(soft music) >> There are many constants in the storage business, relentlessly declining cost per bit, innovations that perpetually battled the laws of physics, a seemingly endless flow of venture capital, despite the intense competition. And there's one other constant in the storage business, Eric Hertzog, and he joins us today in this CUBE video exclusive to talk about IBM's recent storage announcements. Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Great, Dave, thanks very much, we love being on theCUBE and you guys do a great job of informing the industry about what's going on in storage and IT in general. >> Well, thank you for that. >> Great job. >> We're going to cover a lot of ground today. IBM Storage, made a number of announcements the past month around data resilience, a new as-a-service model, which a lot of folks are doing in the industry, you've made performance enhancements. Can you give us the top line summary of the hard news, Eric? >> Sure, the top line summary is of course cyber security is on top of mind for everybody in the recent Fortune 500 list that came out, you probably saw, there was a survey of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, they named cybersecurity as their number one concern, not war, not pandemic, but cybersecurity. So we've got an announcement around data resilience and cyber resiliency built on our FlashSystem family with our new offering, Safeguarded Copy. And the second thing is the move to a new method of storage consumption. Storage-as-a-Service, a pay-as-you-go model, cloud-like the way people buy cloud storage, that's what you can do now from IBM Storage with our Storage-as-a-Service. Those are the key, two takeaways, Dave. >> Yeah and I want to stay on the trends that we're seeing in cyber for a moment, the work from home pivot in the hybrid work approach has really created a new exposures, people aren't as secure outside of the walled garden of the offices and we've seen a dramatic escalation in the adversaries capabilities and techniques, another least of which is island hopping, in other words, putting code fragments in the digital supply chain, they reform once they're inside the company and it's almost like this organic creepy thing that occurs. They're also living as you know, stealthily for many, many months, sometimes years, exfiltrating data, and then just waiting and then when companies respond, the incidents response trigger a ransomware incident. So they escalate the cyber crime and it's just a really, really bad situation for victims. What are you seeing in that regard and the trends? >> Well, one of the key things we see as everyone is very concerned about cybersecurity. The Biden administration has issued (indistinct) not only to the government sector, but to the private sector, cyber security is a big issue. Other governments across the world have done the same thing. So at IBM Storage, what we see is taking a comprehensive view. Many people think that cybersecurity is moat with the alligators, the castle wall and then of course the sheriff of Nottingham to catch the bad guys. And we know the sheriff of Nottingham doesn't do a good job of catching Robin Hood. So it takes a while as you just pointed out, sitting there for months or even longer. So one of the key things you need to do in an overall cybersecurity strategy is don't forget storage. Now our announcement around Safeguarded Copy is very much about rapid recovery after an attack for malware or ransomware. We have a much broader set of cyber security technology inside of IBM Storage. For example, with our FlashSystem family, we can encrypt data at rest with no performance penalty. So if someone steals that data, guess what? It's encrypted. We can do anomalous pattern detection with our backup product, Spectrum Protect Plus, why would you care? Well, if theCUBE's backup was taking two hours on particular datasets and all of a sudden it was taking four hours, Hmm maybe someone is encrypting those backup data sets. And so we notify. So what we believe at IBM is that an overarching cybersecurity strategy has to keep the bad guys out, threat detection, anomalous pattern behavior on the network, on the servers, on the storage and all of that, chasing the bad guy down once they breach the wall, 'cause that does happen, but if you don't have cyber and data resilience built into your storage technology, you are leaving a gap that the bad guys can explain, whether that be the malware ransomware guys oh by the way, Dave, there still is internal IT theft that there was a case about 10 years ago now where 10 IT guys stole $175 million. I kid you not, $175 million from a bunch of large banks across the country, and that was an internal IT theft. So between the internal IT issues that could approach you malware and ransomware, a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, must include storage. >> So I want to ask you about come back to Safeguarded Copy and you mentioned some features and capabilities, encrypting data at rest, your anomalous pattern recognition inferring, you're taking a holistic approach, but of course you've got a storage centricity, what's different about your cyber solution? What's your unique value probability to your (indistinct) . >> Well, when you look at Safeguarded Copy, what it does is it creates immutable copies that are logically air-gapped, but logically air-gapped locally. So what that means is if you have a malware or ransomware attack and you need to do a recovery, whether it be a surgical recovery or a full-on recovery, because they attacked everything, then we can do recovery in a couple hours versus a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Now, in addition to the logical local air-gapping with Safeguarded Copy, you also could do remote logical air-gapping by snapping out to the cloud, which we also have on our FlashSystem products and you also of course, could take our FlashSystem products and back up to tape, giving you a physical air gap. In short, we give our customers three different ways to help with malware and ransomware. >> Let me ask you- >> Are air-gapped locally. >> Yeah, please continue, I'm sorry. >> So our air-gapping locally for rapid recovery, air-gapping remotely, which again, then puts it on the cloud provider network, so hopefully they can't breach that. And then clearly a physical air gap going out to tape all three and on the mainframe, we have Safeguarded Copy already, Dave and several of our mainframe customers actually do two of those things, they'll do Safeguarded Copy or rapid recovery locally, but they'll also take that Safeguarded Copy and either put it out to tape or put it out to a cloud provider with a remote logical air-gap using a snapshot. >> I want to ask you a question about management 'cause when you ask CSOs, what's your number one challenge, they'll say lack of talent, We've got all these tools and all this lack of skills to really do all this stuff. Can't hire people fast enough and they don't have the skills. So when you think about it, and so what you do is you bring a lot of automation into the orchestration and management. My question is this, when you set up air gaps, do you recommend, or what do you see in terms of not, of logically and physically not only physically separating the data, but also the management and orchestration and automation does that have to be logically air-gapped as well or can you use the same management system? What's best practice there? >> Ah, so what we do is we work with our copy management software, which will manage regular copies as well, but Safeguarded Copies are immutable. You can't write to them, you can't get rid of them and they're logically air-gapped from the local hosts. So the hosts, for the Safeguarded Copies that immutable copy, you just made, the hosts don't even know that it's there. So you manage that with our copy management software, which by the way, we'll manage regular snapshots and replicas as well, but what that allows you to do is allows you to automate, for example, you can automate recovery across multiple FlashSystem arrays, the copy services manager will allow you to set different parameters for different Safeguarded Copies. So a certain Safeguarded Copy, you could say, make me a copy every four hours. And then on another volume on a different data set, you could say, make me a copy every 12 hours. Once you set all that stuff update, it's completely automated, completely automated. >> So, I want to come back to something you mentioned about anomalous pattern recognition and how you help with threat detection. So a couple of a couple of quick multi-part question here. First of all, the backup corpus is an obvious target. So that's an area that you have to protect. And so can, and you're saying, you've used the example if your backups taking too long, but so how do you do that? What's the technology behind that? And then can you go beyond, should you go beyond just the backup corpus, with primary data or copies on-prem, et cetera? Two part questions. >> So when we look at it, the anomalous pattern detection is part of our backup software, say Spectrum Protect and what it does it uses AI-based technology, it recognizes a pattern. So it knows that the backup dataset for the queue takes two hours and it recognizes that, and it sees that as the normal state of events. So if all of a sudden that backup that theCUBE was doing used to take two hours and starts taking four, what it does is that's an anomalous pattern, it's not a normal pattern. It'll send a note to the backup admin, the storage admin, whoever you designate it to and say the backup data set for theCUBE that used to take two hours, it's taken four hours, you probably ought to check that. So when we view cyber resiliency from a storage perspective, it's broad. We just talked about anomalous pattern detection in Spectrum Protect. We were talking most of the conversation about our Safeguarded Copy, which is available on the mainframe for several years and is now available on FlashSystems, making immutable local air-gap copies, that can be rapidly recovered and are immutable and can help you recover for a malware or ransomware attack. Our data at rest encryption happens to be with no performance penalty. So when you look at it, you need to create an overarching strategy for cybersecurity and then when you look at your storage estate, you need to look at your secondary storage, backup, replicas, snaps, archive, and have a strategy there to protect that and then you need a strategy to protect your primary storage, which would be things like Safeguarded Copy and encryption. So then you put it all together and in fact, Dave, one of the things we offer is a free cyber resilience assessment. It's not only for IBM Storage, but it happens to be a cyber resilience assessment that conforms to the NIST Framework and it's heterogeneous. So if you're a big company, you've got IBM EMC and HP Storage, guess what? It's all about the data sets not about the storage. So we say, you said these 10 data sets are critical, why are you not encrypting them? These data sets are XYZ, why are you not air-gapping them? So we come up based on the NIST Framework, a set of recommendations that are not IBM specific, but they are storage specific. Here's how you make your storage more resilient, both your secondary storage and your primary storage. That's how we see the big thing and Safeguarded Copy of course fits in on the primary storage side, A on the mainframe, which we've had for several years now and B in the Linux world, the Unix world and the Windows Server world on our FlashSystem portfolio with the announcement we did on July 20th. >> Great, thank you for painting that picture. Eric, are you seeing any use case patterns emerge in this space? >> Well, we see a couple of things. First of all, is A most resellers and most end-users, don't see storage an overarching part of the cybersecurity strategy, and that's starting to change. Second thing we're seeing is more and more storage companies are trying to get into this bailiwick of offering cyber and data resilience. The value IBM brings of course is much longer experience to that and we even integrate with other products. So for example, IBM offers a product called QRadar from the security divisions not a storage product, a security product, and it helps you with early data breach recognition. So it looks at servers, network access, it looks at the storage and it actually integrates now with our Safeguarded Copy. So, part of the value that we bring is this overarching strategy of a comprehensive data and cyber resilience across our whole portfolio, including Safeguarded Copy our July 20th announcement. But also integration beyond storage now with our QRadar product from IBM security division. And there will be future announcements coming in both Q4 and Q1 of additional integration with other security technologies, so you can see how storage can be a vital COD in the corporate cybersecurity strategy. >> Got it, thank you. Let's pivot to the, as-a-service it's, cloud obviously is brought in that as-a-service. Now, it seems like everybody has one now. You guys have announced obviously HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, Pure, everybody's gotten out there as-a-service model, what do we need to know about your as-a-service solution and why is it different from the others? >> Sure. Well, one of the big differences is we actually go on actual storage, not effective. So when you look at effective storage, which most of them do that includes creating the (indistinct) data sets and other things, so you're basically paying for that. Second thing we do is we have a bigger margin. So for example, if theCUBE says we want SLA-3 and we sell it by the SLA, Dave, SLA-1, two and three. So let's say theCUBE needs SLA-3 and the minimum capacity is a 100 terabytes, but let's say you think you need 300 terabytes. No problem. You also have a variable. One of the key differences is unlike many of our competitors, the rate for the base and the rate for the variable are identical. Several of our competitors, when you're in the base, you pay a certain amount, when you go into the variable, they charge you a premium. The other key differentiator is around data reduction. Some of our competitors and all storage companies have data reduction technology. Block-level D do thin provisioning, compression, we all offer those features. The difference is with IBM's pay-as-you-grow, Storage-as-a-Service model, if you have certain data sets that are not very deducible, not very compressible, we absorbed that with our competitors, most of them, if the dataset is not easily deducible, compressible, and they don't see the value, they actually charge you a premium for that. So that is a huge difference. And then the last big difference is our a 100% availability guarantee. We have that on our FlashSystem product line, we're the only one offering 100% availability guarantee. We also against many of the competitors offer a better base nines, as you know, availability characteristics. We offer six nines of availability, which is five minutes and 26 seconds of downtime and a 100% availability of offering. Some of our competitors only offer four nines of availability and if you want five or six, they charge you extra. We give you six nines base in which has only five minutes and change of downtime in a year. So those are the key difference between us and the other as-a-service models out there. >> So, the basic concept I think, is if you commit to more and buy more, you pay less per. I mean, that's the basic philosophy of these things, right? So, if- >> Yes. >> I commit to you X, let's say, I want to just sort of start small and I commit to you to X and great. I'm in now in, maybe I sign up for a multi-year term, I commit this much, whatever, a 100 terabytes or whatever the minimum is. And then I can say, Hey, you know what? This is working for me. The CFO likes it and the IT guys can provision more seamlessly, we got our chargeback or showback model goes, I want to now make a bigger commitment and I can, and I want to sort of, can I break my three-year term and come back and then renegotiate, kind of like reserved instances, maybe bigger and pay less? How do you approach that? >> Well, what you do is we do a couple of things. First of all, you could always add additional capacity, and you just call up. We assign a technical account manager to every account. So in addition to what you get from the regular sales team and what you get from our value business partners, by the way, we did factor in the business partners, Dave, into this, so business partners will have a great pay-as-you-go Storage-as-a-Service solution, that includes partners and their ability to leverage. In fact, several of our partners that do have both MSP and MHP businesses are working right now to leverage our Storage-as-a-Service, and then add on their own value with their own MSP and MHP capability. >> And they can white label that? Is that right or? >> Well, you'd still have Storage-as-a-Service from IBM. They would resell that to theCUBE and then they'd add in their own MHP or MSP. >> Got it. >> That said partners interested in doing a white label, we would certainly entertain that capability. >> Got it. I interrupted you, carry on please. >> Yeah, you can go ahead and add more capacity, not a problem. You also can change the SLA. So theCUBE, one of the leading an industry analyst firms, you bought every analyst firm in the world, and you're using IBM Storage-as-a-Service, pay-as-you-go cloud-like model. So what you do is you call up the technical account manager and say, Eric, we bought all these other companies they're using on-prem storage, we'd like to move to Storage-as-a-Service for all the companies we acquire. We can do that, so that would up your capacity. And then you could say, now we've been at SLA-2, but because we're adding all these new applications of workloads from our acquired companies, we want some of it to be at SLA-1. So we can have some of your workloads on SLA-2, others on SLA-1, you could switch everything to SLA-1, and you just call your technical account manager and they'll make that happen for you or your business partner, obviously, if you bought through the channel. >> I get it, the hard question is what if all those other companies theCUBE acquired are also IBM Storage-as-a-Service customers? Can I, what's that discussion like? Hey, can I consolidate those and get a better deal? >> Yeah, there are all Storage-as-a-Service customers and Dave I love that thought, we would just figure out a way to consolidate the agreement. The agreements are one through five years. What I think also that's very unique is let's say for whatever reason, and we all love finance people. Let's say the IT guys have called the finance and say, we did a one-year contract, we now like to do a three-year contract. The one year is coming up and guess what? Finance's delayed for whatever reason, the PO doesn't go through. So the ITI calls up the technical account manager, we love your service, it's delayed in finance. We will let them stay on their Storage-as-a-Service, even though they don't have a contract. Now, of course they've told us they want to do one, but if they exceed the contract by a quarter or two, because they can't get the finance guys are messing with the IT guys, that's fine. What the key differentiators? Exactly the same price. Several of our competitors will also extend without a contract, but until you do a contract, they charge you a premium, we do not, whatever, if you're an SLA-3, you're SLA-3, we'll extend you and no big deal. And then you do your contract, when the finance guys get their act together and you're ready to go. So that is something we can do and we'll do on a continual basis. >> Last question. Let's go way out. So, we're not doing any time, near-term forecasts, I'm trying to understand how popular you think as-a-service is going to be. I mean, if you think about the end of the decade, let's think industry total, IBM specific, how popular do you think as-a-service models will be? Do you think it will be the majority of the transacted business or it's kind of more of a, just one of many? >> So I think there will be many, some people will still have bare metal on-premises. Some people will still do virtualization on-premises or in a hybrid cloud configuration. What I do think though is Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50% by the end. Remember, we're sitting at 2021. So we're talking now 2029. >> Right. >> So I think Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50%. I think most of that Storage-as-a-Service will be in a hybrid cloud model. I think the days of a 100% cloud, which is the way it started. I think a lot of people realize that a 100% cloud actually is more expensive than a hybrid cloud or fully on-prem. I was at a major university in New York, they are in the healthcare space and I know their CIO from one of my past lives. I was talking to him, they did a full on analysis of all the cloud providers going a 100% cloud. And their analysis showed that a 100% cloud, particularly for highly transactional workloads was 50% more expensive than buying it, paying the maintenance and paying their employees. So we did an all in view. So what I think it's going to be is Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50%. I think most of that Storage-as-a-Service will be in a hybrid cloud configuration with storage on-prem or in a colo, like what our IBM pay-as-you-go service will do and then it will be accessed and available through a hybrid cloud configuration with IBM Cloud, Google, Amazon as or whoever the cloud provider is. So I do think that you're looking at over 50% of the storage being as-a-service, but I do think the bulk of that as-a-service will be as-a-service through someone like IBM or our competitors and then part of it will be from the cloud providers. But I do think you're going to see a mix because right now the expense of going a 100% cloud cloud storage is dramatically understated and when someone does an analysis like that major university in New York did, they had a guy from finance, help them do the analysis and it was 50% more expensive than doing on-premise either on-prem or on-prem as-a-service, both were way cheaper. >> But you own the asset, right? >> Yes. >> As-a-service model. >> We, right, we own the asset. >> And I would bet, >> I would bet that over the lifetime value of the spend and it as-a-service model, just like the cloud, if you do this with IBM or any of your competitors, I would bet that overall you're going to spend more just like you've seen in the cloud, but you get the benefit is the flexibility that you get. >> Yeah, yeah. If you compare it to the, so obviously the number one model would be to buy. That's probably going to be the least expensive. >> Right. >> But it's also the least flexible. Then you also have leasing, more flexibility, but leasing usually is more expensive. Just like when you lease your car, if you add up all the lease payments and then you, at the end, pay that balloon payment to buy, it's cheaper to buy the car up front than it is to lease a car. Same thing with any IT asset, now storage network servers, all are available on leasing, the net is at the bottom line, that's more than buying it upfront. And then Storage-as-a-Service will also be more expensive than buying it, my friend, but ultimate capability, altering SLAs, adding new capacity, being able to handle an app very quickly. We can provision the storage, as you mentioned, the IT guys can easily provision. We provision, the storage in 10 minutes, if you bought from IBM Storage or any competitor you bought and you need more storage, A you got to put a PO through your system and if you're not theCUBE, but you're a giant global Fortune 500, sometimes it takes weeks to get the PO done. Then the PO has to go to the business partner, the business partner has got to give a PO to the distributor and a PO to IBM. So it can take you weeks to actually get the additional storage that you need. With Storage-as-a-Service from IBM with our pay-as-you-go, cloud-like model, all you have to do is provision and you're done. And by the way, we provide a 50% overage for free. So if they end up needing more storage, that 50% is actually sitting on-prem already and if they get to 75% utilization of the total amount of storage, we then call them up, the technical account manager would call them up and their business partner and say, Dave, do you know that you guys are at 75% full? We'd like to come add some additional storage to get you back down to a 50% margin. And by the way, most of our competitors only do a 25% margin. So again, another differentiator for IBM Storage-as-a-Service. >> What about, I said, last question, but I have another question. What about day one? Like how long does it take, if I want to start fresh with as-a-service? >> Get it. >> How long does it take to get up and running? >> Basically you put the PO through, whatever it takes on your side or through your business partner, we then we'll sign the technical account manager, will call you up because you need to tell us, do you want to, in a colo facility that you're working with or do you want to put it on on-prem? And then once we do that, we just schedule a time for your IT guys do the install. So, probably two weeks. >> Yeah. >> It all depends because you've got to call back and say, Eric, we'd like it at our colo partner, our colo partners, ABC, we got to call ABC and then get back to you or on-prem , we're going to have guys in the office, a good day when it's not going to be too busy. Could you come two weeks from Thursday? Which now would be three weeks for sake of argument. But that would be, we interface with the customer, with the technical account manager to do it on your schedule on your time, whether you do it in your own facility or use a colo provider. >> Yeah, but once you tell, once I tell you, once we get through all that stuff, it's two weeks from when that's all agreed. >> Yeah. >> It's like the Xerox copier salesman, (Dave chuckles) Where are you going to put it? Once you decide where you're going to put it, then it's a couple of weeks. It's not a month or two months or yeah. >> Yeah, it's not. And we need additional capacity, remember there's a 50% margin sitting there. So if you need to go into the variable and use it, and when we hit a 75%, we actually track it with our storage insights pro. So we'll call you up and say, Dave, you're at 76%. We'd like to add more storage to give you better margin of extra storage and you would say, great, when can we do it? So, yeah, we're proactive about that to make sure that you stay at that 50% margin. Again, our competitors, all do only have 25% margin. So we're giving you that better margin, a larger margin in case you really have a high capacity demand for that quarter and we proactively will call you up, if we think you need more based on monitoring your storage usage. >> Great. Eric got to go, thank you so much for taking us through that great detail, I really appreciate it. Always good to see you. >> Great, thanks Dave, really appreciate it. >> Alright, thank you for watching this CUBE conversation, this is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> There are many constants in the storage business, relentlessly declining costs per bit. Innovations that perpetually battle the laws of physics, a seemingly endless flow of venture capital, very intense competition. And there's one other constant in the storage industry, Eric Herzog. And he joins us today in this CUBE video exclusive to talk about IBM's recent storage announcements. Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you, my friend. >> Great Dave, thank you very much. Of course, IBM always loves to participate with theCUBE and everything you guys do. Thank you very much for inviting us to come today. >> Really our pleasure. So we're going to cover a lot of ground. IBM Storage made a number of announcements this month around data resilience. You've got a new as a service model. You've got performance enhancements. Eric, can you give us, give us the top line summary of the hard news? >> Yeah. Top line. IBM is enhancing data and cyber resiliency across all non mainframe platforms. We already have it on the mainframe of course, and we're changing CapEx to OpEx with our storage as a service. Those are the key takeaways and the hot ticket items from an end user perspective. >> So maybe we could start with sort of the cyber piece. I mean, wow. I mean the last 18 months have been incredible and you're just seeing, you know, new levels of threats. The work from home pivot has created greater exposure. Organizations are kind of rethinking hybrid. You're seeing the ascendancy of some of the sort of hot cyber startups, but, but you're also seeing the, not only of the attack vectors winded, but the, the techniques are different. You know, threat hunting has become much more important. Your responses to threats. You have to be really careful the whole ransomware thing. So what are some of the big trends that you guys are seeing that are kind of informing how you approach the market? >> Well, first of all, it's gotten a lot worse. In fact, Fortune magazine just released the Fortune 500 a couple of weeks ago, and they had a survey that's public of CEOs, and they said, "What's the number one threat to your business? With no list just what's the number one threat?" Cyber security was number one 66% of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers. Not CIOs not CTOs, but literally the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. However, it's not just big companies. It hits the mid size, the small companies, everyone is open now to cyber threats and cyber attacks. >> Yeah. So for sure. And it's (chuckles) across the board. Let's talk about your solution, the announcement that you made here. Safeguard Copy, I think is what the branding is. >> Yeah. So what we've done is we've got a number of different technologies within our storage portfolio. For example, with our Spectrum Protect product, we can see anomalous pattern detection and backup data sets. Why would that matter? If I am going to hold theCUBE for ransom, if I don't get control of your secondary storage, snaps, replicas, and backups, you can just essentially say, I'm not paying you. You could just do a recovery, right? So we have anomalous protection there. We see encryption, we encrypt at rest with no performance penalty with our FlashSystem's family. We do air gapping. And in case of safeguarded copy, it's a form of air gapping. So we see physical air gapping with tape. logical air gapping, but to a remote location with snaps or replicas to your Cloud provider, and then local logical on-prem, which is what safeguarded copy does. We've had this technology for many years now on the mainframe platform. And we brought it down to the non mainframe environments, Linux, UNIX, and the Windows Server world by putting safeguarded copy on our FlashSystem's portfolio. >> So, okay. So part of the strategy is air gapping. So you're taking a copy, your air gapping it. You probably, you probably take those snaps, you know, at different intervals, you mix that up, et cetera. How do you manage the copies? How do you ensure if I have to do a recovery that you've got kind of a consistent data set? >> Yeah. So a couple things, first of all, we can create on a single FlashSystem array the full array up to 15,000 immutable copies, essentially they're weren't, you can't delete them, you can't change them. On a per volume basis, you can have 255. This is all managed with our storage copy manager, which can automate the entire process. Creation, deletion, frequency, and even recovery mode. So for example, I could have volume one and volume one perhaps I need to make immutable copies every four hours, while at 255 divided by four a day, I can go for many months and still be making those immutable copies. But with our Copy Services Manager, you can set up to be only 30 days, 60 days, you can set the frequency and once you set it up, it's all automated. And you can even integrate with IBM's QRadar, which is a threat detection and breach software from the security division of IBM. And when certain threats hit, it can actually automatically kick off a safeguarded copy. So what we do is make sure you've got that incredibly rapid recovery. And in fact, you can get air gapping, remotely. We have this on the main frame and a number of large global Fortune 500's actually do double air gapping, local logical, right? So they can do recovery in just a couple hours if they have an attack. And then they take that local logical and either go remote logical. Okay. Which gives them a second level of protection, or they'll go out to tape. So you can use this in a myriad of ways. You can have multiple protection. We even, by the way Dave, have three separate different admin levels. So you can have three different types of admins. One admin can't delete, one admin can. So that way you're also safe from what I'll call industrial espionage. So you can never know if someone's going to be stealing stuff from inside with multiple administrative capabilities, it makes it more difficult for someone to steal your data and then sell it to somebody. >> So, okay. Yeah, right. Because immutable is sort of, well, you're saying that you can set it up so that only one admin has control over that, is that right? If you want it... >> There's three, there's three admins with different levels of control. >> Right. >> And the whole point of having a three admins with different levels of control, is you have that extra security from an internal IT perspective versus one person, again, think of the old war movies, you know, nuclear war movies. Thank God it's never happened. Where two guys turn the key. So you've got some protection, we've got multiple admin level to do that as well. So it's a great solution with the air gapping. It's rapid recovery because it's local, but it is fully logically air gapped separated from the host. It's immutable, it's WORM, Write Once, Read Many can't delete can't change. Can't do anything. And you can automate all the management with our Copy Services Manager software that will work with safeguard copy. >> You, you talked about earlier, you could detect anomalous behavior. So, so presumably this can help with, with detecting threats, is that? >> Well, that's what our spectrum protect product does. My key point was we have all levels of data resiliency across the whole portfolio, whether it be encrypting data at rest, with our VTLs, we can encrypt in-flight. We have safeguarded copy on the mainframe, safeguarded copy on FlashSystems, any type of storage, including our competitor storage. You could air gap it to tape, right? With our spectrum virtualized software in our SAN Volume Controller, you could actually air gap out to a Cloud for 500 arrays that aren't even ours. So what we've done is put in a huge set of data and cyber resiliency across the portfolio. One thing that I've noticed, Dave, that's really strange. Storage is intrinsic to every data center, whether you're big, medium, or small. And when most people think about a cybersecurity strategy from a corporate perspective, they usually don't even think about storage. I've been shocked, but I've been in meetings with CEOs and VPs and they said, "oh, you're right, storage is, is a risk." I don't know why they don't think of it. And clearly many of the security channel partners, right? You have channel that are very focused on security and security consultants, they often don't think about the storage gaps. So we're trying to make sure, A, we've got broad coverage, primary storage, secondary storage, backup, you know, all kinds of things that we can do. And we make sure that we're talking to the end users, as well as the channel to realize that if you don't have data resilience storage, you do not have a corporate cybersecurity strategy because you just left out the storage part. >> Right on. Eric, are you seeing any use case patterns emerge in the customer base? >> Well, the main use case is prioritizing workloads. Obviously, as you do the immutable copies, you chew up capacity. Right now there's a good reason to do that. So you've got these immutable copies, but what they're doing is prioritizing workloads. What are the workloads? I absolutely have to have up and going rapidly. What are other workloads that are super important, but I could do maybe remote logical air gapping? What ones can I put out to tape? Where I have a logical, where I have a true physical air gap. But of course tape can take a long recovery time. So they're prioritizing their applications, workloads and use case to figure out what they need to have a safeguarded copy with what they could do. And by the way, they're trying to do that as well. You know, with our FlashSystem products, we could encrypt data at rest with no performance penalty. So if you were getting, you know, 30,000 database records and they were taken, you know, 10 seconds for sake of argument, when you encrypt, normally you slow that down. Well, guess what, when you encrypt with our FlashSystem product. So in fact, you know, it's interesting Dave, we have a comprehensive and free cyber resiliency assessment, no charge to the end-user, no charge to a business partner if they want to engage with us. And we will look at based on the NIST framework, any gaps. So for example, if theCUBE said, these five databases are most critical databases, then part of our cyber resilience assess and say, "ah, well, we noticed that you're not encrypting those. Why are you not encrypting those?" And by the way, that cyber resilience assessment works not only for IBM storage, but any storage estate they've got. So if they're homogenous, we can evaluate that if they're heterogeneous in their storage estate would evaluate that, and it is vendor agnostic and conforms to the NIST framework, which of course is adopted all over the world. And it's a great thing for people to get free, no obligation. You don't have to buy a single thing from IBM. It's just a free assessment of their storage and what cyber security exposure they have in their storage estate. And that's a free thing that we offer that includes safeguarded copy, encryption, air gapping, all the various functionality. And we'll say, "why are you not encrypting? Why are you not air gapping?" That if it's that important, "what, why are you leaving these things exposed?" So that's what our free cyber resilience assessment does. >> Got to love those freebies take advantage of those for sure. A lot of, a lot of organizations will charge big bucks for those. You know, maybe not ridiculously huge bucks, but you're talking tens of thousands. Sometimes you'll get up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for that type of type of assessment. So that's, you've got to take advantage of that if you're a customer out there. You know, I, I wanted to ask you about just kind of shift topics here and get into the, as a service piece of it. So you guys announced your, your as a service for storage, a lot of people have also done that. What do we need to know about the IBM Solution? And what's different from the others, maybe two part question, but what's the first part. What do we need to know? >> A couple of thing is, from an overall strategy perspective, you don't buy storage. It's a full OpEx model. IBM retains legal title. We own it. We'll do the software upgrades as needed. We may even go ahead and swap the physical system out. You buy an SLA, a tier if you will. You buy capacity, performance, we own it. So let's take an easy one. Our tier two, we give you our worst case performance at 2,250 IOPS per terabyte. Our competitors by the way, when you look at their contracts and look what they're putting out there, they will give you their best case number. So if they're two is 2,250, that's the best case. With us it's our worst case, which means if your applications or workloads get 4,000 IOPS per terabyte, it's free. We don't charge you for that. We give you the worst case scenario and our numbers are higher than our competition. So we make sure that we're differentiated true OpEx model. It's not a modified Lease model. So it's truly converts CapEx into operational expense. We have a base as everybody does, but we have a variable. And guess what? There's the base price and the variable price are the same. So if you don't use the variable, we don't charge you. We bill you for 1/4 in arrears, every feature function that's on our FlashSystem technology such as safeguarded copy, which we just talked about. AI based tiering, data at rest encryption with no performance penalty, data in compression with no performance, all those features you get, all of them, all we're doing is giving you an option. We still let you buy CapEx. We will let you lease with IBM Global Financial Services. And guess what? You could do a full OpEx model. The technology though, our flash core modules, our spectrum virtualized software is all the same. So it's all the same feature function. It's not some sort of stripped down model. We even offer Dave, 100% availability option. We give Six Nines of availability as a default, several of the competitor, which is only five minutes and 26 seconds of downtime, several of our competitors, guess what they give? Fournines. If you want five or six, you got to pay for it. We just give you six as a default differentiator, but then we're the only vendor to offer 100% availability guarantee. Now that is an option. It's the one option. But since we're already at Six Nines, when our competitors are at Four or Five Nines, we already have better availability with our storage as a service than the competition does. >> So let me just make this, make sure I'm clear on this. So you got Six Nines as part of the service. That's >> Absolutely >> Fundamental. And I get, I can pay up for 100% availability option. And, >> Yes you can. >> So what does that, what does that mean? Practically? You're putting in redundancies and, >> Right, right. So we have a technology known as HyperSwap. We have several public references by the way, at ibm.com. We've been shipping HyperSwap on both the mainframe, probably eight or nine years now. We brought it to our FlashSystem product probably five years ago. As I mentioned, we've got public references. You don't pay for the software by the way, you do have to have a dual node cluster. And HyperSwap allows you to do that. But you can do that as a service. You can buy it. You can do as CapEx, right? When you need the additional FlashSystem to go with it again, the software is free. So you're not to pay for the software. You just have to pay for the additional system level componentry, but you can do that as a service and have it completely be an OpEx model as well. We even assign a technical account manager to every account. Every account gets a technical account manager. If you will, concierge service comes with every OpEx version of our storage as a service. >> So what does that mean? What does that concierge do? Just paying attention to (indistinct) >> Concierge service will do a quarterly, a quarterly review with you. So let's say theCUBE bought 10,000 other analyst firms in the industry. You're now the behemoth. And you at theCUBE are using IBM storage as a service. You call up your technical account manager to say, "Guess what? We just bought these companies. We're going to convert them all to storage as a service, A, we need a higher tier, you could upgrade the tier B, we have a one-year contract, but you know what we'd like to extend it to two, C, we think we need more capacity." You tell your technical account manager, they'll take care of all of that for you, as well as giving you best practices. For example, if you decide you want to do safeguarded copy, which you can do, because it's built into our spectrum virtualized software, which is part of our storage as a service, we can give you best practices on that he would tell you, or she would tell you about our integration with our security visions, QRadar. So those are various best practices. So the technical account manager makes sure the software is always up to date, right? All the little things that you would have to do yourself if you own it, we take care of, because we legally own it, which is allow you to buy it as a service. So it is a true OpEx model from a financial perspective. >> In the term of the contracts are what? One, two and three years. >> One to five. >> Yeah. Okay. >> If you don't renew and you don't cancel, we'll automatically re up you at the exact tier you're at, at the exact same price. Several of our competitors, by the way, if you do that, they actually charge you a premium until you sign a contract. We do not. So if you have a contract based on tier two, right? We go buy SLA tier one, tier two, tier three. So if I have a tier two contract at theCUBE, and you forgot to get the contract done at the end of two years, but you still want it, you can go for the next 2/4. I mean, well our business partner as I should say, "Dave, don't you want to sign a contract, you said you like it." Obviously you would, but we will let you stay. You just say, now I want to keep it without a contract. And we don't charge your premium. Our competitors if you don't have a contract, they charge your premium. If you keep it installed without putting a contract in place. So little things like that clearly differentiate what we do. We don't charge a premium. If you go above the base. One of the competitors, in fact, when you go into the variable space, okay? And by the way, we provide 50% extra capacity. We over-provision. The other competitors usually do 25%. We do 50%. No charge, is just part of the service. So the other vendors, if you go into the variable space, they raised the price. So if it's $5, you know, for X capacity and you go into the, which is your base, and then you go above that, they charge you $7 and 50 cents. We don't. It's $5 at the base and $5 at the variable. Now obviously your variable can be very big or very small, but whatever the variable is, we charge you. But we do not charge you an a bigger price. Couple of competitors when you go into the variable world, they charge you more. Guess what it gets you to do, raise your base capacity. (Eric laughs) >> Yeah. I mean, that's, that should, the math should be the opposite of that, in my view. If you make a commitment to a vendor, say, okay, I'm going to commit to X. You have a nice chart on this, actually in your, in your deck. If I'm going to commit to X, and then I'm going to add on, I would think the add on price per bit should be at the same or lower. It shouldn't be higher. Right? And I get, I get what you're saying there. They're forcing you to jack up the base, but then you're taking all the risk. That's not a shared risk model. I get... >> And that's why we made sure that we don't do that. In fact, Dave, you can, you know, the fact that we don't charge you a premium if you go beyond your contract period and say, "I still wanted to do it, but I haven't done the contract yet." The other guys charge you a premium, if you go beyond your contract period. We don't do that either. So we try to be end-user friendly, customer friendly, and we've also factored in our business partners can participate in this program. At least one of our competitors came out with a program and guess what? Partners could not participate. It was all direct. And that company by happens to have about 80% of their business through the channel and their partners were basically cut out of the model, which by the way, is what a lot of Cloud providers had done in the past as well. So it was not a channel friendly model, we're channel friendly, we're end user-friendly, it's all about ease of use. In fact, when you need more capacity, it takes about 10 minutes to get the new capacity up and going, that's it? >> How long does it take to set up? How long does it take to set up initially? And how long does it take to get new capacity? >> So, first of all, we deploy either in a Colo facility that you've contracted with, including Equinix, Equinix, is part of our press release, or we install on your site. So the technical account managers is assigned, he would call up theCUBE and say, "When is it okay for us to come install the storage?" We install it. You don't install anything. You just say, here's your space. Go ahead and install. We do the installation. You then of course do the normal rationing of the capacity to this goes to this Oracle, this goes to SAP. This goes to Mongo or Cassandra, right? You do that part, but we install it. We get it up and going. We get it turned on. We hook it up to your switching infrastructure. If you've got switching infrastructure, we do all of that. And then when you need more capacity, we use our storage insights pro which automatically monitors capacity, performance, and potential tech support problems. So we give you 50% extra, right? If you drop that to 25%, so you now don't have 50% extra anymore, you only have 25% extra, we'll, the technical account manager would call you and say, "Dave, do you know that we'd like to come install extra capacity at no charge to get you back up to that 50% margin?" So we always call because it's on your site or in your Colo facility, right? We own the asset, but we set it up and you know, it takes a week or two, whatever it takes to ship to whatever location. Now by the way, our storage as a service for 2021 will be in North America and Europe only, we are really expanding our storage as a service outside into Asia and into Latin America, et cetera, but not until 2022. So we'll start out with North America and Europe first. >> So I presume part of that is figuring out just the compensation models right? And so how, how did you solve that? I mean, you can't, you know, you don't seem to be struggling with that. Like some do. I think there's some people dipping their toes in the water. Was that because, you know, IBM's got experience with like SAS pricing or how were you thinking about that and how did you deal with kind of the internal (indistinct) >> Sure. So, first of all, we've had for several years, our storage utility model. >> Right? >> Our storage utility model has been sort of a hybrid part CapEx and part OpEx. So first of all, we were already halfway there to an OpEx model with our storage utility model that's item, number one. It also gave us the experience of the billing. So for example, we bill you for a full quarter. We don't send you a monthly bill. We send you a quarterly bill. And guess what, we always bill you in arrears. So for example, since theCUBE is going to be a customer this quarter, we will send you a bill for this quarter in October for the October quarter, we'll send you a bill for that quarter in January. Okay. And if it goes up, it goes up. If it goes down, it goes down. And if you don't use any variable, there's no bill. Because what we do is the base you pay for once a year, the variable you pay for by on a quarterly basis. So if you, if you are within the base, we don't send you a bill at all because there's no bill. You didn't go into the variable capacity area at all. >> I love that. >> When you have a variable It can go up and down. >> Is that unique to some, do some competitors try to charge you up front? Like if it's a one-year term. (Dave laughs) >> Everbody charges, everybody builds yearly on the base capacity. Pretty much everyone does that. >> Okay, so upfront you pay for the base? Okay. >> Right. And the variable can be zero. If you really only use the base, then there is no variable. We only bill for it's a pay for what you use model. So if you don't use any of the variable, we never charge you for variable. Now, you know, because you guys have written about it, storage grows exponentially. So the odds of them ending up needing some of the variable is moderately high. The other thing we've done is we didn't just look at what we've done with our storage utility model, but we actually looked at Cloud providers. And in fact, not only IBM storage, but almost every of our competitors does a comparison to Cloud pricing. And when you do apples to apples, Cloud vendors are more expensive than storage as a services, not just from us, but pretty much for a moment. So let's take an example. We're Six Nines by default. Okay. So as you know, most Cloud providers provide three or Fournines as the default. They'll let you get five or Six Nines, but guess what? They charge you extra. So item number one. Second thing, performance, as you know, the performance of Cloud storage is usually very weak, but you can make it faster if you want to. They charge extra for that. We're sitting at 2,250 terabytes per IOPS, excuse me, per terabytes. That's incredible performance If you've got 100 terabytes, okay. And if your applications and workloads and that's the worst case, by the way, which differentiates from our competitors who usually quote the best case, we quote you the worst case and our worst case by the way, is almost always higher than their best cases in each of the tiers. So at their middle tier, our worst case is usually better than their best case. But the point is, if you get 4,000 IOPS per terabyte and you're on a tier two contract, it's a two-tier contract. And in fact, let's say that theCUBE has a five-year deal. And we base this on our FlashSystem technology. And so let's say for tier two, for sake of argument, FlashSystem, 7,200. We come out two years after theCUBE has it installed with the FlashSystem, 7,400. And let's say the FlashSystem, 7,400, won't deliver a 2,250 IOPS per terabyte, but 5,000, if we choose to replace it, 'cause remember it's our physical property. We own it. If we choose to replace that 7,200 with a 7,400, and now you get 5,000 IOPS per terabyte, it's free. You signed a tier two contract for five years. So two years later, if we decide to put a different physical system there and it's faster, or has four more software features, we don't charge you for any of that. You signed an SLA for tier two. >> You haven't Paid for capacity, right? All right. >> You are paying for the capacity (indistinct) performance, you don't pay for that. If we swap it out and the, the array is physically faster, and has got five new software features. You pay nothing, you pay what your original contract was based on the capacity. >> What I'm saying is you're learning from the Cloud providers 'cause you are a Cloud provider. But you know, a lot of the Cloud providers always sort of talk about how they lower prices. They lower prices, but you know, well, you worked at storage companies your whole life and they, they lower prices on a regular basis because they 'cause the cost of the curve. And so. >> Right. The cost of storage to Cloud, I mean, the average price decline in the storage industry is between 15 and 25%, depending on the year, every single year. >> Right. >> As, you know, you used to be with one of those analysts firms that used to track it by the numbers. So you've seen the numbers. >> For sure. Absolutely. >> On average it drops 15 to 25% every year. >> So, what's driving this then? If it's, it's not necessarily, is it the shift from, from CapEx to OPEX? Is it just a more convenient model than on a Cloud like model? How do you see that? >> So what's happened in IT overall is of course it started with people like salesforce.com. Well, over 10 years ago, and of course it's swept the software industry software as a service. So once that happened, then you now see infrastructure as a service, servers, switches, storage, and an IBM with our storage as a service, we're providing that storage capability. So that as a service model, getting off of the traditional licensing in the software world, which still is out there, but it's mostly now is mostly software as a service has now moved into the infrastructure space. From our perspective, we are giving our business partners and our customers, the choice. You still want to buy it. No problem. You want to lease it? No problem. You want a full OpEx model. No problem. So for us, we're able to offer any of the three options. The, as a service model that started in software has moved now into the systems world. So people want to change often that CapEx into OpEx, we can even see Global Fortune 500s where one division is doing something and a different division might do something else, or they might do it different by geography. In a certain geography, they buy our FlashSystem products and other geographies they lease them. And in other geographies it's, as a service. We are delivering the same feature, function, benefit from a performance availability software function. We just give them a different way to procure. Do you want CapEx you want leasing or OpEx you pick what you want, we'll deliver the right solution for you. >> So, you got the optionality. And that's great. You've thought that out, but, but the reason I'm asking Eric, is I'm trying to figure out this is not just for you for everybody. Is this a check-off item or is this going to be the prevailing way in which storage is consumed? So if you had, if you had a guess, let's go far out. So we're not making any near-term forecast, but end of the decade, is this going to be the dominant model or is it going to be, you know, one of the few. >> It will be one of a few, but it'll be a big few. It'll be the big, one of the biggest. So for sake of argument, there we'll still be CapEx, they'll still be OpEx they'll still be, or there will be OpEx and they're still be leasing, but I will bet you, you know, at the end of this decade, it'll be 40 to 50% will be on the OpEx model. And the other two will have the other 50%. I don't think it's going to move to everything 'cause remember, it's a little easier during the software world. In the system world, you've got to put the storage, the servers, or the networking on the prem, right? Otherwise you're not truly, you know, you got to make it a true OpEx model. There's legal restrictions. You have to make it OpEx, if not, then, you know, based on the a country's practice, depending on the country, you're in, they could say, "Well, no, you really bought that. It's not really a service model." So there's legal constraints that the software worldwise easier to get through and easier to get to bypass. Right? So, and remember, now everything is software as a service, but go back when salesforce.com was started, everyone in the enterprise was doing ELAs and all the small companies were buying some sort of contract, right, or buying by the (indistinct) basis. It took a while for that to change. Now, obviously the predominant model is software as a service, but I would argue given when salesforce.com started, which was, you know, 2007 or so, it took a good 10 years for software as a service to become the dominant level. So I think A, it won't take 10 full years because the software world has blazed a trail now for the systems world. But I do think you'll see, right. We're sitting here know halfway through 2021, that you're going to have a huge percentage. Like I said, the dominant percentage will be OpEx, but the other two will still be there as well. >> Right. >> By the way, you know in software, almost, no one's doing ELAs these days, right? A few people still do, but it's very rare, right? It's all software as a service. So we see that over time doing the same thing in the, in the infrastructure side, but we do think it will be slower. And we'll, we'll offer all three as, as long as customers want it. >> I think you're right. I think it's going to be mixed. Like, do I care more about my income statement or my balance sheet and the different companies or individual different divisions are going to have different requirements. Eric, you got to leave it there. Thanks much for your time and taking us through this announcement. Always great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. We really appreciate our time with theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat funk jazz music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. What does every CIO want to do? They want to support the business as it evolves and transforms, using data as that catalyst for better customer experience, improved operations, and more profitable options. But to do that we have to come up with a way of improving the underlying infrastructure that makes all this possible. We can't have a situation where we introduce more complex applications in response to richer business needs and have that translated into non-scalable underlying technology. CIOs in 2020 and beyond have to increasingly push their suppliers to make things simpler. And that's true in all domains, but perhaps especially storage, where the explosion of data is driving so many of these changes. So what does it mean to say that storage can be made more simple? Well to have that conversation we're going to be speaking with Eric Herzog, CMO and VP of Global Channels at IBM Storage, about, quite frankly, an announcement that IBM's doing to specifically address that question, making storage simpler. Eric, thanks very much for coming back to theCUBE. >> Great, thank you. We love to be here. >> All right, I know you got an announcement to talk about, but give us the update. What's going on with IBM Storage? >> Well, I think the big thing is, clients have told us, storage is too complex. We have a multitude of different platforms, an entry product, a mid-range product, a high-end product, then we have to traverse to the cloud. Why can't we get a simple, easy to use, but very robust feature set? So at IBM Storage with this FlashSystem announcement, we have a family that traverses entry, mid-range, enterprise and automatically can go out to a hybrid multicloud environment, all driven across a common platform, common API, common software, our award-winning Spectrum Virtualize, and innovative technologies around, whether it be cyber-resiliency, performance, incredible performance, ease of use, easier and easier to use. For example, we can do AI-based automated tiering from one flash array to another, or from storage class memory to flash. Innovation, at the same time driving better value out of the storage but not charging a lot of extra money for these features. In fact, our FlashSystems announcement, the platforms, depending on the configuration, can be as much as 50% lower than our previous generation. Now that's delivering value, but at the same time we added enhanced features, for example, the capability of even better container support than we already had in our older platform. Or our new FlashCore Modules that can deliver performance in a cluster of up to 17.2 million IOPS, up from our previous performance of 15. Yet, as I said before, delivering that enterprise value and those enterprise data services, in this case I think you said, depending on the config, up to as much as 50% less expensive than some of our previous generation products. >> So let me unpack that a little bit. So, historically, when you look at, or even today, when you look at how storage product lines are set up, they're typically set up for one footprint for the low end, one or more footprints in the mid-range, and then one or more footprints at the high-end. And those are differentiated by the characteristics of the technologies being employed, the function and services that are being offered, and the prices and financial arrangements that are part of it. Are you talking about, essentially, a common product line that is differentiated only by the configuration needs of the volume and workloads? >> Exactly. The FlashSystem traverses entry, mid-range, enterprise, and can automatically get you out to a hybrid multicloud environment, same APIs, same software, same management infrastructure. Our Storage Insights product, which is a could-based storage manager and predictive analytics, works on the entry product, at no charge, mid-range product at no charge, the enterprise product at no charge, and we've even added, in that solution, support for non-IBM platforms, again. So, delivering more value across a standard platform with a common API, a common software. Remember, today's storage is growing exponentially. Are the enterprise customers getting exponentially more storage admins? No. In fact, many of the big enterprises, after the downturn of '08 and '09 had to cut back on storage resources. They haven't hired back to how many storage resources they had in 2007 or '8. They've gotten back to full IT, but a lot of those guys are DevOps people or other functions, so, the storage admins and the IT infrastructure admins have to manage extra petabytes, extra exabytes depending on the type of company. So one platform that can do that and traverse out to the cloud automatically, gives you that innovation and that value. In fact, two of our competitors, just as example, do the same thing, have four platforms. Two other have three. We can do it with one. Simple platform, common API, common storage management, common interface, incredible performance, cyber-resiliency, but all built in something that's a common data management infrastructure with common data software, yet continuing to innovate as we've done with this release of the FlashSystem family. >> OK, so talk about the things that, common API, common software, also, I presume, common, the core module, that FlashCore Module that you have, common across the family as well? >> Almost all the family. At the very entry space we still do use interstandard SSDs but we can get as low as a street price for all-flash config of $16,000 for an all-flash array. Two, three years ago that would've been unheard of. And, by the way, it had six lines of availability, same software interface and API as a system that could go up to millions of dollars at the way high end, right? And anything in between. So common ease of use, common management, simple to manage, simple to deploy, simple to use, but not simple in the value proposition. Reduce the TCO, reduce the ROI, reduce the operational manpower, they're overtaxed as it is. So by making this across the portfolio with the FlashSystem and go out to the hybrid multicloud but bringing in all this high technology such as our FlashCore Modules and, as I said, at a reduced price to the previous generation. What more could you ask for? >> OK, so you've got some promises that you made in 2019 that you're also actually realizing. One of my favorite ones, something I think is pretty important, is storage class memory. Talk about how some of those 2019 promises are being realized in this announcement. >> So what we did is, when we announced our first FlashSystem family in 2018 using our new NVMe FlashCore Modules, we had an older FlashSystem family for several years that used, you know, the standard SaaS interface. But our first NVMe product was announced in the summer of 2018. At that time we said, all the way back then, that in early '20 we would be start shipping storage class memory. Now, by the way, those FlashSystems NVMe products that we announced back then, actually can still use storage class memory, so, we're protecting the investment of our installed base. Again, innovation with value on the installed base. >> A very IBM thing to do. >> Yes, we want to take care of the installed base, we also want to have new modern technologies, like storage class memory, like improved performance and capacity in our FlashCore Modules where we take off the shelf Flash and create our own modules. Seven year media warranty, up to 17.2 million IOPS, 17 mites of latency, which is 30% better than our next nearest competitor. By the way, we can create a 17 million IOP config in only eight rack U. One of our competitors gets close, 15 million, but it takes them 40 rack U. Again, operational manpower, 40 rack U's harder to manage, simplicity of deployment, it's harder to deploy all that in 40 rack U, we can do it in eight. >> And pricing. >> Yes. And we've even brought out now, a preconfigured rack. So what we call the FlashSystem 9200R built into the rack with a switching infrastructure, with the storage you need, IBM services will deploy it for you, that's part of the deal, and you can create big solutions that can scale dramatically. >> Now R stands for hybrid? >> Rack. >> Rack. Well talk to me about some of the hybrid packaging that you're bringing out for hybrid cloud. >> Sure, so, from a hybrid cloud perspective, our Spectrum Virtualize software, which sits on-prem, entry, mid-range and at the upper end, can traverse to a cloud called Spectrum Virtualize for Cloud. Now, one of the keys things of Spectrum Virtualize, both on-prem and our cloud version, is it supports not only IBM arrays, but through a storage virtualisation technology, over 450 arrays from multi-vendors, and in short our competition. So we can take our arrays, and automatically go out to the cloud. We can do a lot of things. Cloud air gapping, to help with malware and ransonware protection, DR, snapshots and replicas. Not only can the new FlashSystem family do that, to Spectrum Virtualize on-prem and then out, but Spectrum Virtualize coming on our FlashSystem portfolio can actually virtualize non-IBM arrays and give them the same enterprise functionality and in this case, hybrid cloud technology, not only for us, but for our competitors products as well. One user interface. Now talk about simple. Our own products, again one family, entry, mid-range and enterprise traversing the cloud. And by the way, for those of you who are heterogeneous, we can deliver those enterprise class services, including going out to a hybrid multi-cloud configuration, for our competitors products as well. One user interface, one throat to choke, one support infrastructure with our Storage Insights platform, so it's a great way to make things easier, cut the CAPEX and OPEX, but not cut the innovation. We believe in value and innovation, but in an easy deploy methodology, so that you're not overly complex. And that is killing people, the complexity of their solutions. >> All right. So there's a couple of things about cloud, as we move forward, that are going to be especially interesting. One of them is going to be containers. Everybody's talking about, and IBM's been talking about, you've been talking about this, we've talked about this a number of times, about how containers and storage and data are going to come together. How do you see this announcement supporting those emerging and evolving need for container-based applications in the enterprise. >> So, first of all, it's often tied to hybrid multi-cloudness. Many of the hybrid cloud configurations are configured on a container based environment. We support Red Hat OpenShift. We support Kubernetes environments. We can provide on these systems at no charge, persistent storage for those configurations. We also, although it does require a backup package, Spectrum Protect, the capability of backing up that persistent storage in an OpenShift or Kubernetes environment. So really it's critical. Part of our simplicity is this FlashSystem platform with this technology, can support bare metal workloads, virtualised workloads, VMware, HyperV, KVM, OVM, and now container workloads. And we do see, for the next coming years, think about bare metal. Bare metal is as old as I am. That's pretty old. Well we got tons of customers still got bare metal applications, but everyone's also gone virtualized. So it's not, are we going to have one? It's you're going to have all three. So with the FlashSystems family, and what we have with Spectrum Virtualized software, what we have with our container support, we need with bare metal support, incredible performance, whatever you need, VMware integration, HyperV integration, everything you need for a virtualized environment, and for a container environment, we have everything too. And we do think the, especially the mid to big accounts, are going to try run all three, at least for the next couple of years. This gives you a platform that can do that, at the entry point, up to the high end, and then out to a hybrid multi-cloud environment. >> With that common software and APIs across. Now, every year that you and I have talked, you've been especially passionate about the need for turning the crank, and evolving and improving the nature of automation, which is another one of the absolute necessities, as we start thinking about cloud. How is this announcement helping to take that next step, turn the crank in automation? >> So a couple of things. One is our support now for Ansible, so offering that Ansible support, integrates into the container management frameworks. Second thing is, we have a ton of AI-type specific based technology built into the FlashSystem platform. First is our cloud based storage and management predictive analytics package, Storage Insights. The base version comes for free across our whole portfolio, whether it be entry, mid-range or high-end, across the whole FlashSystems family. It gives you predictive analytics. If you really do have a support problem, it eases the support issues. For example, instead of me saying, "Peter send me those log files." Guess what? We can see the log files. And we can do it right there while you're on the phone. You've got a problem? Let's make it easier for you to get it solved. So Storage Insights across AI based, predictive analytics, performance, configuration issues, all predicatively done, so AI based. Secondly, we've integrated AI in to our Spectrum Virtualize product. So as exemplar, easier to your technology, can allow you to tier data from storage class memory to Flash, as an example, and guess what it does? It automatically knows based on usage patterns, where the data should go. Should it be on the storage class memory? Should it be on Flash core modules? And in fact, we can create a configuration, we have Flash core modules and introduce standard SSDs, which are both Flash, but our Flash core modules are substantially faster, much better latency, like I said, 30% better than the next nearest competition, up to 17.2 million IOPS. The next closest is 15. And in fact, it's interesting, one of our competitors has used storage class memory as a read cache. It dramatically helps them. But they go from 250 publicly stated mites of latency, to 125. With this product, the FlashSystem, anything that uses our Flash core modules, our FlashSystems semi 200, our FlashSystem 9200 product, and the 9200-R product. We can do 70 mites of latency, so almost twice as fast, without using storage class memory. So think what that storage class memory will offer. So we can create hybrid configurations, with StorageClass and Flash, you could have our Flash core modules, and introduce standard SSDs if you want, but it's all AI based. So we have AI based in our Storage Insights, predictive analytics, management and support infrastructure. And we have predictive analytics in things like our Easy Tier. So not only do we think storage is a critical foundation for the AI application workload and use case, which it is, but you need to imbue your storage, which we've done across FlashSystems, including what we've done with our cloud edition, because Spectrum Virtualize has a cloud edition, and an on-prem edition, seamless transparency, but AI in across that entire platform, using Spectrum Virtualize. >> All right, so let me summarize. We've got an absolute requirement from enterprise, to make storage simpler, which requires simple product families with more commonality, where that commonality delivers great value, and at the same time the option to innovate, where that innovation's going to create value. We have a lot simpler set of interfaces and technologies, as you said they're common, but they are more focused on the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud world, that we're working in right now, that brings more automation and more high-quality storage services to bear wherever you are in the enterprise. So I've got to ask you one more question. I'm a storage administrator, or a person who is administering data, inside the infrastructure. I used to think of doing things this way, what is the one or two things that I'm going to do differently as a consequence of this kind of an announcement? >> So I think the first one, it's going to reduce your operational expenses and your operational man power, because you have a common API, a common software platform, a common foundation for data management and data movement, it's not going to be as complex for you to pull your storage configurations. Second thing, you don't have to make as many choices between high-end workloads, mid-range workloads, and entry workloads. Six lines across the board. Enterprise class data services across the board. So when you think simple, don't think simple as simplistic, low-end. This is a simple to use, simple deploy, simple to manage product, with extensive innovation and a price that's- >> So simple to secure? >> And simple to secure. Data rest encryption across the portfolio. And in fact those that use our FlashCore Modules, no performance hit on encryption, and no performance hit on data compression. So it can help you shrink the actual amount you need to buy from us, which sounds sort of crazy, that a storage company would do that, but with our data reduction technologies, compression being one of them, there's no performance hits, you can compress compressable workloads, and now, anything with a FlashCore Module, which by the way, happens to be FIPS 140-2 certified, there's no excuse not to encrypt, because encryption, as you know, has had a performance hit in the past. Now, our 7200, our 5100 FlashSystem, and our FlashSystem 9200 and 9200R, there's no performance on encrypting, so it gives you that extra resiliency, that you need in a storage world, and you don't get a non-compression, which helps you shrink how much you end up buying from IBM. So that's the type of innovation we deliver, in a simple to use, easy to deploy, easy to manage but incredible innovative value, brought into a very innovative solution, across the board, not just let's innovate at the high end or you know what I mean? Trying to make that innovation spread, which, by the way, makes it easier for the storage guy. >> Well, look, in a world, even inside a single enterprise, you're going to have branch offices, you're going to have local this, the edge, you can't let the bad guys in on a lesser platform that then can hit data on a higher end platform. So the days of presuming that there's this great differentiation in the tier are slowly coming to an end as everything becomes increasingly integrated. >> Well as you've pointed out many times, data is the asset. Not the most valuable one. It is the asset of today's digital enterprise and it doesn't matter whether you're a global Fortune 500, or you're a (mumble). Everybody is a digital enterprise these days, big, medium or small. So cyber resiliency is important, cutting costs is important, being able to modernize and optimize your infrastructure, simply and easily. The small guys don't have a storage guy, and a network guy and a server guy, they have the IT guy. And even the big guys, who used to have hundreds of storage admins in some cases, don't have hundreds any more. They've got a lot of IT people, but they cut back so these storage admins and infrastructure admins in these global enterprise, they're managing 10, 20 times the amount of storage they managed even two or three years ago. So, simple, across the board, and of course hyper multicloud is critical to these configurations. >> Eric, it's a great annoucement, congratulations to IBM to actually delivering on what your promises are. Once again, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Great, thank you very much Peter. >> And thanks to you, again, for participating in this CUBE conversation, I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (upbeat, jazz music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2020, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody, we're here at Cisco Live, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is day one, really, we started day zero yesterday. Eric Herzog is here, he's the CMO and Vice President of Storage Channels. Probably been on theCUBE more than anybody, with the possible exception of Pat Gelsinger, but you might surpass him this week, Eric. Great to see you. >> Great to see you guys, love being on theCUBE, and really appreciate the coverage you do of the entire industry. >> This is a big show for you guys. I was coming down the escalator, I saw up next Eric Herzog, so I sat down and caught the beginning of your presentation yesterday. You were talking about multicloud, which we're going to get into, you talked about cybersecurity, well let's sort of recap what you told the audience there and really let's dig in. >> Sure, well, first thing is, IBM is a strong partner of Cisco, I mean they're a strong partner of ours both ways. We do all kinds of joint activities with them on the storage side, but in other divisions as well. The security guys do stuff with Cisco, the services guys do a ton of stuff with Cisco. So Cisco's one of our valued partners, which is why we're here at the show, and obviously, as you guys know, with a lot of the coverage you do to the storage industry, that is considered one of the big storage shows, you know, in the industry, and has been a very strong show for IBM Storage and what we do. >> Yeah, and I feel like, you know, it brings together storage folks, whether it's data protection, or primary storage, and sort of is a collection point, because Cisco is a very partner-friendly organization. So talk a little bit about how you go to market, how you guys see the multicloud world, and what each of you brings to the table. >> Well, so we see it in a couple of different facts. So first of all, the day of public cloud only or on-prem only is long gone. There are a few companies that use public cloud only, but yeah, when you're talking mid-size enterprise, and certainly into let's say the global 2500, that just doesn't work. So certain workloads reside well in the cloud, and certain workloads reside well on-prem, and there's certain that can back and forth, right, developed in a cloud but then move it back on, for example, highly transactional workload, once you get going on that, you're not going to run that on any cloud provider, but that doesn't mean you can't develop the app, test the app, out in the cloud and then bring it back on. So we also see that the days of a cloud provider for big enterprise and again up to the 2500 of the global fortunes, that's not true either, because just as with other infrastructure and other technologies, they often have multiple vendors, and in fact, you know, what I've seen from talking to CIOs is, if they have three cloud providers, that's low. Many of 'em talk about five or six, whether that be for legal reasons, whether that be for security reasons, or of course the easy one, which is, we need to get a good price, and if we just use one vendor, we're not going to get a good price. And cloud is mature, cloud's not new anymore, the cloud is pretty old, it's basically, sort of, version three of the internet, (laughs) and so, you know, I think some of the procurement guys are a little savvy about why would you only use Amazon or only use Azure or only use Google or only use IBM Cloud. Why not use a couple to keep them, you know, which is kind of normal when procurement gets involved, and say, cloud is not new anymore, so that means procurement gets involved. >> Well, and it's kind of, comes down to the workload. You got certain clouds that are better, you have Microsoft if you want collaboration, you have Amazon if you want infrastructure for devs, on-prem if you want, you know, family jewels. So I got a question for you. So if you look at, you know, it's early 2020, entering a new decade, if you look at the last decade, some of the big themes. You had the consumerization of IT, you had, you know, Web 2.0, you obviously had the big data meme, which came and went and now it's got an AI. And of course you had cloud. So those are the things that brought us here over the last 10 years of innovation. How do you see the next 10 years? What are going to be those innovation drivers? >> Well I think one of the big innovations from a cloud perspective is like, truly deploying cloud. Not playing with the cloud, but really deploying the cloud. Obviously when I say cloud, I would include private cloud utilization. Basically, when you think on-prem in my world, on-prem is really a private cloud talking to a public cloud. That's how you get a multicloud, or, if you will, a hybrid cloud. Some people still think when you talk hybrid, like literally, bare metal servers talking to the cloud, and that just isn't true, because when you look at certainly the global 2500, I can't think any of them what isn't essentially running a private cloud inside their own walls, and then, whether they're going out or not, most do, but the few that don't, they mimic a public cloud inside because of the value they see in moving workloads around, easy deployment, and scale up and scale down, whether that be storage or servers or whatever the infrastructure is, let alone the app. So I think what you're going to see now is a recognization that it's not just private cloud, it's not just public cloud, things are going to go back and forth, and basically, it's going to be a true hybrid cloud world, and I also think with the cloud maturity, this idea of a multicloud, 'cause some people think multicloud is basically private cloud talking to public cloud, and I see multicloud as not just that, but literally, I'm a big company, I'm going to use eight or nine cloud providers to keep everybody honest, or, as you just said, Dave, and put it out, certain clouds are better for certain workloads, so just as certain storage or certain servers are better when it's on-prem, that doesn't surprise us, certain cloud vendors specialize in the apps. >> Right, so Eric, we know IBM and Cisco have had a very successful partnership with the VersaStack. If you talk about in your data center, in IBM Storage, Cisco networking in servers. When I hear both IBM and Cisco talking about the message for hybrid and multicloud, they talk the software solutions you have, the management in various pieces and integration that Cisco's doing. Help me understand where VersaStack fits into that broader message that you were just talking about. >> So we have VersaStack solutions built around primarily our FlashSystems which use our Spectrum Virtualize software. Spectrum Virtualize not only supports IBM arrays, but over 500 other arrays that are not ours. But we also have a version of Spectrum Virtualize that will work with AWS and IBM Cloud and sits in a virtual machine at the cloud providers. So whether it be test and dev, whether it be migration, whether it business continuity and disaster recovery, or whether it be what I'll call logical cloud error gapping. We can do that for ourselves, when it's not a VersaStack, out to the cloud and back. And then we also have solutions in the VersaStack world that are built around our Spectrum Scale product for big data and AI. So Spectrum Scale goes out and back to the cloud, Spectrum Virtualize, and those are embedded on the arrays that come in a VersaStack solution. >> I want to bring it back to cloud a little bit. We were talking about workloads and sort of what Furrier calls horses for courses. IBM has a public cloud, and I would put forth that your wheelhouse, IBM's wheelhouse for cloud workload is the hybrid mission-critical work that's being done on-prem today in the large IBM customer base, and to the extent that some of that work's going to move into the cloud. The logical place to put that is the IBM Cloud. Here's why. You could argue speeds and feeds and features and function all day long. The migration cost of moving data and workloads from wherever, on-prem into a cloud or from on-prem into another platform are onerous. Any CIO will tell you that. So to the extent that you can minimize those migration costs, the business case for, in IBM's case, for staying within that blue blanket, is going to be overwhelmingly positive relative to having to migrate. That's my premise. So I wonder if you could comment on that, and talk about, you know, what's happening in that hybrid world specifically with your cloud? >> Well, yeah, the key thing from our perspective is we are basically running block data or file data, and we just see ourselves sitting in IBM Cloud. So when you've got a FlashSystem product or you've got our Elastic Storage System 3000, when you're talking to the IBM Cloud, you think you're talking to another one of our boxes sitting on-prem. So what we do is make that transition completely seamless, and moving data back and forth is seamless, and that's because we take a version of our software and stick in a virtual machine running at the cloud provider, in this case IBM Cloud. So the movement of data back and forth, whether it be our FlashSystem product, even we have our DS8000 can do the same thing, is very easy for an IBM customer to move to an IBM Cloud. That said, just to make sure that we're covering, and in the year of multicloud, remember the IBM Cloud division just released the Multicloud Manager, you know, second half of last year, recognizing that while they want people to focus on the IBM Cloud, they're being realistic that they're going to have multiple cloud vendors. So we've followed that mantra too, and made sure that we've followed what they're doing. As they were going to multicloud, we made sure we were supporting other clouds besides them. But from IBM to IBM Cloud it's easy to do, it's easy to traverse, and basically, our software sits on the other side, and it basically is as if we're talking to an array on prem but we're really not, we're out in the cloud. We make it seamless. >> So testing my premise, I mean again, my argument is that the complexity of that migration is going to determine in part what cloud you should go to. If it's a simple migration, and it's better, and the customer decides okay it's better off on AWS, you as a storage supplier don't care. >> That is true. >> It's agnostic to you. IBM, as a supplier of multicloud management doesn't care. I'm sure you'd rather have it run on the IBM Cloud, but if the customer says, "No, we're going to run it "over here on Azure", you say, "Great. "We're going to help you manage that experience across clouds". >> Absolutely. So, as an IBM shareholder, we wanted to go to IBM Cloud. As a realist, with what CIOs say, which is I'm probably going to use multiple clouds, we want to make sure whatever cloud they pick, hopefully IBM first, but they're going to have a secondary cloud, we want to make sure we capture that footprint regardless, and that's what we've done. As I've said for years and years, a partial PO is better than no PO. So if they use our storage and go to a competitor of IBM Cloud, while I don't like that as a shareholder, it's still good for IBM, 'cause we're still getting money from the storage division, even though we're not working with IBM Cloud. So we make it as flexible as possible for the customer, The Multicloud Manager is about customer choice, which is leading with IBM Cloud, but if they want to use a, and again, I think it's a realization at IBM Corporate that no one's going to use just one cloud provider, and so we want to make sure we empower that. Leading with IBM Cloud first, always leading with IBM Cloud first, but we want to get all of their business, and that means, other areas, for example, the Red Hat team. Red Hat works with every cloud, right? And they don't really necessarily lead with IBM Cloud, but they work with IBM Cloud all right, but guess what, IBM gets the revenue no matter what. So I don't see it's like the old traditional component guy with an OEM deal, but it kind of sort of is. 'Cause we can make money no matter what, and that's good for the IBM Corporation, but we do always lead with IBM Cloud first but we work with everybody. >> Right, so Eric, we'd agree with your point that data is not just going to live one place. One area that there's huge opportunity that I'd love to get your comment here on is edge. So we talked about, you know, the data center, we talked about public cloud. Cisco's talking a lot about their edge strategy, and one of our questions is how will they enable their partners and help grow that ecosystem? So love to hear your thoughts on edge, and any synergies between what Cisco's doing and IBM in that standpoint. >> So the thing from an edge perspective for us, is built around our new Elastic Storage System 3000, which we announced in Q4. And while it's ideal for the typical big data and AI workloads, runs Spectrum Scale, we have many a customers with Scale that are exabytes in production, so we can go big, but we also go small. It's a compact 2U all-flash array, up to 400 terabytes, that can easily be deployed at a remote location, an oil well, right, or I should say, a platform, oil platform, could be deployed obviously if you think about what's going on in the building space or I should say the skyscraper space, they're all computerized now. So you'd have that as an edge processing box, whether that be for the heating systems, the security systems, we can do that at the edge, but because of Spectrum Scale you could also send it back to whatever their core is, whether that be their core data center or whether they're working with a cloud provider. So for us, the ideal solution for us, is built around the Elastic Storage System 3000. Self-contained, two rack U, all-flash, but with Spectrum Scale on it, versus what we normally sell with our all-flash arrays, which tends to be our Spectrum Virtualize for block. This is file-based, can do the analytics at the edge, and then move the data to whatever target they want. So the source would be the ESS 3000 at the edge box, doing processing at the edge, such as an oil platform or in, I don't know what really you call it, but, you know, the guys that own all the buildings, right, who have all this stuff computerized. So that's at the edge, and then wherever their core data center is, or their cloud partner they can go that way. So it's an ideal solution because you can go back and forth to the cloud or back to their core data center, but do it with a super-compact, very high performance analytics engine that can sit at the edge. >> You know, I want to talk a little bit about business. I remember seven years ago, we covered, theCUBE, the z13 announcement, and I was talking to a practitioner at a very large bank, and I said, "You going to buy this thing?", this is the z13, you know, a couple of generations ago. He says, "Yeah, absolutely, I'll buy it sight unseen". I said, "Really, sight unseen?" He goes, "Yeah, no question. "By going to the upgrade, I'm able to drive "more transactions through my system "in a certain amount of time. "That's dropping revenue right to my bottom line. "It's a no-brainer for me." So fast forward to the z15 announcement in September in my breaking analysis, I said, "Look, IBM's going to have a great Q4 in systems", and the thing you did in storage is you synchronized, I don't know if it was by design or what, you synchronized the DS8000, new 8000 announcement with the z15, and I predicted at the time you're going to see an uptick in both the systems business, which we saw, huge, 63%, and the storage business grew I think three points as well. So I wonder if you can talk about that. Was that again by design, was it a little bit of luck involved, and you know, give us an update. >> So that was by design. When the z14 came out, which is right when I first come over from EMC, one of the things I said to my guys is, "Let's see, we have "the number one storage platform on the mainframe "in revenue, according to the analysts that check revenue. "When they launch a box, why are we not launching with them?" So for example, we were in that original press release on the z14, and then they ran a series of roadshows all over the world, probably 60. I said, "Well don't you guys do the roadshows?", and my team said, "No, we didn't do that on z12 and 13". I said, "Well were are now, because we're the number one "mainframe storage company". Why would we not go out there, get 20 minutes to speak, the bulk of it would be on the Zs. So A, we did that of course with this launch, but we also made sure that on day one launch, we were part of the launch and truly integrated. Why IBM hadn't been doing for a while is kind of beyond me, especially with our market position. So it helped us with a great quarter, helped us in the field, now by the way, we did talk about other areas that grew publicly, so there were other areas, particularly all-flash. Now we do have an all-flash 8900 of course, and the high-end tape grew as well, but our overall all-flash, both at the high end, mid range and entry, all grew. So all-flash for us was a home run. Yeah, I would argue that, you know, on the Z side, it was grand slam home run, but it was a home run even for the entry flash, which did very, very well as well. So, you know, we're hitting the right wheelhouse on flash, we led with the DS8900 attached to the Z, but some of that also pulls through, you get the magic fairy dust stuff, well they have an all-flash array on the Z, 'cause last time we didn't have an all, we had all-flash or hybrids, before that was hybrid and hard drive. This time we just said, "Forget that hybrid stuff. "We're going all-flash." So this helps, if you will, the magic fairy dust across the entire portfolio, because of our power with the mainframe, and you know, even in fact the quarter before, our entry products, we announced six nines of availability on an array that could be as low cost as $US16,000 for RAID 5 all-flash array, and most guys don't offer six nines of availability at the system level, let alone we have 100% availability guaranteed. We do charge extra for that, but most people won't even offer that on entry product, we do. So that's helped overall, and then the Z was a great launch for us. >> Now you guys, you obviously can't give guidance, you have to be very careful about that, but I, as I say, predicted in September that you'd have a good quarter in systems and storage both. I'm on the record now I'm going to say that you're going to continue to see growth, particularly in the storage side, I would say systems as well. So I would look for that. The other thing I want to point out is, you guys, you sell a lot of storage, you sell a lot of storage that sometimes the analysts don't track. When you sell into cloud, for example, IBM Storage Cloud, I don't think you get credit for that, or maybe the services, the global services division. So there's a big chunk of revenue that you don't get credited for, that I just want to highlight. Is that accurate? >> Yeah, so think about it, IBM is a very diverse company, all kinds of acquisitions, tons of different divisions, which we document publicly, and, you know, we do it differently than if it was Zoggan Store. So if I were Zoggan Store, a standalone storage company, I'd get all credit for supporting services, there's all kinds of things I'd get credit for, but because of IBM's history of how the company grew and how company acquired, stuff that is storage that Ed Walsh, or GM, does own, it's somewhat dispersed, and so we don't always get credit on it publicly, but the number we do in storage is substantially larger than what we report, 'cause all we really report is our storage systems business. Even our storage software, which one of the analysts that does numbers has us as the number two storage software company, when we do our public stuff, we don't take credit for that. Now, luckily that analyst publishes a report on the numbers side, and we are shown to be the number two storage software company in the world, but when we do our financial reporting, that, because just the history of IBM, is spread out over other parts of the company, even though our guys do the work on the sales side, the marketing side, the development side, all under Ed Walsh, but you know, part of that's just the history of the company, and all the acquisitions over years and years, remember it's a 100-year-old company. So, you know, just we don't always get all the credit, but we do own it internally, and our teams take and manage most of what is storage in the minds of storage analysts like you guys, you know what storage is, most of that is us. >> I wanted to point that out because a lot of times, practitioners will look at the data, and they'll say, oh wow, the sales person of the competitor will come in and say, "Look at this, we're number one!" But you really got to dig in, ask the questions, and obviously make the decisions for yourself. Eric, great to see you. We're going to see you later on this week as well we're going to dig into cyber. Thanks so much for coming back. >> Great, well thank you, you guys do a great job and theCUBE is literally the best at getting IT information out, particularly all the shows you do all over the world, you guys are top notch. >> Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this break. We're here at Cisco Live in Barcelona, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, John Furrier. We'll be right back.

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

>> From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in Austin, Texas for Pure Accelerate '19. And we're excited to be talking with another one of Pure's happy successful customers. We've got Scott Pedram, the storage architect from One Gas. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So One Gas. Give our audience a little bit of an overview of what One Gas is, what regions you serve, and then dig into your role as a storage architect. >> Of course. So One Gas, we're a natural gas utility company. So we're the downstream, the inline. So we actually deliver the natural gas to our customers, residential and commercial. We operate across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and various regions including Austin. In my role as storage architect, I help, I mean, basically a one-man show. So design the storage, implement the storage, run the storage. And I also help out in other areas such as the servers, the DBAs, networking, kind of a little bit of everything. >> So you've been a Pure customer for about three years. We were talking before we went live. Give us an overview of your storage infrastructure, your IT environment three years ago, and what the impetus was to evaluate Pure. >> Sure. So we were previously an IBM storage shop. I had IBM SAN volume controller backed by DS 8000, FlashSystem 820s, Storwize V7000s, so different tiers of storage all being managed by VSPC. As is common, the warranty runs out on the DS 8000. So it's time to look at a forklift upgrade or whatever the case may be. I had a plan all in place to replace it with IBM, but we are a fully regulated utility company. So I did my due diligence and brought in some competitors. EMT and Pure Storage. Heard Pure's story, especially the Evergreen storage model, and the five and six year total cost of ownership was actually pretty close, but once you went beyond that, there was no contest. Pure won hands down. And again, as a utility company, we like predictable, flat costs. So the fact that we could do that and not have to have this multi-million dollar expense again in just another three or four years. >> So I got to ask you, so TCO, done a lot of TCO studies, and the biggest component of total cost of ownership is labor, humans. So presumably, you did a full TCO, you looked at it. I'm surprised to hear you say that the five-year TCO was about comparable because Pure is, the Kool-Aid injection says it's simpler. It's more modern. Wouldn't that save head count or at least FTE? >> It could if we were a more complex environment, but as it stood, there's me and one other guy kind of as my backup. So, you still have to have somebody to run it, right? >> So that's what I asked so sometimes CFO's will go, Wait a minute. If we're not going to reduce head count, I'm not going to accept that as part of the cost reduction. Is that what's going on here? Because we're going to shift labor to more high value activity so, oftentimes the CFO doesn't count that in his or her business case. Was that the case or did you find that because you're so small it really didn't matter in terms of the management complexity? I'm interested in your thoughts on that. >> We didn't background management complexity when we were calculating TCO. It was purely the cost to acquire the storage and then the maintenance. >> Oh, so there was no management cost? No human capital, okay. >> No. >> And so it's you and somebody else. >> Scott: Correct. >> Have you now spent less time managing the Pure than you did previously with the IBM? >> Oh, for sure. >> Okay. >> And when I first got it I was afraid, am I going to work myself out of a job? >> The Pure? >> 'Cause it was so easy. >> Okay, so, you had two FTE's managing storage. >> Scott: Yeah. >> What percent of your time, prior to Pure, did you spend managing storage versus doing other stuff? (Scott sighs) I mean a rough ballpark. >> Yeah, rough ballpark. >> Dave: Was it 50/50? >> I would say, I was maybe doing 60 to 70% doing just Pure storage before. And now it's 20? >> So you've gone from 60 to 70, let's call it 65% of your time was spent managing storage tuning, troubleshooting, provisioning LANs, provisioning more capacity, planning, all those things that, we love it. Down to 20%. >> Probably. >> Roughly. I'm not going to hold you to it, but. Well I guess we're live TV, so I will hold you to it. (Scott laughing) But that's a significant savings. You can calculate that over five years, right? Take your fully loaded costs and boom, that adds up. What have you done with that time? What are you now doing? I presume you're not just hanging out. >> No, my boss is watching. >> Publicly traded, regulated utility, somebody's watching right? >> No, of course not. No I've been able to be a lot more proactive. So helping out, like I said, with the server teams, the inward teams. Consulting them on looking further. What is our longterm goal or strategy? What's the five year plan, type of thing. Instead of just fighting fires all day. Or, you know, next week we have to deal with this performance issue that's going to be coming up. >> Dave: So you've been able to be more strategic. >> For sure. >> And one more question on this whole, there's intangibles there that everybody always overlooks, but actually when you live them they make a big difference. Has there been a quality effect? In other words, instead of putting out fires you're doing thing that are more strategic. Do you feel like you have better quality infrastructure? And does that affect your business? >> I would say better quality in the fact that it's more consistent. So we ended up sweeping the entire floor with all Pure Storage. So all of production and non-production, in our case, is all on Pure. So the consistency of the latency and the response times and the performance that you get out of the storage. There is no more performance problems. It doesn't exist. >> And in terms of workloads, I know you're running Splunk on FlashArray. Give us some picture of that infrastructure, the workloads that you're running on it. And the stakeholders I can imagine them in different departments and different functions within One Gas that are using this system and not even realizing it because it's just available, it's there. >> Before Splunk, real quick, we had one application, we went to Flash. They thought their processing was broken because it completed so quickly. (Lisa laughing) >> That's a good thought to have. >> Yeah. So they finished so fast they came back to us, it's broken, I'm like, no it's not. (he laughs) >> What's your use case with Splunk? >> With Splunk it started out as cybersecurity and that's kind of what brought it in, but it has since expanded to monitoring, analytics. We actually use it when we roll out our trucks to the field to ensure that we're meeting the SLAs. There's so many different areas where we use Splunk, I'd have to refer to my notes. >> So infrastructure ops has become this big thing, right? And automation and things of that nature? Or not quite there? >> Not so much automation yet. But we do have a plan, a project to start doing more automation. >> And other analytics, I presume? I mean, they're all about analytics, right? >> A lot of our application teams, like our web development team, they use Splunk a lot for their application monitoring and trying to be proactive on that. >> Thinking about the security use case. Security practitioners often tell us, well, we get inundated with incidents. We don't have the time to sort through them all. Does having Splunk on an all FlashArray, high performance all FlashArray, does it affect the response of the security team? Or how does it affect the business, the security side of the business? >> I'm not able to answer that directly, but I can say that I have seen them do a lot of select all type queries, where they're just searching for a needle in a haystack, type of thing. And previously when we had multi-tiered storage those queries took forever, but now that it's all Flash, it's really quick. >> So they spent more time waiting than they do now. I mean that could be a two edge sword. Maybe they more stuff to sift through now. (he laughs) That's somebody else's problem. >> Well the data security is critical because your dealing with customers' data, right? And almost every month we hear about data breaches in the public. Whether it's a bank, or it's a social media platform. Unfortunately they're becoming quite common. But when you're dealing with personal customer data that's a big concern. Some of the things we're hearing Pure talk about is what they're doing with data protection and data security. And also kind of this sift from not looking at data protection as an insurance policy as much as it's an asset because you have so much information, you're storing it for longer, more and more customers, more data. How is that that being reflected up the chain, even up your chain of command and to the executive folks in terms of being confident that what they have your customers data running on in those three states that you talked about, is on a very solid secure platform? >> Well, security, it requires multiple layers. So Pure having always-on encryption is a big help. So if we do have, you know, a failed module that has to be replaced. I don't have to worry about making sure that it's securely erased, destroyed, and all that. 'Cause without the encryption key it's virtually crypto erased. And then of course we have all the security agents on the servers and the applications and our security cyber team managers, all of that. >> And what about cloud? What do you do in cloud? What's the strategy? >> We do cloud where it makes sense. For instance ServiceNow and O365 we're customers to both of those. >> Dave: So SaaS stuff. >> And mostly SaaS. In my opinion doing cloud is doing a lift and shift. And using cloud as infrastructure as a service doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For us anyway. As a utility company we're very pro-capital. So if we just shift that to another provider that's all operational. >> Whereas, take ServiceNow for example and change the operational model. Right? And you had a clear business impact where it wasn't a lift an shift. It was a transformation really. >> Exactly. >> Where do you want to go with Pure and storage infrastructure? It's just like, I just want it to work. I want it to be rock solid, dirt cheap, highly available, you know, high performance, or are there things that you would like to see Pure do that can help drive your business? >> Well I think the announcement today of the FlashArray//C is what I'm probably most exited about, in that I've already asked my business partners to get me some pricing, some quotes on, can I use that for my backups as a back up target? Instead of, you know, the underlying SaaS datadisks. So that's exciting for me. The fact that it's going to be the same software that I'm used to, that's all a plus. >> How are you protecting your Flash arrays today? >> We're implementing Commvault right now So we do leverage Commvault. It's called IntelliSnap. So basically it does a Pure level snapshot and then we can mount that on our media agents. >> Okay, so, using FlashArray//C, that's the right model number, I think. So obviously you want to use Flash, if it's cost effective, for everything. If it's cheaper than spinning Disk why not use it? Do you see any advantage, in theory, for recovery speed? For sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you need to do a fast recovery, I mean, it's on Flash. But with what I'm looking most forward to though is even the ingest of the data, the initial backups. If there's a lot of, you know querying and trying to figure out what's changed and what's not, that can be a lot of disk thrashing on traditional spindle drives. >> So let's look into the future a little bit before we wrap here. You've been a Pure customer for three years now. Presuming you've done some upgrades and swap outs of controllers in that time? >> Not quite yet. In the coming months we will have our first ever green controller swap. I've actually had a failed controller. So effectively the same process. Where one controller's down and didn't have any issues with performance or, >> No downtime, no disruption. >> No downtime. Absolutely not. Even upgrades where they, you know, take one controller down and upgrade it. I'll do those during business hours. >> Are you comfortable with the, go ahead, sorry. >> Just because there's no performance degradation whatsoever. >> So you're obviously comfortable with the architecture. You seem like a pretty happy customer. Some of the critics will say, it's a duel controller architecture, that doesn't bother you? >> No, not at all. (he laughs) >> I had to ask with a straight face. What would you like to see Pure do? If Charlie G. and Carl are sitting right here, what's the one thing that I could do to make your life easier, what would it be? Besides cutting price, you can't say cut price. >> Yeah. You know what, that's a great question. I think what I would have been asking for, top of mind, would have been the lower tier, what they came out with today, the C. >> You know, another criticism from some of the competitors is they don't have tiering. And when you talk to Pure about it they go, oh, we don't need tiering, we don't believe in tiering. What are your thoughts as a practitioner? Would you want to have a tiered array, like high performance Flash, lower in the same array? Or is this not something that is necessary? >> I don't think so. I go back to the consistency. You know we have all of production on Flash now and it's, I don't have to worry about performance. Whereas before I was constantly having to monitor and manage you know, is all the right stuff on the right tier, and it was a headache. >> So automated tiering wasn't so automated? Is that a fair statement? >> It worked fairly well, but there were some cases where it didn't. >> Yeah. So you're better just throwing it at Flash and it'll take care of itself. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Cool. >> So you've got a foundation now that's going to allow One Gas to evolve continually and we look forward to hearing in the next year or so when you go through that first big evergreen upgrade, how that goes. But it sounds like you've made the right choice and the foundation that you've got is pretty strong. And so many other layers of the business are benefiting and they don't even know it. Because as you said before, on of the constituents thought something was broken, it was that fast. >> Correct. >> So well done on your decision. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Scott, for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me about what One Gas has been doing how you're succeeding and we look forward to hearing more of your success. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you, thanks. >> Scott: Appreciate it. >> For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, from Pure Accelerate '19. (upbeat electronic 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)

(sprightly music) >> Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Great. Well, thanks for having us. We love to be participating in this community event, something a little bit different from what we've usually done with theCUBE. We're really excited to be here today. >> Yeah, this is a really special thing that we're trying to do 'cause we're going to introduce some thought leadership concepts, take a look at some recent moves by IBM and then at the end of it, as we've talked about, give an opportunity for the community to come together in the crowd chat. But let me start with this proposition, Eric. Our research, here at Wikibon, pretty strongly shows that we're in the midst of a pretty similar transformation in the industry. Everybody talks about digital transformation, everybody talks about the emergence of AI, big data and related type of technologies are going to have an enormous impact on how businesses operate and how they engage their customers. But we think that, none of that would be possible without some of the fundamental changes that are happening in storage. I mean, a lot of these AI algorithms for knowledge representation and learning have been around for 30, 40 years. What's new, is now we have storage technologies that are not dedicated to persisting data but actually delivering data, and increasingly delivering data over high-value storage services that look like a fabric. And that changes the way we think about applications and we could think about digital business. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's very much about the application, workloads and use cases and you go to digital transformation. And what you need, underneath that is a strong storage highway. From a performance perspective you've got to be able to move data back and forth seamlessly, transparently and automatically, to the cloud, back on prem and from cloud-to-cloud in a multi-cloud environment. All that's critical to go to digital transformation. For any company, big, medium or small. >> So, specifically it's a lot of the new things that we can do with Flash, in terms of getting data out faster but you mentioned multi-cloud. Now, it seems like it's a practical reality, it's not going to all end up in one cloud, in fact there's going to be multiple avenues for achieving that cloud experience. What do you think about that? Why is that so important? >> Well I think you've got a couple different things. From a perspective of, why multi-cloud? You've got some people that want to keep it private. So you've got companies we need to, for a storage company, we need to provide them with private cloud technology. You've got public cloud providers which are a big customer, by the way, of IBM Storage. And the third thing is hybrid cloud, part private, part public, moving around. And lastly, some people really will be using multiple public cloud providers whether it be cloud provider going public or whether they're trying to be hybrid. You're going to use IBM Cloud and you're going to use Amazon depending on the size of the company, the geography and sometimes even legal regulation. IBM's whole storage strategy is to make sure not only provide that incredible resiliency, that incredible reliability and the performance you need for all data set workloads as they move to the cloud, but also you can transparently move data to the cloud and in fact, all of our storage software is heavily cloudified, as we've talked about actually a couple of years ago, with IBM Storage software. >> So, that suggests ultimately that we and that these businesses think about digital business, they're going to use their data differently. And storage, types of storage technology, relying on it to happen, in a multi-cloud setting. But what are some of those kind of baseline storage technologies that make this, that become so critical, as we think about this transformation? >> So, the first thing is the move to NVMe. NVMe is a new protocol that's very high-speed. We've introduced a new product, couple weeks ago, called the FlashSystem 9100, that has NVMe actually in the storage subsystem itself, dramatically increasing the performance, for example, you can go up to 10 million IOPS, and have latency of only 350 mics. Well, guess what? The real enemy of all workloads and applications is your latency and at 350 mics, that's almost nothing. Then the second thing is making sure that you have a robust software interconnect. So what we've done, is make sure that all of our storage products can automatically and transparently tier data out to multiple clouds, not just one but in a multi cloud environment. So those two things are critical. The high performance of NVMe that we just launched and integrating a storage subsystem with all of this cloudified software, and getting it for one price. >> Now you mentioned the FlashSystem 9100. I presume also that there is new thoughts about how to imagine packaging, how to imbue some of that engineering discipline into some of these new products. Tell, talk to us a little bit about some of the things that IBM is doing to simplify the packaging and the availability of these types of technologies in context of this journey to the multi-cloud. >> So we've done two things. In addition to having this FlashSystem 9100 being NVMe from end-to-end, supporting NVMe over fabric infrastructures, you talked about already, the cloud is all about a fabric. But, secondly what we're doing is integrating a whole family of the IBM Spectrum Storage software. Spectrum Protect Plus, we've got our Spectrum Connect for containerized environments, we've got our Spectrum Virtualize for public cloud, the base software is our regular Spectrum Virtualize which happen to work with over 440 arrays that are ours, giving them all sorts of technology such as data rest encryption, the ability to move out to the cloud, so if you've got an older array and it happens to be working with the 9100 with our Spectrum Virtualize, we can move data from an older array, that's not ours, or our older arrays too, and move it out to IBM Cloud or move it out to Amazon or Azure with our transparent cloud tiering. So imbuing all of this software functionality. And now the third thing we've done is create a bunch of solutions blueprints, think of them as recipes. Easy use for the end-user, it shows them what they need to do to work in a private cloud environment, what they need to do to really work on secondary data sets. Remember, data is your most valuable asset. It's not just about your primary data. What do you do with your secondary data? Are you mining that for AI? Are you in that to do any business intelligence? And we've got software that allows you to do that, and all of that is imbued and embedded integrated into your FlashSystem 9100, when you buy it. >> Sounds like a pretty exciting time for storage. >> It is. Storage is white hot. >> Great conversation Eric-- >> White hot. >> Great. >> Alright so that's the first one, we'll go into the segway. (sprightly music) Good? (sprightly music)

(upbeat music) >> Bina, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming back in theCUBE and participating in this digital community event. >> Oh, thanks for having me. It's an exciting event. I'm 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, 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 kind of an 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 pretesting, prepackaging 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, 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 investments to deliver a set of solutions that are pretested, they are supported at the solutions level, really focusing on delivering and underpinning those solutions with blueprints, step-by-step documentation. And as clients deploy these solutions, if they run into challenges, having IBM support to assess, 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 cost, but also flexibility and agility are very critical. >> Well, that sounds like, therefore, the history of storage has been tradeoffs. This disk can only go that fast, and that tape can only go that fast. But now, when we start to think about Flash NVMe, the tradeoffs 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&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, is going through a transformation. New emerging capabilities, new ways to do backup. And what we're doing is pulling all of that together. The things that we introduce, 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 of 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 values: one-stop, pretested 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 manifest itself as 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's 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 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 into the cloud. So those are some of the key ways that we've kind of brought this together to really deliver on client value. >> So can you give us just one quick use case of some 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 base. We have a lot of clients that are doing that and then taking that, making the snapshots, using those copies for things like, well, there's disaster recovery, or secondary use cases like analytics, DevOps. DevOps 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, and 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. >> Great conversation! >> All right, we're clear, thank you. >> Did it hit on [Cuts Off] (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President Global Channel Sales for IBM Storage. CUBE alum, great to see you. Thanks for comin' by. >> Great, we always love comin' and talkin' to theCUBE. >> Love havin' you on. Get the insight, and you get down and dirty in the storage. But I gotta, before we get into the storage impact, the cloud, and all the great performance requirements, and software you guys are building, news is that the CEO of Cisco swung by your booth? >> Yes, Chuck did come by today and asked how-- Chuck Robbins came by today, asked how we're doin'. IBM has a very broad relationship with Cisco, beyond just the storage division. The storage division, the IOT division, the collaboration group. Security's doin' a lot of stuff with them. IBM is one of Cisco's largest resellers through the GTS and GBS teams. So, he came by to see how were doin', and gave him a little plug about the VersaStack, and how it's better than any other converge solutions, but talked about all of IBM, and the strong IBM Cisco relationship. >> I mean, it's not a new relationship. Expand on what you guys are doin'. How does that intersect with division that he put on stage yesterday with the keynote. He laid out, and said publicly, and put the stake in the ground, pretty firmly, "This is the old way." Put an architecture, a firewall, a classic enterprise network diagram. >> Right, right. >> And said, "That's the old way," and put in a big circle, with all these different kinda capabilities with the cloud. It's a software defined world. Clearly Cisco moving up the stack, while maintaining the networking shops. >> Right. >> Networking and storage, always the linchpin of cloud and enterprise computing. What's the connection? Share the touch points. >> Sure, well I think the key thing is everyone's gotta realize that whether you're in a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud configuration, storage is that rock solid foundation. If you don't have a good foundation, the building will fall right over, and it's great that you've got cloud with its flexibility, it's ability to transform, the ability to modernize, move data around, but if what's underneath doesn't work, the whole thing topples over, and storage is a cruel element to that. Now, what we've done at IBM is we have made all of our solutions on the storage side, VersaStack, our all-flash arrays, all of our software defined storage, our modern data protection, everything is what we'll say is cloudified. K, it's, I designed for multiple cloud scenarios, whether it be private, hybrid, or public, or, as you've probably seen, in some the enterprise accounts, they actually use multiple public cloud providers. Whether it be from a price issue, or a legal issues, because they're all over the world, and we're supporting that with all our solutions. And, our VersaStack, specifically, just had a CVD done with Cisco, Cisco Validated Design, with IBM Cloud Private on a VersaStack. >> Talk about the scale piece, because this becomes the key differentiator. We've talked about on theCUBE, many of the times with you around, some of the performance you guys have, and the numbers are pretty good. You might wanna do a quick review on that. I'm not lookin' for speech and feeds. Really, Eric, I'd like to get your reaction, and view, and vision, on how the scale piece is kicking, 'cause clients want scale optionality. They're gonna have a lot of stuff on premise. They have cloud goin' on, multi cloud on the horizon, but they gotta scale. The numbers are off the charts. You're seein' all these security threats. I mean, it's massive. How are you guys addressing the scale question with storage? >> So, we've got a couple things. So first of all, the storage itself is easily scalable. For example, on our A9000 all-flash array, you just put a new one, automatically grows, don't have to do anything, k? With our transparent cloud tiering, you can set it up, whether it be our Spectrum Scale software, whether it be our Spectrum Virtualize software, or whether it be on our all-flash arrays, that you could automatically just move data to whatever your cloud target may be. Whether that be something with an object store, whether that be a block store, and it's all automated. So, the key thing here on scalability is transparency, ease of use, and automation. They wanna automatically join new capacity, wanna automatically move data from cloud to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to on premise, and IBM's storage solutions, from a software perspective, are all designed with that data mobility in mind, and that transportability, both on premise, and out to any cloud infrastructure they have. >> What should Cisco customers know about IBM storage, if you get to talk to them directly? We're here at Cisco Live. We've talked many times about what you guys got goin' on with the software. Love the software systems approach. You know we dig that. But a Cisco deployment, they've been blocking and tackling in the enterprise for years, clouds there. What's the pitch? What's the value proposition to Cisco clients? >> So, I think they key thing for us talkin' to a Cisco client is the deep level of integration we have. And, in this case, not just the storage division, but other things. So, for example, a lot of their collaboration stuff uses under pitting software from IBM, and IBM also uses some software from Cisco inside our collaboration package. In our storage package, the fact that we put together the VersaStack with all these Cisco Validated Designs, means that the customer, whether it be a cloud product, for example, on the VersaStack, about 20 of our public references are all small and medium cloud providers that wheel in the VersaStack, connect 'em, and it automatically grows simply and easily. So, in that case, you're looking at a cloud provider customer of Cisco, right? When you're looking at a enterprise customer of Cisco, man, the key thing is the level of integration that we have, and how we work together across the board, and the fact that we have all these Cisco Validated Designs for object storage, for file storage, for block storage, for IBM Cloud Private. All these things mean they know that it's gonna work, right outta the box, and whether they deploy it themselves, whether they use one of our resellers, one of our channel partners, or whether they use IBM services or Cisco service. Bottom line, it works right out of the box, easy to go, and they're up and running quickly. >> So, Eric, you talked a bunch about VersaStack, and you've been involved with Cisco and their UCS since the early days when they came up, and helped drive, really, this wave of converged infrastructure. >> Right. >> One of the biggest changes I've seen in the last couple years, is when you talk to customers, this is really their private cloud platform that they're building. When it first got rolled out, it was virtualization. We kinda added a little bit of management there. What, give us your viewpoint as to kinda high-level, why's this still such an important space, what are the reasons that customers are rolling this out, and how that fits into their overall cloud story? >> Well, I think you hit it, Stu, right on the head. First of all, it's easy to put in and deploy, k? That is a big check box. You're done, ready to go. Second thing that's important is be able to move data around easily, k? In an automated fashion like I said earlier, whether that be to a public cloud if they're gonna tier out. If I'm a private cloud, I got multiple data centers. I'm moving data around all the time. So, the physical infrastructure and data center A is a replica, or a DR center, for data center B, and vice versa. So, you gotta be able to move all this stuff around quickly easy. Part of the reason you're seeing converge infrastructure is it's the wave of what's hit in the server world. Instead of racking and stacking individual servers, and individual pieces of storage, you've got a pre-packed VersaStack. You've got Cisco networking, Cisco server, VMware, all of our storage, our storage software, including the ability to go out to a cloud, or with our ICP IBM Private Cloud, to create a private cloud. And so, that's why you're seeing this move towards converge. Yes, there's some hyperconverged out there in the market, too, but I think the big issue, in certain workloads, hyperconverged is the right way to go. In other workloads, especially if you're creating a giant private cloud, or if you're a cloud provider, that's not the way to go because the real difference is with hyperconverged you cannot scale compute and storage independently, you scale them together, So, if you need more storage, you scale compute, even if you don't need it. With regular converge, you scale them independently, and if you need more storage, you get more storage. If you need more compute-- If you need both, you get both. And that's a big advantage. You wanna keep the capex and opex down as you create this infrastructure for cloud. 'Member, part of the whole idea of cloud are a couple things. A, it's supposed to be agile. B, it's supposed to be super flexible. C, of course, is the modern nomenclature, but D is reduce capex and opex. And you wanna make sure that you can do that simply and easily, and VersaStack, and our relationship with Cisco, even if you're not using a VersaStack config, allows us to do that for the end user. >> And somethin' we're seeing is it's really the first step for customers. I need to quote, as you said, modernize the platform, and then I can really start looking at modernizing my applications on top of that. >> Right. Well, I think, today, it's all about how do you create the new app? What are you doin' with containers? So, for example, all of our arrays, and all of our arrays that go into a VersaStack, have free persistent storage support for any containerize environ, for dockers and kubernetes, and we don't charge for that. You just get it for free. So, when you buy those solutions, you know that as you move to the container world, and I would argue virtualization is still here to stay, but that doesn't mean that containers aren't gonna overtake it. And if I was the CEO of a couple different virtualization companies, I'd be thinkin' about buyin' a container company 'cause that'll be the next wave of the future, and you'll say-- >> Don't fear kubernetes. >> Yeah, all of that. >> Yeah, Eric Herzog's flying over to Dockercon, make a big announcement, I think, so. (laughing) >> Evaluation gonna drop a little bit. I gotta ask you a question. I mean, obviously, we watch the trends that David Floy and our team, NVMe is big topic. What is the NVMe leadership plan for you, on the product side, for you? Can you take a minute to share your vision for what that is gonna be? >> Sure, well we've already publicly announced. We've been shipping an NVMe over fabric solution leveraging InfiniBand since February of this year, and we demoed it, actually, in December at the AI Conference in New York City. So, we've had a fabric solution for NVMe already since December, and then shipping in February. The other thing we're doing is we publicly announced that we'd be supporting the other NVMe over fabric protocols, both fabric channel and ethernet by the end of the year. We publicly already announced that. We also announced that we would have an end to end strategy. In this case, you would be talking about NVMe on the fabric side going out to the switching and the host infrastructure, but also NVMe in a storage sub-system, and we already publicly announced that we'd be doing that this year. >> And how's the progress on that plan? You feel good about it? >> We're getting there. I can't comment yet, but just stay tuned on July 1st, and see what happens. >> So, talk about the Spectrum NAS, and other announcements that you have. What's goin' on? What are the big news? What's happening? >> Well, I think that, yeah, the big thing for us has been all about software. As you know, for the analysts that track the numbers, we are, and ended up in 2017, as tied as the number one storage software company in the world, independent of our system's business. So, one of the key powers there is that our software works with everyone's gear, whether it be a white box through a distributor or reseller, whether it be our direct competitors. Spectrum Protect, which is a, one of the best enterprise backup packages. We backup everybody's gear, our gear, NetApp's gear, HP's gear, Pure's gear, Hitachi's gear, the old Dell stuff, it doesn't matter to us, we backup everything. So, one of the powers that IBM has, from a software perspective, is always being able to support not only our own gear, but supporting all of our competitors as well. And the whole white box market, with things that our partners may put together through the distributors. >> I know somethin' might be obvious to you, but just take me through the benefits to the customer. What's the impact to the customer? Obviously, supporting everything, it sounds like you guys have done that with software, so you're agnostic on hardware. >> Right. >> So, is it a single pane of glass? What's the benefit to the customer with that software capability? >> Yeah, I feel there's a couple things. So, first of all, the same software that we sell as standalone software, we also sell on our arrays. So if you're in a hybrid configuration, and you're using our Flashsystem V9000 in our Storwize family, that software also works with an EMC, or NetApp box. So, one license, one way to do everything, one set of training, which in a small shop is not that important, but in a big shop, you don't have to manage three licenses, right? You don't have to get trained up on three different ways to do things, and you don't have to, by the way, document, which all the big companies would do. So it dramatically simplifies their life from an opex perspective. Makes it easier for them to run their business. >> Eric, we'd love to get your opinion on just how's Cisco doin' out there? It's a big sprawling company. I looked at the opening keynote, the large infrastructure business doing very well in the data center, but they've got collaboration, they do video, they're moving out in the cloud. Wanna see your thoughts as to how are they doing, and still making sure they take care of core networking, while still expanding and going through their own transformation, that they're talkin' very public about. How do we measure Cisco as a software company? >> Well, we see some very good signs there. I mean, we partner with 'em all the time, as I mentioned, for example, in both the security group and our collaboration group, and I'm not talkin' storage now, just IBM in general, we leverage software from them, and they leverage software from us. We deliver joint solutions through our partners, or through each of the two service organizations, but we also have products where we incorporate their software into ours, and they incorporate software in us. So, from our perspective, we've already been doing it beyond their level, now, of expanding into a much greater software play. For us, it's been a strong play for us already because of the joint work we've been doing now for several years on software that they've been selling in the more traditional world, and now pushing out into the broader areas, like cloud, for example. >> Awesome work. Eric, thanks for coming on. I gotta ask you one final, personal, question. >> Sure. >> You got the white shirt on, you usually have a Hawaiian shirt on. >> Well, because Chuck Robbins came by the booth, as we talked about earlier today, felt that I shouldn't have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on, however, now that I've met Chuck, next time, at next Cisco Live, I'll have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on versus my IBM traditional shirt. >> Chuck's a cool guy. Thanks for comin' on. As always, great commentary. You know your stuff. >> Great, thank you. >> Great to have the slicing and dicing, the IBM storage situation, as well as the overall industry landscape. At Cisco Live, we're breakin' it down, here on theCUBE in Orlando. Second day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more live coverage after this break.

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. Day 2, lots of stuff going on. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed colleague Dave Vellante. >> Hey hey. >> Hey hey! I'm excited to welcome an old friend, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM, as well as Sam Warner offering management IBM software-defined storage. Welcome, guys! >> Well thanks, we always love to be on The Cube, always. >> Dave: Love the shirt. >> Thank you, I'm glad I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt again. >> Dave: Thank you for making sure you wore that, yeah. >> I think it's like my 25th time on The Cube with a Hawaiian shirt. >> Lisa: Oh you're like the Alec Baldwin of The Cube. (laughs) >> Lisa: Alright guys, so here we are- >> Dave: If we have the record, that is the same shirt you wore last year, isn't it? >> Yes, but I did clean it, Dave. (laughs) >> He wears it once a year. >> I've never had to ask anyone about dry cleaning on The Cube but there's a first time for everything. Alright guys, so here we are at VMworld. What's new with IBM and VMware? Kind of talk to us, Eric, from a marketing perspective. What's going on there? >> Sure, well the big thing is IBM and VMware have a very strong alliance across our entire portfolio. The Cloud Division has a big agreement with VMware that was announced with Pat Gelsinger and the head of the division last year, the Storage Division has all kinds of heavy duty integration with our VersaStack product, as well as in all of our all-flash arrays, and then Sam's team brought out a new backup and recovery product, Spectrum Tech Plus, which is optimized for VMware and hypervisor and cloud environments. >> Excellent. And that's one of the things actually thematically that we heard yesterday is that, you know, backup is hot. So tell us a little bit more about that hotness and how you guys are working with VMware to dial that- >> Dial that heat. >> Yeah, dial that heat up. >> Sam: Well it's actually, it's more than backup, right, it's about data availability, and ensuring your data's safe, data's the bloodline of your company now, right? Everything's moving toward cognitive and AI, you can't do that without data. Most of your data's trapped as a backup. And what we're trying to do now is make it really easy for people to get at that data and use it for other purposes. So first of all, making sure you're safe from things like ransomware, but also making sure you can get some value out of that data. Make it very easy to recover that data. >> So, lots of topics that we could cover there, I wonder, did you have one more and I want to jump in. >> I did. Just, Eric from a, as the CMO, from a messaging perspective now we've heard backup is hot, you've just kind of articulated that a little bit more, same with storage. From a conversation perspective, and you talked about the importance of data, Michael Dell talked about that this morning, that the data conversation is a CEO agenda. How is the conversation changing, and the position of IBM changing when you guys are talking to customers that, is backup, is storage a conversation around data that you're having with the C-suite of your customers? >> So, a couple things, and I've done storage for 32 years. EMC, IBM twice, seven startups, and the C-suite hates storage, including the CIO, but they do love their data. So they all know they need storage but when you talk about data, data availability, the resiliency of the data, the data always needs to be there, you don't even use things like data resiliency 'cause the CEO doesn't know what that is, so you need to say, so how'd you like it if you were in Star Trek, and Bones wanded you with a new healthcare wand, and it came back with no answer? (laughs) That's 'cause your storage is not resilient and it's not fast enough. So the data has to be available and it has to be fast. So we're moving to this world where everything is AI and everything is immediate. If your storage goes down and you're in dark trading, you just lost ten million bucks per second. So, but it's all about the data. So basically what we're doing is getting out of the storage conversation and talking about the data conversation. How data is used to optimize their business, and then you weave the storage in underneath as, well as you know if you've got a bad foundation to your building and the earthquake hits, boom. You building falls down. So data is that building, and storage is the foundation on which your data rests. >> I love this conversation, and I think you're right on. The C-suite, they hate storage because it's to them, it's just an expense, but I want to pick up on something that was one of my favorite interviews thus far this year. Believe it or not, it was the interview that you and Burris and Ed Walsh did in our studio in Palo Alto. And I wonder if you could add some color, and then Sam I want you to chime in. What I loved about that interview is you guys talked about digital business and digital business being all about data and how you leverage data. And you said something there, and I want to unpack it a little bit. Storage should not be just a dumb target that is unintelligent. it should be an active element of your data and digital strategy. >> Eric: Right. >> So what did you mean by that and how does IBM make it, storage, an active element of a data strategy? >> So the first thing you want to do is you want to make it all automated. You want to make it transparent to the user. So, whether it's in the healthcare space, I don't care what your business, Herzog's bar and grill? My storage is transparent. Okay I'm running a bar and grill, I don't have time to fool around with the storage. I need it automated, I need it fast, I need to see who's drinking what, how many cigars I can sell, I don't have time to fart around. Right? Storage can make that happen. So you've got certain CPU that's done on the server level or in the virtual machines, and then you've got to have storage that's intelligent. So, we're working on some products we're not ready to announce yet, but we've got some products that have built-in AI into the storage themselves. So things like, you can search in the storage instead of search on the server. How do like, be able to look at metadata and have the storage actually fetch the data not the server fetch the data, so the server's crunching, crunching, crunching, and the storage is smart enough to go grab the data on its own and then bring it to the server. Versus the server having to do that work. So all that's about making data more available, more resilient, and again, having smart storage not dumb storage. >> So Sam, when we were talking about backup it's how you say, it's not just backup, it's more than that. >> Sam: Right. >> Pick up on what Eric just said. How is Spectrum Protect more than just backup and playing into what Eric just talked about? >> Well a lot of things Eric was just talking about you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily going to be able to do all this analysis reporting, analytics on your production data, you don't want to get in the way of your critical workloads, so how can we make copies off to the side where you can do things like analytics, where you can do dev test, quickly build new applications, so we give the ability to have access to that data in a way that's not going to jeopardize your core applications as well. And of course, that data, you can't lose it, right? I mean, you've got to make sure it's protected. So we also offer you a very simple way to protect it, and very rapidly restore it. >> So, let's go through an example or use case. You mentioned ransomware before. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of people think okay I'll create an air gap, but air gap, in and of itself, you know, you watch these Black Hat shows, and they go, "Air gap is a joke. It's easy for me to get through an air gap." >> Sam: Right. >> So how do you deal with that problem? Presumably, you have insights and analytics that can help you identify anomalies, but I wonder if you can address what's the conversation like with your customers and how are you solving a problem like that? >> Well I think there's a lot of stages that would solve it. First of all, there's simple things you can do like have copies that are immutable, so they can't be changed, encryption can't go and encrypt a read-only volume, there is air gapping, which like you said there are ways around that, but then there's also, Eric touched on some of the metadata analysis. If you can find anomalies and changes in the metadata that are unexpected, you can take action and alert an administrator and let them know that something doesn't seem right, so there's a lot more work we're doing to introduce cognitive capabilities that can also detect that. >> One of the things actually that Pat Gelsinger said this morning, and this may have put a smile on your face when you said there's something you can't quite talk to yet is, companies have to integrate AI into their products. And machine learning. >> Eric: So, that's the plan at IBM, and we've already done some of that, we have some products that we've hinted at, that's product code name Harmony, and we've already done a public blog on that, a statement of direction, and that is our first step in implementing AI technology directly into the storage, again it's part of what I talked about a couple weeks ago when I filmed at your Palo Alto office, storage is not dumb anymore. I may be dumb, but storage is not. Storage is smart, storage is intelligent, storage is active not passive, and in the old worlds, when I started doing storage a long time ago, storage was just passive. Just a big brick. It's no longer a brick. It's a brain, and it thinks and it acts, and it relieves the CPU, and the other areas of your IT infrastructure from having to do the work, which is part of the metadata action that Sam talked about that we're working on and also this project Harmony that we talked about, is adding AI intelligence, things like Watson for example, maybe, but I can't quote me on that yet, but maybe we might put Watson inside of our storage, since we happen to own Watson, the dominant AI platform on the planet, we could probably put that into our storage. Maybe we will. >> So there's still a... okay why not? There's still a lot of dumb storage out there though. >> Yes. >> Huge install base. You actually probably sold a lot of it back in the day, so fixing the problem that you created, that's smart marketing. (laughs) But when you talk about the technical debt that exists, how do you go from point A to point B, going from that dumb storage to that active element? What's that conversation like with customers? >> So, it's actually pretty easy. First of all, storage refreshes every three to five years anyway. So now you can say, "Well you know the storage you had only did this, how about if we could do this, this, this or this, and really raise the bar?" The other thing of course is that IBM is the number one storage software company in the world, so anything we do is going to be integrated into the software side of our business, not just embedded in the storage systems we sell. And that software works with everyone's arrays. So that, if you will, artificial intelligence that we can bring to bear in an IBM Storwize or flash systems would also work on an EMC VNX2, would also work on a Dell Compellent, would also work on an HP 3PAR, would also work on this guy, that guy, and the other guy, because we are the number one storage software company in the world, for the guys that track the numbers, and all of this is being implemented into the software layer, which means it'll work with the other guys' gear. So we can take the old stuff I used to do at the evil machine company and make that stuff smart. >> What do you mean when you say you're the number one software company, because when you worked for that company you guys would always tell me, us as analysts, "Look, we don't really have any hardware engineers any more, we spend all our time on software, so we're a software company." You're talking about something different today, you guys leaned in to software to find, you've put your chips in, you did your billion dollar Steve Mills bet, what does it mean today to be a software company in storage? >> So for us, let's take all of our storage systems for example, FlashSystem V9 comes with Spectrum virtualized software, which works with over 400 arrays that aren't IBM logo. That software comes on that system. FlashSystem A9000 comes with Spectrum Accelerate, which is a scale-out block infrastructure that works both on-premise and in the cloud. Again, not just with our own gear. So we basically decided that, do we want to sell the full system solution? Sure we do. But if we sell the software only, that's fine with us, and remember, most of the big shops in IBM is exceedingly strong, enterprise to the Global Fortune 1000, and the Global Fortune 1000 down to those sort of, you know, one billion dollar company and up, most of them are heterogeneous anyway, so you're, if you're smart, and we think we are at IBM, to this effect, we made sure our software works with everybody else's gear. Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus will back up any storage from any vendor, old or new, will go to any tape drive, will go to any cloud, we can automatically back up to the cloud, will automatically go to an object store, not just to our own object store, but other object stores. Will automatically go to disk or flash, so we've made it completely heterogeneous and, if you will, media and technology independent. And we're doing that across the board with all the IBM storage software. >> So that compatibility matrix, if I can call it that, is very important, has always been important in the storage business, but I feel like it's insufficient in today's cloud world. And let me tell you, explain what I mean and get your reaction. I'll start with Sam. So we've been talking all week about the imperative to not try to reform your business and bring it to the cloud, but rather to shape the cloud and bring cloud services to your data. And that's the right model, and now part of that, a big part of that, a huge part of that is simplicity. So we're here at VMworld, we're talking about backup and data protection, simplicity is fundamental. What are you guys doing in that regard, generally and specifically with regard to Spectrum Protect? >> Yeah, I think what you want is a very simple way to do data protection, and a methodology to do data protection that's consistent between your applications that you're running in your own data center and what you're running in the cloud. So you don't want to find out that, yeah your traditional applications that you've been you know, running in your data center for years are all protected, but it turns out all the new applications being built out on the cloud don't have the same rigor, aren't following the same standards, you're breaking your governance models, and you're at risk. So what you want is a simple way to manage both sides, you want a simple dashboard that gives you visibility to the entire environment in one space, so you know I've got 2,000 VMs, 1,800 of them are backed up, two of them aren't backed up, oh those are in the cloud, somebody didn't set it up correctly. You want to be able to see it very easily on a simple dashboard, and that's what we're bringing with Spectrum Protect Plus. >> Speaking of simple, Eric, last question to you, as the CMO, how do you make this message simple for a C-suite to comprehend and understand and help take them to the next level for them? >> Well for us, we don't even talk storage anymore. We just talk data, applications, their workloads and their use cases. That's it, and then you bring storage up underneath it, again it's the foundation of your data infrastructure, your data is the primary building, but if you don't have a solid foundation and, being from Silicon Valley and being from the '89 earthquake, when the earthquake hits, if you have a solid foundation, the building stays up, if you don't the building falls down. So, we lead with data, data, data, ease of use, simplicity, but really focus on what's your application, what's the workload you're trying to accomplish, what's the use case you need. And when you do it that way, you take the discussion away from being, "You're a storage guy." It's, "You're the data guy. You're the business guy." And that's how you have to pitch it. >> I like that. Hashtag data data data you heard it here first. (laughs) Eric and Sam, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube, I wish you best of luck and we'll be keeping our eyes and ears open for what's coming with AI and machine learning. Thank you for watching The Cube, continuing coverage live from VMworld 2017 Day 2, I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante. Stick around, we've got more great conversations coming right back up. (upbeat music)