>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by vertical. >>Hi, everybody. And welcome to this cube special presentation of the vertical virtual Big Data conference. The Cube is running in parallel with Day One and day two of the vertical of Big Data event. By the way, the Cube has been every single big data event in It's our pleasure to be here in the virtual slash digital event as well. Gabriel Chapman is here. He's the director of Flash Blade Products Solutions Marketing at Pure Storage. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you too. How's it going? >>It's going very well. I mean, I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel, but, uh, you know, and hopefully we'll be able to meet it, accelerate at some point, future or one of the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows, but because we've been covering that show as well. But I really want to get into it. And the last accelerate September 2019 pure and vertical announced. Ah, partnership. I remember a joint being ran up to me and said, Hey, you got to check this out. The separation of compute and storage by EON mode now available on Flash Blade. So, uh and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on Prem and in the cloud. So I want to ask, what were the trends and analytical database and cloud led to this partnership? You know, >>realistically, I think what we're seeing is that there's been a kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the traditional, you know, Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of directors that storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected. When we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises, they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore, you know, the flash blade platform ended up being a great solution to support America in their transition Tian mode. Leveraging essentially is an S three object store. >>Okay, so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of the flash blade, you make the claim that Flash Blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever. That's a bold statement. So defend that What? >>I would like to go beyond that and just say, you know, So we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of, you know, as as we've developed Flash Blade as a platform and keep in mind, it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has been very successful for pure storage. The reality is, is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go, and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object best file storage place in realistically, which we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics. But doing so on Prem for a multitude of different reasons. We've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around, you know, making things this year that you know, fast matters for us. Ah, simple is smart. Um we can provide, you know, cloud integrations across the spectrum. And, you know, there's a subscription model that fits into that as well. We fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern day takes variance. And it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio. >>Okay, so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of flash blade and then understand the fit for, uh, analytic databases generally, but specifically for vertical. So it is a blade, so you got compute and network included. It's a key value store based system. So you're talking about scale out. Unlike, unlike, uh, pure is sort of, you know, initial products which were scale up, Um, and so I want on It is a fabric based system. I want to understand what that all means to take us through the architecture. You know, some of the quote unquote firsts that you guys talk about. So let's start with sort of the blade >>aspect. Yeah, the blade aspect of what we call the flash blade. Because if you look at the actual platform, you have, ah, primarily a chassis with built in networking components, right? So there's ah, fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades. Individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside. It's not like we're just taking SSD is and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off the shelf hardware design. This is very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast filing past object scalability, massive parallel ization. When it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to 150 that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for, especially as we start to address these larger analytics pools. They are multi petabytes data sets, you know that single addressable object space and, you know, file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale up storage platforms are able to deliver. >>Yes, I interviewed cause last September and accelerate, and Christie Pure has been attacked by some of the competitors. There's not having scale out. I asked him his thoughts on that, he said Well, first of all, our flash blade is scale out. He said, Look, anything that adds complexity, you know we avoid. But for the workloads that are associated with flash blade scale out is the right sort of approach. Maybe you could talk about why that is. Well, >>realistically, I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to work with large, unstructured data sets. I mean, flash blade is unique. The architected to allow customers to achieve superior resource utilization for compute and storage, while at the same time, you know, reducing significantly the complexity that has arisen around this kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytics solutions. I mean, we're really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered are created applications in the public cloud space of dress, you know, object storage and an unstructured data. And for some organizations, the importance is bringing that on Prem. I mean, we do see about repatriation coming on a lot of organizations as these data egress, charges continue to expand and grow, um, and then organizations that want even higher performance and what we're able to get into the public cloud space. They are bringing that data back on Prem They are looking at from a stamp. We still want to be able to scale the way we scale in the cloud. We still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud, but we want to do it within control of our own, our own borders. And so that's, you know, that's one of the bigger pieces to that. And we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models? A zealous the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers to do that with inside their own data center. >>So you're talking about the trends earlier. You have these cloud native databases that allowed of the scaling of compute and storage independently. Vertical comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you, You love me. Here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight, you know, go to market. Are there other aspects of this partnership that they're non Barney deal like, in other words, any specific engineering. Um, you know other go to market programs? Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, >>it's it's It's more than just that what we consider a channel meet in the middle or, you know, that Barney type of deal. It's realistically, you know, we've done some first with Veronica that I think, really Courtney, if they think you look at the architecture and how we did, we've brought to market together. Ah, we have solutions. Teams in the back end who are, you know, subject matter experts. In this space, if you talk to joy and the people from vertical, they're very high on our very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to leverage on mode and get into some of the the nuance task specs of how they leverage the depot depot with inside each individual. Compute node in adjustments with inside their reach. Additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time, for them, that's still tough. The ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to. And so I think a lot of it is around. How do we partner is to companies? How do we do a joint selling motions? How do we show up in and do white papers and all of the traditional marketing aspects that we bring to the market? And then, you know, joint selling opportunities exist where they are, and so that's realistically. I think, like any other organization that's going to market with a partner on MSP that they have, ah, strong partnership with. You'll continue to see us, you know, talking about are those mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market. >>Okay, you know, of course, he used to be a Gartner analyst, and you go to the vendor side now, but it's but it's, but it's a Gartner analyst. You're obviously objective. You see it on, you know well, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat There, there their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, etcetera for every vendor. So you have you have vertical who's got a very mature stack and talking to a number of the customers out there who are using EON mode. You know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases makes sense. It's not just the economics of scaling and storage independently. I want to talk more about that. There's flexibility aspect as well. But Vertical really has to play its its trump card, which is Look, we've got a big on premise state, and we're gonna bring that eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now. There obviously have been there to play catch up in the cloud, but at the same time, they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago. So you know, so there's trade offs that customers have to make. How do you sort through that? Where do you see the interest in this? And and what's the sweet spot for this partnership? You know, we've >>been really excited to build the partnership with vertical A and provide, you know, we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the yang mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together. You know, it's ah, it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space, where I think that there's still not to say that not everybody wants to go there, but I think there's aspects and solutions that worked very well there. But for the vast majority, I still think that there's, you know, the your data center is not going away. And you do want to have control over some of the many of the assets with inside of the operational confines. So therefore, we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on prim. And that's realistically, where we start to see the stronger push for those customers. You still want to manage their data locally. A swell as maybe even worked around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring. You know, the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring applications purely cloud native. It's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with. And realistically, I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons, and we've been doing cloud long enough where people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center. So I mean, realistically, as we move forward, that's, Ah, that better option when it comes to a modern architecture that can do, you know, we can deliver an address, a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data, you know, based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage. And that's really what Flash was built for. It was built for a platform that could address small files or large files or high throughput, high throughput, low latency scale of petabytes in a single name. Space in a single rack is we like to put it in there. I mean, we see customers that have put 150 flash blades into production as a single name space. It's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms. Pure and Veronica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing uh, you know, particularly on technology. >>I'm interested in exploring the use case. A little bit further. You just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have, um, and take us through kind of what the customer discussions are like. Obviously you've got a big customer base, you and vertical that that's on Prem. That's the the unique advantage of this. But there are others. It's not just the economics of the granular scaling of compute and storage independently. There are other aspects of take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases. Yeah, you >>know, I mean, I could give you a couple customer examples, and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses vertical on last way to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time, You know, then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing their streaming and whatnot that they can. They can fine tune the grand we control that. So that's one aspect that that we address. We have a multinational car car company, which uses vertical on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision making trees. You know, that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built for, um, there's another healthcare organization that uses vertical on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time. The impact lives, especially when we start to look at and, you know, the current state of affairs with code in the Corona virus. You know, those types of technologies, we're really going to help us kind of get of and help lower invent, bend that curve downward. So, you know, there's all these different areas where we can address that the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real time analytics decision making tools like and you know, realistically is we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just, you know, a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of driving information >>that we're talking about Hadoop earlier. We're kind of going well beyond that now. And I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud, it was all about infrastructure. It was about, you know, uh, spin it up. You know, compute and storage is a little bit of networking in there. >>It >>seems like the next new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got. And it started with the cloud native databases. But then bringing in, you know, AI and machine learning tooling on top of that Ah, and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bog this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years. A lot of that is driven by a dupe bringing machine intelligence into the equation, scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on Prem scale. You know, across organizations and across your partner network, that really is a new emerging workloads. You see that? And maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing with customers. >>Yeah. I mean, it really is. We see several trends. You know, one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab, but into production. Um, you know, especially when it comes to data science projects, machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept, easy to spin up in the cloud. But when a customer wants to scale and move towards a riel you know, derived a significant value from that. They do want to be able to control more characteristic site, and we know machine learning, you know, needs toe needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy. There's just too much data retrieving the cloud for every training job. Same time Predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking. You know, we see this. Ah, the visualization of Data Analytics is Tricia deployed is being on a continuum with, you know, the things that we've been doing in the long in the past with data warehousing, data Lakes, ai on the other end. But this way, we're starting to manifest it and organizations that are looking towards getting more utility and better elasticity out of the data that they are working for. So they're not looking to just build apps, silos of bespoke ai environments. They're looking to leverage. Ah, you know, ah, platform that can allow them to, you know, do ai, for one thing, machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much Jeff um, you know, it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environment. >>I think it's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years. Gable. I wish we were in Boston together. You would have painted your little corner of Boston orange. I know that you guys have but really appreciate you coming on the cube wall to wall coverage. Two days of the vertical vertical virtual big data conference. Keep it right there. Right back. Right after this short break, Yeah.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas for Vmworld 2018. It's theCUBE's three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host this segment, Alan Cohen, who's an industry legend, retired now, doing a lot of boards, as our guest analyst here for this segment. Our next two guests-- >> Another word for unemployed. (all laugh) >> Bartender in Silicon Valley ??? On boards. Our next two guests, Bruce Shaw, Senior Director of Globalization Solutions, remaking what it means to partner in the cloud, and of course, Keith Norbie, theCUBE alumuni, Manager of bus dev, does the bus dev for NetApp. Guys, thanks for coming on. Thanks for spending the time. >> Oh, thanks for having us. >> The first thing I want to get to is, give us an update on the relationship with NetApp and VMware. Obviously, Pat Gelsinger, spring in his step. Go back three years ago, his job was on the line. So much has happened, the relationship with Amazon, the clarity around the cloud, cloud operations, the role of infrastructure in that, with devops driving programmable infrastructure. Kind of the world's spinning in the NetApps front door right now. >> Yeah, we feel pretty good about it. Keith, he runs that relationship, so I'll let him lead the answer. >> I thought it was best said, and we can kind of unite together, VMware and NetApp on moving from data centers to centers of data. NetApp's been on this data visionary, and sort of the data authority track for a couple years now. You guys have known that; you've been to a net admin site. The relationship, really, is complementary from that perspective, and it goes back many years, more than a decade. If you look at our common base, VMware, of course, has 500,000 users in its install base. We've got a couple 100,000, so it's a gigantic opportunity together to move people exactly in the acts that Pat talked about in the keynote, act one through act four, and getting us all to multi cloud. When you look at the relationship, and the base of the ONTAP products that we have VMware and the architecture, all the way to cloud volumes, and then the latest architecture that we've just done with VMware for NetApp HCI, there's a lot to talk about. >> I've been covering NetApp since theCUBE, nine years, This is our ninth VMWorld, but I've been following the company since the late 90s when they went public. Always a culture of learning and adaptability, but to survive in the past 10 years, specifically, it's really been about adaptation, because if you look at that model, a lot of losers are dead, bankrupt, see companies come and go, but the ones that are customer-centric seem to win. Jassy on stage, very customer-centric. VMware, listening to their customers, got a great community. You guys have a very loyal customer base, both on the customer side, going back to the original products and the partners. >> Right. >> So Bruce, as you think about partnering in the cloud era, when you're now looking at all kinds of different relationships, whether it's in the staff from a technology standpoint, or go to market, or whatever the machination of the relationship is, you got to think differently, so I got to ask you the question. How do you partner? 'Cause it's not just about the profit anymore. What is value in this era? Take a minute to explain the vision. >> Yeah, and you hit it right in the head. The value question is no longer the primary driver of what you're going after. When I say value, just pure revenue stream. You want to look at, obviously, the evolution to an ecosystem, and we spent a lot of time with that on the internal side. Not that anybody cares about what we do under the covers. We restructured our business units from one single business unit into three, so we've got a cloud-focused CDS, which is cloud focuses on the hyperscalers, and our cloud volumes business. CIBU, which is our conversion, hyperconversion infrastrcutures, and then of course, the guys that handle ONTAP, and the big stuff on the back end that provides the building blocks to all of that. >> These are dedicated teams, right? >> Dedicated teams. Dedicated business units, and that gives us the potential of three pathways, in terms of which we partner, and my goal since I came in to run the group in January has been, how do we transition from a traditional alliances organization to evolve to one where we're much more focused on production of solutions, designing with our partners solutions that meet in the market. We're a very channel-focused company. We obviously, you look at the success that NetApp's had over the 10 years with Cisco and FlexPod, that's a meet in the market model, focused on validation to provide solutions for customers, for industry problems, and trying to replicate that through key strategic partners that hit the ecosystem to do it, and that's been a very effective approach for us, and we've spent a lot of time kind of recrafting the organization to match up both with our BUs, and then our delivery through what we call pathways, and that pathway begins from everything, from the channels to the GSIs. We have a new G100 account group, and then to our own sales force, of course. >> All right, so what's in it for me as the customer? I'm like, at the end of the day, it's like, okay, you're reorganized, sounds good. Focused teams, highly cohesive, good segmentation, dedicated teams. What's the impact for the customer? >> The impact for you guys, it's easier to implement, lower cost, quicker delivery, and the assurance that you actually have a validated architecture that's using best of ??? For what you want, as opposed to, I've bought a monolithic stack of something and I'm locked in, and maybe it's the a piece of this and the b of that. You can actually choose your Lego bricks to put together, and we'll stand behind it with the validation that this works. >> Maybe to just kind of pull a layer back on that. Obviously today, we have Andy Jassy on stage with VMware a year later. People were extremely cynical a year ago when that announcement went down. Here they are, they're throwing up their hands. Actually, today-- >> Capitulation was the term. >> Yeah, right, it's capitulation now, but if you are now partnering, and you're building alliances in the cloud era. Three or four years ago, people were saying, "The cloud, they're the enemy. "We can't do business with that." That's what they said, that their customers, their partnerships. How has that changed, and how do you think about partnerships with the cloud providers today? >> Three years ago, the smart people out there said the cloud is going to kill NetApp. >> Right. >> Right? We're an on-premise, standalone storage company. The cloud is the end. Well, fast forward to now, the cloud is our best friend. It's our biggest growing area. You look at the business we do with the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye, and that's the fastest-growing piece of the business we got. We've made it very easy, through ONTAP, to work in either a cloud only relationship, or a hybrid, where you're moving things from on-prem to off-prem and vice versa, and that's becoming main focus of our business, and from an alliances standpoint, of course, once you have it in our own key ingredient, then it's what are the partners that we partner with to bring them into that, to make it a more cohesive solution. >> And then ???Senator, if I might have a second question. >> Of course. >> If I am a customer, and on one side you have your alliance with VMware, and the other side I have my growing initiatives with AWS, or Google Cloud, it doesn't matter. Where does NetApp fit between those two environments? 'Cause you have alliances with both sides. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> What do I count on NetApp for, because I'm looking multi cloud, I'm looking at migration. How do I think about you in that-- >> To me, I think it's pretty clear. It's all of it needs data to run, just like software needs hardware to run on. Even though it's in cloud, it's rendered. It is all about the transition of being very hardware-defined to being software-defined, to being really function-defined, and once you start to modernize an architecture that way, or a general organization that's trying to deliver IT services, it's the delivery of those things the start to define where you have to take things that are both on-prem and in the cloud, so the entire thing around multi cloud sort of requires that you have strategies for things that are in current data centers that just have to become more cloud-like in their functions and their functionality. Delivering it as a service is not just the mantra, but it's the time to value, and it's the consumption style. As an example, as we're trying to do things on-prem with our NetApp HCI solution, doing embedded OEM with VMware isn't because we want to sell VMware licenses. It's because we want to make it as fast a possible, and as easy for our customer to be able to turn it on and start using it, similar to your experience buying a new iPhone. We want to have you be able to add software to it, like NSX, like vRealize, or a full VMware private cloud stack is something that will hopefully take minutes, rather than hours, weeks or months, because we want that time to value, that consumption experience to be the king, and that extends to data protection, that extends to security. We're not just a storage company. We're a data company that's really in the game for the full stack, and the advantage we have is that we're in all the hyperscalers, and I think we can help VMware there, ??? >> The piece I'd add, I think that's different than before, is most companies think about alliances is us plus them, and in the cloud environment, it's us plus plus plus plus plus to get a solution, and having a much different approach, where it's, okay, we're going to have to be multi-partnered in a cloud environment to go get this done, and that also requires a different alliance motion. >> Less tennis, more soccer. >> Yeah, exactly (John laughs). Great analogy. >> It's yours. >> Tell them the source was theCUBE. >> This show demonstrates how an ecosystem has really extracted the maximum value out of the partners, because there's a ton of this extension to the partner, the channel partner, the pathway partner, to really go and do, moreso than VMware having to do it all themselves, or NetApp having to do it all themselves. It is about that three-way partnership between the product, the solution, and the delivery partner itself, and what AWS even say to them, they said in the partner keynote yesterday that what they want out of the partners is capabilities, and isn't that awesome? We want competencies and capabilities to understand who can deliver these certain capabilities, security, networking, storage, app refactoring, you can go down the list. >> I want to ask you guys, while I've got you both here. I want to get your reaction to something Pat Gelsinger said. He said two things I want get your comments on. One was, he made a comment that said, "No one should ever have to pay for DR ever again CapEx," and two, he made a comment about how AI's 30 years old, and, "Hello, AI, good to see you. "Welcome to the introduction of AI, 30 years later." >> I think he said it's an overnight 30-year success. >> It's an overnight 30-year success, exactly. So one, never pay for DR CapEx, and then hello AI, so again, that kind of signals what's going on. You got the service model, and then you got AI. It's an enabler, and one is a changeover. Curious what are your thoughts on the reaction to those two comments. >> I think the DR statement, while bold, might not be the solution for everybody (John laughs). I think there's certain folks that would say, based on their requirements, they have to have a traditional DR regardless, whether it's compliance or whatever else, but certainly, you should look at how the cloud infrastructure is targeted. There's a lot of cost savings to be gleaned from that, and we are absolutely investing in how we take the services we offer and make them much more readily available as a consumption model, as you go, as you consume, as opposed to a traditional CapEx type purchase. >> So a little bit over the top, but kind of directionally correct, in your mind? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Never going to go away. It's kind of like storage, it never went away. >> Certainly, I think it will continue to decline and decline and decline, but also to declare it over, people still buy desktops, right? That was declared dead in '97. >> Dave and I were just talking about infrastructures were supposed to be dead 10 years ago. >> Pat's always said he's been a fan of NetApp, so I don't want to project words into his mouth, but I think he's been there for us, in a majority of the NetApp and VMware interactions at Vmworld. >> There's a picture of Pat wearing a NetApp jersey at a CUBE event. >> Yes, that was a big moment for us, obviously. >> So the AI piece too, any thoughts on that comment or the AI comment? >> I'll defer the AI to him, but I would just say that on the DR thing is that, we already have that in cloud volumes, and a lot of the data services we're doing in AWS and the public cloud, so I think we present a clear example of that. AI. >> AI, Pat's exactly right. Something that's been around forever, that's really getting a lot of air time right now, but he's precisely right. We see the growth of AI applications in usage is absolutely huge, and when you combine that with the types of instruments that are collecting data, what's wired today versus what wasn't two, three, five years ago, obviously, as a storage company, there's just an exponential amount of data growth that's being captured out there, based upon these AI type machines that are only getting faster and smarter, so for us, we're welcoming the the 30-year success. It's great that it's here to the party. As we look at that ecosystem, that's where we're heavily investing and expanding our partnerships and our routes to market, because we're all so focused on that. >> Maybe just to follow on that, so the traditional conversation people have about cloud is it's somebody else's data center. >> It's somebody else's, right. >> But now, the cloud discussion is about, we were just talking about AI, self-driving cars, edge clouds, so the nature of where all this data reside is becoming much more dynamic and much more distributed. >> That's the point, it's much more distributed. >> How does that fit in to where you guys are going? >> We think it's great. It fits perfectly with our business model of being able to move your data around in a multi cloud environment, and have it where you need it to be, whether it's on the edge, even further out, kind of the fog of the cloud, or all the way at the center where you want it to be, so we think it fits the model that we have, from data everywhere, the data fabric. That's really what we've been designing for years and pushing to. This is the realization of that strategy. In our minds, is that's what we're arriving at. >> Partner program, quick update as we wrap up. What's the update on any kind of tiering? Do you guys have a strategy? You've obviously got more partners engaged. Sounds like cloud gives more touch points. Give a quick overview of what's going on. >> Jeff McCullough's our channel chief. He has done a great job coming in, and absolutely driving that program more aggressively out in to the field in North America. We've got a bunch of stuff, but I don't want to steal his thunder coming up at Insight, >> (laughs) That's okay. >> Not sure what I can steal at the moment. We are aggressively investing in the channel program. We have been, and will continue to be a channel-driven company. Even myself as the alliances head, we look at always, and Keith mentioned it, that third piece of the three in the box is always who's the delivery partner, and how can we help them, and obviously, the underlying tenet of that always is, let's make it meaningful, and let's be honest, meaningful to a partner is, they make money, they have services that they can absolutely embrace and then deliver. >> What's next for the relationship with AWS, and what other top partners you have. You mentioned NVIDIA before we came on camera. What's next for VMware and some of your top name partners? >> We've got some big announcements coming up with VMware, if you want to tease one of them. >> The reality in the world is that, if you want to buy solutions from VMware, a VMware validated design is kind of the pathway to really getting the mark of validation, and so we're on that path as well. We're looking to get that down the road. We've got some early tracks to it. We announced the first leg of that at this show called the net verified architecture for VMware private cloud. That gives us the first proof points that we're running the entire stack on NetApp HCI. We're going to use this as a way, along with ONTAP over time to be able to have on-prem solutions, as well as cloud volumes. With futures, they showcased it yesterday, with some future previews of VMC with cloud volumes, so look for that to come in the future timeframe. >> ONTAP AI? >> ONTAP AI. >> Back to your AI question, we just announced a joint meet in the market solution with NVIDIA, a conversion architecture, where it's NetApp storage, NVIDIA's GTX CPU servers. We've got some switching in there from Cisco, and you've got a very solid conversion infrastructre that goes specifically and targets the AI market. >> And AI, they're a pretty strategic partner, you guys with NVIDIA. >> They are. >> They've been hot lately, I mean, talk about AI. >> There's a lot of guys smiling in that booth over there. (Bruce and John laugh) They look pretty happy. >> They can't make enough GPUs for all those block chain miners. >> I think the key factor for the new alliance model is that the context shifts depending upon the market you're trying to reach, so if it's the AI market, typically NVIDIA's going to lead that conversation. If you flip it to the EUC market, and you look at GPU acceleration for BDI, they're an ecosystem to VMware driving the Horizon package, so it's a very interesting context that you have to be very savvy on to understand how the technologies fit together in a way that solution partners already today are putting them together for customers, and that AWS and all the hyperscalers know natively. >> You guys get a lot of good props. Congratulations on your success. Notable hallway conversations, certainly here and out in the field, I've talked with customers. You guys are good. With the solid state drives, and the software investment you made, it's paying off, so congratulations. >> Flash has been huge for us. >> Good luck with the new reorganization. Bruce, Keith, good too see you. >> It's great to see a solid player of come through the ACI. >> We're here on theCUBE. We'll be right back. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Alan Cohen. We'll be right back; stay with us.

(energetic music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burroughs and welcome to another CUBEConversation from our wonderful studios in Palo Alto, California. Today we're talking storage, not just any kind of storage, but fast, intelligent storage. We're got NGD Systems with us, and specifically welcome back to theCUBE, Nader Salessi, CEO founder, and Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing. >> Good to see you again, Peter. >> So, the last time we were here we had a great conversation about the role that storage is going to play in overall system performance. And Nader, when I think of NGD Systems, I think of really smart people doing great engineering to create really fast high-performance products. Where are we in the state of the art of fast storage, fast systems? >> So, what we are learning from the customers, the demand of the storage continues to grow exponentially. They want larger capacity per drive. All the challenge they have, physical space is limited always and the power consumption. It is not necessarily just power consumption of the device, they have also self resources for implementing their Hyperscale Data Centers from the physical space, from buying servers, network storage. The challenge that they face is power available from the utility companies are limited. They cannot overcome that. So, if they need to increase their capacity of the storage by double the size of the storage in a year timeframe, they cannot get access to the utilities and the power. So, they need to focus on energy efficiency. >> So, when I think of NGD Systems, what I should think about is smart, fast, and efficient from a power standpoint. >> That's correct. So, that's one of the areas that we are focusing a lot to provide energy efficient. We are improving the watt per terabyte by a factor of 10 compared to the best in class available the other side of the SSD drive that exists in the industry. >> Oh, let me make sure I got that. So, by improved wattage by a factor of 10 for the same capacity. >> Correct. In meaning we are improving watts per terabyte in a same physical space. And that's the challenge that the industry is facing. >> Got it. >> The next set of the challenge that all the hyperscalers are facing, and we are learning from them, moving of the data is a challenge. It just takes time and it's not efficient. So, the more they can do inside of the drive to do the manipulation of the data without moving the data, that's what they are looking for. And that's exactly where we are focusing and with our intelligent product that we're introducing. In the fourth quarter of this year, we are introducing mass producible solution that can take it to a mass production. >> So, give us an example of that, 'cause I know you were one of the first suppliers of technology that did things like brought mass produced down closer to the data. Is that the basic notion that we're talking here, and what are the use cases we're looking at? >> So, there are by far a lot more use cases and I'll let Scott go into some of the use cases that we have implemented as an example with some large partners which we are also announcing this coming week, or next week during the FMS. So, Scott, do you want to explore? >> Yeah, absolutely, so Peter, just to give to your point. There's a lot of different ways you can look at making storage intelligent. What we looked at we took a different direction. We're not trying to just do simple things like the minor database applications, we're going for what's new and innovative in the way of things like AI and machine learning. So, we talked last time a little bit about this image similarity search concept. As Nader mentioned, we're going to be live with a guest speaker at FMS implementing a version of that. >> Now, FMS is Flash Memory Summit. >> Yes, for those that don't know, Flash Memory Summit that happens every year. Other things that we've worked on again with partners relate to things like relational databases and being able to do things like implement Google TensorFlow live in the drive. We've also been able to port docker containers directly into the drives, so then there's now a customer's ability to take any application you're running, whatever format it's in and literally drop it in a container format into the drive and execute the commands in place on the data. And we're seeing improvements of 10 to 50x on execution time of those applications because they're not physically moving data around. >> So, to put this, kind of summarize this, if a customer, user, has a choice of moving 50 terabytes around of raw data as opposed to moving maybe a couple of hundred kilobytes or megabytes of application down to the drive, then obviously you want to move the smaller down. But it requires a fair amount of processing power and control be located very close to the data. So, how's that happening? >> So, by architecting the fundamentals of the storage from a sketch, we are able to provide the right solution. So, architecting within each control, or each SSD there is a controller for managing the flash and the interfacing with the host. As part of that, we have embedded additional resources. Part of it is a quad-core application processor, 64 bit application processor that is running at at least a gigahertz that the application can come down and run on that, or operating system is running on it. In addition to that we have embedded the hardware accelerator to accelerate certain functions that makes sense to be done. Plus the access to the data tower that is readily available at a much higher bandwidth than the host interface. So, that's how we are at this end. Then of course, by providing the complete software stack to make it easy for the customers to bring their application rather than starting from scratch, or having it very specialized and custom solutions. >> So, when I think about if I'm a CIO or if I'm a senior person in infrastructure, I'm thinking, what workloads naturally lend themselves to high degrees of parallelism? Then I'm thinking, how can I move more of that parallelism closer to the data. Have I got that right? >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> So, how's this turning into product? >> So, for that perspective we've been releasing, or we've had released now two platforms we've called the Catalina Family of Solutions. And they've been POCs, prototypes, and some limited production volume. As Nadir mentioned, our third platform we're calling the Newport Platform is going to be an ASIC base solution that's going to be able to drive that mass marketed option that he referenced. It's a whole bunch of unique things about it. A, we have the application coprocessors. It's the first SSD controller to ever be done on a 14 nanometer process node, so that's where the energy efficiency piece of this comes into play. And the fact that we can do the densities the customers are looking for. 'Cause right now, there's a challenge in the market to be able to do a large enough drive at the right performance characteristics and power consumption to solve the need. >> So, you're following some locations in Southern California, from Catalina to Newport. In the next couple of years you'll be in the San Bernardino Mountains. >> Sure. >> So, as we think about where the technology is, so give us an example of the performance improvements, which you're seeing from an overall benchmark standpoint. >> So, one of the other use cases that it may not be intuitive to think about this is for the content of a video, for video content everywhere. So, the new generation of contents, they are large, they are massive, they require massive amounts of storage. And the old fashioned way of doing it, they have multiple drives in a server. They all converge and they go through another server for the encryption and authentication. Well, we are moving that function inside of the storage. Now, all of a sudden, same server instead of having all converging and going through one narrow pipe, all the drives concurrently can serve multiple subscriber in parallel by more than factor of 10. And that's substantial from the performance point of view. So, it is not necessary the old fashioned way of measuring it, what's the IOPS, those are the old way of measuring it. The new ways, the end users how they can access the data without being a bottleneck. And that's again, another use case of it. The other use case as Scott mentioned for the doing image similarity search, in the old fashioned way when they were accessing a billion images, it's working fine with the current SSDs, off the shelf SSDs, and the current servers, and GPUs. The challenge they are facing as they increase this database to a trillion images, it just cannot do it that old way. So, it's more than just how many gigabytes they push through or how many IOPS. It's being able to look at it from the system level point of view, and how many subscribers or how many customers can access it concurrent. >> So, you're describing a number of relatively specialized types of applications, but nonetheless, applications of significant value to their businesses. But let's talk just for a second about how a customer would employ the technology. Customers don't mind specialized or more specialized devices as long as they fit in within the conventions for how they get used. So, what's the complexity of introducing your product? >> Very good point that you're raising. Fundamentally, we are a solid state drive storage as a block storage based on PCle NVMe without any drivers. They plug it in, it's plug and play. It works. On top of that, and for this scenario of the block storage, we are the highest capacity, lowest power consumption, or lowest watt per terabytes, and servicing the majority of the market that nowadays are focused more on the read and consistent read, rather than what's the again, IOPS or how fast is the write. So, we have our architecture and the algorithms is set up that we would provide a very narrow beam of the consistent latency no matter what workload they put on it, and provide the right solution for them. Then on top of that, if they have a specialized workload or the use cases, they still can enable it or disable it based on simple software switch. >> So, Scott, when you think about partners, the ecosystem, I know that we talked about this a bit last time, getting started, expanding it, where are we in terms of NGD Systems getting the market? >> Absolutely, so from that perspective we've gone beyond the proof of concept only phase. We've actually got production orders that have shipped to customers. We're starting to see that roll out in the back half of this quarter. As Nadir mentioned, we roll into Q4 with the new product, then upgrade those customers and start getting into even larger rollouts. But it's not just a couple of mom and pop shops type of thing. It's some big names. It's some high-level partners. And we're starting to now build out the ecosystem and how to deliver it through server ODMs or other partners that can play off of the system, whether it be storage array providers or even some of the big box players. >> So, we're now here with Newport. >> Yes. >> You've no doubt got plans. We don't have to go too deep into 'em, but as your company starts to scale, what's the cadence going to look like? Are you going to be able to continue to push the state of the art from performance smarts and energy efficiency standpoint? >> Absolutely, there are already things that are in the pipeline for the next generation of how to bring more intelligence inside of the drive. With more resources for a lot more workload to be able to adapt itself to many, many use cases, rather than only maybe today it might be a dozen use cases, to go infinite. It truly is a platform rather than just a unique for this application. And then we're going to expand on that toward the next generation of it. So obviously, as we ramp up the first generation of product in mass production, the R&D's working on the next generation of the intelligence that they've got to pour into it and continue that cadence. And of course, we scale the company accordingly. >> Great news from NGD Systems. Nadir. >> It is wonderful, this FMS coming up, we are announcing there are new generation of product, as well as announcing the close partner with one of the hyperscalers that we are introducing the next generation of product. >> Fantastic, Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing. Nadir Salessi, CEO founder. NGD Systems, thanks very much again for being on theCUBE. And to you, once again, thanks for watching this CUBEConversation. Until we meet again, thanks for watching. (energetic music)

(bright music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another special digital community event, brought to you by theCUBE and Wikibon. We've got a great session planned for the next hour or so. Specifically, we're gonna talk about the journey to the data-driven multi-cloud. Sponsored by IBM, with a lot of great thought leadership content from IBM guests. Now, what we'll do is, we'll introduce some of these topics, we'll have these conversations, and at the end, this is gonna be an opportunity for you to participate, as a community, in a crowd chat, so that you can ask questions, voice your opinions, hear what others have to say about this crucial issue. Now why is this so important? Well Wikibon believes very strongly that one of the seminal features of the transition to digital business, driving new-type AI classes of applications, et cetera, is the ability of using flash-based storage systems and related software, to do a better job of delivering data to more complex, richer applications, faster, and that's catalyzing a lot of the transformation that we're talking about. So let me introduce our first guest. Eric Herzog is the CMO and VP Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM. Eric, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great, well thank you Peter. We love coming to theCUBE, and most importantly, it's what you guys can do to help educate all the end-users and the resellers that sell to them, and that's very, very valuable and we've had good feedback from clients and partners, that, hey, we heard you guys on theCUBE, and very interesting, so I really appreciate all the work you guys do. >> Oh, thank you very much. We've got a lot of great things to talk about today. First, and I want to start it off, kick off the proceedings for the next hour or so by addressing the most important issue here. Data-driven. Now Wikibon believes that digital transformation means something, it's the process by which a business treats data as an asset, and re-institutionalizes its work and changes the way it engages with customers, et cetera. But this notion of data-driven is especially important because it elevates the role that storage is gonna play within an organization. Sometimes I think maybe we shouldn't even call it storage. Talk to us a little bit about data-driven and how that concept is driving some of the concepts in innovation that are represented in this and future IBM products. >> Sure. So I think the first thing, it is all about the data, and it doesn't matter whether you're a small company, like Herzog's Bar and Grill, or the largest Fortune 500 in the world. The bottom line is, your most valuable asset is you data, whether that's customer data, supply chain data, partner data that comes to you, that you use, services data, the data you guys sell, right? You're an analysis firm, so you've got data, and you use that data to create you analysis, and then you use that as a product. So, data is the most critical asset. At the same time, data always goes onto storage. So if that foundation of storage is not resilient, is not available, is not performant, then either A, it's totally unavailable, right, you can't get to the customer data. B, there's a problem with the data, okay, so you're doing supply chain and if the storage corrupts the data, then guess what? You can't send out the T-shirts to the right retail location, or have it available online if you're an online retailer. >> Or you sent 200,000 instead of 20, and you get stuck with the bill. >> Right, exactly. So data is that incredible asset and then underneath, think of storage as the foundation of a building. Data is your building, okay, and all the various aspects of that data, customer data, your data, internal data, everything you're doing, that's the building. If the foundation of the building isn't rock solid the building falls down. Whether your building is big or small, and that's what storage does, and then storage can also optimize the building above it. So think of it more than just the foundation but the foundation if you will, that almost has like a tree, and has got things that come up from the bottom and have that beautiful image, and storage can help you out. For example, metadata. Metadata which is data about data could be used by analytics, package them, well guess what? The metadata about data could be exposed by the storage company. So that's why data-driven is so important from an end-user perspective and why storage is that foundation underneath a data-driven enterprise. >> Now we've seen a lot of folks talk about how cloud is the centerpiece of thinking about infrastructure. You're suggesting that data is the centerpiece of infrastructure, and cloud is gonna be an implementation decision. Where do I put the workloads, costs, all the other elements associated with it. But it suggests ultimately that data is not gonna end up in one place. We have to think about data as being where it needs to be to perform the work. That suggests multi-cloud, multi-premise. Talk to us a little bit about the role that storage and multi-cloud play together. >> So let's take multi-cloud first and peel that away. So multi-cloud, we see a couple of different things. So first of all, certain companies don't want to use a public cloud. Whether it's a security issue, and actually some people have found out that public cloud providers, no matter who the vendor is, sort of is a razor in a razor blade. Very cheap to put the storage out there but we want certain SLAs, guess what? The cloud vendors charge more. If you move data around a lot, in and out as you were describing, it's really that valuable, guess what? On ingress and egress gets you charges for that. The cloud provider. So it's almost the razor and the razor blades. So A, there's a cost factor in public only. B, you've got people that have security issues. C, what we've seen is, in many cases, hybrid. So certain datasets go out to the cloud and other datasets stay on the premises. So you've got that aspect of multi, which is public, private or hybrid. The second aspect, which is very common in bigger companies that are either divisionalized or large geographically, is literally the usage, in a hybrid or a public cloud environment, of multiple cloud vendors. So for example, in several countries the data has to physically stay within the confines of that country. So if you're a big enterprise and you've got offices in 200 different, well not 200, but 100 different countries, and 20 of 'em you have to keep in that country by law. If your cloud provider doesn't have a data center there you need to use a different cloud provider. So you've got that. And you also have, I would argue that the cloud is not new anymore. The internet is the original cloud. So it's really old. >> Cloud in many respects is the programming model, or the mature programming model for the internet-based programming applications. >> I'd agree with that. So what that means is, as it gets more mature, from the mid-sized company up, all of a sudden procurement's involved. So think about the way networking, storage and servers, and sometimes even software was bought. The IT guy, the CIO, the line of business might specify, I want to use it but then it goes to procurement. In the mid to big company it's like, great, are we getting three bids on that? So we've also seen that happen, particularly with larger enterprise where, well you were using IBM cloud, that's great, but you are getting a quote from Microsoft or Amazon right? So those are the two aspects we see in multi-cloud, and by the way, that can be a very complex situation dealing with big companies. So the key thing that we do at IBM, is make sure that whichever model you take, public, private or hybrid, or multiple public clouds, or multiple public cloud providers, using a hybrid configuration, that we can support that. So things like our transparent cloud tiering, we've also recently created some solution blueprints for multi-clouds. So these things allow you to simply and easily deploy. Storage has to be viewed as transparent to a cloud. You've gotta be able to move the data back and forth, whether that be backing the data up, or archiving the data, or secondary data usage, or whatever that may be. And so storage really is, gotta be multi-cloud and we've been doing those solutions already and in fact, but honestly for the software side of the IBM portfolio for storage, we have hundreds of cloud providers mid, big and small, that use our storage software to offer backup as a service or storage as a service, and we're again the software foundation underneath what an end-user would buy as a service from those cloud providers. >> So I want to pick up on a word you used, simplicity. So, you and I are old infrastructure hacks and for many years I used to tell my management, infrastructure must do no harm. That's the best way to think about infrastructure. Simplicity is the new value proposition, complexity remains the killer. Talk to us a little bit about the role that simplicity in packaging and service delivery and everything else is again, shaping the way you guys, IBM, think about what products, what systems and when. >> So I think there's a couple of things. First of all, it's all about the right tool for the right job. So you don't want to over-sell and sell a big, giant piece of high-end all-flash array, for example, to a small company. They're not gonna buy that. So we have created a portfolio of which our FlashSystem 9100 is our newest product, but we've got a whole set of portfolios from the entry space to the mid range to the high end. We also have stuff that's tuned for applications, so for example, our lasting storage server which comes in an all-flash configuration is ideal for big data analytics workloads. Our DS8000 family of flash is ideal for mainframe attach, and in fact we have close to 65% of all mainframe attached storage, is from IBM. But you have the right tool for the right job, so that's item number one. The second thing you want to do is easier and easier to use. Whether that be configuring the physical entity itself, so how do you cable, how do you rack and stack it, make sure that it easily integrates into whatever else they're putting together in their data center, but it a cloud data center, a traditional on-premises data center, it doesn't matter. The third thing is all about the software. So how do you have software that makes the array easier and easier to use, and is heavily automated based on AI. So the old automation way, and we've both been in that era, was you set policies. Policy-based management, and when it came out 10 years ago, it was a transformational event. Now it's all about using AI in your infrastructure. Not only does your storage need to be right to enable AI at the server workload level, but we're saying, we've actually deployed AI inside of our storage, making it easier for the storage manager or the IT manager, and in some cases even the app owner to configure the storage 'cause it's automated. >> Going back to that notion that the storage knows something about the metadata, too. >> Right, exactly, exactly. So the last thing is our multi-cloud blueprint. So in those cases, what we've done is create these multi-cloud blueprints. For example, disaster recovery and business continuity using a public cloud. Or secondary data use in a public cloud. How do you go ahead and take a snapshot, a replica or a backup, and use it for dev-ops or test or analytics? And by the way, our Spectrum copy data management software allows you, but you need a blueprint so that it's easy for the end user, or for those end users who buy through our partners, our partners then have this recipe book, these blueprints, you put them together, use the software that happens to come embedded in our new FlashSystem 9100 and then they use that and create all these various different recipes. Almost, I hate to say it, like a baker would do. They use some base ingredients in baking but you can make cookies, candies, all kinds of stuff, like a donut is essentially a baked good that's fried. So all these things use the same base ingredients and that software that comes with the FlashSystem 9100, are those base ingredients, reformulated in different models to give all these multi-cloud blueprints. >> And we've gotta learn more about vegetables so we can talk about salad in that metaphor, (Eric laughing) you and I. Eric once again. >> Great, thank you. >> Thank you so much for joining us here on the CUBE. >> Great, thank you. >> Alright, so let's hear this come to life in the form of a product video from IBM on the FlashSystem 9100. >> Some things change so quickly, it's impossible to track with the naked eye. The speed of change in your business can be just as sudden and requires the ability to rapidly analyze the details of your data. The new, IBM FlashSystem 9100, accelerates your ability to obtain real-time value from that information, and rapidly evolve to a multi-cloud infrastructure, fueled by NVMe technology. In one powerful platform. IBM FlashSystem 9100, combines the performance, of IBM FlashCore technology. The efficiency of IBM Spectrum Virtualize. The IBM software solutions, to speed your multi-cloud deployments, reduce overall costs, plan for performance and capacity, and simplify support using cloud-based IBM storage insights to provide AI-powered predictive analytics, and simplify data protection with a storage solution that's flexible, modern, and agile. It's time to re-think your data infrastructure. (upbeat music) >> Great to hear about the IBM FlashSystem 9100 but let's get some more details. To help us with that, we've got Bina Hallman who's the Vice President Offering Management at IBM Storage. Bina, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. It's an exciting even, we're looking forward to it. >> So Bina, I want to build on some of the stuff that we talked to Eric about. Eric did a good job of articulating the overall customer challenge. As IBM conceives how it's going to approach customers and help them solve these challenges, let's talk about some of the core values that IBM brings to bear. What would you say would be one of the, say three, what are the three things that IBM really focuses on, as it thinks about its core values to approach these challenges? >> Sure, sure. It's really around helping the client, providing a simple one-stop shopping approach, ensuring that we're doing all the right things to bring the capabilities together so that clients don't have to take different component technologies and put them together themselves. They can focus on providing business value. And it's really around, delivering the economic benefits around CapEx and OpEx, delivering a set of capabilities that help them move on their journey to a data-driven, multi-cloud. Make it easier and make it simpler. >> So, making sure that it's one place they can go where they can get the solution. But IBM has a long history of engineering. Are you doing anything special in terms of pre-testing, pre-packaging some of these things to make it easier? >> Yeah, we over the years have worked with many of our clients around the world and helping them achieve their vision and their strategy around multi-cloud, and in that journey and those set of experiences, we've identified some key solutions that really do make it easier. And so we're leveraging the breadth of IBM, the power of IBM, making those investment to deliver a set of solutions that are pre-tested, they are supported at the solutions level. Really focusing on delivering and underpinning the solutions with blueprints. Step-by-step documentation, and as clients deploy these solutions, they run into challenges, having IBM support to assist. Really bringing it all together. This notion of a multi-cloud architecture, around delivering modern infrastructure capabilities, NVMe acceleration, but also some of our really core differentiation that we deliver through FlashCore data reduction capabilities, along with things like modern data protection. That segment is changing and we really want to enable clients, their IT, and their line of business to really free them up and focus on a business value, versus putting these components together. So it's really around taking those complex things and make them easier for clients. Get improved RPO, RTO, get improved performance, get improved costs, but also flexibility and agility are very critical. >> That sounds like therefore, I mean the history of storage has been trade-offs that you, this can only go that fast, and that tape can only go that fast but now when we start thinking about flash, NVMe, the trade-offs are not as acute as they used to be. Is IBM's engineering chops capable of pointing how you can in fact have almost all of this at one time? >> Oh absolutely. The breadth and the capabilities in our R and D and the research capabilities, also our experiences that I talked about, engagements, putting all of that together to deliver some key solutions and capabilities. Like, look, everybody needs backup and archive. Backup to recover your data in case of a disaster occurs, archive for long-term retention. That data management, the data protection segment, it's going through a transformation. New emerging capabilities, new ways to do backup. And what we're doing is, pulling all of that together, with things that we introduced, for example, our Protect Plus in the fourth quarter, along with this FS 9100 and the cloud capabilities, to deliver a solution around data protection, data reuse, so that you have a modern backup approach for both virtual and physical environments that is really based on things like snapshots and mountable copies, So you're not using that traditional approach to recovering your copy from a backup by bringing it back. Instead, all you're doing is mounting one of those copies and instantly getting your application back and running for operational recovery. >> So to summarize some of those value, once stop, pre-tested, advanced technologies, smartly engineered. You guys did something interesting on July 10th. Why don't you talk about how those values, and the understanding of the problem, manifested so fast. Kind of an exciting set of new products that you guys introduced on July 10th. >> Absolutely. On July 10th we not only introduced our flagship FlashSystem, the FS 9100, which delivers some amazing client value around the economic benefits of CapEx, OpEx reduction, but also seamless data mobility, data reuse, security. All the things that are important for a client on their cloud journey. In addition to that, we infused that offering with AI-based predictive analytics and of course that performance and NVMe acceleration is really key, but in addition to doing that, we've also introduced some very exciting solutions. Really three key solutions. One around data protection, data reuse, to enable clients to get that agility, and second is around business continuity and data reuse. To be able to really reduce the expense of having business continuity in today's environment. It's a high-risk environment, it's inevitable to have disruptions but really being prepared to mitigate some of those risks and having operational continuity is important and by doing things like leveraging the public cloud for your DR capabilities. That's very important, so we introduced a solution around that. And the third is around private cloud. Taking your IBM storage, your FS 9100, along with the heterogeneous environment you have, and making it cloud-ready. Getting the cloud efficiencies. Making it to where you can use it for environments to create things like native cloud applications that are portable, from on-prem and into the cloud. So those are some of the key ways that we brought this together to really deliver on client value. >> So could you give us just one quick use case of your clients that are applying these technologies to solve their problems? >> Yeah, so let me use the first one that I talked about, the data protection and data reuse. So to be able to take your on-premise environment, really apply an abstraction layer, set up catalogs, set up SLAs and access control, but then be able to step away and manage that storage all through API bays. We have a lot of clients that are doing that and then taking that, making the snapshots, using those copies for things like, whether it's the disaster recovery or secondary use cases like analytics, dev-ops. You know, dev-ops is a really important use case and our clients are really leveraging some of these capabilities for it because you want to make sure that, as application developers are developing their applications, they're working with the latest data and making sure that the testing they're doing is meaningful in finding the maximum number of defects so you get the highest quality of code coming out of them and being able to do that, in a self-service driven way so that they're not having to slow down their innovation. We have clients leveraging our capabilities for those kinds of use cases. >> It's great to hear about the FlashSystem 9100 but let's hear what customers have to say about it. Not too long ago, IBM convened a customer panel to discuss many aspects of this announcement. So let's hear what some of the customers had to say about the FlashSystem 9100. >> Now Owen, you've used just about every flash system that IBM has made. Tell us, what excites you about this announcement of our new FlashSystem 9100. >> Well, let's start with the hardware. The fact that they took the big modules from the older systems, and collapsed that down to a two-and-a-half inch form-factor NVMe drive is mind-blowing. And to do it with the full speed compression as well. When the compression was first announced, for the last FlashSystem 900, I didn't think it was possible. We tested it, I was proven wrong. (laughing) It's entirely possible. And to do that on a small form-factor NVMe drive is just astounding. Now to layer on the full software stack, get all those features, and the possibilities for your business, and what we can do, and leverage those systems and technologies, and take the snapshots in the replication and the insights into what our system's doing, it is really mind-blowing what's coming out today and I cannot wait to just kick those tires. There's more. So with that real-world compression ratio, that we can validate on the new 900, and it's the same in this new system, which is astounding, but we can get more, and just the amount of storage you get in this really small footprint. Like, two rack units is nothing. Half our services are two rack units, which is absolutely astounding, to get that much data in such a very small package, like, 460 terabytes is phenomenal, with all these features. The full solution is amazing, but what else can we do with it? And especially as they've said, if it's for a comparable price as what we've bought before, and we're getting the full solution with the software, the hardware, the extremely small form-factor, what else can you do? What workloads can you pull forward? So where our backup systems weren't on the super fast storage like our production systems are, now we can pull those forward and they can give the same performance as production to run the back-end of the company, which I can't wait to test. >> It's great to hear from customers. The centerpiece of the Wikibon community. But let's also get the analyst's perspective. Let's hear from Eric Burgener, who's the Research Vice President for Storage at IDC. >> Thanks very much Peter, good to be back. >> So we've heard a lot from a number of folks today about some of the changes that are happening in the industry and I want to amplify some things and get the analyst's perspective. So Wikibon, as a fellow analyst, Wikibon believes pretty strongly that the emergence of flash-based storage systems is one of the catalyst technologies that's driving a lot of the changes. If only because, old storage technologies are focused on persisting data. Disc, slow, but at least it was there. Flash systems allow a bit flip, they allow you to think about delivering data to anywhere in your organization. Different applications, without a lot of complexity, but it's gotta be more than that. What else is crucial, to making sure that these systems in fact are enabling the types of applications that customers are trying to deliver today. >> Yeah, so actually there's an emerging technology that provides the perfect answer to that, which is NVMe. If you look at most of the all-flash systems that have shipped so far, they've been based around SCSI. SCSI was a protocol designed for hard disk drives, not flash, even though you can use it with flash. NVMe is specifically designed for flash and that's really gonna open up the ability to get the full value of the performance, the capacity utilization, and the efficiencies, that all-flash arrays can bring to the market. And in this era of big data, more than ever, we need to unlock that performance capability. >> So as we think about the big data, AI, that's gonna have a significant impact overall in the market and how a lot of different vendors are jockeying for position. When IDC looks at the impact of flash, NVMe, and the reemergence of some traditional big vendors, how do you think the market landscape's gonna be changing over the next few years? >> Yeah, how this market has developed, really the NVMe-based all-flash arrays are gonna be a carve-out from the primary storage market which are SCSI-based AFAs today. So we're gonna see that start to grow over time, it's just emerging. We had startups begin to ship NVMe-based arrays back in 2016. This year we've actually got several of the majors who've got products based around their flagship platforms that are optimized for NVMe. So very quickly we're gonna move to a situation where we've got a number of options from both startups and major players available, with the NVMe technology as the core. >> And as you think about NVMe, at the core, it also means that we can do more with software, closer to the data. So that's gotta be another feature of how the market's gonna evolve over the next couple of years, wouldn't you say? >> Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the data services that generate latencies, like in-line data reduction, encryption and that type of thing, we can run those with less impact on the application side when we have much more performant storage on the back-end. But I have to mention one other thing. To really get all that NVMe performance all the way to the application side, you've gotta have an NVMe Over Fabric connection. So it's not enough to just have NVMe in the back-end array but you need that RDMA connection to the hosts and that's what NVMe Over Fabric provides for you. >> Great, so that's what's happening on the technology-product-vendor side, but ultimately the goal here is to enable enterprises to do something different. So what's gonna be the impact on the enterprise over the next few years? >> Yeah, so we believe that SCSI clearly will get replaced in the primary storage space, by NVMe over time. In fact, we've predicted that by 2021, we think that over 50% of all the external, primary storage revenue, will be generated by these end-to-end NVMe-based systems. So we see that transition happening over the course of the next two to three years. Probably by the end of this year, we'll have NVMe-based offerings, with NVMe Over Fabric front ends, available from six of the established storage providers, as well as a number of smaller startups. >> We've come a long way from the brown, spinning stuff, haven't we? >> (laughing) Absolutely. >> Alright, Eric Burgener, thank you very much. IDC Research Vice President, great once again to have you in theCUBE. >> Thanks Peter. >> Always great to get the analyst's perspective, but let's get back to the customer perspective. Again, from that same panel that we saw before, here's some highlights of what customers had to say about IBM's Spectrum family of software. (upbeat music) We love hearing those customer highlights but let's get into some of the overall storage trends and to do that we've asked Eric Herzog and Bina Hallman back to theCUBE. Eric, Bina, thanks again for coming back. So, what I want to do now is, I want to talk a little bit about some trends within the storage world and what the next few years are gonna mean, but Eric, I want to start with you. I was recently at IBM Think, and Ginni Rometty talked about the idea of putting smart to work. Now, I can tell you, that means something to me because the whole notion of how data gets used, how work gets institutionalized around your data, what does storage do in that context? To put smart to work. >> Well I think there's a couple of things. First we've gotta realize that it's not about storage, it's about the data and the information that happens to sit on the storage. So you have to have storage that's always available, always resilient, is incredibly fast, and as I said earlier, transparently moves things in and out of the cloud, automatically, so that the user doesn't have to do it. Second thing that's critical is the integration of AI, artificial intelligence. Both into the storage solution itself, of what the storage does, how you do it, and how it plays with the data, but also, if you're gonna do AI on a broad scale, and for example we're working with a customer right now and their AI configuration in 100 petabytes. Leveraging our storage underneath the hood of that big, giant AI analytics workload. So that's why they have to both think of it in the storage to make the storage better and more productive with the data and the information that it has, but then also as the undercurrent for any AI solution that anyone wants to employ, big, medium or small. >> So Bina, I want to pick up on that because there are gonna be some, there's some advanced technologies that are being exploited within storage right now, to achieve what Eric's talking about, but there's gonna be a lot more. And there's gonna be more intensive application utilizations of some of those technologies. What are some of the technologies that are becoming increasingly important, from a storage standpoint, that people have to think about as they try to achieve their digital transformation objectives. >> That's right, I mean Peter, in addition to some of the basics around making sure your infrastructure is enabled to handle the SLAs and the level of performance that's required by these AI workloads, when you think about what Eric said, this data's gonna reside, it's gonna reside on-premise, it's gonna be behind a firewall, potentially in the cloud, or multiple public clouds. How do you manage that data? How do you get visibility to that data? And then be able to leverage that data for your analytics. And so data management is going to be very important but also, being able to understand what that data contains and be able to run the analytics and be able to do things like tagging the metadata and then doing some specialized analytics around that is going to be very important. The fabric to move that data, data portability from on-prem into the cloud, and back and forth, bidirectionally, is gonna be very important as you look into the future. >> And obviously things like IOT's gonna mean bigger, more, more available. So a lot of technologies, in a big picture, are gonna become more closely associated with storage. I like to say that, at some point in time we've gotta stop thinking about calling stuff storage because it's gonna be so central to the fabric of how data works within a business. But Eric, I want to come back to you and say, those are some of the big picture technologies but what are some of the little picture technologies? That none-the-less are really central to being able to build up this vision over the course of the next few years? >> Well a couple of things. One is the move to NVMe, so we've integrated NVMe into our FLashSystem 9100, we have fabric support, we already announced back in February actually, fabric support for NVMe over an InfiniBand infrastructure with our FlashSystem 900 and we're extending that to all of the other inter-connects from a fabric perspective for NVMe, whether that be ethernet or whether that be fiber channel and we put NVMe in the system. We also have integrated our custom flash models, our FlashCore technology allows us to take raw flash and create, if you will, a custom SSD. Why does that matter? We can get better resiliency, we can get incredibly better performance, which is very tied in to your applications workloads and use cases, especially in data-driven multi-cloud environment. It's critical that the flash is incredibly fast and it really matters. And resilient, what do you do? You try to move it to the cloud and you lose your data. So if you don't have that resiliency and availability, that's a big issue. I think the third thing is, what I call the cloud-ification of software. All of IBM's storage software is cloud-ified. We can move things simultaneously into the cloud. It's all automated. We can move data around all over the place. Not only our data, not only to our boxes, we could actually move other people's array's data around for them and we can do it with our storage software. So it's really critical to have this cloud-ification. It's really cool to have this now technology, NVMe from an end-to-end perspective for fabric and then inside the system, to get the right resiliency, the right availability, the right performance for your applications, workloads and use cases, and you've gotta make sure that everything is cloud-ified and portable, and mobile, and we've done that with the solutions that are wrapped into our FlashSystem 9100 that we launched a couple of weeks ago. >> So you are both though leaders in the storage industry. I think that's very clear, and the whole notion of storage technology, and you work with a lot of customers, you see a lot of use cases. So I want to ask you one quick question, to close here. And that is, if there was one thing that you would tell a storage leader, a CIO or someone who things about storage in a broad way, one mindset change that they have to make, to start this journey and get it going so that it's gonna be successful. What would that one mindset change be? Bina, what do you think? >> You know, I think it's really around, there's a lot of capabilities out there. It's really around simplifying your environment and making sure that, as you're deploying these new solutions or new capabilities, that you've really got a partnership with a vendor that's gonna help you make it easier. Take those complex tasks, make them easier, deliver those step-by-step instructions and documentation and be right there when you need their assistance. So I think that's gonna be really important. >> So look at it from a portfolio perspective, where best of breed is still important, but it's gotta work together because it leverages itself. >> It's gotta work together, absolutely. >> Eric, what would you say? >> Well I think the key thing is, people think storage is storage. All storage is not the same and one of the central tenets at IBM storage is to make sure that we're integrated with the cloud. We can move data around transparently, easily, simply, Bina pointed out the simplicity. If you can't support the cloud, then you're really just a storage box, and that's not what IBM does. Over 40% of what we sell is actually storage software and all that software works with all of our competitors' gear. And in fact our Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, for example, can simultaneously have datasets sitting in a cloud instantiation, and sitting on premises, and then we can use our copy data management to take advantage of that secondary copy. That's all because we're so cloud-ified from a software perspective, so all storage is not the same, and you can't think of storage as, I need the cheapest storage. It's gotta be, how does it drive business value for my oceans of data? That's what matters most, and by the way, we're very cost-effective anyway, especially because of our custom flash model which allows us to have a real price advantage. >> You ain't doing business at a level of 100 petabytes if you're not cost effective. >> Right, so those are the things that we see as really critical, is storage is not storage. Storage is about data and information. >> So let me summarize your point then, if I can really quickly. That in other words, that we have to think about storage as the first step to great data management. >> Absolutely, absolutely Peter. >> Eric, Bina, great conversation. >> Thank you. >> So we've heard a lot of great thought leaderships comments on the data-driven journey with multi-cloud and some great product announcements. But now, let's do the crowd chat. This is your opportunity to participate in this proceedings. It's the centerpiece of the digital community event. What questions do you have? What comments do you have? What answers might you provide to your peers? This is an opportunity for all of us collectively to engage and have those crucial conversations that are gonna allow you to, from a storage perspective, drive business value in your digital business transformations. So, let's get straight to the crowd chat. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2018 brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamOn 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Stu, always great working with you. Bruce Shaw is here, he's the Senior Director of Global Alliances and Industry Solutions at NetApp. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I got to start out with NetApp, I mean, we've followed NetApp for decades, ya know, from the very beginning back when I was at IDC, Stu, you were probably still in your mother's womb. (laughing) But you guys are back in a big way, I mean, for a while there it looked vulnerable. You took advantage of the Dell EMC merger. You're gaining share again, you're growing, stock price is up, there's a spring in your step, what's going on? >> Well, a lot of things are going on. I think we've had a lot of leadership additions to the company, Henri Richard joined and took over as the CSO with the company. We've got a new CMO in Jean English. But more importantly, a lot of the areas that we were late to the market, and candidly we've admitted we were late. We didn't have a good Flash story a couple years ago. We've been very aggressive with Flash over the last 24 to 18 months. We're now the fastest growing Flash storage provider out in the market, and we think we'll exit this year as number one. In fact, we think that's the current course and trajectory. We're very happy with where that's going. The FlexPod partnership with Cisco was great this past year. We had a record year in Converged infrastructure, which was a down market, we picked up about 13 points a share according to IDC, so a lot of the cylinders are starting to fire, but the one that is probably the biggest and the most shocking for folks is three, four years ago, the belief was that cloud was going to kill on-prem storage for companies like NetApp. I think the one thing that they did right ahead of the curve was they embraced the cloud. They've got great partnerships with Google, Amazon, the hyperscalers, and cloud strategy and the business that drives the company there is the fastest part of the company, and Anthony Lye runs that team, and it's doing an amazing job. >> Explain how, and you're absolutely right, many, most, frankly myself at times, felt that way. Explain how cloud is a tailwind and not just a one-way street into the roach motel. >> Oh well, there isn't an enterprise today that isn't thinking about cloud in some way, shape, or form, right? Now, ya have prognosticators on either side saying it's all going to the cloud or something less than that, but the truth is when you look at a strategy like ONTAP and the ability to move your data, whether it's on-prem or to the cloud and manage it through our data fabric story, that's where NetApp really starts coming into their own. I think, again, that's where we've been able to take advantage, and it's not just having it one way or the other or being good just with the hyperscalers or good with the guys that want to be secure because most companies do a hybrid story, and they want to bit of both. >> Well, I think the one thing that I would observe about NetApp, having followed the company for many, many years, which I think gives you an advantage, is NetApp really has always had storage services in software that were largely decoupled from the hardware, and that allowed you to get into cloud early, don't ya think, Stu? >> Yeah, absolutely, and Bruce, we're here at VeeamOn, and their message sounds a lot like that to me, so maybe help explain, we were just talking to Veeam's CMO, when you hear some of the descriptions of storage services, software, multicloud, and everything, NetApp and Veeam sound alike. How are they complementary in, ya know, maybe where do they bump up against each other, yeah? >> Yeah, well, we both compete in the same market, which is storage, so of course, there's areas where we're going to compete with each other, but we are very complementary in terms of the story and the markets that we serve, right? NetApp is incredible strong in the enterprise. Veeam has great commercial channel presence, so from a route to market there's a lot of complementary stuff we do with each other. Price point, in terms of where we hit the market and the things that we go after, we have a lot of opportunity where there's not overlap to help each out to the point they're now, the relationship's evolved over the last four years where we're actually doing OEM of each other's products. We've got our E-Series we just announced yesterday that we're OEMing with these guys, which again is targeted at exactly those markets. The story between the two that we're both at our core not hardware companies, not storage companies, but data management companies really is where this starts to come together and play well. The fact that they're mutually supportive of each other makes for a really strong value proposition for the customer and the channel, especially the guys like the service providers or ya know, hybrid cloud providers, it's a big time story for them. >> So you're growing with, the partnership with Veeam is growing. >> Right. >> Ya got a combination of trends that become tailwinds, but then you've got execution. Can you explain what are those tailwinds, and what's the execution ethos with the partnership? >> We are a channel-only company for all intents and purposes. >> Dave: Oh yeah, I don't know what the number is now, but you've always been very, very high performing. >> Yeah, I know, so we look at businesses that we drive, and channel is at the core of what we do, so when you have a tailwind like, ya know, where we are with Flash and the growth there, the channel partners are making more money, the programs that are coming for them, we're not taking business that they're doing today and pushing it towards the cloud. Again, we're talking about the story that's transitory between the two, so for a lot of the channel providers that are out there getting in the market, that's a very powerful story for them. That it's not a competitive business, we're not going to try to create our own cloud service to take away from them. We want to help them as they migrate between the two. >> All right, Bruce, one of the other areas we're hearing a lot about at this show that I think lines up with NetApp is the analytics and AI, can you maybe talk about how that ties into the products? >> Yeah, I mean, you look at a lot of these markets like AI, like analytics in terms of what companies are doing, it sheds off a tremendous amount of data, right? And that data is at the heart of what they want to analyze and go through, and when they bring those things to market, the goal is how I quickly move it from where I'm capturing it to where I need it, and ONTAP does a really good job of doing that in terms of being able to take the data to where they need it, whether it's at the edge or whether it's back at the core of the company, so that you can actually do the real work with it and gain the insights that drive the business. >> Bruce, what's the resale agreement that you have with Veeam, can you explain that? >> We have Veeam on our price list. Our sales reps can sell Veeam, can be compensated for it, vice versa, they can absolutely hook in and drive away with NetApp, and now that we're getting products like E-Series where their product is embedded in ours, that only strengthens that kind of motion. So for a NetApp sales rep today, if they have an opportunity where Veeam is needed on it as part of the offering, it's absolutely in their wheelhouse to go sell it, and they get the sale level of love and attention from quote and comp standpoint that they would if it was NetApp only products. >> So this is kind of interesting innovation that Veeam, I think, has been out in front of, they, and I dunno how they do it, Stu, but I think Veeam understands the lifetime value of a customer and is willing to make, put sweat equity into a deal as part of a partnership to make it transparent to a partner sales force. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's innovation in business model. >> Absolutely, we're very proud of our sales force and the work that they're able to do. We view ourselves as kind of the last big enterprise standalone storage company that's out there doing this, and I run strategic alliances, and some partners integrate really well with our sales guys. Others, it's more of a, ya know, it requires more work. To your point, Veeam has done a superb job at identifying how and where they play with our folks and getting together where we go to market together. >> It's interesting, we used to, ya know, several years ago now, ask the question can NetApp remain independent. We've seen all these independent storage companies kind of go away. Used to have this conversation with David Scott at 3PAR all the time, EMC itself wasn't able to maintain it, and then NetApp got to the point where it was almost too big for an acquisition, and although stock price was down, everybody, NetApp was the rumor of MNA more than any company I can think of in the storage business, but now you're seeing sort of antithetical to what most people expected, it's kind of like the cloud we were talking about before, storage companies emerged. Pure was the first one over a billion since NetApp. What are your thoughts, and what's that, I wonder what, you guys must talk in the hallways about that whole, the dynamics of the industry. It seems like it's still a viable business model to be best of breed. >> It's very viable, so I took over running the strategic alliances at the beginning of January, and my dance card's full. I can't believe the number of folks that are calling up wanting to partner. I think we've gotten much more mature in terms of how we view the market and our ability to get strategically with other companies to be successful, and there absolutely is always going to be a place out there for a best of breed story. Customers want the best technology that they can get to handle their business needs, and if we partner with great partners, whether it's Veeam or others to provide that for them, I think the viability of NetApp only gets stronger not weaker. >> It's interesting because now ya got NetApp, Pure, Nutanix, soon to be Veeam, as billion dollar independent pure play companies in the storage business. Isilon couldn't get there, Data Domain couldn't get there, Compellent couldn't get there, 3PAR couldn't get there, Lefthand couldn't get, EqualLogic, I can go down the list. They were never able to reach that escape velocity, and maybe it is cloud, maybe cloud is that weird tailwind for people who can figure out how to take advantage of cloud and hybrid cloud, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think it is, number one. I think also the companies that you mentioned at various times, and I'm a hardware industry dinosaur, I've been around forever. A lot of those companies you talk about the difficult moment from them was hey, we're a storage company, now we want to add compute or now we want to go into this part of the market that put them at odds with the guys they were partnering with. George, our CEO, has been absolutely maniacal with his vision of our path forward is managing data, period. Whatever that form takes, we don't need to be a compute company, we don't need to be a networking company, we want to be a data company. I think how that then drives the decisions, whether it's partnering with cloud, whether it's going into new markets with HCI, even if it's things about transforming the legacy data center from traditional data center and how it's managed on-prem to something that's all Flash driven and much more efficient and much more programmable than it was in the past, so it's easier to administer, those are the areas that we can go innovate, and as long as we're partnering with the right partners out in the industry, that makes us a very good viable destination for the customer without worrying about well, do we have a compute node, are we in the server business now, are we suddenly in the switch business? Those are things that are not even on our radar. >> Yeah, I mean, you guys are in a unique position from that standpoint. You're very large now, you're the largest independent storage company, so everybody wants to work with you. You don't bump up into these adjacencies, and you can make bets, you can place your chips in areas whereas some of the startups, there's tons of innovation, but it's really hard to hit that escape. The amount of resources that you need, the money you need for promotion, the talent war that's going on out there, the go-to-market challenges, the partner challenges, so you guys are in a pretty good position right now. >> We really are, and I think we've actually done a lot of the restructuring internally to continue that and capitalize on it. Probably the biggest change, which outside the company, most folks wouldn't notice immediately, is that we moved at the beginning of this year to a three distinct business unit structure where we're focusing on three parts of the business to go forward. We've got our cloud business unit, which is driving into, as I said, the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye. We've got cloud data center, which is more of the new technologies like HCI and Converge and object storage technology like StorageGRID, and that's, right now that's an incredibly fast growing business for us. Then, of course, we've got our traditional storage software infrastructure business where we have products like E-Series and modernizing the data center, which is primarily driven with this transition to Flash. You've got three BUs now that are maniacally focused on the different areas of the market where we see here's an immediate opportunity in Flash. Here's a slightly longer opportunity in things like hybrid cloud and HCI and Converge infrastructure and a much longer term bet was how does the cloud really become a piece where we're managing between all of those. It lets us be a lot nimble between it. It's almost like three subbusinesses where we're going to market. >> Yeah, Dave, and actually that aligns perfectly with the research we've been doing for over five years from server stand and true private cloud, you've got the hyperscale, you've got the transformation locally in spanning those two, and then you've got that transition from the traditional. >> Oh, I think it's a sound strategy, and it'll serve us well in the years to come. >> There's obviously a lot of noise about artificial intelligence in the marketplace. You've got some companies trying to position to be the platform for machine intelligence or artificial intelligence, what's NetApp's point of view on that? >> Well certainly, we share some of that, but again, I think at the end of the day for us, it's much more important about fine, wherever I'm capturing that artificial intelligence is not likely the place where I'm going to do a lot of the analytics and work on it, so it really does come down to, ya know, am I moving it up to the cloud to do that work, where am I making my big insights, where am I mining through it, and then how am I relating that back, whether it's at the edge or whether it's at the core data center, and again, we think with ONTAP, with the partners that we're going to market with for AI, for ML, IoT, that's the difference maker for us at the end of the day. It's not that we're just another storage company storing the telemetry data off of a car for AI, we're putting it into a format and a form that's usable quickly, efficiently, real time, where Tesla can go make a decision on the car right now, not days, weeks, months from now. >> All right, Bruce, well hey, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time and good luck. >> Enjoyed having me, thank you. >> All right, great. >> Good to see you guys. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching VeeamOn 2018, this is theCUBE.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at WikiBon.com. Our next two guests is Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director Data Center Solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously, in the industry, it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately, but all the action's been on the intersection between a raise, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software defined stuff, value. What's the check involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? >> I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective is that super interconnected highway and as many on ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves, prolific, double digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter, listed together on there. That's how tight this partnership's been. Leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. >> Siva, I want to get your thoughts because actually Cisco, we've been... Stu and I love talking about networking, in Cisco in particular because the old days, provision the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built. Things get done. But with the Cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you got cloud-native happening. The real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network, so you guys have been successful with a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? >> If you look at the way Data Center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above layer, in terms of the software's tech and use cases, is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what Cloud did to you anyways. That level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed, it is what got us together. We have continued to build world class platforms that started one way, started mainly looking at virtualization in those place over time. In the last four or five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is a joined solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. That, in a very large way, has become the key for the success between the two of us. >> We had talked Brandon on here earlier and he validated our thesis and WikiBon actually had a report that came out last year, in the middle of the year, called "True Private Cloud." It was the only research analyst firm that actually got this one right, in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that... Certainly any (mumbles) would argue that everything is moving to the Cloud, tomorrow. Certainly there's some cloud migration and some stuff in the Public Cloud, no problem. But what WikiBon did is they looked at the true Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action where the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work both refreshing and retooling is on premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on premises now as a way, as a way, as a sequence, to hybrid and then maybe full Multi-Cloud or full Public Cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? Because certainly, I understand what a Cloud operating model is, but I'm talking about storage and networking. >> Yeah. >> What does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts? Comment on that. >> We're seeing, you saw on the key note this morning them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. I think that is, both you're enabling and your barring the factor to changing how you're consuming resources on site. Cloud architects as they're coming in to prominence enterprise architects. I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift, that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. I think 2018, you guys hit on DevOps, highly versatile model going forward and I think Multi-Cloud is going to be the right answer. >> John: The roles are changing. >> Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. >> John: Does the product change? >> The product, the tenets behind the product, not so much but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. >> Siva, your thoughts on this. >> You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of Cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS. It really started people to think that everything is moving to Cloud, but if you look at the innovation that happens in the Cloud, the Cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on. That's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say hey, there is a tremendous value in what I can do and on-prim, the data gravity and the latency and those things. >> So you agree with the "True Private Cloud" report, the on-prim action is where? >> We continue to see that from our customers, you see it as option and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. >> Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it, and it's like oh, well CI's been happening now for gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. We want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, what we see is there's still the majority of people, still building their own. They're taking the pieces. FlexPod is a little bit different than say hyper-converged from a single skew, but you've still got to build your own CI. Big partnership >> Absolutely. >> There's a huge revenue. HCI has both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still a meaningful part of the discussion today? >> I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. What do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCIs isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. It's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just the initial scoping project but with Flash and able data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer. Those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. Having the versatility, not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think is what's really driving that main stay of CI. >> Siva, we heard in the key notes this morning a lot of discussion about Multi-Cloud and management. Talk about Cisco and NetApp. How do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? >> Absolutely. If you guys look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call or say code platform for data center. That was the biggest success. We had a lot of work loads and news cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, because individually we have portfolio products that allow a Cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of Multi-Cloud and the journey to Cloud and proving customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to Cloud and how to go to Cloud. There are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of on that leverage, is the Cloud Center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's call location within the equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the Cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize while these guys really provide me the journey to Cloud model. That is more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. >> Stu: Lee, you want to build on that? >> Yeah, providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero but through the entire lifespan of that asset and that's the... Quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective as we're coming together and we're planning what the future state is going to look like. It's not just hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in, that's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? >> So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage compute and switching cause you're leaders in those areas, what's next? What's driving the partnership? You talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers. What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? >> The conversation we have out there a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. FlexPod's been around seven going on eight years and they say what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS Native on Azure going forward. Leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? >> Siva, how are you guys successful with that? How do you talk about the relationship because they have a unique capabilities, been around the block for awhile in the storage business? Look at the history of NetApp. Very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. >> Lee: 25 years. >> What's your position in this? >> I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building, but what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We are not young anymore in the partnership. We have over $10 billion of install based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. Just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey however they want to go, it absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. That's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey and at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question. I got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network storage software engineering going on under the hood, it's like a car. You're now an engine. You got to work together. What are you guys doing specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? >> In the context of Kubernetes, we are-- >> Under the hood. What's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you got to sit with that app. You got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound like for the customers? Why NetApp and Cisco together? >> If you look back at our containerization, micro services that journey, we certainly again, same logic, same model. We are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation and infrastructure automation level, network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment of Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plug-ins for how the plug-ins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands and scales with that. >> All right, Lee. Your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. >> It's infrastructure is code. That's what we are together and I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do and we're marrying that up with the core tenets that made us an IT powerhouse together. >> It was the developer angle John- >> All right. (laughs) >> We've been doing so many of these together. Absolutely where we wanted to go. >> Stu and I get the-- Infrastructure is code. The great shows. We do the cloud-native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fud out there and they want to know one thing. Who's going to be around in the future? Having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. >> I think continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. >> I'd boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction and knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. >> Well, congratulations. Certainly, the developers are going to be testing the hardware under the hood and we got a DevOps culture developing all on-prim and in the Cloud hybrid. It's going to be an interesting couple years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist with NetApp and Siva Sivakumar, Senior Director Data Center Solutions. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Live from Barcelona. Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMWorld 2017 everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman and this is theCube. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. A lot going on here at Pure Accelerate 2017. Siva Sivakumar is here as the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, and Mayur Dewaikar is the Product Management Lead for Converge at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. We've heard a lot this morning about Converge, the Cisco partnership. We just had a couple customers on that are doing FlashStack. So Siva, let's start with you. Thoughts on Accelerate? >> This is probably the coolest event I've been in many years. >> Different venue, right? >> The ambience, the venue, and the fact that Warriors won last night, it's just joy, it's awesome today. >> Dave: Oh, you want to talk hoops for a little bit? You know, we can do that if you guys. We're Patriots fans so we know. We're not just winning fans. Two out of the last three, it's good. It's good to be a winner, isn't it. >> Yep, absolutely. >> Well, Mayur, give us your thoughts on Converge. You guys are talking about Converge a lot today in FlashStack. We just heard from some customers. Talk about the strategy. What are you guys trying to accomplish there. >> Yeah, so we launched the FlashStack program about three years ago and what we were starting to see in the industry was that there was a very clear preference from customers to buy full stack solutions. So we thought that was an opportunity for us to take our storage business and move it into an adjacent market, which was Converge. And we thought we had really addressed a lot of the storage pain points that people were seeing with the existing Converge solution so with our flash performance and the simplicity that Pure brings to the table, we thought we had an opportunity really to team up with Cisco and build a solution that can be sufficiently differentiated and something that people would really love to try out. >> Mayur, I wonder if you could help clarify something. A lot of times people hear converge and they think coming together. When I think about the solutions that both Cisco, UCS, and Pure, there's lots of software and it's really a distributed-type scalable architecture so how am I both converged and scalable? >> So what we're basically doing is we are trying to, we're bringing best of breed solutions together, right. So I think there's a lot of synergy between the way UCS is architectured and Pure is architectured. So we're both stateless architectures on the compute side and the storage side and what we're doing as part of the Pure Storage for or FlashStack Converge program is that we're really doing these things together with a unified management platform, which really brings everything together. So it really simplifies the deployment, it simplifies the day-to-day management of the entire stack, which is really what people are looking for. >> Yeah, so Siva, we've heard a lot today about Converge, we heard some comments about hyper-converge. What's the difference between converged and hyper-converged? >> I think if you look at the evolution in the industry, these are big ships or the big ways customers want to consume. The genesis of all the work around convergence, if you will, that started it all was the customer started to realize, "I have bigger problems to solve from an IT perspective. "I would rather not solve infrastructure "problems all by myself. "I want the vendors to solve this. "I want the vendors to give me an experience "that is far more turnkey so I invest my time "and resource on higher artifacts" that are more in a business critical from their perspective. That truly allowed us to look into convergence as a strategy and bring together certain use cases and value propositions that is very critical to IT. High availability, scalability, multi-side deployment, which are all critical for an IT to solve. We solve it first ourself as a joint architecture. We validate that and then we provide blueprints that both our customers can choose in and our partners can choose. We had a very big channel partner community. Lot of our partners leverage the work we do to deliver great value to our customers. While Convergence was heavily centered around heavy-based storages that the market was absorbing, the evolution of storage to include more in the software-defined work, created another set of categories that allows customers to say, you know what, my interest is much more on the simplification and start small and those types of models, it propped a new industry at a new paradigm in the industry. From our perspective, there's a huge value in convergence. It's a 7 billion dollar business and IDC thinks it continues to grow. And we absolutely believe we have a purpose built on a ground-up platform that was built for Flash, that's the Pure Storage architecture, is truly here and truly is a big part of our strategy-building dive. And of course, as more use cases are coming to the compute side, we are here to embrace technologies like hyper-convergence because that's obviously something that's great for a software vendor to embrace as well. >> So from your standpoint, I think of you guys as software heavy, software led, but you're not participating in the so-called hyper-converge. Is that because you don't want to own that part of the stack, you'd rather partner for it. What's your point of view there? >> Yeah, so I think from our standpoint, we believe that there is basically use cases both for hyper-converge and converge infrastructure, right. We believe that with the program we have at Cisco, we can basically provide a very good, a very compelling solution of FlashStack. And Cisco already has a solution in hyperflex that addresses the hyper-converge use case and we really see both of these co-existing in a lot of customer environments that are use cases where NCI absolutely shines and then there are use cases where we believe FlashStack is really the right solution. >> But it's interesting you haven't sort of chased that trend, you're more focused on your areas and you're doing very well with it. Is that fundamental to the strategy or is it just sort of you guys are focused elsewhere. >> Yeah, so I think for us, for Pure Storage, I think we are looking at the Converged market really as there is a lot of existing business there that can be had. Which is really tied to legacy storage platforms coming up for refresh as part of the Converged infrastructure deployments people already have. So that in itself is a fairly large opportunity for us and we believe that with the messaging we have, which is you can consolidate a lot of your workloads on FlashStack. I think the platform that FlashStack is providing is really very well-suited for the use cases that Pure Storage has traditionally played in. Which is really the enterprise workloads, in my opinion. >> Is it fair to say that Convergence 1 data, and of course Cisco was heavily involved in Convergence 1.0, you kind of arguably created it along with some partners, but is it fair to say it was just too complex for a lot of customers? And are you trying to take that to the next level? Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, I can answer that. I think Convergence 1.0 was truly about idea operational simplification. Because they truly wanted to consume these best-of-breed technologies without having to deal with so much of technology consumption itself but as a system-level consumption. But apparently what happened in the industry is obviously the evolution of cloud. Cloud brought a completely different paradigm of how you consume an infrastructure in itself. I mean, email is an infrastructure now because you buy from a cloud winner, you get your VM in an email. So that's a very different way of consumption model which created additionally requirements for more simplification. The turnkey experiences and things like that led to another category. But if you look at FlashStack, what we are doing is we are bringing this simplification model into FlashStack as well. We recognize, while building the best-of-breed is a great idea, and great market for itself, simplification is never lost. People love that as well. So we're looking at bringing together as close to a single pane of glass as possible with such strong technology play to deliver some of the simplification in this model as well. So you're truly trying to bridge the gap and offering something that customers really want to see. >> Yeah, simplification's definitely a big piece of that wave of both converged and hyper-converged. When I think back, when we launched all of these solutions, it was, okay, that Day Zero, I should be able to speed that up and the Day One, the stuff afterwards, we should be able to make that easier. How are you measuring that these days? Any customers you can speak to as to how they dramatically shift that, kind of keeping the lights on versus really being able to focus on the business. >> Yeah, so I think if you really look at a Converged stack, there is three distinct pieces in it, right. So there's compute, storage, networking. And I think Cisco did a phenomenal job with the UCS and UCS manager platforms in helping really put a cookie cutter approach on deploying compute. So if you look at what was remaining, networking was always kind of the low-hanging fruit. Storage was very complex. So with Pure coming in to the picture, we have really simplified the overall deployment and management of storage. So we were talking from days down to a few hours to get storage going and get the entire FlashStack infrastructure going as a result. And then what we're doing is, we're using a lot of existing tools that exist in the ecosystem. So great example of that is UCS Director which is being used very prominently by customers to deploy their entire data centers. We are integrating with that and in addition to that, we're also integrating with a lot of hypervisor level tools like Recenter or hyper v-level tools. And the benefit is that customers are getting to use the tools that they're already used to with the simplicity of UCS and Pure to really simplify the overall deployment and also management of the entire stack. >> So really, the problem you're solving is one of IT labor intensity, right. IT labor is too much IT labor, it's too non-differentiated, it's too expensive. Is that fair? >> Well, yeah. So fundamentally what we are solving is providing you a platform. A platform and an experience that IT wants, IT desires, but that also is optimized so that it can easily provide a platform experience but then the workload and the diversification you see in the market and the one side is an article database. You don't touch for four years kind of a thing. On the other hand, you have a container which you use for two seconds. So you really have a complete range of use cases. Each demand something different from a platform. Our strategy and our goal is to provide a single cohesive platform that uniformly works across all of these use cases from an IT operations and management standpoint. You realize the challenge is quite complex but the solution is a huge value for our customers and that's really our journey in solving this problem. >> Can you share any, what should we expect to see from a kind of joint-engineering deployment going forward. We heard in the keynote this morning, said some really you know, the cloud native, AI, ML type deployments. We're talking less about virtualization, more about containers and microservices. Where should we look to Cisco and Pure in the future? >> So, I think there's an interesting demo on the floor. It really talks about something that's cutting edge. NVMe over Fabric, so the next big innovation from Pure is NVMe, all NVMe, right. That is, obviously, no performance goals there. It's absolutely a screaming box. We have a Cisco adaptor technology that can deliver high performance, low-latency iO transport on top of a fabric, on top of an Ethernet fabric to talk ENVme from the host. Just the power of how much you can do iO subsystem from a compute perspective onto the network and talking to the storage and the ability to bring a superclass performance on a storage perspective is absolutely a next generation cutting edge and vendors like this coming together truly solves the industry's next big problem. Who better to solve a fabric, network, bandwidth issue than Cisco? Partnering with best-of-breed from the storage. Then that's one, just sort of a technology and architectural play if you will. But on a use-case workload type of scenarios, we've done a lot of the traditional use cases quite a bit in the databases and the VDIs of the world. But we are now looking at the next generation of use cases. Containers, microservices. How do I make the docker environment integrate seamlessly with the FlashStack? Now, this is already different, this is a very different paradigm. How do I enable FlashStack to be very simple to consume kubernetes. Because these are use cases where the developer who is much more focused on clouds does not really think there is an infrastructure underneath. He doesn't even care about it. So we need to give him that experience so that it's a seamless way of deploying and managing these DevOps environments as well. So that's the next wave of work we are doing is to provide that agility factor coming out of the FlashStack. and if conditional architecture is being built for this, it obviously helps. >> And you see NVMe over Fabric as kind of one of those foundational aspects, right. >> That'll be another architectural cog in the same context of what we are trying to do. >> Are you, with FlashStack, able to preserve that same experience for customers? The Evergreen experience, the never have to migrate your day, I mean all that wonderful stuff. Does that translate into the partnership? >> We are. So, we are taking a lot of the same goodness we have with the storage platform and we're extending that into FlashStack. So we have, very similar to Pure, you can almost non-disruptively upgrade pretty much everything in the UCS stack and we have special programs now with Cisco to which we can provide people the option to also get new gear every couple of years. Very similar to the Evergreen Storage Program we have through Pure Storage. >> So is it fair to say, well, first of all, is that unique to Pure or is that something that Cisco sort of has innovated on? >> It's, from a storage perspective, Pure, I think truly created the easy button for storage which is nonexistent. It's one of the hardest problems to solve. >> But what about the other pieces? >> And Cisco obviously pioneered the fabric-based stateless compute, which is still a standard in the industry of how to do the easy button for compute is truly what we brought to the table that really revolutionized the industry. I absolutely think that's where the architecture individually are building technology that are great. When you combine that and jointly engineer the solution and provide the turnkey value for the customer then the absolute value is manifested in a very big way. And I think that's our journey. We are hear, obviously we are hearing a lot of great customers coming in but the more customers we hear, the more we learn. >> But you've substantially sort of recreated that experience to a great degree. >> Siva: Absolutely, absolutely. >> I think that's a huge differentiator for Pure. You don't hear a lot of other companies talking about it and when you talk to your customers, they always point to that. You know, the migrations are just such a painful, horrible experience. >> Yep. >> So, good stuff. Alright, we have to leave it there, gents. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Mayur: Thank you. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, take care. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017. Be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017, our eighth year coverage with the Cube. Formerly EMC World, now Dell EMC World. This is the Cube's coverage. I'm John Furrier, my cohost, Paul Gillin. Our next two guests are Craig Bernero, who is the senior vice president general manager of the midrange and entry storage solutions at Dell EMC. And Pierluca Chiodelli, VP appliance management at Dell. Guys, welcome to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Likewise. >> Thank you. >> Give us the update. We're hearing a ton of stories, 'cause the top stories, obviously the combination, merger, acquisition, whatever side you want to call acquired who. But all good, good stories. I mean, some speed bumps, little bumps along the way, but nothing horrific. Great stories. Synergies was the word we've been hearing. So you got to have some great growth with the Dell scale. Entry-level touchpoint growth, high end, get more entry level, give us the update. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, first and foremost, I wanted to call out to all our customers and partners that are critical for the success that we've seen. No doubt, and actually, we've committed better together one fourth, which is why you saw two of our launches, both on the Unilining and the Assine line, which historically were part of EMC and Dell respectively prior. And main point is, a lot of the feedback we got from customers was they really respected and appreciate our customer choice first philosophy. But also understanding that there's clear demarkation where each of those technologies play in their sweet spot-- >> Well, how are you demarcating them right now? >> Absolutely, so traditionally, pre the EMC acquisition, what we actually ended up determining is, when you define the midrange market segment we were looking at, it was more in the upper range, upper level of it, where they're driving value from a technology aspect and with their Unity product set. We are focusing heavily into the all-Flash market segment, too, which is one of the major refreshes we did here. And then in the Dell storage, which is very server affinity, a direct attached construct at the entry through the lower end of the midrange band, it was actually some very clear swim lanes of where each of the respective products played to their strengths as well. And so as a result of that, we've really taken that to heart with our hybrid offering on the C side to get your economics. Again, effectively, our 10 cents per gig as they've rolled it outlined on Monday as far as the most affordable hybrid solution there on the market. And then you go to the upper, premium level of value capability, with all Flash to deal with your performance workloads and other characteristics, too. >> Here Luca, talk about the overlap, because we address that, we hit him head on with that. Turns out, not a lot of overlap. But as you guys come together with, we just had Toshiba on earlier. Flash is obviously big part of the success. Getting those price points down to the entry, midrange, enabling that kind of performance and cost is key, but as you look at the product portfolio, where are the areas you guys are doubling down on, and where is kind of some of the overlapping taking care of, if any? >> Yeah, so let me tell you, the first thing that is very important and we have in the show is the reaffirmation of the investment in the two product. So we have a panel entry yesterday also a panel with 120 customer. Divide 50% between the legacy, the heritage Dell and the EMC customer, and the amazing things there was the Flash adoption is very strong, but also they want to have it economical, so Four I is very strong. So this is really feet to our two product. Because if you remember, Compellan has been created as the best storage for data progression. And we double down on Unity now that we are now that we are now so completely full line of Unity product today. So in the other face, on the FC line, we reaffirmed the completion of the family with the new 5020. That provide more performance, more capacity, much more lenience. And we'll drive our 4020 customer to a very new product. So yes, some people before they think, "Oh these guys, they have a lot of overlap." But actually, we have two amazing product that they play together in this market. >> And talk about the customer dynamic, 'cause that's interesting about that. Almost the 50/50 split as you mentioned. They got to be, I mean, not, their indifference is probably, they're probably like, "Bring on the better product." I'm not hearing any revolts. Right, that no one's really revolting. Can you just share the perspective of some of the insight that they're telling you about, what they're expecting from you guys? >> So I think it's very fun to be in this position where we are right now, where we have such a good portfolio of product where a customer, company, people inside of our company start to learn how this product works. Because you sell what you know, right? Or you use what you know. People, right, try to do the same things every day. So we are forced now to look outside of our part and say, "You know, we have two product. "What is the benefit?" And now, we sparkle this discussion with the customer. And in any customer, we have before tremendous amount of common customer, right? The customer, they have a preference, but now they say, "Oh let me," an EMC customer say, "Maybe I have a huge case for "an all-Flash upgrade with Unity." And the SC customer say, "Oh, maybe now I can run "this application on Unity or SC "or Open App to a different things." What we say is, this is the line I use. We are the top one now because we can solve any use case. Right, if you look at our competitors, they try to cover everything with one product, right? >> John: You can mix and match. >> Yes, you can mix and match and we have a very differential part between the two. And we said, "SC economy, drive economy with the fact "that we can have a de-looped compression on speedy media." Unity optimized for Flash. >> Is there any incompatibility between the two? Do the two platforms work pretty seamlessly together? >> Pierluca: Yes. >> Yeah, so I'm going to expand a little further on that. So one of the things we did highlight as part of the all-Flash offering for Unity, 350 through the 650, the four new entry models, customers were surprised, you know. And there were some questions on the level of innovation we're driving. A year later, getting a full platform refresh was a very big surprise for customers. I typically, two years, 18 months of other vendors in the field, and they're like, "You just launched "the product last year, and you already have a refresh." And we did that 'cause we listened to customer requirements and the all-Flash, the performances as absolutely critical, so the controller upgrade. We went from a Haswell to Broadwell design. We actually added additional core capabilities in memory, and all with the architecture built to do an online date and place upgrade that will be driving later in the year, too. So, and the SC 5020 that we announced too as a separate product line to complementing, as Pierluca stated, but the third area that hasn't been necessarily amplified but customers have raved about seeing in the showroom area is our Cloud IQ technology, which is actually built off of Cloud Foundry. That's a value, the portfolio of the company and a strategic aligned business. And actually, it does preemptive and proactive not only monitoring, but we're taking that from Jeff Boudreau's keynote today. That whole definition of autonomous and self-aware storage well, in midrange 'cause of all the use cases and requirements, we're driving that into it. And there's actually, we have compatibility between Unity and SC in Cloud IQ. As that one pane of glass, it's not helmet manager, but more to take that value to a whole new level. And we're going to continue to drive that level innovation beyond, not just through software, but clearly leveraging better together talent to really solve some key business needs for customers. >> As David Guilden always says in the Cube, it's better to have overlap than holes in a product line. So that's cool that you guys got that addressed, and certainly mixing and match, that's the standard operating procedure these days in a lot of guys in IT. They know how to do that. The key is, does it thread together? So, congratulations. The hard question that I want to ask you guys and what everyone wants to know about, where the customer wins? Okay, because at the end of the day, you'd be number one at whatever old category scoreboard. >> Craig: Sure. >> Scoreboard of customers is what we're looking at. Are you getting more customers? Are they adopting, are they implementing a variety of versions? Give us the updates on the wins and what the combination is of Dell EMC coming together. What has that done for sales and wins? >> Yeah, so there's a public blog I posted for Dell EMC World, and it's about the one two punch with midrange storage. >> John: What was the title of that blog post? >> It was basically a one two punch, our midrange storage. And I'll provide you the link in followup. >> John: I'll look at it later. >> The reason we preemptively provided that was the biggest question I would get from customers was, which product are you going to choose? And our point was, both, right? Both products, the power of the portfolio. We don't need to choose one. Our install base on both those technologies is significant. But in that post, I also did quote some of the publicly available IEDC data, which showed us in our last quarter, in Q4, where you compare Q3 to Q4, we actually had double digit quarter growth for both Uni and SC, our primary leading lines in both the portfolio, which actually allowed us to get effectively back into a midrange market share segment. Now that's for purpose build. >> That reflects a very positive trend for Dell EMC midrange storage portfolio. I'm quoting directly from your blog post. One two punch drives midrange storage momentum. >> Craig: Correct. >> And it's not only the storage, right? I've been with a very big customer of ours. I was telling to an analyst this morning it's amazing to see the motion of the business that we can do now that we are Dell EMC. So being a private company in one sense allows us to do creative things that we didn't do before. So we can actually position not only one product or two product, but the entire portfolio. And as you see, with the server business, the affinity that some of the storage they have with the server, we can drive more and more adoptions for our work class. >> Just quickly, how is your channel reacting to all this? Are they fully on board, do they understand? Are they out there selling both solutions? >> 100%, we put a lot of investment into our channel enablements across the midrange storage products in portfolio as well, 'cause that's the primary motion that we drive as well. And that it allowed us to actually enable them for success, both in education enablement, and clearly, proper incentives in play. They're very well received. The feedback we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. And we've been complementing that more and more with constant refresher of not only our technology and sharing roadmap delivery so that it can plan ahead as that storage is used. >> I asked Mike Amerius Hoss and David Guilden the question, they both had the same answers. It's good to see them on the same page. But I said, you know, what's, where are the wins? And they both commented that where there's EMC Storage, they bring more Dell in. Where there's Dell, they bring more EMC Storage in. >> Yes, that's why they judged this with this customer. The new business motion that we can now propose like we have a very loyal customer from Arita GMC for example, but now we can offer also server, a software define on top of all that and the storage, right? And you can enter from the other one, from the server and position now a full portfolio of storage. >> Alright, I'm going to ask you a personal question. I'd like to get your reactions. Take your EMC hat off for a second. Put your industry participant, individual hat on. What's the biggest surprise from the combination, from your area of expertise and your jobs that you've personally observed with the combination? Customer adoption, technology that wasn't there, chaos, mayhem, what? >> Yeah, so I'll comment first. I think the, I mean, recognizing the real power of global scale, and what I mean by that is the combined set. So from an organization and R and D investment, being able to have global scale, where you have engineering working literally 24 by five, right, based on effectively, a follow the sun model, that's how you're seeing that innovation engine just cranking into high gear. And that was further extended with the power of the supply chain and innovation bringing together has been in my opinion, super powerful, right? 'Cause couple customers had shared with me, it's like, my concern if I go with a startup that may not be in business and relative to the supply chain leverage and the level of innovation, breadth, and depth of products that we have. >> Craig, that's a great point. Before we go to Pierluca, I just want to comment on that. We're seeing the same thing in the marketplace. A lot of the startups can't get into the pure storage play because scale requirements is now the new barrier entry, not necessarily the technology. >> Exactly. >> Not necessarily the technology, so that kind of reaffirms, that's why the startups kind of are doing that a lot of data protection, white space stuff. And their valuations, by the way, are skyrocketing. Go ahead, your comment, observation that surprised you or didn't surprise you, took you by storm, what? >> I need to say that I'm living a dream in this moment because I think it's a few times in life that you can experience a trust formation. And you can have the ability, actually, in my role that I have right now to accelerate this trust formation. And that it's not the common things to do in the company that is already established. So this shape, this come together give you more and more opportunity. So I'm so very exciting to do what I'm doing, and I love it. >> Injection of the scale, and more capabilities, it's like, go to the gym and you're like pumped up, you're in shape. >> Actually, I started to go to the gym after 20 years. (laughing) >> It's like getting a good meal. You're Italian, you appreciate a good buffet of resource, right? >> That's right. >> Dell's got the gourmet-- >> You know, every day, I find something new, some product that I didn't know, something that we did, innovation that we have in the company that we can actually use together. It's very very exciting. >> And the management teams are pretty solid. They didn't really just come in and decimate EMC. They essentially, it was truly a combination. Some say that EMC acquired Dell, some say Dell acquired EMC. But the fact that is even discussed shows a nice balance in terms of a lot of EMC at the helm. Its great sales force, great commercial business with Dell, very well play, I think. You guys feel the same way? >> I appreciate that, and couldn't agree more. And I think it shows as you look at business results and even from an employee satisfaction level. We continue to see that being record high, 'cause there's always that uncertainty, but the interesting piece is people have really been jazzed based on opportunity ahead. >> Alright, we're done complimenting. Let's get to the critical analysis. What's on the roadmap? >> Craig: A lot. >> Tell us what's coming down the pike. I know you privately do your earnings call, but you guys have been transparent, some of the things. What can you say about what's coming out for customers? What can they expect from you guys in the storage? >> I'll let Pierluca run the product management team. He drives that every day. >> So I do not say much, things that I'm getting. >> Share all, come on. You're telling, just spill it out. Come on. You and your dream, come on, sell it. >> We have only 20 minutes, so, really, as I said, we announced the 5020, right, we add the 7020 in August. We are planning to finish the lineup of the new family of SC for sure. We announced the ability to tiering to the Cloud, we're going to expand that. Also, we announced a full new set a family of Flash Unity. So we're going down that trajectory to offer more and more. And we are going to be very bold to offer also upgrades from old jan to the new jan and non-destructive upgrade and also a line upgrade. So it's a very very beefy roadmap that we show with our customer in the A and DH section. I need to say the feedback is tremendous, and to your point at the beginning, what is the ecosystem? How do you integrate the thing? You're going to see more and more, for example, the UI, the experience for the customer being the same. So the experience from the UI perspective-- >> Paul: Simplicity. >> Yes, simplicity. >> Paul: Simplicity is the new norm. >> Cloud IQ key, but also going between the products who have the same kind of philosophy. >> Hey, I always say, this great business model, make thins super fast, really easy to use, and really intuitive. Can't go wrong with that triple threat right there. So that's like what you guys are doing. >> Yes. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing insight and update. Congratulations on the one two punch and the momentum and the success. That's the scoreboard we look at on the Cube. Are customers adopting it? Sharing all the data here inside the Cube live in Las Vegas with Dell EMC World 2017, stay with us for more coverage after this short break.