from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by vmware and it's ecosystem sponsors and now your host dave vellante we're back at Moscone everybody this is the cube SiliconANGLE Wikibon it's continuous production of vmworld 2015 we're riding the data wave Eric Harris dog is here he's a vice president marketing IBM storage in the Hawaiian shirt great to see you again my friend well Dave thank you very much as I keep telling people it's not about data lakes people have oceans a day to these days yes I oceans a day to dos today that oceans a data now so what's the story get the Hawaiian shirt on what do you got going on across the straw our big thing really is oceans of data so between all the solutions we have from a storage solution set a platform computing environment our joint deal that we do with Cisco with what we call the versus stack and our spectrum family of software now our customers are saying everything's going digital and it doesn't matter whether you're a global enterprise a midsize company or even an SMB with everything going digital it isn't about lakes of data it's about oceans of data so let's start maybe at the versus stack as a hyper converge is sort of taken the world by storm you're seeing vmware's obviously talking about it you got a bunch of startups talking about it when you guys made the move to to sell the the server business the x86 server business to lenovo BNT the acquisition of B&C went with it opened up whole new opportunities for IBM from a partnership standpoint and one of the first guys you went to a cisco so talk about that well we've had a great partnership with Cisco we deliver the versus tak through our mutual channel partners so globally so we have channel partners in all of the gos that are selling the versus stack solution we started originally with our v7000 product which allows us to not only provide a strong mid to your offering but because of our integration of our spectrum virtualized actually will virtualize heterogeneous torso over 300 arrays from our competitors can be virtualized giving any data center or cloud deployment single way to replicate single way to snapshot and of course a single way actually my great dinner which is a huge issue obviously in big deployment well and the same volume controller was really the first platform to do that that was the right gold standard and the whole the original you know tier 1 tier two storage sort of was defined by the sand volume controller kept really now you've built those capabilities into an end to the array so we started with our v7000 storwize was the first with a versus tack we announced last week two new versions one hour v nine thousand which incorporates that same value of the sand volume controller but an all-flash array okay that product is been incredibly successful for us we have thousands of customers we have deployed more petabytes than anyone in the industry and more units than anyone in the issue for you know some of those analysts that track the number side of the business we've done more than any pricing it right is what you're telling me we are definitely pricing it right we do north petabytes more minutes and more units than anybody by far but not the most revenue second most revenue so you well we're a fair price for a fair job as opposed to a high price for okay job that's what we believe in delivering more value for the money so we've got that so that opens up heavy virtualized environments heavy cloud environments big data analytics all those applications were all flash high-end Oracle deployments SP Hana configs all those sort of things are ideal same time you brought in the v5000 at the lower entry place of the mid-tier and it's with the UCS mini from Cisco so it gives you a lower entry price and allows a couple things one you can go in department until deployments a big enterprise to you can go into remote office deployments and also of large enterprise but three it allows you to take the value of a converged infrastructure down into smaller customers because it's a lower entry price point it's got all the value of the virtualization engine we have in all of our V family of products that v5 to be seven in the v9 all flash but it's at a much lower price point with a lower cost UCS mini and a lower cost switch infrastructure from from Cisco so it's a great solution for those big offices but again remote and department level and ideal though to move converged infrastructure down into smaller companies so so cisco has been incredibly successful with that space when Cisco first came out I a misunderstood I said how they going to fall flat in their face and servers and I was totally wrong about that because I didn't understand that they were trying to change the game what's it like partnering with those guys and how is it added value to your business well it's been very strong for us one they've got an excellent channel two they have a great direct sales model as does IBM three we've been partnering them for ages and ages and ages in fact in the 90s we sold a bunch of our networking technology to Cisco and is now deployed by Cisco so some of the networking technology at Cisco puts out there to the to their end users to their channel partners into you know their big telcos that actually came from IBM when we sold our networking division to Cisco in the mid-90s so strong partnership ever since then so let's talk more about the portfolio particularly i'm sickly interested in the whole TSM vs TSM came over to the storage group which thrilled me i think there was a great move by IBM to do that whoever made that decision smart move how has that affected having that storage software capability embedded into the storage business how has that affected your ability to go to market well it's been great so that's our spectrum family there are six elements to that spectrum protect which used to be TSM spectrum control which used to be the tsc product spectrum virtualized which is a software version of the sand volume controller so you can get as a software-only solution spectrum archive spectrum accelerate which is a scale-out block solution think of it as a software version of our XIV platform but software only and spectrum scale which gives incredible scale-out nas capability in fact spectrum scale has a number of customers in the enterprise side not in the HPC market but in global enterprises over 100 petabytes and we even have one customer that has one exabyte in production under spectrum scale exabyte one exabyte in production and not an hpc customer or not not one of the big universities not one of the think tanks but a commercial large global fortune 500 company we an exabyte with spectrum scale so so talk a little bit more about the strategy I think people all times misunderstand IBM's approach they say okay IBM getting out of the hardware business which they think Inferno must get another storage business you're not get out of the storage business obviously they hired hogging store oh so talk more about the strategy and how you're you know pursuing that yeah well I'd say a couple things so first of all our commitment to storage is very strong we're investing a billion in all flash technology and a billion in spectrum software in addition to our normal engineering development for our store wise family and our other members of our products that we've already had so a billion extra in flash and a billion extra in our software family in addition to that we've got a method of consumption that we're looking at so some end users want a full storage solution our ds8000 our flash systems are storwize some customers want to move to the software-defined storage and in several cases such as XIV software only spectrum virtualize okay we've got a number of different ways that you can consume the product and then lastly in several of the products such as spectrum scale spectrum accelerate and a lite version of spectrum control that we call spectrum control storage insights available through a cloud consumption model so if the customer wants a comprehensive solution we have it if the customer wants software-defined storage we have it if the customer wants integrated infrastructure with our vs stack we have it and if the customer wants a cloud storage model of consumption we have that too and quite honestly we think in bigger accounts they may have multiple consumption models for example core data center might go for a full storage solution but guess what the cloud solutions would be ideal for a remote or branch office so talk to me more about the cloud you're talking about the SoftLayer we here we go to the IBM shows you a soft layer of bluemix you know so a lot of money or the devops crowd what's going on bactrim accelerate spectrum scale and spectrum control are all available as a soft layer offering they are not targeting test and Dev they are not targeting you know just the bluemix out these are targeting core data center they could be testing dev or they could be remote office branch office opportunities for large enterprises that want to spend a full storage solution and spend that money on the core data center but for the remote office have spectrum scale delivered over softlayer an ideal solution and various consumption models which ever fits their need so David flora just wrote a piece on Wikibon calm of talking about latency and capacity storage at a very high level sort of segmenting the market those ways it's sort of sizing it up and projecting some of the trends and obviously latency storage he's thinking you know more flash oriented capacity storage more more disk spinning disk and tape is that a reasonable way to look at the business and how does it apply to your portfolio so we do think that's a reasonable way to look at it you have if you will a performance segment and a capacity segment depending the number of things that people need to really look at when they buy storage first of all I'm a storage guy for 30 years no one cares about storage it's all about the data it's all about the data that your storage optimizes it's about the workload the activation the use case for me I do too but unfortunately almost every time you know see how it's going to say almost every CIO is a software guy so it's how does the storage optimize my software environment and that's what's critical to them so we see certain applications that are very performance exit certain SLA s they need to meet we have some that are medium sensitive and we have some that of course are very capacity oriented which is our spectrum scale one exabyte with a single customer now that's capacity that's an ocean of data but we also have solutions we're able to put it together so for example in a lot of data analytics workloads that would run in spectrum scale we actually sell a lot of our all flash flash systems use the flash to ingest the data use flash to manage the metadata use the flash to run the search engine in a big giant config such as that and when you're running an analytics workload you run the analytics workload on that flash yet you're really doing a very large deployment hundreds of petabytes to an exabyte with our spectrum scale so we see if you will a continuum and the key thing as IBM offers all of the various piece parts to any level of the continuum and in that example I just gave combining high performance and deep high capacity software in a single solution to meet a business I mean IBM is an unbelievable company think about Watson cloud bluemix the analytics business deep deep heavy rd z mainframe so you got all the pieces how is the storage business how can it better leverage those other pieces and and is it or is it is it relevant or is it just just take the storage hill so we see our storage products as integrating with our other so for example we do a lot of deals where they buy a mainframe in our ds8000 sure we offer integrated infrastructure not only with cisco but actually with the power family as well it's called pure power and that has an integrated v7000 with a power server and we're looking at deepening that relationship as well a lot of analytics were lot alex workloads going scale so whether they buy the big insights whether they use in Watson we've got several customers use Watson but by flash systems because it's obviously very compute intensive so they use flash systems to do that so you know we fit in at the same time we have plenty of customers that don't buy anything else from IBM and just buy storage so we are appealing to a very broad audience those that are traditional IBM shops that by a lot of different products from IBM and those that go in fact one of our public references general mills they had not bought anything from any division of IBM for 50 years and one of our channel partners in Minnesota we are able to get in there with our XIV product and now not only do they buy XIV and some spectrum protect for backup but they've actually started to buy some other technology from IBM and for 50 years they bought nothing from IBM from any division so in that case storage led the way so again in certain accounts we're in there with the ds8000 and Z or were in there with Watson and flash systems and other accounts were pioneering and in some cases we're the only product they buy they don't buy from IBM we will meet whichever need they have now in periods in the last I mean it's been Evan flow in the storage business for IBM periods the last decade IBM deep rd but the products couldn't seem to go to market now you shared with me under under NDA so we can't talk about it in detail but shared with me the roadmap and and the product roadmap is accelerating from release maybe it's just my impression from what I'm used to should we expect to see a much more you know steady cadence of product delivery from IBM going forward absolutely so keeping in our spirit of oceans we ride the wave we don't fight the way and in today's era in any era of high-tech not just in store it doesn't matter whether storage whether its servers whether it's web to know whatever it is it's all about innovation and doing it quickly so we're going to ride that wave of innovation we're going to have a regular cadence of releases we released four different members of spectrum plus two verses stocks and next quarter you'll see five really five major product releases in one quarter and then in q1 you're going to see another three so we're making sure that as this trajectory of innovation hits all of high tech in all segments that IBM storage is not going to be left behind and we're going to continue to innovate on an accelerated pace that pace is is really important you know IBM again spends a lot of money on R&D it's key to get that product into the pipeline let's talk about vmware and vmworld obviously we're here at vmworld so on vmware very important constituency a lot of customers you got a you got to talk to vmware if you want to be in the data center today what is your strategy around vmware specifically but also generally as it relates to multi cloud environments whether it's your own cloud or other clouds OpenStack or what if you could talk about those so let's take virtualization first so we support a number of different hypervisors we support VMware extensively we support hyper-v we support kvm we support ovm we support open initiatives like OpenStack cinder we support Hadoop we have Hadoop connectors in many of our products so whether it's a cloud deployment or a virtual deployment we want to make sure we support everybody for example spectrum protect was announced last week with support for softlayer as a target device basically a tier well guess what in 1h we're going to support amazon and as you're not just softlayer so again we want to make sure we support everything with VMware specifically for the first time ever VMware has invited IBM storage on stave at three questions iBM has done things in the server world in the past but we have never ever ever been invited by VMware to their technical sessions in fact when is it five o'clock today it's called Project capstone which they publicly announced last week and it's about deploying Oracle environments in VMware virtualization it's a partnership with VMware with IBM flash systems all flash and with HP superdome servers and that's going to be on stage at five o'clock today here at moscone center awesome so we're starting to see a tighter relationship with with VMware building out the portfolio what do you say to the customer says yeah I hear you but vmware's doing all this sort of interesting stuff around things like v san what do you what do you tell a customer you know what about that so we see the San as it you know in this era of behemoths everyone is your partner everyone is your competitor but we work with Intel all the time other divisions of IBM think Intel's a major competitor some of our server division work with some of our storage competitors so we think you know we will work with everyone and while we work with VMware a number of angles so if he sounds a little bit of a competitor that's fine and we see an open space for all of the solutions in the market today we got to leave it there the last question so take us through sort of your objectives for IBM storage over the you know near and midterm what do you what should we be well so our big thing is to make sure we keep the cadence up there's so much development going on whether that be in software defined and integrated infrastructure in all flash in all the areas that we are going to make sure that we continue to develop in every area we've got the billion dollars in all flash in the billion dollars in software to find we are going to spend it and we're going to bring those products to market that fit the need so that the oceans of data that everyone is dealing with can be handled appropriately cost-effectively and quite honestly that oceans of data it's about the business value of the data not the storage underneath so we're going to make sure that for all those oceans a data we will allow them to drive real business value and make sure that those data oceans are protected meet their SLA s and are always available to their end user base I love it yet the Steve Mills billion-dollar playbook obviously worked in Linux it was well over a billion in analytics business IBM's a leader they're applying it to flash great acquisition of Texas memory systems you become a leader they're now going after the software to find Eric Herzog thanks very much for coming to the cubes great very much we love to have all right everybody will be back with our next guest right after this World we're live from vmworld and Moscone keep right there you