microseconds of latency by creating our own custom flash. At the same time when we launched that product, the FlashSystem 9100, we were able to launch it with NVME technology built right in. So we were one of the first players to ship NVME in a storage subsystem. By the way, we're end-to-end, so you can go fiber channel of fabric, InfiniBand over fabric, or ethernet over fabric to NVME all the way on the back side at the media level. But not only do we get that performance and that latency, we've also been able to put up to two petabytes in only two rack U. Two petabytes in two rack U. So incredibly rack density. So those are the things you can do by innovating in a flash environment. So flash can continue to have innovation, and in fact, you should watch for some of the things we're going to be announcing in the first half of 2020 around our flash core modules and our FlashSystem technology. >> Well, I look forward to that conversation. But before you go here, I got one more question for you. >> Sure. >> Look, I've known you for a long time. You spend as much time with customers as anybody in this world. Every CIO I talk to says, "I want to talk to the guy who brings me "or the gal who brings me the great idea." You know, "I want those new ideas." When Eric Herzog walks into their office, what's the good idea that you're bringing them, especially as it pertains to storage for the next year? >> So, actually, it's really a couple things. One, it's all about hybrid and multicloud. You need to seamlessly move data back and forth. It's got to be easy to do. Entry platform, mid-range, high-end, out to the cloud, back and forth, and you don't want to spend a lot of time doing it and you want it to be fully automated. >> So storage doesn't create any barriers. >> Storage is that foundation that goes on and off-prem and it supports multiple cloud vendors. >> Got it. >> Second thing is what we already talked about, which is because data is your most valuable asset, if you don't have cyber-resiliency on the storage side, you are leaving yourself exposed. Clearly big data and AI, and the other thing that's been a hot topic, which is related, by the way, to hybrid multiclouds, is the rise of the container space. For primary, for secondary, how do you integrate with Red Hat? What do you do to support containers in a Kubernetes environment? That's a critical thing. And we see the world in 2020 being trifold. You're still going to have applications that are bare metal, right on the server. You're going to have tons of applications that are virtualized, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, OVM, all the virtualization layers. But you're going to start seeing the rise of the container admin. Containers are not just going to be the purview of the devops guy. We have customers that talk about doing 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 containers, just like they did when they first started going into the VM worlds, and now that they're going to do that, you're going to see customers that have bare metal, virtual machines, and containers, and guess what? They may start having to have container admins that focus on the administration of containers because when you start doing 30, 40, 50,000, you can't have the devops guy manage that 'cause you're deploying it all over the place. So we see containers. This is the year that containers starts to go really big-time. And we're there already with our Red Hat support, what we do in Kubernetes environments. We provide primary storage support for persistency containers, and we also, by the way, have the capability of backing that up. So we see containers really taking off in how it relates to your storage environment, which, by the way, often ties to how you configure hybrid multicloud configs. >> Excellent. Eric Herzog, CMO and vice president of partner strategies for IBM Storage. Once again, thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (funky music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at AWS re:Invent, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Justin Warren. This is day one of AWS re:Invent. Rob Lee is here, he's the Vice President and Chief Architect at Pure Storage. And he's joined by Rob Walters, who is the Vice President, General Manager of Storage as a Service at Pure. Robs, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us back. >> Yep, thank you. >> Dave: You're welcome. Rob, we'll start with, Rob Lee we'll start with you. So re:Invent, this is the eighth re:Invent, I think the seventh for theCUBE, what's happened at the show, any key takeaways? >> Yeah, absolutely it's great to be back. We were here last year obviously big launch of cloud data services, so it's great to be back a year in. And just kind of reflect back on how the year's gone for uptick at cloud data services, our native US. And it's been a banner year. So we saw over the last year CloudSnap go GA Cloud Block Store go GA and you know just really good customer uptake, adoption and kind of interest out of the gate. So it's kind of great to be back. Great to kind of share what we've down over the last year as well as just get some feedback and more interest from future customers and prospects as well. >> So Rob W, with your background in the cloud what's you take on this notion of storage as a service? How do you guys think about that and how do you look at that? >> Sure, well this is an ever more increasingly important way to consume storage. I mean we're seeing customers who've been you know got used to the model, the economic model, the as a service model in the cloud, now looking to get those benefits on-prem and in the hybrid cloud too. Which if you know, you look at our portfolio we have both there, as part of the Pure as a service. >> Right okay, and then so Pure Accelerate you guys announced Cloud Block Store. >> Yeah, that's when we took it GA. Right so we've been working with customers in a protracted beta process over the last year to really refine the fit and use cases for tier one block workloads and so we took that GA in Accelerate. >> So this is an interesting, you're a partner obviously with Amazon I would think many parts of Amazon love Cloud Block Store 'cause you're using EC2, you're front-ending S3 like you're helping Amazon sell services and you're delivering a higher level of availability and performance in certain workloads, relative to EVS. So there's probably certain guys at Amazon that aren't so friendly with you. So that's an interesting dynamic, but talk about the positioning of Cloud Block Store. Any sort of updates on uptake? What are customers excited about? What can you share? >> Yeah, no absolutely You know I'd say primarily we're most pleased with the variety of workloads and use cases that customers are bringing us into. I think when we started out on this journey we saw tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the AWS Echo system and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud. What we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS, it's allowed customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flash arrays into. So that's their tier one mission critical environments, their VMware workloads, their Oracle workloads, their SAP workloads. They're also looking at us from everything from to do lift and shift, test and dev in the cloud, as well as DR right, and that again I think speaks to a couple things. It speaks to the durability, the higher level of service that we're able to deliver in AWS, but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and have it operate in exactly the same way on-prem and in the cloud. 'Cause look, if you're going to DR the last time, the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat, hey this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a DR failover. And so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness, you know it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases that customers are bringing us into. >> So you guys obviously a big partner of VMware, you're done very well in that community. So VMware cloud on AWS, is that a tailwind for you guys or can you take advantage of that at this point? >> Yeah no, so I think the way I look at it is both VMware, Pure, AWS, I think we're all responding to the same market demands and customer needs. Which at the end of the day is, look if I'm an enterprise customer the reality is, I'm going to have some of my workloads running on-premise, I'm going to have some of my workloads running in the cloud, I expect you the vendors to help me manage this diverse, hybrid environment. And what I'd say is, there are puts and takes how the different vendors are going about it but at the end of the day that's the customer need. And so you know we're going about this through a very targeted storage-centric approach because that's where we provide service today. You know and you see VMware going after it from the kind of application, hypervisor kind of virtualization end of things. Over time we've had a great partnership with VMware on-premise, and as both Cloud Block Store and VMware Cloud mature, we'd look to replicate the same motion with them in that offering. >> Yeah, I mean to to extent I mean you think about VMware moving workloads with their customers into the cloud, more mission critical stuff comes into the cloud, it's been hard to get a lot of those workloads in to date and that's maybe the next wave of cloud. Rob W., I have a question for you. You know Amazon's been kind of sleepy in storage over the, S3, EBS, okay great. They dropped a bunch of announcements this year and so it seems like there's more action now in the cloud. What's your sort of point of view as to how you make that an opportunity for Pure? >> The way I've always looked at it is, there's been a way of getting your storage done and delivered on AWS and there's been the way that enterprises have done things on-premise. And I think that was a sort of a longer term bet from AWS that that was the way things will tend to fall towards into the public cloud. And now we see, all of the hyperscalers quite honestly with on-prem, hybrid opportunities. With the like Outpost today, et cetera. The hybrid is a real things, it's not just something people said that couldn't get to the cloud, you know it's a real thing. So I think that actually opens up opportunity from both sides. True enterprise class features that our enterprise class customers are looking for in the cloud through something like CBS are now available. But I think you know at Amazon and other hyperscale are reaching back down into the on-prem environments to help with the onboarding of enterprises up into the cloud >> So the as a service side of things makes life a little bit interesting from my perspective, because that's kind of new for Pure to provide that storage as a service, but also for enterprises as you say, they're used to running things in a particular way so as they move to cloud they're kind of having to adapt and change and yet they don't fully want to. Hybrid is a real thing, there are real workloads that need to perform in a hybrid fashion. So what does that mean for you providing storage as a service, and still to Rob Lee's point, still providing that consistency of experience across the entire product portfolio. 'Cause that's quite an achievement and many other as storage providers haven't actually been able to pull that off. So how do you keep all of those components working coherently together and still provide what customers are actually looking for? >> I think you have to go back to what the basics of what customers are actually looking for. You know they're looking to make smart use of their finances capex potentially moving towards opex, that kind of consumption model is growing in popularity. And I think a lot of enterprises are seeing less and less value in the sort of nuts and bolts storage management of old. And we can provide a lot of that through the as a service offering. So had to look past the management and monitoring. We've always done the Evergreen service subscription, so with software and hardware upgrades. So we're letting their sort of shrinking capex budget and perhaps their limited resources work on the more strategically important elements of their IT strategies, including hybrid-cloud. >> Rob Lee, one of the things we've talked about in the past is AI. I'm interested in sort of the update on the AI workloads . We heard a lot obviously today on the main stage about machine learning, machine intelligence, AI, transformations, how is that going, the whole AI push? You guys were first, really the first storage company to sort of partner up and deliver solutions in that area. Give us the update there. Wow's it going, what are you learning? >> Yeah, so it's going really well. So it continues to be a very strong driver of our flash play business, and again it's really driven by it's a workload that succeeds with very large sums of data, it succeeds when you can push those large sums of data at high speed into modern compute, and rinse and repeat very frequently. And the fourth piece which I think is really helping to propel some of the business there, is you know, as enterprises, as customers get further on into the AI deployment journeys what they're finding is the application space evolves very quickly there. And the ability for infrastructure in general, but storage in particular, because that's where so much data gravity exists to be flexible to adapt to different applications and changing application requirements really helps speed them up. So said another way, if the application set that your data scientists are using today are going to change in six months, you can't really be building your storage infrastructure around a thesis of what that application looks like and then go an replace it in six months. And so that message as customers have been through now the first, first and a half iterations of that and really sort of internalize, hey AI is a space that's rapidly evolving we need infrastructure that can evolve and grow with us, that's helping drive a lot of second looks and a lot of business back to us. And I would actually tie this back to your previous question which is the direction that Amazon have taken with some of their new storage offerings and how that ties into storage as a service. If I step back as a whole, what I'd say is both Amazon and Pure, what we see is there's now a demand really for multiple classes of service for storage, right. Fast is important, it's going to continue to get more and more important, whether it's AI, whether it's low latency transactional databases, or some other workload. So fast always matters, cost always matters. And so you're going to have this stratification, whether it's in the cloud, whether its on flash with SCM, TLC, QLC, you want the benefits of all of those. What you don't want is to have to manage the complexity of tying and stitching all those pieces together yourself, and what you certainly don't want is a procurement model that locks you out or in to one of these tiers, or in one of these locations. And so if you think about it in the long term, and not to put words in the other Rob's mouth, where I think you see us going with Pure as a service is moving to a model that really shifts the conversation with customers to say, look the way you should be transacting with storage vendors, and we're going to lead the charge is class of service, maybe protocol, and that's about it. It's like where do you want this data to exist? How fast do you want it? Where on the price performance curve do you want to be? How do you want it to be protected? And give us room to take care of it from there. >> That's right, that's right. This isn't about the storage array anymore. You know you look at the modern data experience message this is about what do you need from your storage, from a storage attribute perspective rather than a physical hardware perspective and let us worry about the rest. >> Yeah you have to abstract that complexity. You guys have, I mean simple is the reason why you were able to achieve escape velocity along with obviously great product and pretty good management as well. But you'll never sub optimize simplicity to try to turn some knobs. I mean I've learned that following you guys over the years. I mean that's your philosophy. >> No absolutely, and what I'd say is as technology evolves, as the components evolve into this world of multis, multi-protocol, multi-tier, multi-class of service, you know the focus on that simplicity and taking even more if it on becomes ever more important. And that's a place where, getting to your question about AI we help customers implement AI, we also do a lot of AI within our own products in our fleet. That's a place where our AI driven ops really have a place to shine in delivering that kind of best optimization of price, performance, tiers of service, so on, so forth, within the product lines. >> What are you guys seeing at the macro? I mean that to say, you've achieved escape velocity, check. Now you're sort of entering the next chapter of Pure. You're the big share gainer, but obviously growing slower than you had in previous years. Part of that we think is this, part of your fault. You put so much flash into the marketplace. It's given people a lot of headroom. Obviously NaN pricing has been an issue, you guys have addressed that on your calls, but still gaining share much, much more quickly than most. Most folks are shrinking. So what are you seeing at the macro, what are customers telling you in terms of their long term strategy with regard to storage? >> Well, so I'll start, I'll let Rob add in. What I'd say is we see in the macro a shift, a clear shift to flash. We've called the shots since day one, but what I'd say is that's accelerating. And that's accelerating with pricing dynamics, with and you know we talked about a lot of the NaN pricing and all that kind of stuff, but in the macro I think there's a clear realization now that customers want to be on flash. It's just a matter of what's the sensible rate? What's the price kind of curve to get there? And we see a couple meaningful steps. We saw it originally with our flash array line taking out 15K spinning drives, 10K's really falling. With QLC coming online and what we're doing in FlashArray//C the 7200 RPM drive kind of in the enterprise, you know those days are numbered, right. And I think for many customers at this point it's really a matter of, okay how quickly can we get there and when does it make sense to move, as opposed to, does it make sense. In many ways it's really exciting. Because if you think about it, the focus for so long has been in those tier one environments, but in many ways the tier two environments are the ones that could most benefit from a move to flash because a couple things happen there. Because they're considered lower tier, lower cost they tend to spread like bunnies, they tend to be kind of more neglected parts of the environment and so having customers now be able to take a second look at modernizing, consolidating those environments is both helpful from a operational point of view, it's also helpful from the point of view of getting them to be able to make that data useful again. >> I would also say that those exact use cases are perfect candidates for an as a service consumption model because we can actually raise the utilization, actually helping customers manage to a much more utilized set of arrays than the over consumption, under consumption game they're trying to play right now with their annual capex cycles. >> And so how aggressive do you see customers wanting to take advantage of that as a service consumption model? Is it mixed or is it like, we want this? >> There's a lot of customers who are just like we want this and we want it now. We've seen a very good traction and adoption so yeah, it's a surprisingly large, complex enterprise customer adoption as well. >> A lot of enterprise, they've gotten used to the idea of cloud from AWS. They like that model of dealing with things and they want to bring that model of operating on site, because they want cloud everywhere. They don't actually want to transform the cloud into enterprise. >> No, exactly, I mean if I go back 20 plus years to when I was doing hands on IT, the idea that we as a team would let go of any of the widgetry that we are responsible for, never would have happened. But then you've had this parallel path of public cloud experience, and people are like well I don't even need to be doing that anymore. And we get better results. Oh and it's secure as well? And that list just goes on. And so now as you say, the enterprise wants to bring it back on-prem for all of those benefits. >> One of the other things that we've been tracking, and maybe it falls in the category of cloud 2.0 is the sort of new workload forming. And I'll preface it this way, you know the early days, the past decade of cloud infrastructures of service have been about, yeah I'm going to spin up some EC2, I'm going to need some S3, whatever, I need some storage, but today it seems like, there's all this data now and then you're seeing new workloads driven by platforms like Snowflake, Redshift, you know clearly throw in some ML tools like Databricks and it's driving a lot of compute now but it's also driving insights. People are really pulling insights out of that data. I just gave you cloud examples, are you seeing on-prem examples as well, or hybrid examples, and how do you guys fit into that? >> Yeah, no absolutely. I think this is a secular trend that was kicked off by open source and the public cloud. But it certainly affects, I would say, the entire tech landscape. You know a lot of it is just about how applications are built. If you about, think back to the late '80s, early '90s you had large monoliths, you had Oracle, and it did everything, soup to nuts. Your transactional system, your data warehouse, ERP, cool, we got it all. That's not how applications are built anymore. They're built with multiple applications working together. You've got, whether it's Kafka connecting into some scale out analytics database, connected into Cassandra, connected right. It's just the modern way of how applications are built. And so whether that's connecting data between SaaS services in the cloud, whether it's connecting data between multiple different application sets that are running on-prem, we definitely see that trend. And so when you peel back the covers of that, what we see, what we hear from customers as they make that shift, as they try to stand up infrastructure to meet those need, is again the need for flexibility. As multiple applications are sharing data, are handing off data as part of a pipeline or as part of a workflow, it becomes ever more important for the underlying infrastructure, the storage array if you will, to be able to deliver high performance to multiple applications. And so the era of saying, hey look I'm going to design a storage array to be super optimized for Oracle and nothing else like you're only going to solve part of the problem now. And so this is why you see us taking, within Pure the approach that we do with how we optimize performance, whether it's across FlashArray, FlashBlade, or Cloud Block Store. >> Excellent, well guys we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts with us. And have a good rest of re:Invent. >> Thanks for having us back >> Dave: All right, pleasure >> Thank you >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one. Dave Vellante for Justin Warren. You're watching theCUBE from AWS re:Invent 2019. Right back (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, CUBE's live coverage for VMworld 2019 in Moscone North, in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, our 10 years, we have Eric Herzog, the CMO and vice president of Global Storage Channels at IBM. CUBE alum, this is his 11th appearance on theCUBE at VMworld. That's the number one position. >> Dave: It's just at VMworld. >> Congratulations, welcome back. >> Well, thank you very much. Always love to come to theCUBE. >> John: Sporting the nice shirt and the IBM badge, well done. >> Thank you, thank you. >> What's going on with IBM in VMworld? First, get the news out. What's happening for you guys here? >> So for us, we just had a big launch actually in July. That was all about big data, storage for big data and AI, and also storage for cyber-resiliency. So we just had a big launch in July, so we're just sort of continuing that momentum. We have some exciting things coming out on September 12th in the high end of our storage product line, and then some additional things very heavily around containers at the end of October. >> So the open shift is the first question I have that pops into my head. You know, I think of IBM, I think of IBM Storage, I think of Red Hat, the acquisition, OpenShift's been very successful. Pat Gelsinger was talking containers, Kubernetes-- >> Eric: Right. >> OpenShift has been a big part of Red Hat's offering, now part of IBM. Has that Red Shift, I mean OpenShift's come in, to your world, and how do you guys view that? I mean, it's containers, obviously, is there any impact there at all? >> So from a storage perspective, no. IBM storage has been working with Red Hat for over 15 years, way before the company ever thought about buying them. So we went to the old Red Hat Summits, it was two guys, a dog, and a note, and IBM was there. So we've been supporting Red Hat for years, and years, and years. So for the storage division, it's probably one of the least changes to the direction, compared to the rest of IBM 'cause we were already doing so much with Red Hat. >> You guys were present at the creation of the whole Red Hat movement. >> Yeah, I mean we were-- >> We've seen the summits, but I was kind of teeing up the question, but legitimately though, now that you have that relationship under your belt-- >> Eric: Right. >> And IBM's into creating OpenShift in all the services, you're starting to see Red Hat being an integral part across IBM-- >> Eric: Right. >> Does that impact you guys at all? >> So we've already talked about our support for Red Hat OpenShift. We do support it. We also support any sort of container environment. So we've made sure that if it's not OpenShift and someone's going to leverage something else, that our storage will work with it. We've had support for containers now for two and half years. We also support the CSI Standard. We publicly announced that earlier in the year, that we'd be having products at the end of the year and into the next year around the CSI specification. So, we're working on that as well. And then, IBM also came out with a thing that are called the Cloud Paks. These Cloud Paks are built around Red Hat. These are add-ons that across multiple divisions, and from that perspective, we're positioned as, you know, really that ideal rock solid foundation underneath any of those Cloud Paks with our support for Red Hat and the container world. >> How about protecting containers? I mean, you guys obviously have a lot of history in data protection of containers. They're more complicated. There's lots of them. You spin 'em up, spin 'em down. If they don't spin 'em down, they're an attack point. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, first thing I'd say is stay tuned for the 22nd of October 'cause we will be doing a big announcement around what we're doing for modern data protection in the container space. We've already publicly stated we would be doing stuff. Right, already said we'd be having stuff either the end of this year in Q4 or in Q1. So, we'll be doing actually our formal launch on the 22nd of October from Prague. And we'll be talking much more detail about what we're doing for modern data protection in the container space. >> Now, why Prague? What's your thinking? >> Oh, IBM has a big event called TechU, it's a Technical University, and there'll be about 2,000 people there. So, we'll be doing our launch as part of the TechU process. So, Ed Walsh, who you both know well and myself will be doing a joint keynote at that event on the 22nd. >> So, talk a little bit more about multi-cloud. You hear all kinds of stuff on multi-cloud here, and we've been talkin' on theCUBE for a while. It's like you got IBM Red Hat, you got Google, CISCO's throwin' a hat in the ring. Obviously, VMware has designs on it. You guys are an arms dealer, but of course, you're, at the same time, IBM. IBM just bought Red Hat so what are your thoughts on multi-cloud? First, how real is it? Sizeable opportunity, and from a storage perspective, storage divisions perspective, what's your strategy there? >> Well, from our strategy, we've already been takin' hybrid multi-cloud for several years. In fact, we came to Wikibon, your sister entity, and actually, Ed and I did a presentation to you in July of 2017. I looked it up, the title says hybrid multi-cloud. (Dave laughs) Storage for hybrid multi-cloud. So, before IBM started talkin' about it, as a company, which now is, of course, our official line hybrid multi-cloud, the IBM storage division was supporting that. So, we've been supporting all sorts of cloud now for several years. What we have called transparent cloud tiering where we basically just see cloud as a tier. Just the way Flash would see hard drive or tape as a tier, we now see cloud as a tier, and our spectrum virtualized for cloud sits in a VM either in Amazon or in IBM Cloud, and then, several of our software products the Spectrum line, Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Scale, are available on the AWS Marketplace as well as the IBM Cloud Marketplace. So, for us, we see multi-cloud from a software perspective where the cloud providers offer it on their marketplaces, our solutions, and we have several, got some stuff with Google as well. So, we don't really care what cloud, and it's all about choice, and customers are going to make that choice. There's been surveys done. You know, you guys have talked about it that certainly in the enterprise space, you're not going to use one cloud. You use multiple clouds, three, four, five, seven, so we're not going to care what cloud you use, whether it be the big four, right? Google, IBM, Amazon, or Azure. Could it be NTT in Japan? We have over 400 small and medium cloud providers that use our Spectrum Protect as the engine for their backup as a service. We love all 400 of them. By the way, there's another 400 we'd like to start selling Spectrum Protect as a service. So, from our perspective, we will work with any cloud provider, big, medium, and small, and believe that that's where the end users are going is to use not just one cloud provider but several. So, we want to be the storage connected. >> That's a good bet, and again, you bring up a good point, which I'll just highlight for everyone watching, you guys have made really good bets early, kind of like we were just talking to Pat Gelsinger. He was making some great bets. You guys have made some, the right calls on a lot of things. Sometimes, you know, Dave's critical of things in there that I don't really have visibility in the storage analyst he is, but generally speaking, you, Red Hat, software, the systems group made it software. How would you describe the benefits of those bets paying off today for customers? You mentioned versatility, all these different partners. Why is IBM relevant now, and from those bets that you've made, what's the benefit to the customers? How would you talk about that? Because it's kind of a big message. You got a lot going on at IBM Storage, but you've made some good bets that turned out to be on the right side of tech history. What are those bets? And what are they materializing into? >> Sure, well, the key thing is you know I always wear a Hawaiian shirt on theCUBE. I think once maybe I haven't. >> You were forced to wear a white shirt. You were forced to wear the-- >> Yes, an IBM white shirt, and once, I actually had a shirt from when I used to work for Pat at the EMC, but in general, Hawaiian shirt, and why? Because you don't fight the wave, you ride the wave, and we've been riding the wave of technology. First, it was all about AI and automation inside of storage. Our easy tier product automatically tiers. You don't have, all you do is set it up once, and after that, it automatically moves data back and forth, not only to our arrays, but over 450 arrays that aren't ours, and the data that's hottest goes to the fastest tier. If you have 15,000 RPM drives, that's your fastest, it automatically knows that and moves data back and forth between hot, fast, and cold. So, one was putting AI and automation in storage. Second wave we've been following was clearly Flash. It's all about Flash. We create our own Flash, we buy raw Flash, create our own modules. They are in the industry standard form factor, but we do things, for example, like embed encryption with no performance hit into the Flash. Latency as low as 20 microseconds, things that we can do because we take the Flash and customize it, although it is in industry standard form factor. The other one is clearly storage software and software-defined storage. All of our arrays come with software. We don't sell hardware. We sell a storage solution. They either come with Spectrum Virtualize or Spectrum Scale, but those packages are also available stand-alone. If you want to go to your reseller or your distributor and buy off-the-shelf white-box componentry, storage-rich servers, you can create your own array with Spectrum Virtualize for block, Spectrum Scale for File, IBM Object Storage for Cloud. So, if someone wants to buy software only, just the way Pat was talking about software-defined networking, we'll sell 'em software for file blocker object, and they don't buy any infrastructure from us. They only buy the software, so-- >> So, is that why you have a large customer base? Is that why there's so much, diverse set of implementations? >> Well, we've got our customers that are system-oriented, right, some you have Flash system. Got other customers that say, "Look, I just want to buy Spectrum Scale. "I don't want to buy your infrastructure. "Just I'll build my own," and we're fine with that. And the other aspect we have, of course, is we've got the modern data protection with Spectrum Protect. So, you've got a lot of vendors out on the floor. They only sell backup. That's all they sell, and you got other people on the floor, they only sell an array. They have nice little arrays, but they can't do an array and software-defined storage and modern data protection one throat to choke, one tech support, entity to deal with one set of business partners to deal with, and we can do that, which is why it's so diverse. We have people who don't have any of IBM storage at all, but they back up everything with Spectrum Protect. We have other customers who have Flash systems, but they use backup from one of our competitors, and that's okay 'cause we'll always get a PO one way or another, right? >> So, you want the choice as factor. >> Right. >> Question on the ecosystem and your relationship with VMware. As John said, 10th year at VMworld, if you go back 10 years, storage, VMware storage was limited. They had very few resources. They were throwin' out APIs to the storage industry and sayin' here, you guys, fix this problem, and you had this cartel, you know, it was EMC, IBM was certainly in there, and NetApp, a couple others, HPE, HP at the time, Dell, I don't know, I'm not sure if Dell was there. They probably were, but you had the big Cos that actually got the SDK early, and then, you'd go off and try to sell all the storage problems. Of course, EMC at the time was sort of puttin' the brakes on VMware. Now, it's totally different. You've got, actually similar cartel. Although, you've got different ownership structure with Dell, EMC, and you got (mumbles) VMwware's doin' its own software finally. The cuffs are off. So, your thoughts on the changes that have gone on in the ecosystem. IBM's sort of position and your relationship with VMware, how that's evolved. >> So, the relationship for us is very tight. Whether it be the old days of VASA, VAAI, V-center op support, right, then-- >> Dave: V-Vault, yeah yeah. >> Now, V-Vault two so we've been there every single time, and again, we don't fight the wave, we ride the wave. Virtualization's a wave. It's swept the industry. It swept the end users. It's swept every aspect of compute. We just were riding that wave and making sure our storage always worked with it with VMware, as well as other hypervisors as well, but we always supported VMware first. VMware also has a strong relationship with the cloud division, as you know, they've now solved all kinds of different things with IBM Cloud so we're making sure that we stay there with them and are always up front and center. We are riding all the waves that they start. We're not fighting it. We ride it. >> You got the Hawaiian shirt. You're riding the waves. You're hanging 10, as you used to say. Toes on the nose, as the expression goes. As Pat Gelsinger says, ride the new wave, you're a driftwood. Eric, great to see you, CMO of IBM Storage, great to have you all these years and interviewing you, and gettin' the knowledge. You're a walking storage encyclopedia, Wikipedia, thanks for comin' on. >> Great, thank you. >> All right, it's more CUBE coverage here live in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier for Dave Vellante, stay with us. I got Sanjay Putin coming up, and we have all the big executives who run the different divisions. We're going to dig into them. We're going to get the data, share with you. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, buddy. This is David Lantz. Welcome to this cube. Conversation with Dr Rico is the CMO of infinite out. It's still I still have a hard time saying that doctor or an engineer and I love having you on because we could talk storage. We could go deep and we could talk trends and marketing trends, too. But so welcome. Thanks for coming on my sled. So tell me what's new since the scale to win launch that you guys had. Tell me what you know. Is everything shipping Now What's the uptake been like with customers? And the reaction? Yeah, >> they're the reaction has been phenomenal. This, as you may recall, you were there. It was biggest launch in our history, which was fantastic. And the reaction has just been overwhelmingly positive, with customers with partners with analysts. Human scum cases with competitors is an interesting you know, we had a lot of things that were already shipping. They were an early customer release. There were a few things that we had started shipping in December on the things that we said we'd be coming in three Q. We G eight on time. So there, there now all generally available except the stuff that we talked about that would be available in 2020 which right now looks like it's on track. It's doing very, very well. >> So VM wear VM world eyes coming up later on this month, things are obviously changing. There was announcement recently that that VM wears gonna choir pivotal. So a little bit of financial engineering going on stock stock rose 77% on the day when the Dow dropped 800. So okay, the funny money. But things are changing in the V m where ecosystem you certainly saw we we This is our 10th year the M world. We go back and you hear Tod Nielsen back in the day, talk about for every dollar spent on a V M where lice and 15 was spent a Negro system, you know, we're kinda del izing vm wear now, which is sort of interesting, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing what that all means to you. I mean, still half a million 600,000 customers, you've got to be there you guys have great success at that show. So your thoughts what's going on? But VM world this year? Yeah, I >> kind of kind of loaded their first of all congratulations on the milestone. That's great. 10 years is super. Remember, probably seeing you with the 1st 1 there. Of course we knew each other longer. Uh, you know, and sure I get the incestuous, you know, money changing of hand there, I think I think it's it's good in one respect. You certainly CBM where, you know, making big inroads with VM wear on AWS. And this isn't now with Pivotal will be a good launching platform for Della's well, a svm where to be a little bit more in control of their own destiny. And it's certainly the way a lot of people are going. We're doing a lot of that ourselves. Not so much, in a sense. We don't have a cloud platform that we sell is a total encompassing platform. But of course, with new tricks cloud on big players and then certainly a large portion of our our customer base, our cloud service providers, they love our stuff. It helps them compete. It actually gives them in some respects, a competitive advantage, but VM world itself. Lots going on there. We have amplified our presence once again because VM where does represent a large portion of our customer base? So we're we're very proud of that. We're very proud to be a technology alliance partner of the M wears Andi. We're expecting to see a really good show in a really good cloud. A cloud crowd has they return back to their home base in San Francisco for us this year, it's It's gonna be a different experience. Were tellingme or of the software story, more of the portfolio story more about how you scare scale the win. We have a virtual presence this year, which is going to be very helpful in telling that story. Customers can come in and they can see more than just a ah box that in our world is really not important because it's for us. It's all about the software and stuff we do. We even in Booth Theater, we have some private meeting spaces well, to take people into a bigger, deeper drill down. But the virtual experience will allow them to touch and feel stuff that maybe they didn't get to do before, and that's gonna be kind of exciting as well. >> So you mentioned C S P s. We had Michael Gray thrive on a while back, and you know, he was saying that Look, he likes your product because it allows him to do other things. And don't worry about, you know, the old sort of tuning and managing and ableto re shift labor. I felt like that was an interesting discussion, primarily because you've got all these cloud service providers that everybody thought aws was just gonna kill. And if anything, it's elevated them. What are you seeing in the CSP space? Yeah, you know, >> Michael had a lot of interesting things to say that definitely love the fact that we enable multiple workloads without them having to do lots of cautious planning and re planning and shifting and shuffling. And we are seeing C S P is becoming more value. Add to a lot of businesses, especially the mid market and the smaller enterprise where people may want more than just infrastructure. You know, they don't they need that application level support and companies like thrive in some of our other really good customer, US signal and you know they're all capable of Flex Central's. Another one they're all capable of providing service is beyond the hardware they're capable of providing that application support the guidance and, in the case of Thrive, the cybersecurity guidance especial Really, which is really, really critical. So they're growing, and they're also, by the way, working with eight of us and Google and Azure to provide that capabilities well, when necessary. >> Well, that leads me to the sort of multi cloud discussion in our industry. We tend to have this alphabet soup of acronyms like another reason I like talking to you because we can kind of cut through that. And, you know, I love the marketing. I think marketing helps people understand what's going on differentiate. It gives you an indication of where the industry is going, and multi cloud is one of those things that I mean. I've kind of said it's a symptom of multi vendor and more so than a strategy. But increasingly it seems like it's becoming a strategy with customers, and you just gave an example of thrive working with multiple cloud vendors. Clearly, VM where wants to be in that business. What your thoughts on multi cloud and and hybrid. What does it mean for for infinite at What's your strategy there? You know, it's it's interesting because I >> just read an article the other day about you know, the definition of multi cloud on whether it's being abused and, you know, I I look at it as someone just trying to tell their story and give it. Give it some favor. I think at the end of the day, uh, every business is going to be talking to multiple platforms whether they want to or not. You know, there are many customers and companies out there, businesses who are in our customers who have gone the way of the cloud and repatriated. Certain things is they've they found that it it may work. It may not work, and there are many cloud providers who were trying to do things to accelerate migration of applications because they see that certain applications don't work. You know, we got one of the cloud providers buying Ah, now as provider, another one buying very recently, you know, an envy me based flash company to try to pick up those loose workloads where they might struggle today. But the end of the day everybody's going to be multiple. And whether it's because they're using cloud service is from from a software perspective or whether they just need to basically broker and maintain sort of that that independence so that they can maintain some cost control, availability, control, security, control and in some cases it will remain on premises. And some of things will be off just so they could get the applications closer to their end users. So you know what is multi Cloud? Multi Cloud really is just one of those terms that literally means what it says. It's your business running in multiple places. It doesn't have to necessarily be simultaneously by the same application. >> A big part of your value proposition is the simplicity. We've heard that from your customers, and you guys obviously push that out there. I want to ask you because you mentioned repatriation and you know, Cloud keeps growing like crazy. Sure, and the on prem not so much. You guys are smaller company. You're growing your stealing share, So yep. So maybe is that simplicity thing. Here's my question. So it's around automation. The cloud providers, generally an Amazon specifically have have driven automation. They've attacked the IittIe labor problem and they're able to charge for that on Dhe. So my question is, are you seeing that you're able to attack that labor problem in a similar sense and bring forth the value proposition to customers is Look, we can create a cloud like experience on Prem if you want MacLeod. Great. But if you want to stay on Prem, you're gonna get the benefit of being able to shift. Resource is two more strategic things and not have to worry about all this heavy, heavy lifting. You You seeing tangible evidence of that? >> We're seeing significant tangible evidence of that on and, you know, a couple of things. You know, you talk about growth, right? And I think when we did the launch, you know, only a few months ago we were at about 4.6 exabytes of capacity shipped. We just passed 5.1. That's some significant growth in in just a few months. It's like a 33% growth just from the same time last year, which is which is fairly significant. And of course, if you're familiar with the way we talk, you know you have an engineer is the head of marketing. We like to tell the truth. You know, we don't like to mask, do many things and confuse people. We don't like talking about effective storage because effective capacity doesn't really mean much to some people. So that's, you know, this is what we This is what we shipped and it's growing rapidly. And a lot of that is growing, in part because of the significance of the message and in part because of this need to control costs, contain costs and really operate in a more modern way. So get back to your comments about cloud and cloud operation. That's really what people want. People like the consumption model of cloud. They don't always like the cost on hidden costs. So simplifying that, but giving them the flexibility Thio have either an op X or cap ex that allows him to grow and shrink as they move workloads around. Because everybody grows even on Prem is growing. It's just, you know, it's the law of numbers, right? Cloud is growing, absolutely. But on Prem really is growing. And then the other thing I want is they want the operational flexibility. And that's what we talked about in our elastic data fabric. They don't like constantly having to re jigger and re balance workloads. Infinite box by itself. The platform of infinite Box takes away a lot of that mystery and magic, because it it kind of hides all of the complexity of that workload. And it, you know, we take the randomness out of the I o. I think maybe Craig Hibbert mentioned in his video is he was describing in detail how that happens. Remember Michael Gray talking about that as well, you know, So those those things come out in a single infinite box. But even if you said well, I still want to move my workload from, uh, you know this data center to an adjacent data center or perhaps a data center in another facility. Um, excuse me, Another city. So that's closer to the end user. Making that transparent to the applications is critically important. >> Yes, he talked about growth in about 1/2 a PETA bite. Sorry, half an exabyte in just a few months. A couple months? Really Right. That's that's growth. But I want to ask you about petabytes. Petabytes scales. Kind of key of companies that don't do that in a year day, eh? Exactly. So that's a petabytes scale. Is big party of marketing two questions? Why is that relevant? Or is that relevant to VM? Where customers? Why so and then, does it scare some people owe you? Asked a great question. >> It absolutely scared some people. And I know that there are some pundits out their industry pundits who who basically don't agree with our messaging. But this is this is the business problem that we we targeted the solve rate. Um, there are a lot of people out there who don't think they're petabytes scale yet because maybe they're individual applications aren't petabytes scale. But when you add it up, they get there and a lot of our customers are existing. Customers didn't start with infinite at at petabytes scale. They started a couple 100 terabytes, perhaps, but they're petabytes skill now. In fact, over 80% of the customers and systems that we have out there today or above the petty bite. We have customers that are in the tens of petabytes. We have customers that are in the hundreds of petabytes. They grow, they grow rapidly on. Why is that? Well, to two factors. Really. Number one, if you go back to. Probably when I first met you back when I had your hair, at least in quantity, way had way. Were kind of crusting that terabyte mark. Right? Right. And what was the problem? The problem was nobody could figure out how to deal with the performance. Nobody wanted to put that much risk on a single platform, so they couldn't deal with the availability. And they really didn't know how to deal with even the serviceability of that scale. So terabyte was a problem solved No, 25 years ago, and then things were rapidly from there. Now we're at the same juncture, just three orders of magnitude later. Right? >> Well, that's interesting, because, you know, you're right. People didn't want to put all all that capacity under an actuator that cost performance problems. They were concerned about, you know, just availability. And then two things happen so simultaneously, flash comes along. And, you know, you would say was put sort of a Band aid to some of the performance problems. Sure. And you guys came up with, like, this magic sauce to actually use spinning disc and get the same performance or better performance you would argue with flash. And so as a result, you were now able to do a lot Maur with the data, the concerns about that much date under the actuator somewhat attenuated because, I mean, you've got now so much data, you've got to do something that's almost that's flywheel effective. You've got tons of data machine intelligence and a I. Now, coming into the picture, you've got Cloud, which has been this huge tail when for the industry and for data creation in general. And so I see. You know, you see, like the I. D. C numbers and for forecasting growth of data and storage could be low. I mean, the curve could be bending, you know, kind of more than exponentially your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting observation. I think what it really comes down to is our storyline is math is greater than media, all right? And when you when you look at the flash being, you know, the panacea to performance it was just a step in the evolution, right? You go back and and say, spinning disc was the same solution to the performance problem 20 years ago. 25 years ago, even it was 5400 rpm discs and then very rapidly. Servers got faster. The interconnects got a little bit faster. They were still mostly differential. Scuzzy. There was 7200 rpm discs. And I promise you, by the way, that if you're running 5400 rpm desk, you install 7200 rpm. All yours performance problems will go away until the day you install it. And then it was 10,000 rpm discs and I was 15,000 rpm disc, and it still wasn't getting fast enough because, you know, you went to Fibre Channel One Gig Fibre channel and then to Geek Fibre, Channel four, Gig fibre, Channel eight, gig fibre channel. The unified connects got faster. The servers got faster. That was more cash on the servers. Then this thing came along, cuts called solid state disc. Right. And then it was it was SLC single layer cell technology. But don't worry about it's very expensive. Not a problem. You only need 4% of your application, right? Jerry? No, no, I'm sorry. percent. No, I'm sorry. 30%. What the heck? You know, M l c is now a little bit more reliable, so let's just make make it all slash. Right? So that was the end of the story, right? No. Servers continue to get faster. Uh, the media continue to get faster and denser, right? So now the interconnect isn't fast enough, So envy me. Is that the answer to life? The universe and everything? Well, wait. I got a better answer for your test. CIA storage class memory in parallel with that. By the way, there are some vendors out there who said that's still not fast enough. We want to put more d ram and the servers and do things in memory. We went in memory databases. I guarantee whatever you do from a media perspective on my personal guarantee to you, it's obsolete by the time you're up and running. By the time you get your applications migrated, configured and running with business value, it's already obsolete. Some vendors got something better coming out. The right answers. This stuff you talked about, the right answer is everything that you're doing for your business. APs. It's a it's a Mel. It's solving the problems in software and, you know, you said we use disc and make it fast. It's not despite itself, of course, right? It's D Bram. It's a lot of the Ram, which, by the way, is orders of magnitude faster than flash the NAND flash. And even if its ECM and still orders of magnitude faster than that, what we use the disk for today in the architecture is the cost factor. We take the random ization out in the flash and we take the >> end and in the in the diagram >> and we used the SAS in the back end to manage costs. But we use it in a way that it performs well, which is highly sequential, massively parallel. And we take full advantage of that Beck and Ben with to do that with that massive dear am front end. Our cash ratios are unparalleled in the industry and and we use it even more effectively that way. But if architecture already evolves, so if if SCM becomes more stable and becomes more cost effective, we can replace that that S S D layer with the cm. And if you know, if the economics of Q L C or something beyond that. Come down will replace the back end with that, do you? Do >> you ever look at what you're doing today as sort of a modern day symmetric. So I mean, a lot of things you just said. I mean, you've got a lot of memory. You've got a massive back end. You know, those were two of the characteristics of symmetric snow. Of course. Fast forward. Whatever. 30 years, right. But a lot of it was sort of intelligence and understanding. Sure. So how data works, is it Is it a fair sort of, or is it radically different? Well, in terms of mindset, I mean, I know the implementation is >> right, right? >> Yeah. I mean, it's not an unfair comparison. I mean, tiered storage was around before some metrics. Right? So it's certainly existed existed then, too. It was just at the time. It was a significant innovation course to layer at the time, right? A big cash front, ending some slower media and then taking advantage of the media on the back end. The big difference today is that if you look at what some metrics became through its Evolution's DMX and V Max and now Power Max. It's still tiered storage, you know, you still have some cash. That's that's for unending some faster media with power. Max, you're you're dealing now with us with an SS a back end. But what happened with those types of architectures is the tearing became more automated. But you're still moving information around. You're still moving Information from one said it This to another set of this leader in the cycle. You're still trying to promote things you know, to to the cash up front. We're doing it in real time. We're >> doing it by analyzing >> the data on the way it comes in. We're reassembling it again, taking the random ization out we're reassembling it and storing it across multiple disks in a way that it it increases our probability of pulling that information associated information back when we need it later. So there's there's no movement. Once its place, we don't have to replace it. You know it's already associated with other data that makes sense, and that gives us a lot of value. >> And secret sauce is the outcome of the secret sauce is you're able to very efficiently. Well, historically, you haven't been able to do a lot of garbage collection, a lot of data movement, and that just kills performance. There's >> really no garbage collection necessary in our in our world way. Also use very modern data structures or patents. Ah, lot of them on our neural cash Deal with the fact that we use a try data structure. So we're not using old fashioned hash tables and you know, l are you algorithms, You know it Sze very, very rapid traverse a ll of these trees >> and you're taking advantage of machine intelligence inside the software architecture. That really is some of the new innovation that really wasn't around to be able to take advantage of that 20 years ago. Maybe it was it was just not cost effective. Do the math was there, put it that the math of the mouth was there and >> there there There's been lots of evolutions of that over the years, a swell, but we continue to evolve and innovate. And, you know, one of the one of the cool things I think about working infinite at is is the multiple multiple generations of engineer where you've got people who understand that math they understand the real nuances of what it means to operate in a world of storage, which is quite a bit different than operating, saying networks or proceed be used because data integrity is paramount. There's lots of lots of things that go on there as well. But we also have younger generations, generations who like new challenges and like to re invent things so they find newer and greater ways to do things. >> This is exciting. So systems, thinkers and I mean server thinkers. I mean, people who understand, you know, systems designed it all the way through and and, you know, newbies who are super smart like you say, wanna learn and solve problems? Go back to the petabytes scale discussion, >> solve problems at petabytes scale, right? Even if the customer doesn't need that necessarily to solve that problem is critically important because even if you look at Les, just take, you know NFS, for example, most NFS systems deal with thousands of objects. Hundreds to thousands of objects are an F s. Implementation deals with billions, right? Do you need billions? How many applications you know that have billions of objects, But being able to do that in a way where performance doesn't degrade over time and also do it in a way where we say our nlm implementation isn't impacted by any any type of service events, we can take a note out, and it doesn't impact in ln There's no no degradation and performance. There's no impact or outage in service. All that's important. Even when you're dealing with smaller application sizes because they add up, they really do add up. He also brought up the point about, you know, density and actually intensity. Great. You know, back 25 years ago, when we were dealing with, you know, the first terabyte storage system, you know, how much how much stories did you have on your laptop? How much you have today, right? You know, you're probably more than a terabyte. They were laughing about putting things terabyte on the floor. And now you get more than a terabyte on your laptop. Things changing? >> Yeah. Um, I wanna ask you where you see the competition. We talked about all flash. We've had a long conversation, long, many conversations in the past about this, But you really, you know, the all flashy kind of described it as a Band Aid, essentially my words, but it was sort of a step function. Okay, great. Um, you have one company, really us who achieve escape velocity in that business in terms of pure But is that where you see in competition and you're seeing it from, you know, the hyper scale er's where you Yeah, you know, >> it's interesting. You know, you look at companies like, you know, we admire what they dio, especially with regard to marketing. They do a really good job of that. They also, um I have some really interesting ideas innovating the media, which is which is great. It helps us in the long run as well. Um, we just look at it as a component of our system, not these system, which makes it different. We don't really see the A f a. You know, the small scale a FAA is are the majority of our competition. We do run into them, but typically it the lower end of the opportunity. Even within the bigger companies that have competitors to those products, we run into them and smaller opportunities, not bigger opportunities where we run into them where there's a significant performance advantage as long as you don't mind the scale out approach to solving the problem. Unfortunately, when you're using a phase two skill out, you know you're putting all of the intelligence requirements on some poor storage administrator or system administrator to figure out what those where right, we take all of that away. So once it starts to scale, that's where we come in a plan. We don't see tons of competition there. Certainly, we're seeing competition from the clouds. And the competition from the clouds is more born of customer mandates and company mandates. Sometimes they I'm not quite sure that everybody knows why there who think to the cloud and we're problem they're trying to solve. But once they start to see a story that says, Hey, if the reasons are and you do understand those reasons, if the reasons are agility and financial flexibility and operational agility not as well as his acquisition agility, you know, we have answers to that and it starts to become a little bit more interesting and compelling. >> All right. One of the highlights of the M world each year is your dinner. Your customer I crashed in a couple of years ago when there were no other analysts there. And then last year again, it was in Vegas. Shows a nice steak house. This year we're in San Francisco, but But I had some great conversations with customers. I remember speaking to one customer about juxtaposing the sand thio to infinite debts platform. And you know the difference. The Sands taken off doing really well, but But he helped me understand the thinking from their standpoint of how they're applying it to solve problems and why v san wasn't a good fit. Your system was, um that was just one of many conversations last year had again other great conversations with customers. What do you do in this year? You have a customer dinner. We are? Yeah. We love to have you in and gave the invitation there. Yeah, the invitation. Is that definitely there? You know, a couple of >> years ago we didn't invite analysts, and you know what it was? It was a mistake. We and we learned that lesson into a large part. We credit you for for showing us how wrong we are. Our customers are very loyal. They're some of the most loyal in the industry. Don't take my word for it going. The gardener Pierre Insights and and look at our numbers compared to everybody else's any pick. Pick a vendor. We're at the top of the list with regard to not only the ratings but, more importantly, the customers willingness to recommend in every category, too. By the way, it's It's not just product quality and performance, and it's it's service support. It's easy doing business. It's an entirely different experience. So we love having the customers there, and the customers love having you there, too. They love having you and your appears in the industry there because they love learning from you and they love answering the questions and getting new insights. And we'd love to have you there. We're gonna be in the Mint this year. San Francisco meant not the not the current one that that's pretty coins, but the original historical site on duh. You know we have. We have invitations out thio to about 130 people because there's only so much room we have it at the event, but we're looking forward to a great time and a great meal and good conversation. >> That's great. Well, VM World is obviously one of the marquee events in our industry. It's the It's the fat middle of where the IittIe pro goes on dhe We're excited. Used to be Labor Day started the fall season. Now it's VM world. Well, Doc will see you out there. Thanks very much for your good to see you. All right. Excellent. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is day Volonte in the Cube will see you next time we'll see you at the M World 2019.

(upbeat music) [Announcer] From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE conversation from our studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. One of the biggest challenges that every user faces is how are they going to arrange their resources that are responsible for storing, managing, delivering, and protecting data. And that's a significant challenge, but it gets even worse when we start talking about multi-cloud. So, today we've got Eric Herzog who's the CMO and VP of Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM Storage to talk a bit about the evolving relationship of what constitutes a modern, comprehensive storage portfolio and multi-cloud. Eric, welcome to theCUBE. >> Peter, Thank you, thank you. >> So, start off, what's happening with IBM Storage these days, and let's get into this kind of how multi-cloud is affecting some of your decisions, and some of your customer's decisions. >> So, what we've done, is we've started talking about multi-cloud over two years ago. When Ed Walsh joined the company as a general manager, we went on an analyst roadshow, in fact, we came here to theCUBE and shot a video, and we talked about how the IBM Storage Division is all about multi-cloud. And we look about that in three ways. First of all, if you are creating a private cloud, we work with you. From a container, whether you're Vmware based, whether you are doing a more traditional cloud- private cloud. Now the modern private cloud, all container based. Second is Hybrid Cloud, data on parem, out to a public cloud provider. And the third aspect, and in fact, you guys have written about it in one of your studies is that no one is going to use one public cloud provider, they're going to use multiple cloud providers. So whether that be IBM Cloud, which of course we love because we're IBM shareholders, but we work with Amazon, we work with Google, and in fact we work with any cloud provider. Our Spectrum Protect backup product, which is one of the most awarded enterprise backup packages can backup to any cloud. In fact, over 350 small to medium cloud providers, the engine for their backup as a service, is Spectrum Protect. Again, completely heterogeneous, we don't care what cloud you use, we support everyone. And we started that mantra two and a half years ago, when Ed first joined the company. >> Now, I remember when you came on, we talked a lot about this notion of data first and the idea that data driven was what we talked about >> Right, data driven. >> And increasingly, we talked about, or we made the observation that enterprises were going to take a look at the natural arrangement of their data, and that was going to influence a lot of their cloud, a lot of their architecture, and certainly a lot of their storage divisions or decisions. How is that playing out? Is that still obtaining? Are you still seeing more enterprises taking this kind of data driven approach to thinking about their overall cloud architectures? >> Well the world is absolutely data-centric. Where does the data go? What are security issues with that data? How is it close to the compute when I need it? How do I archive I, how do I back it up? How do I protect it? We're here in Silicon Valley. I'm a native Palo Alton, by the way, and we really do have earthquakes here, and they really do have earthquakes in Japan and China and there is all kinds of natural disasters. And of course as you guys have pointed out, as have almost all of the analysts, the number one cause of data loss besides humans is actually still fire. Even with fire suppressant data centers. >> And we have fires out here in Northern California too. >> That's true. So, you've got to make sure that you're backing up that data, you're archiving the data. Cloud could be part of that strategy. When does it need to be on parem, when does it need to be off parem? So, it's all about being a data-driven, and companies look at the data, profile the date and time, What sort of storage do I need? Can I go high end, mid-range and entry, profile that data, figure that out, what they need to do. And then do the same thing now with on parem and off parem. For certain data sets, for security reasons, legal reasons you probably are not going to put it out into a public cloud provider. But other data sets are ideal for that and so all of those decisions that are being made by: What's the security of the data? What's the legality of that data? What's the performance I need of that data? And, how often do I need the data? If you're going to constantly go back and forth, pull data back in, going to a public cloud provider, which charge both for in and out of the data, that actually may cost more than buying an Array on parem. And so, everyone's using that data-centricity to figure out how do they spend their money, and how do they optimize the data to use it in their applications, workloads and use cases. >> So, if you think about it, the reality is by application, workload, location, regulatory issues, we're seeing enterprises start to recognize and increase specialization of their data assets. And that's going to lead to a degree of specializations in the classes of data management and storage technologies that they utilize. Now, what is the challenge of choosing a specific solution versus looking at more of a portfolio of solutions, that perhaps provide a little bit more commonality? How are customers, how are the IMB customer base dealing with that question. >> Well, for us the good thing was to have a broad portfolio. When you look at the base storage Arrays we have file, block and object, they're all award winning. We can go big, we can go medium, and we can go small. And because of what we do with our Array family we have products that tend to be expensive because of what they do, products that mid-price and products that are perfect for Herzog's Bar and Grill. Or maybe for 5,000 different bank branches, 'cause that bank is not going to buy expensive storage for every branch. They have a small Array there in case core goes down, of course. When you or I go in to get a check or transact, if the core data center is down, that Wells Fargo, BofA, Bank of Tokyo. >> Still has to do business. >> They are all transacting. There's a small Array there. Well you don't want to spend a lot of money for that, you need a good, reliable all flash Array with the right RAS capability, right? The availability, capability, that's what you need, And we can do that. The other thing we do is, we have very much, cloud-ified everything we do. We can tier to the cloud, we can backup to the cloud. With object storage we can place it in the cloud. So we've made the cloud, if you will, a seamless tier to the storage infrastructure for our customers. Whether that be backup data, archive data, primary data, and made it so it's very easy to do. Remember, with that downturn in '08 and '09 a lot of storage people left their job. And while IT headcount is back up to where it used to be, in fact it's actually exceeded, if there was 50 storage guys at Company X, and they had to let go 25 of them, they didn't hire 25 storage guys now, but they got 10 times the data. So they probably have 2 more storage guys, they're from 25 to 27, except they're managing 10 times the data, so automation, seamless integration with clouds, and being multi-cloud, supporting hybrid clouds is a critical thing in today's storage world. >> So you've talked a little bit about format, data format issues still impact storage decisions. You've talked about how disasters or availability still impact storage decisions, certainly cost does. But you've also talked about some of the innovative things that are happening, security, encryption, evolved backup and and restore capabilities, AI and how that's going to play, what are some of the key thing that your customer base is asking for that's really driving some of your portfolio decisions? >> Sure, well when we look beyond making sure we integrate with every cloud and make it seamless, the other aspect is AI. AI has taken off, machine learning, big data, all those. And there it's all about having the right platform from an Array perspective, but then marrying it with the right software. So for example, our scale-out file system, Spectrum Scale can go to Exabyte Class, in fact the two fastest super computers on this planet have almost half an exabyte of IBM Spectrum Scale for big data, analytics, and machine learning workloads. At the same time you need to have Object Store. If you're generating that huge amount of data set in AI world, you want to be able to put it out. We also now have Spectrum discover, which allows you to use Metadata, which is the data about the data, and allow and AI app, a machine learning app, or an analytics app to actually access the metadata through an API. So that's one area, so cloud, then AI, is a very important aspect. And of course, cyber resiliency, and cyber security is critical. Everyone thinks, I got to call a security company, so the IBM Security Division, RSA, Check Point, Symantec, McAfee, all of these things. But the reality is, as you guys have noted, 98% of all enterprises are going to get broken into. So while they're in your house, they can steal you blind. Before the cops show up, like the old movie, what are they doing? They're loading up the truck before the cops show up. Well guess what, what if that happened, cops didn't show up for 20 minutes, but they couldn't steal anything, or the TV was tied to your fingerprint? So guess what, they couldn't use the TV, so they couldn't steal it, that's what we've done. So, whether it be encryption everywhere, we can encrypt backup sets, we can encrypt data at rest, we can even encrypt Arrays that aren't ours with our Spectrum Virtualize family. Air gapping, so that if you have ransomware or malware you can air-gap to tape. We've actually created air gapping out with a cloud snapshot. We have a product called Safeguard Copy which creates what I'll call a faux air gap in the mainframe space, but allows that protection so it's almost as if it was air gapped even though it's on an Array. So that's a ransomware and malware, being able to detect that, our backup products when they see an unusual activity will flag the backup restore jam and say there is unusual activity. Why, because ransomware and malware generate unusual activity on back up data sets in particular, so it's flaky. Now we don't go out and say, "By the way, that's Herzog ransomware, or "Peter Burris ransomware." But we do say "something is wrong, you need to take a look." So, integrating that sort of cyber resiliency and cyber security into the entire storage portfolio doesn't mean we solve everything. Which is why when you get an overall security strategy, you've got that Great Wall of China to keep the enemy out, you've got the what I call, chase software to get the bad guy once he's in the house, the cops that are coming to get the bad guy. But you've got to be able to lock everything down, you'll do it. So a comprehensive security strategy, and resiliency strategy involves not only your security vendor, but actually your storage vendor. And IBM's got the right cyber resiliency and security technology on the storage side to marry up, regardless of which security vendor they choose. >> Now you mention a number of things that are associated with how an enterprise is going to generate greater leverage, greater value out of data that you already know. So, you mentioned, you know, encryption end to end, you mention being able to look at metadata for AI applications. As we move to a software driven world of storage where physical volumes can still be made more virtual so you can move them around to different workloads. >> Right. >> And associate the data more easily, tell us a little bit about how data movement becomes an issue in the storage world, because the storage has already been associated with it's here. But increasingly, because of automation, because of AI, because of what businesses are trying to do, it's becoming more associated with intelligent, smart, secure, optimized movement of data. How is that starting to impact the portfolio? >> So we look at that really as data mobility. And data mobility can be another number of different things, for example, we already mentioned, we treat clouds as transparent tiers. We can backup to cloud, that's data mobility. We also tier data, we can tier data within an Array, or the Spectrum Virtualize product. We can tier data, block data cross 450 Arrays, most of which aren't IBM logo'd. We can tier from IBM to EMC, EMC can then tier to HDS, HDS can tier to Hitachi, and we do that on Arrays that aren't ours. So in that case what you're doing is looking for the optimal price point, whether it be- >> And feature set. >> And feature sets, and you move things, data around all transparently, so it's all got to be automated, that's another thing, in the old days we thought we had Nirvana when the tiering was automatically moved the data when it's 30 days old. What if we automatically move data with our Easy Tier technology through AI, when the data is hot moves it to the hottest tier, when the data is cold it puts it out to the lowest cost tier. That's real automation leveraging AI technology. Same thing, something simple, migration. How much money have all the storage companies made on migration services? What if you could do transparent block migration in the background on the fly, without ever taking your servers down, we can do that. And what we do is, it's so intelligent we always favor the data set, so when the data is being worked on, migration slows down. When the data set slows down, guess what? Migration picks up. But the point is, data mobility, in this case from an old Array to an new Array. So whether it be migrating data, whether it be tiering data, whether you're moving data out to the cloud, whether it be primary data or backup data, or object data for archive, the bottom line is we've infused not only the cloudification of our storage portfolio, but the mobility aspects of the portfolio. Which does of course include cloud. But all tiering more likely is on premise. You could tier to the cloud, but all flash Array to a cheap 7200 RPM Array, you save a lot of money and we can do that using AI technology with Easy Tier. All examples of moving data around transparently, quickly, efficiently, to save cost both in CapEx, using 7200 RPM Arrays of course to cut costs, but actually OpEx the storage admin, there aren't a hundred storage admins at Burris Incorporated. You had to let them go, you've hired 100 of the people back, but you hired them all for DevOps so you have 50 guys in storage >> Actually there are, but I'm a lousy businessman so I'm not going to be in business long. (laughing) One more question, Eric. I mean look you're an old style road warrior, you're out with customers a lot. Increasingly, and I know this because we've talked about it, you're finding yourself trying to explain to business people, not just IT people how digital business, data and storage come together. When you're having these conversations with executives on the business side, how does this notion of data services get discussed? What are some of the conversations like? >> Well I think the key thing you got to point out is storage guys love to talk speeds and feeds. I'm so old I can still talk TPI and BPI on hard drives and no one does that anymore, right? But, when you're talking to the CEO or the CFO or the business owner, it's all about delivering data at the right performance level you need for your applications, workloads and use cases, your right resiliency for applications, workloads and use cases, your right availability, so it's all about application, workloads, and use cases. So you don't talk about storage speeds and feeds that you would with Storage Admin, or maybe in the VP of infrastructure in the Fortune 500, you'd talk about it's all about the data, keeping the data secure, keeping the data reliable, keeping it at right performance. So if it's on the type of workload that needs performance, for example, let's take the easy one, Flash. Why do I need Flash? Well, Mr. CEO, do you use logistics? Of course we do! Who do you use, SAP. Oh, how long does that logistics workload take? Oh, it takes like 24 hours to run. What if I told you you could run that every night, in an hour? That's the power of Flash. So you translate what you and I are used to, storage nerdiness, we translate it into businessfied, in this case, running that SAP workload in an hour vs. 24 has a real business impact. And that's the way you got to talk about storage these days. When you're out talking to a storage admin, with the admin, yes, you want to talk latency and IOPS and bandwidth. But the CEO is just going to turn his nose up. But when you say I can run the MongoDB workload, or I can do this or do that, and I can do it. What was 24 hours in an hour, or half an hour. That translates to real data, and real value out of that data. And that's what they're looking for, is how to extract value from the data. If the data isn't performant, you get less value. If the data isn't there, you clearly have no value. And if the data isn't available enough so that it's down part time, if you are doing truly digital business. So, if Herzog's Bar and Grill, actually everything is done digitally, so before you get that pizza, or before you get that cigar, you have to order it online. If my website, which has a database underneath, of course, so I can handle the transactions right, I got to take the credit card, I got to get the orders right. If that is down half the time, my business is down, and that's an example of taking IT and translating it to something as simple as a Bar and Grill. And everyone is doing it these days. So when you talk about, do you want that website up all the time? Do you need your order entry system up all the time? Do you need your this or that? Then they actually get it, and then obviously, making sure that the applications run quickly, swiftly, and smoothly. And storage is, if you will, that critical foundation underneath everything. It's not the fancy windows, it's not the fancy paint. But if that foundation isn't right, what happens? The whole building falls down. And that's exactly what storage delivers regardless of the application workload. That right critical foundation of performance, availability, reliability. That's what they need, when you have that all applications run better, and your business runs better. >> Yeah, and the one thing I'd add to that, Eric, is increasingly the conversations that we're having is options. And one of the advantages of a large portfolio or a platform approach is that the things you're doing today, you'll discover new things that you didn't anticipate, and you want the option to be able to do them quickly. >> Absolutely. >> Very, very important thing. So, applications, workload, use cases, multi-cloud storage portfolio. Eric, thanks again for coming on theCUBE, always love having you. >> Great, thank you. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris, talking with Eric Herzog, CMO, VP of Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM Storage. Thanks again for watching this CUBE conversation, until next time. (upbeat music)

(funky upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're wrapping up day one of Cisco Live! Barcelona CUBE coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Donnie Williams is the IT Director at Scott Equipment out of Louisiana and Eric Herzog is back. He's the CMO of IBM Storage. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. So tell us about Scott Equipment. What do you guys do? What's the company all about? >> We're a heavy equipment dealer, so we've been in the business for 80 years, privately owned company. And so we started out in farm implement 80 years ago by the founder Tom Scott which is where the name Scott Equipment comes from. And so we transitioned over the years to construction equipment and we're now, so back in 2014 we sold all of our, the farm stores that handle all of that equipment, and now we're strictly servicing the construction industry and petrochemical industry. >> So you're a dealer of large equipment. And you service it as well, or? >> Yes we service it. We're primarily a rental company first. Then we also sell what we rent. We service it and it also parts as well. >> So we're talking massive? >> Yes big. If you think, one of our main clients is Volvo which if you've seen the show Gold Rush, that Volvo equipment that you see there, that's what we sell. >> It's incredible machines. >> Yeah, yeah they are I had a chance to play with one. I went to a Shippensburg Pennsylvania where their North America office is and had a chance to play with their largest excavator. That was fun. >> So is a lot of you IT centered on sort of the maintenance business and the service business or? >> Yes. Mostly Mirror is like a car dealership. So like I said, we do sale service, parts, all of that. >> So the business flow starts after the sale is made, obviously. >> Exactly, yes, we sell, yeah, exactly. We get the equipment out there in the territory and then the revenue continues to come in. >> So what are some of the challenges, the external challenges that are driving your business? >> So really, our, the whole heavy equipment industry is, is kind of behind the times in my, from a dealership perspective. From a manufacturer perspective. They're somewhat up with technology, especially Volvo, but from a dealership, they're mainly privately owned, so they're not, there's not a whole lot of resources in technology. That's not a focus for them. They're focused on the business side of it, so. When I first started at the company 10, 11 years ago now, there was one guy servicing 600 employees. And it was-- >> One IT person? >> One IT person. So, as you can imagine, it was a nightmare. I mean it's not the guy's fault. I don't blame him at all. It's just the way that they had done business and not changed. >> He was a bummed out IT person. >> Yeah, right exactly, yeah. >> Now how'd you guys find them? >> So they're a customer of ours for the verses stack. We have a partner that they've been buying their IBM and their Cisco gear from, and then when they were doing a modernization effort, the reseller talked to Scott and said, Donnie, what d'ya think? How about doing this converge infrastructure. Easier to employ at sep-tor. So it all came through their existing channel partner that they were using for both IBM gear and Cisco gear. >> So you wanted a solution that one guy could run, right? >> We've now at least grown that, our company to, now we have six total in our department. So we've changed a lot since I started 11 years ago. >> And what are they spending their time doing? >> Primarily, we do a lot of help desk, assistant administration, we do mostly, my focus is to make sure that our employees are satisfied so they can take care of the customer. And that's the primary goal and along with that comes systems administration, as well, so. >> But you know, a full stack like this. I mean the joke. You need more than one person. >> Right. But it's going to be simplified, you know what you're buying, >> Right, exactly. >> It's predictable, and therefore, you shouldn't need to be seen on a day to day basis. >> Yes, I like keeping things simple, simple as possible. So, that makes my job easier, it makes my team's job easier, as well. >> So what kind of things are you driving? Is it, ya know, data protection? Is it, what sort of, you know, use cases do you have on your stack? >> We're from our, we're servicing on our, with Cisco, I'm sorry, verses stack. It's mostly it's all private cloud. We're servicing applications that supplement our core ERP system. So, we have reporting solutions. When we first bought the verses stack, we were considering moving to another ERP system, and we would have that infrastructure in place to migrate to that. So we still have that, actually, element table as an option for us. >> The migration to a new ERP system? >> Yes. >> We should talk afterwords. >> We're avoiding that all costs. >> Right, well, of course. You don't want to convert if you don't have to. Yeah but sometimes it's a business case. Sometimes it's hard to make. We'll talk. >> Exactly. >> Cloud in your future or present? >> We're doing some-- >> SAS stuff, or? >> Yeah a little of that. I mean anything. I mean things that make sense for us to do cloud. Security services. We're doing, of course, probably the most common is hosting email. We're doing a lot of that. Share point. That type of solution in the cloud. >> How long you've been with the company? >> 11 years. >> 11 years, okay, so, thinking about the last decade, I mean a lot has changed. >> Yes. >> What are you most proud of? What's like your biggest success that you can share with us? >> Really building the IT department and bringing our company into the 21st century from a technology perspective. I mean, like I said, we had one person that was handling it. It was really impossible. I mean, you couldn't depend on one person and expect the company to survive long term. >> Yeah, that one person had to say no a lot. >> Exactly, right. He just couldn't get everything done. >> So, really that modernization and that's kind of where you guys came in, right? >> IT modernization play. The verses stack is heavily used for that and, you know, as we've said on the earlier interview, we had a CSPN. We've also used it to go to the next level from an IT transformation to the future. 'Cause in that case, as you know, that was a CSP who uses it to service, you know, hundreds of customers all across the UK in a service model. And in this case, this is more of a IT modernization, take the old stuff, upgrade it to what it was. They even had an old IBM blade servers. That's old this stuff was. Old XE6 Blade servers that must've been 10 years old before they went to the verses stack. >> How many people in the company? Roughly? >> Right now, we've actually sold off side since I've been with the company, we've sold off some of our nonperforming business units. We're probably roughly around 550 now. >> Okay. >> So I mean, we're actually more profitable now than we were 11 years ago. We have less employees, but our profitability is actually exceeded. >> Theme of simplification. >> Exactly, right. >> So what's the biggest challenge you face as the head of IT, today? >> The biggest, probably the biggest challenge would be me wanting to implement technologies that are not ready. I want to have the competitive edge of the industry. I want to be able to be ahead of the curve. And that's probably the biggest challenge. >> And you're saying you can't because the tech isn't ready? Or it's a skills issue? >> It's just the industry. Just trying to work with vendors and getting them to be ready for, I say vendors, manufacturers. They're our vendors. To get them to, and know their dealers as well. To all be acceptable to the technology's that's been there 20 years. >> What would you say is the top, number one, or the top things IBM has done to make your life easier? And what's the one thing they could to do that they're not doing that could make your life easier? What's the, start with what they've done. You know what the success is that have helped. >> Really, we've been a longtime IBM customer. We have not just the verses stack, but we also have the power system, which actually runs our core ERP. >> Ah, okay, so. >> So I mean, we've had long standing relationship with IBM. Reliability is there. The trust is there, as well. >> Yeah, long term partnership. Alright, what's the one thing they could do? If you could wave a wand and you said, IBM will to X, what would x be to make your life better? >> Cut the price. >> Ah, here we go! (all laughing) I should've prefaced that soon! Besides cut the price. Alright we'll leave it there on that topic. But you know, the power system thing brings up, you know, our friend Bob Piccano's running the cognitive systems group now. You guys doing some stuff with AI. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> So what we've done is two things. First of all, we've imbued inside of our systems AI all over the place. So for example, we tier data which can do not only to own array, but literally to 440 arrays that have someone else's logo on them. It's all AI done. So when the data's hot, it's on the fastest tier. So if you have 15,000 RPM drives and 7,200 RPM drives, it goes to 15,000 when it cools off. AI automatically moves it. The storage admin does nothing. You don't set palsies AI takes care of it. We have Flash, and you have hard drives. Same thing. It'll move around. And you could have an IBM array talking to an EMC array. So all sorts of technology that we've implemented that's AI in the box. Then on top of that, what we've done is come up with a series of AI reference architectures for storage as one of the critical elements of the platform. So what we've done is create what we call a data pipeline. It involves not only our storage arrays, but four pieces or our software, spectrum scale, which is giant scale off file system, in fact, the two fastest supercomputers in the world have almost half an exabyte of that software, storage with that software. Our spectrum discover, which we announced in CUBE 4, which is all about better management of metadata. So, for AI workloads, big data analytic workloads, the data scientist doesn't prep the data. They can actually talk to what we do, and you can create all these metadata templates, and then boom, they run an AI workload on Thursday, and then run an analytic workload on Friday, but all automated. Our archive, and then our cloud object storage. So, all that is really, think about it more as an oval, because when you're doing an AI system, you're constantly learning. So the thing you got to do is, one, you've got to have high performance and be able to handle the analytics which you we do on Flash. 'Kay, so the Flash is connected. You've got to be able to move the data around and part of the thing with the Spectrum Discover is that we can talk through an API, to a piece of AI software, to piece of analytic software, to a piece of big data software. And they can literally go through that API, create templates for the metadata, and then automatically suck what they need into their app and then munge it and then spew it back out. And then obviously on the archive side, want to be able quickly recall the data because if you think about an AI system, it's like a human. So let's give you my Russian example. So I'm old enough, when I was a kid, there were bomb shelters in my neighborhood that people dug in the backyard. Then we have, you know, Nixon lighting up the Chinese. Then we have Reagan and Gorbachev. Next thing you know, the wall comes down, right? Then the next thing you know, there's no longer a Soviet Union. All of a sudden, ah, the Russians might be getting a little aggressive even though they're no longer communist, and now you see, depending on which political party, that they're totally against us, or they're totally helping us, but, you know, if they really were hacking systems, whatever political party you're in, they really were hacking our systems trying to manipulate the election. Pro or con, the point is that's kind of like a cyber attack. And that's not a good thing. So we learn and it changes. So an AI system needs to understand and change, constantly learn, if all of a sudden you have flying cars, that's going to be different than a car with tires. Now a lot of it may be the same. The interior, all the amenities, but the engines going to be different, and there are companies, including the big three, four, five, auto, who are actually working on flying cars. Who knows if it'll happen, but the AI system needs to understand and learn that and constantly learn. And so, the foundation has to heavily resilient, heavily performant, heavily available, last thing you want is an AI system going down on you. Especially if you're in healthcare, or big giant manufacturing, like Volvo, his customer. When they're building those cranes and things, they must cost 50, 60 million dollars. If that assembly line goes down, it's probably a big deal for them. So you need AI systems that always keep your other systems up and running. So you have to have that solid foundation of storage underneath. >> Awesome, alright, we got to leave it there. Give the customer the last word. Donnie, first time in Barcelona, right? >> Yes it is. >> How are you finding the show and the city? >> Oh it's awesome. This is my fifth Cisco Live. First time in Europe, so yeah. Enjoying it. >> Good, good. Well thank you guys for coming to theCUBE. >> Great thank you for coming. >> Thank you! >> Really appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one Cisco Live! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back >> to Barcelona. Everybody would adapt. Wrapping up day one of Sisqo live Barcelona Cube coverage. I'm David. Long day. He's stupid men. You're watching the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. Donnie Williams is it director at Scott Equipment out of Louisiana. And Eric hurts August back. He's the CMO of IBM storage. Gentlemen, good to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. So tell us about Scott equipment. What do you guys do? Look, what's the company all about were >> a heavy equipment dealer, So we've been we've been in the business for eighty years, privately owned company. And so we're we're We started out and farm implement eighty years ago by the founder, Thomas Scott, which is where the name Scott equipment comes from. And so we transition over the years, Teo construction equipment, Andi were now back in two thousand fourteen, we sold all of our the farm stores that handled all of that equipment. And now we're We're strictly servicing the construction industry and petrochemical in >> history. So your dealer of exactly what equipment and your services as well? >> Yes. We service that we were primarily a rental company. First then then we We also sell what we rent. We service service it and and also parts as well. So we're talking massive? Yes, they got. If you if you think our one of our main lines is Volvo, which you have you have you seen the show? Gold rush that that Volvo equipment you see there, that's that's what we sell. So is incredible machine. Yeah, Yeah, they are. Hada chance tio to play with one. I went Teo Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. Where were their North America offices and had a chance to play with their largest excavator? That was That was >> fun. So is a lot of your Senate on sort of the maintenance business in the service business? >> Yes. So we were just mostly. Mirror is like a car dealership. If if you so we were like I said, we do sale service parts, all of that. >> So the business flow starts after the sale is made on >> exactly. Yes. We still like, Yeah, exactly. We get. We get equipment out there in the in the in the territory, and then the revenue continues tio to come in. >> So what are some of the challenges? The external challenges that are driving your business? You really >> are. The whole heavy equipment industry is It's kind of behind the times in my from a dealership perspective from from a manufacturer perspective there. They're somewhat up with technology, especially especially Volvo. But from a dealership there, there might mainly privately owned. So they're not there's not a whole lot of resource is in, and ah, in technology they don't. That's not a focus for them that they're they're focused on the business side of it. So what? We we're not When I first started the company ten, eleven years ago, now there was one guy servicing six hundred employees and and it was one eyed person, one i t person. So, as you can imagine, it was, it was a nightmare. Go. I mean, it's not the guy's fault. I don't blame him at all. Is this Is this the way that they had done business and not change bombed out, >> right? Exactly. Yeah. Guys >> find them. >> So their customer of ours for the versus stack, we have, ah, partner that they've been buying their IBM in their Cisco gear from. And then when they were doing a modernization effort, the reseller talk to Scott and said, Dani, what do you think? How about doing this? Converge infrastructure. Easier to play. It's after. So it all came through their existing channel. Part of that they were using for both IBM gear and Cisco Gear. >> So you wanted a solution. That one guy could run, right? We've now at least growing that company to house. We have six total in our in our department. So we've changed a lot since I started the eleven years ago. >> And why are they spending their time doing what? Premier >> Li? We do a lot of help desk on systems administration way do mostly, uh, are My focus is to make sure that our employees are satisfied that so they could take care of the customer, and that's that's the primary goal. And along with that comes comes systems administration. A cz. Well, so, But, >> you know, a full stack like this. I mean, the joke. You need more than one person, but it's going to be simplified. You know what you're buying, right? Predictable. And therefore, you shouldn't need to be seen on a basis. >> Yes, I like keeping things simple. Simple as possible. So that makes that makes my job easier. It makes my team's job easier. What >> kind of >> things you driving? Is it? You know, data protection, is it? You know what? What? What? What sort of, you know, use cases do you have on your stack >> on that Were from our were servicing on our with Francisco verse. Sorry versus stack. We are mostly it is all profit cloud were servicing applications. That's the supplement. Our court system. So we have reporting solutions. We were when we first bought it. The vs stack way were considering moving to another Air P system. Oh, and we would have that that infrastructure in place tio migrate to that. So we see what we still have that that actually on the table as a as an option >> for us, but the migration to a new Europe E system. Yes, we should talk afterwards. No, you >> were warning that it >> all about you. Of course, you don't want to convert if you don't have to write. But sometimes there's a business case. Sometimes it's hard to make you talk. Cloud in your in your future president were doing some that's ass stuff. >> Yeah, a little of that. I mean, anything. I mean things that that makes sense for us to to cloud I security services we're doing. Of course, probably most common is hosting email. Were doing a lot of that share point that that type of solution in the cloud >> How long you been with the company? Eleven years. Eleven years. Okay, So, thinking about the last decade, I mean, it's a lot of lot has changed. Yes. What's your What do you most proud of? What you like your biggest success that you can share with us. Oh, >> really? Building my the that dude the I T department and bringing our company into the twenty first system century from a from a technology perspective. I mean, like I said, we had one person that was that was handing. It was really impossible. I mean, you couldn't depend. Depends on one person. And and and, yeah, expect the company's or saw survive long term. Yeah, That one person had to say no a lot. Exactly. Right. Why would he? Just couldn't get everything >> done right? So that really that modernization? Yes, I know where you guys >> can. Ninety Mater, My team modernization play. The versus stack is heavily used for that. And, you know, as we said, on the earlier and every we had to see ESPN, we've also used it to do you know, to the next level from a night transformation to the future. Because in that case, as you know that was a CSP who uses it to service. You know, hundreds of customers all across the UK in a service model. And in this case, this is more of a mighty modernization. Take the old stuff, upgraded to what it was. They even have old IBM blade servers. That's how old the stuff wass old, actually, six played servers that must have been ten years old before they went to the Versus Stack. >> How many people in the company >> right now? We've actually sold off side since I've been with the company we sold off. Some of our non performing business units were probably roughly around five hundred fifty now. Okay, so I mean, we're Ah, we're actually more profitable now than we were eleven years ago from Ah, I mean, we have less employees, but our profitability is actually exceeded >> the name of simplification. Exactly. Right. So what's the biggest challenge you face Is the head of it today? The biggest, Probably >> the biggest challenge would be me wanting to implement technologies. They're not really not ready. I want it. I want tohave the competitive edge, that of the industry. I want to be able to be ahead of of the ahead of the curve. Uh, and that's probably the probably biggest challenge. And you're >> saying you can't Because the tech is ready or skills >> is just is just the industry just trying Teo. I work with vendors and getting getting them to be ready for I say, vendors, manufacturers, they're our vendors. Toe Get them Tio and other dealers as well. Teo Teo Albee. Acceptable to technology that's been there twenty years. >> What would you say is the but the top number one or the top things that IBM has done to make your life easier? And what's the one thing they could do that they're they're not doing that could make your life easier. What's the start with what they've done? You know whether successes, you know that >> really? Really. I mean, we've been a long time IBM customer. We have not, not just the versus Stack, but we also have the power system, which were actually runs are our core AARP. Um, okay. And so that we had long standing relationship with IBM, and the reliability is there. The trust is, >> there's well, a long term partnership. But what's the one thing they could do? One thing that you could If you could wave a wand and IBM will do x what would x B to make your life better? Uh, cut the price way. Go >> way. I should have prefaced that something that size >> on that topic. But you know, the power system thing brings up. You know, our friend Bob. Pity on who's running the cognitive systems group now You guys do with some stuff in a I talked about that a little bit. >> So what we've done is two things. First of all, we've been beauty inside of our system's ai ai all over the place. So, for example, we tear data which can weaken due not only to our own array, but literally two four hundred forty rays that have someone else's logo on them. It's all a eye dunce. When the data is hot, it's on the fastest here. So if you have fifteen thousand rpm drives in seventeen hundred rpm drives, it goes to fifteen thousand. When it cools off A. I automatically moves that the storage admin does nothing. You don't set policies, A takes care. We have flash and you have hard drive's same thing. It'll move around and you could have on IBM array talking to any AMC array. So all sorts of technology that we implement, that's a I in the box. Then, on top of that, what we've done is come up with a Siri's of a reference architectures for storage, as one of the critical elements in the platform. So we've done is create what we call a data pipeline. It involves not only our storage raise, but four pieces of our software spectrum scale, which is giant scale out file system, in fact, to fastest super computers in the world have almost half an exabyte of that software storage. With that software, our spectrum discover which we announced in queue for which is all about better management of metadata. So for a I workloads, big get anally work loves the data scientist doesn't prep the data. They can actually talk to what we do, and you could create all these meditate a template, then boom. They run a a ay workload on Thursday and then run a analytic workload on Friday. But all automated our archive and then our cloud objects towards. So all that is really think about it. Maura's an oval because when you're doing an A I system, you're constantly learning. So the thing you got to do is one you've got to have high performance and be ableto handle the analytics, which we do on flash. Okay, so the flashes connected, you've got to be able to move the date around. And part of thing with the spectrum Discover is that we can talk through an A P I to a piece of a AI software two piece of analytic software to piece of big data software, and they can literally go through that. AP I create templates for the metadata and then automatically suck what they need into their app and then munge it and then spirit back out and then obviously on the archives side, you want to be able to quickly recall the data, because if you think about a I system, it's like a human. So it's giving my Russian example. So I'm old enough. When I was a kid, there were bomb shelters in my neighborhood that people dug in the backyard. Then we have, you know, Nixon lightening up with the Chinese and we have Reagan and Gorbachev next, You know, the wall comes down right then. Next thing you know, there's no longer Soviet Union. All of a sudden, no, the Russians might get a little aggressive, even though they're no longer communist. And now, you see, depending on which political party. Either they're totally against us where they're totally helping us. But, you know, if they really were hacking systems whose whatever political party urine, they really were hacking our system, tried to manipulate the election pro or con. The point is, that's kind of like a cyber attack, and that's not a good thing. So we learn and it changes. So when a I system needs to understand and change constantly, learn. If all of a sudden you have flying cars, that's going to be different than a car with tires. Now, a lot of it, maybe the same, the interior, all the amenities. But the engine is going to be different. And there are companies, including the big Big three, four five who are actually working on flying cars, knows it will happen. But the A I system needs to understand and learn that and constantly learning. So the foundation has to be heavily resilient, heavily performance, heavily available, lasting one is an A I system going down on you, especially if you're in health care or big giant manufacturing. Like Volvo, his customer. When they're building those cranes and things, they must cost fifty sixty million dollars at that assembly line goes down its prey a big deal for them. So you need a I systems that always keep your other systems up and running. So you have to have that solid foundation storage underneath. >> Awesome. All right, we got to leave it there. Give the customer the last word. Donnie. First time in Barcelona, right? Yes. It ISS how you find in the show and the >> syphilis is awesome. This's my, actually my fifth, uh, Cisco lifers our first time in Europe, so yeah, enjoying it. >> Good. Good. Well, thank you, guys. For German of the >> correct. Thank you. Have you appreciate it? >> You're welcome. Alright. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back to rap Day one. Sisqo live Barcelona watching you.

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group welcome back I'm Stu minimun and you're watching the cube at wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome to the program two gentlemen from the Boston Architectural College to my left is Carl Jasperson who is the systems administrator and to his left is Jason O'Brien who's the director of IT gentlemen thanks so much for joining us thank you for having us all right so Jason why don't we start with you help us power up this conversation to tell us a little bit about the college so Boston Architectural college we started in the late 1800s it's a small design at school and we offer programs in landscape interior and traditional architecture yeah so I love that to talk to a little bit more about you know that the charter of the school and how IT fits into that so we we are a mission of the schools to provide excellent education to a diverse population technology factors in is very important and over the last ten years the Carll I've been at the school technology has use has increased immensely our students are using it more and more every year and meeting those needs has become you know difficult and it's a challenge we we strive to achieve every year well Design Thinking is is so important these days I I studied engineering as an undergrad in which I've learned more about design one of my favorite authors so I have an interview about a month ago Walter Isaacson you know the ones he studies are the ones that can take that design thinking and technology and bring them together Carles bring us up to speed on from from the IT standpoint you know how big of a team do you have what are you involved with I said you know things have been changing over the last few years yeah so I mean we've got Jason in addition to running the department he runs our online learning system I'm responsible for all the backend its infrastructure servers networking backup virtualization we recently hired a junior systems administrator to help me out we've got a web guy we've got a DBA to the woodshop is under IT because we have a fabrication guy so 3d printing laser cutting we have the help desk and the help desk manager who also does our purchasing and she and I will take escalations so it's there's not a lot of crossover you know skill crossover in the group but we managed to keep everything going yeah but as you said they've been you know woodworking not something you think of in Italy as you know an IT thing IT an OT or you know really converging a lot when you talk about manufacturing as you know we talk about sensors and IOT it's it's hitting everywhere yeah for us you know 3d printing and laser cutting and we also have a CNC router they all started as experiments at the school and have turned into a major factor in for our students it's a resource that they demand and the increasing use every single year and how we meet those demands is is becoming tricky to accomplish in our you know we're in the Back Bay real estate is very expensive and we have to make our space do amazing things Jason that's great points I mean I've talked to lots of higher education and even you talk to the K 2 through 12 it was you know what mobility has had a huge impact you know therefore stresses and strains on wireless you know how do I get devices into the classroom how do I manage it I had gentleman from bu who's here at the show last year we were talking a lot about MOOCs so you know it's that that role of i TS but it's expanding but luckily they're throwing way more money at you I'm sure well we've been flat headcount over the last eight years we lost someone last year and gain someone this year so you know we we basically have to do more with less every year like most IT departments so you know we've we redesign our spaces periodically to meet those our students needs you know and turn returning what was labs just computer labs into more flexible space where students are can move the tables around and you the computers are available sometimes there we have high end alien wares in a in a cabinet they pull out news or they can use it to make models we have they can put up their designs on a 3d TV they're using VR headsets to walk around their own designs it's really fascinating where the technologies okay I wish we could spend more time anywhere in VR stuff and everything like that our production crews gamers my son's into this stuff but but Karl I'm hearing things like space constrained we need to do more with less we need to simplify this environment wow that seems like a really good set up for kind of infrastructure modernization so how long have you guys been there about 10 years right yeah so it's a change don't want one in ten years so walk us back 10 years ago and give us that point when you went to modernize yeah well when we started there's no virtualization 3 server racks in a room in the basement for 10 years that we've been there there's been water in that room twice so that always gave us the warm fuzzies you're saying it wasn't water cooling I mean no we tried for that but it didn't you know it didn't work out last year we moved to Colo facility in Summerville so and by the time we did that move yeah we did we started virtualization with VMware like three five within a year or two of me starting and the racks got you know less and less full and now in the fall we rolled out VX rail and we're in a single rack in a data center and there's I think three physical servers in that rack that aren't the VX rail at this point so it's it's consolidation power savings stuffs in a much better physical location than it used to be moving that server room out we were able to free up that space for you know the students to be able to have it's a it's a meditation space now so it's it's been really interesting kind of going through all that great what I wanted you know we don't have a ton of time but let's talk about that VX rail was your team were you looking for HCI was it you know just time for a server refresh you know what what kind of led to that was there a specific application that you started with so this event two years ago we saw Brian from bu give this presentation on their tan and that really turns us on to the whole hyper-converged option we we worked with Winslow we actually talked to another vendor and we looked at Nutanix we looked at pivot three we looked at rolling our own you know visa non FX 2 and after kind of comparing everything and seeing the pros and cons VX rail made the most sense from management perspective and a price perspective our old cluster was coming up on the five-year mark things were going out of warranty we had ecologic sand with 7200 rpm drives one gig I scuzzy just flow for most of its life we were just doing lightweight servers and applications two years ago we needed to virtualize our database server and we threw her Knicks in there with 800 gig on VM e drives and that was a great stopgap but you know we we needed something more permanent more robust - that's how we got to be X ray from a management standpoint the hyper-converged model gave us more flexibility it's easier to expand and since we're small we're not talking about you know racks and racks working together ryote you started with just three hosts so from a overview standpoint it's easy for us as we grow to just add another node and we get the compute we get the storage and we get the memory all at once as an expansion so it's the model is just fantastic for our workload that we put on it we've got like 70 servers in there the only stuff that's not in there yet is our student file server and exchange and they're going in there in the next six months yeah yeah good great and that's so so it sounds like you're real happy with the solution you've been with Dell for four years so from an Operations standpoint was there you know a lot of steep learning curve or was this pretty straightforward and very easy I mean I was I was already really familiar with the VMware piece going into this so that you know that wasn't a big deal we were already on Ruby sphere 6 and we started in the it's row of B so 6px role manager is it's kind of a stupid easy interface you know you can go in you can see are there alerts is there an update you know can it see my hardware is all that good there's not a whole lot to learn from there if we were doing V San on our own my understanding is that some a lot more complicated to stand up once you have it going you're good until you try to make a change so the VX rail manager extract abstracts all that away and just kind of gives you the the VMware experience that you're used to yeah any commentary on the economic service you know we actually found it was very interesting because our original assessment of our own needs were there was no way we could afford all flash and we started we focused exclusively on hybrid solutions and after a certain point we saw I think a presentation from Rick on the external platform and we saw the VX rail as inline dedupe and compression with the all flash and we thought wait maybe we could make this work with all flash and so we actually had a very slight reduction in RAW storage in our new platform but the percentage that we're actually consuming is far less than on our old platform simply because of those gains and it is the performance is far far faster and it's a we've just been very pleased with the implementation from a cost perspective the all-flash VX rail came in under the hybrid pivot 3 and the hybrid Nutanix products so you know we it was a huge win from that perspective we were shocked we could be able to do it thrilled with it ok final word it sounds like you're real happy with the solution when it smoothly operates well economics were good what final takeaways would you give for your peers I mean I'd say the implementation was you know the VX rail platform the the installation is as advertised it was it's basically a wizard that walks you through the installation process the very few minor issues we encountered the winslow team and the is EMC no support support people had no problem solving for us it was really a pretty easy migration to the new platform and we were able to do it with essentially zero downtime yeah awesome well gentlemen thanks so much for joining that's the promise is to get that easy button for IT HD I definitely helping to move in that direction next time we'll get to talk a little bit more about cloud and everything like that be back with lots more coverage here from wtg transform 2018 I'm Stu minimun thanks for watching the Q

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. (upbeat music) Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018 everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day three of our wall to wall coverage of IBM Think. The inaugural Think conference. Good friend Eric Herzog is here. He runs marketing for IBM storage. They're kicking butt. You've been in three years, making a difference, looking great, new Hawaiian shirt. (laughter) Welcome back my friend. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to see you. >> Always love being on theCUBE. >> So this is crazy. I mean, I miss Edge, I loved that show, but you know, one stop shopping. >> Well, a couple things. One when you look at other shows in the tech industry, they tend to be for the whole company so we had a lot of small shows and that was great and it allowed focus, but the one thing it didn't do is every division, including storage, we have all kinds of IBM customers who are not IBM storage customers. So this allows us to do some cross pollination and go and talk to those IBM customers who are not IBM storage customers which we can always do at a third party show like a VM World or Oracle World, but you know those guys tend to have a show that's focused on every division they have. So it could be a real advantage for IBM to do it that way, give us more mass. And it also, you know, helps us spend more on third party shows to go after a whole bunch of new prospects and new clients in other venues. >> You, you've attracted some good storage DNA. Yourself and some others, Ed Walsh was on yesterday. He said Joe Tucci made a comment years ago Somebody asked him what's your biggest fear. If IBM wakes up and figures it out in storage. Looks like you guys are figuring it out. >> Whipping it up and figuring it out. >> Four quarters of consistent growth, you know redefining your portfolio towards software defined. One of the things we've talked about a lot, and I know you brought this was the discipline around you know communicating, getting products to market, faster cycles, because people buy products and solutions right? So you guys have really done a good job there, but what's your perspective on how you guys have been winning in the last year or so? >> Well I think there's a couple of things. One is pure accident, okay. Which is not just us, is one of the leaders in the industry, where I used to work and Ed used to work has clearly stubbed its toe and has lost its way and that has benefited not only IBM but actually even some of our other competitors have grown at the expense of, you know, EMC. And they're not doing as well as they used to do and they've been cutting head count and you know, there's a big difference in the engineering spend of what EMC does versus what Michael Dell likes to spend on engineering. We have been continuing to invest. Sales resources, marketing resources, tech support resources in the field, technical resources from a development perspective. The other thing we did as Ed came back was rationalize the portfolio. Make sure that you don't have 27 products that overlap, you have one. And maybe it has a slight overlap with the product next to it, but you don't have to have three things that do the same thing and quite honestly, IBM, before I showed up, we did have that. So that's benefited us and then I think the third thing is we've gone to a solution-oriented focus. So can we talk about, as nerdy as tracks per sector and TPI and BPI and, I mean all the way down to the hard drive or to the flash layer? Sure we can. You know what, have you ever... You guys have been doing this forever. Ever met a CIO who was a storage guy? >> No, no. CIOs don't care about storage. >> Exactly, so you've got to... >> We've had quite a couple of ex-CIOs who were storage guys. (laughter) >> So you've really got to talk about applications, workloads, and use cases. How you solve the business problems. We've created a whole set of sales tools that we call the conversations available to the IBM sales team and our business partners which is how to talk to a CIO, how to talk to a line of business owner, how to talk to the VP of software development in a global enterprise who doesn't care at all, and also to get people to understand that it's not... Storage is a critical foundation for cloud, for AI, for other workloads, but if you talk latency right off the top, especially with a CIO or the senior executive, it's like what are you talking about? What you have to say is we can make your cloud sing, we can make your cloud never go down. We can make sure that the response time on the web browser is in a second. Whereas you know Google did that test about if you click and it takes more than two and a half seconds, they go away. Well even if that's your own private cloud, guess what they do the same thing. So you've got to be able to show them how the storage enables cloud and AI and other workloads. >> Let's talk about that for a second. Because I was having a thought here. It's maybe my only interesting thought here at Think, being pretty much overwhelmed. But the thought that I had was if you think about all the things that IBM is talking about, block chain, analytics, cloud, go on down the list, none of them would have been possible if we were still working at 10, 20, 30 milliseconds of wait time on a disc head. The fundamental change that made all of this possible is the move from disc to flash. >> Eric: Right. >> Storage is the fundamental change in this industry that has made all of this possible. What do you think about that? >> So I would agree with that. There is no doubt and that's part of the reason I had said storage is a critical foundation for cloud or AI workloads. Whether you're talking not just pure performance but availability and reliability. So we have a public reference Medicat. They deliver healthcare services as a service, so it's a software as a service model. Well guess what? They provide patient records into hospitals and clinics that tend to be focused at the university level like the University of California Health Center for the students. Well guess what? If not only does it need to be fast, if it's not available then you can't get the healthcare records can you? So, and while it's a cloud model, you have to be able to have that availability characteristic, reliability. So storage is, again, that critical foundation. If you build a building in a major city and the foundation isn't very good, the building falls over. And storage is that critical foundation for any cloud, any AI, and even for the older workloads like an SAP Hana or a Oracle workload, right? If, again if the storage is not resilient, oh well you can't access the shipping database or the payroll database or the accounts receivable database cause the storage is down and then obviously if it's not fast, it takes forever to get Dave Vellante's bill, right. And that's a waste of time. >> So it's plumbing, but the plumbing's getting more intelligent isn't it? >> Well that's the other thing we've done is we are automating everything. We are imbuing our software, and we announced this, that our range are going to be having an intelligent infrastructure software plane if you will that is going to help do diagnostics. For example, in one of the coming releases, if a customer allows access, if a power supply is going bad, we will tell them it's going bad and it'll automatically send a PO to IBM with a serial number, the address, and say please send me a new power supply before the power supply actually fails. But it also means they don't have to stock a power supply on their shelf which means they have a higher cost of cap ex. And for a big shop there's a bunch of power supplies, a bunch of flash modules, maybe hard drives if they're still dinosauric in how they behave. And they have those things and they buy them from us and our competitors. So imbuing it with intelligence, automating everything we can automate. So automatically tiering data, moving data around from tier to tier, moving it out to the cloud, what we do with the reuse of backup sets. Instead of doing it the old way of back up. And I know you've got Sam Warner coming on later today and he'll talk about modern data protection, how that is revolutionizing what dev ops and other guys can do with their, essentially, what we would've called in the old days back up data. >> Let's talk about your spectrum launch. Spectrum NAS, give us some plugs for that. What's the update there? >> So we announced on the 20th of February a whole set of changes regarding the Spectrum family. We have things around Spectrum PROTECT, with GDPR, Spectrum PROTECT Plus as a service as well as some additional granularity features and I know Sam Warner's going to come on later today. Spectrum NAS software defined network attached storage. Okay, we're not going to sell any infrastructure with it. We have for big data analytics our Spectrum scale, but think of Spectrum NAS as traditional network attached storage workloads. Home directories. Things like that. Small file service where Spectrum scale has one of our public references, and they were here actually at Edge a couple of years ago, one of the largest banks in the world, their entire fraud detection system is based on Spectrum scale. That's not what you would use Spectrum NAS for. So, and it's often common as you know in the file world to have sort of a traditional file system and then a big one that does big data, analytics and AI and is very focused on that and so that's what we've done. Spectrum NAS is a software only, software defined, rounds out our block, now gives a traditional file. We had scale out file already and IBM cloud object storage is also software defined. >> Well how about the get put world. What's happening there? I mean we've been waiting for it to explode. >> Ah so the get put world is all about NVME. NVME, new storage protocol as you know it's been scuzzy forever. Scuzzy and/or SATA. And it's been that way for years and years and years and years, but now you've got flash. As Peter pointed out spinning disc is really slow. Flash is really fast and the protocol of Scuzzy was not keeping up with the performance so NVME is coming out. We announced an NVME over InfiniBand Fabric solution. We announced that we will be adding a fiber channel. NVME fabric based and also in ethernet. Those will come and one of the key things we're doing is our hardware, our infrastructure's all ready to go so all you have to do is a non-disruptive software upgrade and for anyone who's bought today, it'll be free. So you can start off with fiber channel or ethernet fabrics today or InfiniBand fabric now that we can ship, but on the ethernet and fiber channel side, they buy the array today and then later this year in the second half software upgrade and then they'll have NVME over fiber channel or NVME over ethernet. >> Explain why NVME and NVME over fabric is so important generally but in particular for this sort of new class of applications that's emerging. >> Well the key thing with the new class of applications is they're incredibly performance and latency sensitive. So we're trying to do real artificial intelligence and they're trying to, for example, I just did a presentation and one of our partners, Mark III has created a manufacturing system using AI and Watson. So you use cameras all over, which has been common, but it actually will learn. So it'll tell you whether cans are bad. Another one of our customers is in the healthcare space and they're working on a genomic process for breast cancer along with radiology and they've collected over 20 million radiological samples of breast cancer analysis. So guess what, how are you going to sort through that? Are you or I could sort through 20 million images? Well guess what, AI can do that, narrow it down, and say whether it's this type of breast cancer or that type of breast cancer. And then the doctor can decide what to do about it. And that's all empowered by AI and that requires incredible performance which is what NVME delivers. Again, that underlying foundation of AI, in this case going from flash with Scuzzy, flash to NVME, increasing the power that AI can deliver because of its storage foundation. >> But even those are human time transactions. What about when we start taking the output of that AI and put it directly into operational transactions that have to run like a bat out of hell. >> Which is where NVME will come in as well. You cannot have the performance that we've had these last almost 30 years with Scuzzy and even slower when you talk about SATA. That's just not going to cut it with flash. And by the way, you know there's going to be things beyond flash that will be faster than flash. So flash two, flash three, it's just the way it was with the hard drive world, right? It was 2400 RPM then 36 then 54 then 72 then 10k then 15/5. >> More size, more speed, lower energy. >> Which is what NVME will help you do and you can do it as a fabric infrastructure or you can do it in the array itself. You dual in box and out of box connectivity with NVME increasing the performance within your array and increasing the performance outside of the array as you go out to your host and out into your switching infrastructure. >> So I'm loving Think. It's too many people to count, I've been joking all week. 30,000 40,000. We're still tallying up. I'm going to miss Edge for sure. I'm going to miss the updates in the you know, late spring. But so let's get 'em now. What can we expect? What are you trying to accomplish in the next six to nine months? What should we be looking for without giving any confidential information. >> Well we've already publicly announced that we'll be fleshing out NVME across the board. >> Dave: Right. >> So we already publicly announced that. That will be a big to-do. The other thing we're looking at is continuing to imbue what we do with additional solution sets. So that's something we have a wide set of software. For example, we publicly announced this week that the Versa stack, all flash array will be available with IBM cloud private with a CYSCO validated design in May. So again, in this case taking a very powerful system, the Versa Stack all flash, which already delivers ROI and TCO, but still is if you will a box. Now that box is a converge box with compute with switching with all flash array and with a virtual environment. But now we're putting, again as a bundle, IBM cloud private on there. So you'll see more and more of those types of solutions both with the rest of IBM but also from third parties. So if that offers the right solution set to cut capx/opx, automate processes, and again, for the cloud workloads, AI workloads and any workloads, storage is that foundation. The critical foundation. So we will make sure that we'll have solutions wrapped around that throughout the rest of this year. >> So it's great to see the performance in the storage division. Great people. We're under counting it. We're not even counting all the cloud storage that goes and counts somewhere else. You guys are doing a great job. You know, best of luck and really keep it up Eric, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Great thank you very much. >> We really appreciate it. >> Thanks again Peter. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018. (upbeat music)

(string music) >> Welcome to the Cube conversation here at the Cube studios in Palo Alto California, I'm John Furrier, cohost of the Cube and cofounder of Slip and Angle Media. We're here with Shlomi Ben Haim who's the founder and CEO of Jfrog, hot startup. I asked him to come in to chat about his business. In the dev/op space, we see him at a lot of shows, your company's doing well, we love the marketing, the frog thing is great, love it, very cool. But there's a lot of real serious action going on in the enterprise and in the cloud and in emerging tech, whether it's AI or machine learning, whether its innovative things, developers are front and center in the marketplace and there's a boatload of noise out there, there's like this approach, this approach, there's a lot of different approaches, but at the end of the day, the devs are driving a lot of innovation. You guys are at the center of it so welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> First question for you, just take a minute to talk about what you guys do, Jfrog, what's your company, what's your business, what are you guys up to, what's your deal? >> The way I think that the community will describe us would be that we are the binaries people, we are taking care of your binaries. As you know in the dev/ops world, everything you do you do with your binaries, with your software artifacts, so I heard some of the community members call us the database of dev/ops and we are the providers of artifactory, bintray, xray and mission control which take care of your binaries, managing them, host them, distribute them and secure them. >> Open source event we were at, we saw you guys because I was doing all the interviews and you guys were right on the edge there, then you guys got some nice background images off the Cube videos, but it was really interesting. The trend is your friend as the saying goes and the number of open source projects is increasing, the actual lines of code is exponentially going to grow from 22 million to 200, 400 million lines of code over the next couple of years, that's hockey stick. More developers are coming in, not old school like me that built their own stuff from scratch, there's a lot of lego blocks in fact Jim Samlin said that 10% of the code will probably be original ideas and differentiation, 90% of most of the code will be a code sandwich, which I believe, I think that's the legit direction. How do you guys fit into that trend and what does that mean for your business because I can imagine, there's a ton of Git Hub stuff going on, tons of forking, tons of projects, you got block chain catching the world by storm, there is a massive developer tsunami going on. How do you guys help them? >> It's very interesting, when we started Jfrog, actually my co-founder Yoav Landman started by providing developers with a very dummy, basic solution to proxy, public repositories like Maven central and it was not about the code for the first time, it was about the binaries. Code is great and the line of code, as you said, it's going to go enormous but what happened is that when you need to automate, when you need to rebuild, when you need to release faster, you go down to the binary level, to the software artifact level and guess what, no one took care of your binaries before, you were just throwing your binaries to your version controller or file store, maybe you were hosting them. >> They were messy, it's like a kid with their room, all the stuff spread around all over the place, where's that binary, no one keeps track of it. >> Nobody care about that, but this is the one thing that you keep consuming, keep building with, keep recompiling and in the era of dev/ops, is the one asset that you need to automate and reuse. This is where we, >> The core problem if I get this right, is that compiling is going to be, if you think of dev/ops, it's infrastructure as code, as the phrase goes as we always say and programming infrastructure is what dev guys want to do, they don't want to be in the business of switching configurations, getting in the routers and the network. They want it to be just one layer of resource, serverless is a great trend for you, more and more developers are going to love this. They want to program, so when you're programming, the inherent next step is where's the code, who's compiling it, does it need to be compiled? Is that the core problem, that there's more and more stuff going on under the hood that needs to be managed? Is that growing part of your business solution or is the problem just lost binaries, what's the core problem? >> It's a perfect question. First of all, we are providers, we are the providers of the only universal solution. Binaries are not just for java developers, they are not just for python developers, they are not just for dot net developers, they are not just for docker users and the way you package it, binaries happens between your get and your CI server, let's say Jenkins, get and Jenkins and your Kubernetes. Something happens between those two sites. Your orchestration tool and your code repository tool. In this land is where binaries play a very significant role and this is where we are a major player. >> Is the problem error prone in that zone, in that zone it's like the wild west, it's like a black hole if you will, think about what you're saying, if I get it right. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in there, is it mismanagement, what's the core thing that you guys got to do there? >> Tons of binaries, too much public repositories that the community cannot rely on. You need to manage and host your own binaries, the ones that you create yourself, and to provide and this is the last strength we see in the market, big organization need to provide dev/ops as a service to their own developers, so they need to ask this very important asset that we call software artifact and binaries or darker images or whatever you want to call it. >> Yeah a lot of great trends going on, obviously containers and Kubernetes you mentioned. Let's get into those, that's driving a lot of change. Certainly containers has been around for a while, whether you call it wrappers or whatever, it's a great magical thing, we love containers, Kubernetes really gets the trend right, if you look at the google trend, you see Kubernetes has got so much more traction than containers, although I'm not saying one's more relevant than the other, certainly orchestration's important, linking and loading all these containers together. Why is Kubernetes accelerating the binary conversation? Is it because more rapid development is going on, more programmability's going on, why is Kubernetes impacting the binaries components more now than ever? >> Putting aside the need for automating and integrating, this whole orchestration solution requires some work on the binary level but if you think about what Kubernetes is trying to solve, or what the containers are all trying to solve is a better, faster release, better, faster deployment, better, faster delivery and then you can do it only if you will combine the power of the developers and the power of the machine and release faster. This is what we say in Jfrog, release fast or die because it's all about how fast can you release? >> Before we get into some of the product specific stuff, I want to ask you some pointed questions on that. I want to ask you about automation. AI is obviously hot, I love AI, even though it's hyped up, it still promotes great software development, machine learning really is where the meat on the bone is there, so machine learning and automation bots, whatever you want to look at it, is an opportunity to actually to create adaptive code. How did that new software paradigm affect binaries because I can almost imagine that if you got a bot going wild, it could screw up the binaries. >> Completely. >> So can you comment on that, that area. Obviously we want more bots, automation is a good thing on one level, but how do you guys look at that market as an opportunity, as a challenge, what's that whole AI thing look like? >> Well if we take a step back, I think the dev/ops started with the need to automate and release faster. It was like the playground of developers, we need a better integration, we need a continuous integration, we need better delivery, we need continuous delivery. If you think about it now, in 20/20 perspective, you understand that this was all milestones. The next big challenge is continuous updates. People like me, people like you, just want their devices and machines to be updated. >> And secure, look at Equifax. Equifax is a great example, they didn't update the code. >> Absolutely and it's flowing and just happening and secure and in the world of automation, the world of AI, I think that the big challenge or the next big challenge of dev/ops is how can I create a continuous update machine which is also secure and software update will just flow. It will not be something that you press I agree, I reboot and do any kind of crazy stuff in order just to get your software update. It's more about the user experience of all of us. It's not just developers and dev/ops companies anymore. >> That's a great vision by the way, I love that. It should work like that and programmable infrastructure for dev/ops should be programmable and always available and highly reliable. Mark Zuckerberg used to have the saying, move fast, break stuff, that's not a dev/ops ethos by the way, they built their own dev/ops, but then he kind of quickly waffled back to move fast, be reliable, because he got some religion on ops. Totally get that, let's go into today's world. That gives us a little future view, what is a use case for a customer? Take me through the day and the life of a customer that's using Jfrog, what are their problems, what are some of the things that are burning in their office? Where's the smoke, what's the problem that they have that they need to take care of the binaries? Sprawl of code, just mismanagement, what are some of the signals? Share with your view there. >> It starts with the fact that it's not your developer anymore that builds software. You have a CI server there that never goes to a lunch break, never take a break with Facebook, which by the way, it's a great company but sometimes it stop giving the time during the work time and you keep building and building like crazy. Your CI server keep producing binaries. >> It's an always on code machine basically. >> It's a binaries machine and it's being built 24 by seven and yes, you use just a portion of it but you have to host and manage all of it and if you will host it in your version controller, it will explode, if you will put it in a file store, it will not be something, >> Explode because of capacity? >> Because you cannot do any cleanups on the version controller, not get or subversion or the false or any of them, you don't do cleanups on version control. >> Hygiene is an issue. >> Yes, plus integration. You need to integrate with your records system, plus promotion, you need to allow and automate promotion of the specific bites that you build. >> So that's why people call you the database or I would even say the brains of binaries, you got to keep track of the goods if you will, it's like the crown jewel is the binary. >> Right. >> If I get that right, okay let's take it to the next level. You have good hygiene, you have good stuff going on, what are you guys doing specifically that gives you a differentiation of the market because is it software, is it hardware, what is the Jfrog differentiation? >> I think that the first thing that happened to us was that we realized that binaries is for everyone. If you remember Jfrog's slogans from 2010, it was binaries for the people. We felt like we are leading the revolution of taking care of your binaries and therefore, we decided that whatever we build, our philosophy base, our concept will be universal. We started with the Java community, Maven and Gradel and then the dot net community with Nougat and then when it came to be more like a dev/ops industry in 2013 or '14 was it, >> Roughly, 2008 to 2014 was really the cloud errati and then it grew and then it matured a little bit. >> And the combination of dev and ops and IT and then we started to support packages like Debian and RPM, beyond repositories, docker registry, we were the first docker registry in the market. >> You were riding the wave from the beginning. >> Yes. >> You were right there riding the binary wave with the native cloud growth, public cloud growth big time which by the way had a lot of iterations quickly. >> Which is also one of our differentiators, we are the only hybrid providers for your binary solution. We have it in the cloud, any cloud or on prem. >> Who's the competition? >> It's a very good question, on a niche level, we have companies like docker that provide a docker registry we have Cores that provide docker registry, by the way, anyone in the market now that want to have a docker registry, a container registry. On the Java Maven domains, Sonotype provide a nexus which is a binary repository manager for Java for Maven builds. NPM provide a solution for NPM but if you think about the universal solution that supports other, >> Those are siloed platform specific binaries. >> Yes. >> You're taking much more of a wholistic, horizontally scalable, any binary any time management. >> Exactly, we don't do the before and after, but in the binaries world, we want to be one solution for all. >> I get the whole registry thing, love that positioning. Just a dumb question, when someone's coming in and managing intermittently in the registry, how do you guys handle that piece? How do you know that a Java request coming in from a Java registry, you guys have a front end to this thing, is it your software, how do you guys manage the integration of requests to and from the binaries. >> The read and write to the repository you mean? >> Yes. >> Artifactor is a very sophisticated repository if I may say it's built more like a database, it's based on a check sum mechanism and not just a basic file store. >> You verify it coming in on the front end. >> Right, the parts and machine caching, managing, hosting and distributing, it's all happening in artifactor. >> And performance is as good? No problems with performance? >> Well we are the only provider that has a highly available solution with over 4000 customers, so I guess it is. >> You got a smile yeah, I see you at the shows. You got a good reputation so it's great to have you come in. I want to just take a minute to pause because I know we're having a great conversation, I could talk about CI servers til the cows come home, one of my favorite topics dev/ops, as people who have been following me since 2008 know, I love the cloud, cloud native vision from day one. There's a lot of people out there who don't know what the hell a binary is, so take a minute and explain, what is a binary and why is it such an important thing right now in context to open source growth, more developers coming in, context to enterprises trying to be cloud like and just for the general purpose, why are binaries important? Why should the general public, how would you talk about what is a binary? >> I'll try. I think that the main difference is that binaries are more like, maybe it's a basic metaphor, but binaries are more like fresh food, unlike freeze food. Your source code is freezed, you're not allowed to touch it, you're not allowed to clean it, you're not allowed to change it. Your one dot seal would be my one dot seal. It's kind of freeze food, this is why in dev for get and other player in this market are so important. We see how bit bucket with the class in and Git Hub are growing and still playing a significant role binaries are different, binaries is the fresh food. Something that you keep changing, any minute and you build with a specific binary something and then something else and it become another binary if I may say so. I think that the flexibility that you need to gain when you go on full automation and full integration is the flexibility that you can get on the binary level. You cannot get it on the code level. Therefore, binaries playing a very significant role in the cloud era and in the dev/ops era. >> Sure it allows for extensibility of source code. In a way what you're saying. You can eat the frozen food or you can chop up your own organic meal yourself. >> Exactly. >> Okay I get that, final question for you, thanks for coming in, appreciate the one on one on binaries there. People can always just go on Wikipedia and look at other definitions on stack overflow and whatnot. What is the customer value proposition for Jfrog? Why should I work with you, what's the main reason for you to have 4000 customers? What's driving them to use you? Is it just convenience? Is it scalability, all of the above? Just take a minute to explain why customers go to you and if people don't work with you, why should they work with you? >> I think that the biggest challenge today is that you want to treat binaries as first level citizens and instead of having an NPM repository, docker registry, Maven repository, python repository and there is no single organization that will have just one repository, you can have it all with Jfrog. The second thing we are the providers of highly available solution to protect your data centers so if you don't want your 1000 developers sitting down, waiting for the binary repository to be up and running and to allow the environment, then you probably want to, >> Productivity right there is one. >> Productivity and efficiency, absolutely. We are also providing it to secure your binary flow and the platform that distributes your binaries. We take binaries very seriously, over two billion downloads a month on bintray, our distribution hub and we work with the community and for the community, we are developers ourself, coming from the open source community so it's all bottom up and community friendly. >> Shlomi, great commentary, I want to just get a personal, take your Jfrog hat off for a minute, put your developer, executive, industry expert hat on. Share with the audience your view on the developer market. There's been a lot of negative press around the brogrammer lately and all these things, but trends are clear that you have massive growth in open source, comment on the role open source plays as it goes into some argue fifth generation, fourth, fifth generation, I remember when the first generation I was coding on. Those were the days but different, it's changed. You have so much code, it's really a party right now in open source, there's so much good stuff happening. Google's donating tensorflow, all these people putting real big libraries out there to code on. Kubernetes is just so awesome, system guys specifically love what's going on in the cloud. But cloud is exploding a lot of opportunities, IoT and AI, what's the developer market like right now, just share your thoughts, what's the sentiment, what's the excitement, what are the young kids doing? What are some of the big things that you see happening? >> From business perspective, what we see in the market is developers first of all taking decisions. They hear their managers coming with the pain and expect it to solve it and the bottom up process is something we never saw in the market. The last five, six years, we see more and more developers kind of educating their managers with how to do it and how to do it faster. The second thing and this is, >> So bottom up's happening now you're saying. >> Happening for the last five years and it's growing. The second thing we see in the cloud, you see it more than I am, Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Red Hat, everyone want a piece of the cloud, Orca now just announced two days ago, three days ago. Everyone want a piece of the cloud and everybody understand that data traffic comes from developers, it's not individuals, it's communities, the open source community is giant and it's a very, there's a very important player in the data traffic of what we call the cloud highway. >> And the communities are very most important piece, you would agree with that, right? We're very community focused, that's the key, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> I think the world will be developer indoctrinated with basically developer premises across all business, so it's not a department anymore, it's permeating all through organizations. >> Right and also impact our user experience. People like simple people that doesn't understand code, they're not contributing to the open source world still need software updates and competitive analysis are talking about that, how fast can you release? >> Well Stu Miniman and Dave Alante and Peter Burris and I always talk about community is the key in open source, you guys have been very successful in the community. Congratulations, obviously we're very community focused with our content, with the Cube. If you like the Cube, check us out at cube.net, give us a call, come in the studio if you're a thought leader, love to chat with you. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, more thought leadership coverage in Palo Alto here inside the Cube. We'll be right back, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

live from San Francisco California it's the queue at vmworld 2014 brought to you by vmware cisco EMC HP and nutanix now here are your hosts John courier and Dave vellante okay welcome back at when live in San Francisco here this is the cube vmworld 2014 our fifth year I'm John furry with Dave a lot the extracting the signal noise we love talking to the executives the entrepreneurs the VCS all all the action is here on the ground ball tickets our next guest Eric Herzog the CMO and I think you're running biz dev as well yes is Deb for violin memory systems violin is went recently went public now on a complete transformation you're at the helm there from EMC so you know a little bit bout storage and flash welcome to the cube well thank you very much i always enjoy coming to the cube and doing it now for four or five years it's been great guys do an outstanding job we really appreciate it one of the things we're excited about aussies flash and every gets move them up here that's been in the storage and the periphery of stored with cloud and hybrid cloud is raving about the economic disruption of flash the performance of flash flash is super hot now doctors getting a lot of the press right now cuz the deal but still flashes at the under the hood that's where the action is so what's the update give us a take on what's going on in flash in violin what are you guys up to so the big thing is flashes at that economic tipping point so if you go back to late 70s and early 80s as everyone remembers everything was taped all the data centers were taped hard drives were more expensive they were faster and you got to the economic tipping port we're using a hard drive base to Ray was much better than using a tape subsystem than tape became backup archive which is still great at tape in fact I saw from one of the analysts who tracks such things that tape is actually still the cheapest media I don't see any CIO rushing to the all taped data center so what you've got now is flashes at that economic tipping point that between the savings and storage server software licensing power rack space floor space etc that when you do the economic analysis you can just literally do with the calculator pay is to go flash in fact flash is almost free these days so certainly the economists are ridiculously amazing in terms of cost now on the performance side you're starting to see some segmentation yesterday were talking about capacity flash and performance flash what does that mean I mean I was how they different off is it flashes flash but you started to see these conversations that are being kind of workload specific is that where it's going we still in the flash adoption phase what's your take them now we're anthem at the maturation phase flash is shifting away from everyone assuming it's the same just think of the old hard drives you know even today got 7200 rpm 10,000 RPM and 15,000 rpm and it really makes a difference as you use those various capacities and the various perform em extra around them flashes and it's all the same medium same media same heads but they make changes flash is doing the same thing there is people focusing on performance flash violin being one of those we have one of the highest performing systems out there as measured by not by violin by third parties and they got other people that want to go would all say cheap and deep flash not as cheap as hard drive but let's make flash you know faster than hard drives but not uber fast and so you could put other workloads on it that are more capacity sensitive than performance sensitive so I want if we get to unpack performance a little bit so people talk about I ops they talk about latency how do you guys look at performance how should customers be looking at performance so it's really a package okay the number one enemy of most applications particularly in mid up to global enterprise is absolutely latency so I ops is important but if you don't have good latency I ops don't overpower that so you need to have both good I ops and really strong latency in order to optimize where that be an Oracle workload at sa p workload a sequel workload those types of workloads often are very latency sensitive the lower the latency the better the application functions and the more you can do with it so so who are the kings and queens and princes of latency you would put you guys in that mix and we are in that category we can guarantee under half a millisecond latency or five hundred microseconds whichever term you want to you is whether the array is empty or full we also have some customers that have done some host-based aggregation in production and we have one of the 25 largest companies in the world with multiple petabytes in production they aggregate on the host side are arrays and they're able to deliver to millions sustained I ops regardless of workload across all those petabytes and point 15 millisecond of latency now that's not what we claim on an individual array the spec sheet so they're really getting it and they've proven it to us several times so you know that's in the performance side of the equation so latency I ops bandwidth snot as much of an issue because bandwidth obviously you can get off a hard drives and hard drives are very good for high-bandwidth situation you're not going to use all flash in meeting or attainment applications or an oil and gas or a lot of the genomic research stuff because it's very bandwidth intensive and you could get great bandwidth off of low-cost hard drives actually and create you know giant mass cluster for example is better in those workloads but in database workloads virtualized workloads for example we have a customer that on a certain physical server had 14 vm virtual machines they then used our flash and they were able to get 50 on the same exact physical Hardware same size virtual machine same I ops for that those virtual machines and go from 14 to 50 just by switching to flash same vm was VMware same exact server infrastructure all they do is swap the storage out so that's an example of how a you get the performance and be you also get the economics because obviously putting 50 virtual machines on the same physical Hardware saves you money so I would think the big benefit to is consistency all right so you hear from customers are just give me consistent predictable right moments right so while you're in the same thing from customers yes absolutely so what you have when you look out at the flash world what you're going to see is certain people have a right cliff and what happens is when you hit the right cliff or they're going to have unequal performance they'll be better than a hard drive system for sure but there they'll still get a sawtooth not as dramatic as you'd see in a hard drive subsystem but sawtooth what we do is we guarantee consistent I ops and since latency whether the array is empty half full or all the way full and very few guys in the off lash community can do that I want to talk a little bit about the the stack so you came from a company you were running you know very senior executive at emc within the mid-range business VNX awesome stack been around forever a lot of value in that stack takes a long time to harden a stack a lot of the flash guys you know you guys included came out you solving a problem start selling stack takes a long time to mature so how should we be thinking about the stack so raid stack is always crucial you know rate is not just about performance redundant array of independent disks its number one function when raid came out quite evident across the bay here at UC Berkeley was for resiliency so that's the number one thing that a raid stack does the second thing it does of course is give you performance as well because you aggregate whether it's hard drives or flash drives or hybrids you aggregate the performance across the pieces of media so I think one of the benefits you're going to see from certain vendors in the flash base we being one of them is we have a long history we're on our fourth generation flash configuration and we basically rev our generations every two years so we're looking at a raid stack that's in the eighth year time frame some of the other flash startups you know they've been shipping for two years you have a two-year-old raid stack an eight-year-old raid stack has got much more resiliency it's got more test time for us in particular our sweet spot is in the upper mid to global enterprise if you look at the fortune global 500 list over 50 of those customers use violin which when you're big company is one thing when you're a small company like us to have 50 of the global fortune 500 using your products it's got to be pretty resilient in the stack or they wouldn't be using it I mean I was on it I probably spoke one-on-one or maybe one on 2132 over 500 customers in the first half of this year and the on flash and i would ask every one of them who's used an all-flash array and it was actually pretty low penetration still right not surprising violin came up a lot TMS came up a lot I mean not and then and then pure a little bit and then you know bits and pieces but violin was consistently there's guys did a good job early on getting into this space but I want to ask you about sometimes I call it channel ft the urinary Olympics and particularly around data reduction and so you guys are now you know throwing your head into that ring how should we be thinking about sort of data reduction compression d2 obviously drives pricing down rank it helps create that that's I think part of the reason why we're at that tipping point that and you know ml see how should we be thinking about data reduction there's a lot a lot of you know finger-pointing in line not in line post process give us your point of view so the bottom line is dated ed will help you in two primary workloads virtual desktop and virtual server okay beyond that it doesn't help you compression helps you in database oriented workloads and there are certain data types that are not compressible at all so for example mpegs JPEGs and other data types are not compressed with all their already pre compressed by the nature of the data type so everyone needs to be wary that just as when you get your miles per gallon when you buy that brand new car it will vary and it will vary by workloads so if you've got a workload that's heavily already compressed you're not going to get benefit from anyone's compression including arms if you've got a workload that's already been d duped you're not going to get a benefit from anyone's d do so you have to segment your workloads I think the other thing Dave in addition to what's driving that price point which is compression and D do is multiple workloads so for violin in particular our average arraign we've already publicly talked about this our average array shipping is well over 30 terabytes that's not true of a lot of other guys when you've got 30 terabytes with the average database being four to five terabytes people don't put one database on our stuff people who sell five terabyte arrays and a recent large coming just announced the new five terabyte array they're going to put one database with us at 30 to 40 terabytes average people run three four five databases does anyone really buy a vmax or a netapp 8,000 class or a high-end IBM box and run one workload on that in the hybrid world or in the hard drive world no but that's now that people are running multiple and mixed workloads on flash arrays that plus the dee doop and compression is driving this economic switch over and why flashes the right choice for your data center well you guys do obvious do a lot in database generally and specifically oracle database via Oracle's big on pushing hybrid Columba compression and trying to lock out its competitors for grants abating in that what are you seeing there in Oracle environments and I've again I've talked a lot of customers and the the instances of hybrid columnar are still very limited right in theory on the road map how what are you seeing what are your thoughts on that what do you talk to customers customers must say well you know Oracle's locking you out you know how about I just a chubber a couple things first of all on the price points it won't matter because people run violin arrays with mixed in multiple workloads already so even if you want Oracle stuff if you were to buy the Oracle if you're going to buy Oracle compression or compression to any of the database from the database vendors themselves for us it's still benefits us we don't sell a lot of five and ten terabyte arrays we sell lots of 30 and 40 and 70 tera byte arrays we can even scale are raised up to 280 terabytes which most the other guys can't do and I'm talking now raw capacity not d duper compressor capacity at the same time while the database guys are trying to do that one thing I'd encourage the end users do is just look at the list price it's available readily Oracle's is available it's a pretty high ticket item so whether it's violent or any of the other flash vendors that have compression it won't compress as well as Oracle's will or any other database vendors but the price is pretty high so if you get reasonable compression from a storage render it's going to be a lot less expensive than using that from the database vendor down maybe the database vendors an Oracle change their strategy but right now it's a very high ticket item and when you get it from the storage vendor and even if it doesn't compress as much it's still a lot cheaper so you'll have to take that as part of the financial analysis when you're looking at your database deployment now you made a big personal bet on violin I mean you and I i was there in the front row and you announcing the latest sort of v NX which is a great announcement I mean it was you guys ticked a lot of boxes it was a lot of hard work and I realize that but my one big question was what about all flash like well we have all flash too well you said all the right marketing things and then you know several months later here you are at violin big personal bet all right you have senior executive at emc years not bad I know a lot of travel but you know pretty pretty good life hey yeah a lot of a lot of people working with you for you you know a lot of great customers why'd you make that that choice so a couple things first of all violence got an incredible set of customers when they divulge the customers to me under NDA I was like shocked I couldn't believe who the customers were you know I worked at IBM as well as EMC so of course all the big boys are your customers and they always will be but the number of really big companies they had was very impressive incredible technology this year has been all about the software stack which violin has been very mediocre at now it's got a whole set of software potential and as you know Dave I've done seven startups five of them been acquired and I can smell a stinker this is not a stinker so it past the fume test after doing seven startup so it you know feels like the what was that attraction obviously the IPO went off without a hitch right in terms of at least going public but it stopped in climb there was a little hitch excuse me absolutely being a low I'd like violent emerging player also the market team is huge yeah so that's I mean one market opportunity so with that kind of the IPO stumble if you will you still came on board yes that was not an issue for you like okay I'm going guns blaring well in addition doing seven starters I've done this is my fourth turn around and all of them have ended up very well IBM wat one of my turn arounds i was at mac store as the senior VP of Marketing when CJ Mack store that was another turnaround although be at a very large company obviously mac store at five billion at the time of the acquisition but done a number of turnarounds as well so it's it's an attractive thing to do it's a fun thing to do you feel you could really do this yeah the park I know I'm a good man but I'm not that old yet yeah it's pretty straightforward you get the customers give them some good product collect some cash do it again well I mean it's all about execution you know and violin get a lot of really great things they did really well by the customers customers love them great tech support great field support the SE teams even a group of consulting engineers and all the consulting engineers actually RX oracle and microsoft guys know their learning story but they know all about the database community and we got a couple guys from actually ex vmware guys as well so that's that's a big thing but I think the key thing is you got to execute on all cylinders and we had a great technology leadership group that did the first set got the company to the first hundred million but it wasn't the right guys to grow the business make the visit and by the way you guys interview VCS all the times you know it's very common you get to a certain point and then the founding executive team sort of needs to move aside great technology guys but not the best business men and that's a strong attraction we're just talking some VCS up here some tier 1 Greylock and any a move the question that came in over text and the day was texting me that we wanted to ask was you know at these big valuation the private companies it's hard for the employees to make money so the silver lining and your opportunity is there is a lot of growth opportunities and money-making opportunities for the management team and investors right so so that's a good position to attract some town yeah that's well that's the that's the appeal yeah when you think about there's certain guys that are really good at IBM EMC Microsoft HP VMware and they're never going to do well in a start-up you got other guys that are hybrids can be big and small company and the attraction for those that can do both is you can bring the seasoned management that you learn at an IBM and EMC a Microsoft a VMware bring that to the small company which has great technology would often does not have the discipline and rigor that a big company does and what you have to do is bounce the drive for new technology and new customers with the business model and not become overly bureaucratic and that's the attraction of a turnaround as well as guys who do lots of startups is to be able to do that and grow the company and the key thing has got to grow it properly and that's the upside well you're getting your track records phenomenal we've been following your career tech athlete for sure now Wall Street you got to kind of do the dance and you know keep keep nice and get these guys back to snap them in line right that's kind of the key focus to as well right yeah it's it's about financial execution right now we brought out a whole bunch of new products our windows flash array in line to you to compression a whole class of I'd say unmatched enterprise class data services in the off flash erase space and you've got to be able to leverage all of that and that's a key thing you've got the technology if you don't execute on the business side you know you go out of business and we've got the right team in place now to take the technology where it needs to deliver the business value to the shareholders and the and the stockholders Eric herzlich CMO violin memory systems you know my philosophy in my experience although you know not as extensive as yours is in a growing market a few missteps can be rewarded with great product so you guys have certainly a good product to get a mulligan with a growth market wind behind your back so congratulations seeing things on track and really exciting to see good company this is the cube here at vmworld 2014 right back into the short break