(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this "Cube Conversation." My name is Dave Vellante and you know, containers, they used to be stateless and ephemeral but they're maturing very rapidly. As cloud native workloads become more functional and they go mainstream persisting, and protecting the data that lives inside of containers, is becoming more important to organizations. Enterprise capabilities such as high availability or reliability, scalability and other features are now more fundamental and important and containers are linchpin of hybrid cloud, cross-cloud and edge strategies. Now fusing these capabilities together across these regions in an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity of the infrastructure, is where the entire enterprise technology industry is headed. But how do you do that without making endless copies of data and managing versions not to mention the complexities and costs of doing so. And with me to talk about how IBM thinks about and is solving these challenges are Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Storage Channels. For the IBM Storage Division is Sam Werner is the vice president of offering management and the business line executive for IBM Storage. Guys, great to see you again, wish should, were face to face but thanks for coming on "theCUBE." >> Great to be here. >> Thanks Dave, as always. >> All right guys, you heard me my little spiel there about the problem statement. Eric, maybe you could start us off. I mean, is it on point? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we see is containers are going mainstream. I frame it very similarly to what happened with virtualization, right? It got brought in by the dev team, the test team, the applications team, and then eventually of course, it became the main state. Containers is going through exactly that right now. Brought in by the dev ops people, the software teams. And now it's becoming again, persistent, real use clients that want to deploy a million of them. Just the way they historically have deployed a million virtual machines, now they want a million containers or 2 million. So now it's going mainstream and the feature functions that you need once you take it out of the test sort of play with stage to the real production phase, really changes the ball game on the features you need, the quality of what you get, and the types of things you need the underlying storage and the data services that go with that storage,. to do in a fully container world. >> So Sam how'd we get here? I mean, container has been around forever. You look inside a Linux, right? But then they did, as Eric said, go mainstream. But it started out the, kind of little experimental, As I said, their femoral didn't really need to persist them, but it's changed very quickly. Maybe you could talk to that evolution and how we got here. >> I mean, well, it's been a look, this is all about agility right? It's about enterprises trying to accelerate their innovation. They started off by using virtual machines to try to accelerate access to IT for developers, and developers are constantly out, running ahead. They got to go faster and they have to deliver new applications. Business lines need to figure out new ways to engage with their customers. Especially now with the past year we had it even further accelerated this need to engage with customers in new ways. So it's about being agile. Containers promise or provide a lot of the capabilities you need to be agile. What enterprises are discovering, a lot of these initiatives are starting within the business lines and they're building these applications or making these architectural decisions, building dev ops environments on containers. And what they're finding is they're not bringing the infrastructure teams along with them. And they're running into challenges that are inhibiting their ability to achieve the agility they want because their storage needs aren't keeping up. So this is a big challenge that enterprises face. They want to use containers to build a more agile environment to do things like dev ops, but they need to bring the infrastructure teams along. And that's what we're focused on now. Is how do you make that agile infrastructure to support these new container worlds? >> Got it, so Eric, you guys made an announcement to directly address these issues. Like it's kind of a fire hose of innovation. Maybe you could take us through and then we can unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, so what we did is on April 27th, we announced IBM Spectrum Fusion. This is a fully container native software defined storage technology that integrates a number of proven battle-hardened technologies that IBM has been deploying in the enterprise for many years. That includes a global scalable file system that can span edge core and cloud seamlessly with a single copy of the data. So no more data silos and no more 12 copies of the data which of course drive up CapEx and OpEx. Spectrum Fusion reduces that and makes it easier to manage. Cuts the cost from a CapEx perspective and cuts a cost for an OpEx perspective. By being fully container native, it's ready to go for the container centric world and could span all types of areas. So what we've done is create a storage foundation which is what you need at the bottom. So things like the single global namespace, single accessibility, we have local caching. So with your edge core cloud, regardless of where the data is, you think the data's right with you, even if it physically is not. So that allows people to work on it. We have file locking and other technologies to ensure that the data is always good. And then of course we'd imbued it with the HA Disaster Recovery, the backup and restore technology, which we've had for years and have now made of fully container native. So spectrum fusion basically takes several elements of IBM's existing portfolio has made them container native and brought them together into a single piece of software. And we'll provide that both as a software defined storage technology early in 2022. And our first pass will be as a hyperconverged appliance which will be available next quarter in Q3 of 2021. That of course means it'll come with compute, it'll come with storage, come with a rack even, come with networking. And because we can preload everything for the end users or for our business partners, it would also include Kubernetes, Red Gat OpenShift and Red Hat's virtualization technology all in one simple package, all ease of use and a single management gooey to manage everything, both the software side and the physical infrastructure that's part of the hyperconverged system level technologies. >> So, maybe it can help us understand the architecture and maybe the prevailing ways in which people approach container storage, what's the stack look like? And how have you guys approached it? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Really, there's three layers that we look at when we talk about container native storage. It starts with the storage foundation which is the layer that actually lays the data out onto media and does it in an efficient way and makes that data available where it's needed. So that's the core of it. And the quality of your storage services above that depend on the quality of the foundation that you start with. Then you go up to the storage services layer. This is where you bring in capabilities like HA and DR. People take this for granted, I think as they move to containers. We're talking about moving mission critical applications now into a container and hybrid cloud world. How do you actually achieve the same levels of high availability you did in the past? If you look at what large enterprises do, they run three site, for site replication of their data with hyper swap and they can ensure high availability. How do you bring that into a Kubernetes environment? Are you ready to do that? We talk about how only 20% of applications have really moved into a hybrid cloud world. The thing that's inhibiting the other 80% these types of challenges, okay? So the storage services include HA DR, data protection, data governance, data discovery. You talked about making multiple copies of data creates complexity, it also creates risk and security exposures. If you have multiple copies of data, if you needed data to be available in the cloud you're making a copy there. How do you keep track of that? How do you destroy the copy when you're done with it? How do you keep track of governance and GDPR, right? So if I have to delete data about a person how do I delete it everywhere? So there's a lot of these different challenges. These are the storage services. So we talk about a storage services layer. So layer one data foundation, layer two storage services, and then there needs to be connection into the application runtime. There has to be application awareness to do things like high availability and application consistent backup and recovery. So then you have to create the connection. And so in our case, we're focused on open shift, right? When we talk about Kubernetes how do you create the knowledge between layer two, the storage services and layer three of the application services? >> And so this is your three layer cake. And then as far as like the policies that I want to inject, you got an API out and entries in, can use whatever policy engine I want. How does that work? >> So we're creating consistent sets of APIs to bring those storage services up into the application, run time. We in IBM have things like IBM cloud satellite which bring the IBM public cloud experience to your data center and give you a hybrid cloud or into other public cloud environments giving you one hybrid cloud management experience. We'll integrate there, giving you that consistent set of storage services within an IBM cloud satellite. We're also working with Red Hat on their Advanced Cluster Manager, also known as RACM to create a multi-cluster management of your Kubernetes environment and giving that consistent experience. Again, one common set of APIs. >> So the appliance comes first? Is that a no? Okay, so is that just time to market or is there a sort of enduring demand for appliances? Some customers, you know, they want that, maybe you could explain that strategy. >> Yeah, so first let me take it back a second. Look at our existing portfolio. Our award-winning products are both software defined and system-based. So for example Spectrum Virtualize comes on our flash system. Spectrum Scale comes on our elastic storage system. And we've had this model where we provide the exact same software, both on an array or as standalone piece of software. This is unique in the storage industry. When you look at our competitors, when they've got something that's embedded in their array, their array manager, if you will, that's not what they'll try to sell you. It's software defined storage. And of course, many of them don't offer software defined storage in any way, shape or form. So we've done both. So with spectrum fusion, we'll have a hyper-converged configuration which will be available in Q3. We'll have a software defined configuration which were available at the very beginning of 2022. So you wanted to get out of this market feedback from our clients, feedback from our business partners by doing a container native HCI technology, we're way ahead. We're going to where the park is. We're throwing the ball ahead of the wide receiver. If you're a soccer fan, we're making sure that the mid guy got it to the forward ahead of time so you could kick the goal right in. That's what we're doing. Other technologies lead with virtualization, which is great but virtualization is kind of old hat, right? VMware and other virtualization layers have been around for 20 now. Container is where the world is going. And by the way, we'll support everything. We still have customers in certain worlds that are using bare metal, guess what? We work fine with that. We worked fine with virtual as we have a tight integration with both hyper V and VMware. So some customers will still do that. And containers is a new wave. So with spectrum fusion, we are riding the wave not fighting the wave and that way we could meet all the needs, right? Bare metal, virtual environments, and container environments in a way that is all based on the end users applications, workloads, and use cases. What goes, where and IBM Storage can provide all of it. So we'll give them two methods of consumption, by early next year. And we started with a hyper-converged first because, A, we felt we had a lead, truly a lead. Other people are leading with virtualization. We're leading with OpenShift and containers where the first full container-native OpenShift ground up based hyper-converged of anyone in the industry versus somebody who's done VMware or some other virtualization layer and then sort of glommed on containers and as an afterthought. We're going to where the market is moving, not to where the market has been. >> So just follow up on that. You kind of, you got the sort of Switzerland DNA. And it's not just OpenShift and Red Hat and the open source ethos. I mean, it just goes all the way back to San Volume Controller back in the day where you could virtualize anybody's storage. How is that carrying through to this announcement? >> So Spectrum Fusion is doing the same thing. Spectrum Fusion, which has many key elements brought in from our history with Spectrum Scale supports not IBM storage, for example, EMC Isilon NFS. It will support, Fusion will support Spectrum Scale, Fusion will support our elastic storage system. Fusion will support NetApp filers as well. Fusion will support IBM cloud object storage both software defined storage, or as an array technology and Amazon S3 object stores and any other object storage vendor who's compliant with S3. All of those can be part of the global namespace, scalable file system. We can bring in, for example, object data without making a duplicate copy. The normal way to do that as you make a duplicate copy. So you had a copy in the object store. You make a copy and to bring that into the file. Well, guess what, we don't have to do that. So again, cutting CapEx and OpEx and ease of management. But just as we do with our flash systems product and our Spectrum Virtualize and the SAN Volume Controller, we support over 550 storage arrays that are not ours that are our competitors. With Spectrum Fusion, we've done the same thing, fusion, scale the IBM ESS, IBM cloud object storage, Amazon S3 object store, as well as other compliance, EMC Isilon NFS, and NFS from NetApp. And by the way, we can do the discovery model as well not just integration in the system. So we've made sure that we really do protect existing investments. And we try to eliminate, particularly with discovery capability, you've got AI or analytics software connecting with the API, into the discovery technology. You don't have to traverse and try to find things because the discovery will create real time, metadata cataloging, and indexing, not just of our storage but the other storage I'd mentioned, which is the competition. So talk about making it easier to use, particularly for people who are heterogeneous in their storage environment, which is pretty much the bulk of the global fortune 1500, for sure. And so we're allowing them to use multiple vendors but derive real value with Spectrum Fusion and get all the capabilities of Spectrum Fusion and all the advantages of the enterprise data services but not just for our own product but for the other products as well that aren't ours. >> So Sam, we understand the downside of copies, but then, so you're not doing multiple copies. How do you deal with latency? What's the secret sauce here? Is it the file system? Is there other magic in here? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll build a little bit off of what Eric said, but look one of the really great and unique things about Spectrum Scale is its ability to consume any storage. And we can actually allow you to bring in data sets from where they are. It could have originated in object storage we'll cash it into the file system. It can be on any block storage. It can literally be on any storage you can imagine as long as you can integrate a file system with it. And as you know most applications run on top of the file system. So it naturally fits into your application stack. Spectrum Scale uniquely is a globally parallel file system. So there's not very many of them in the world and there's none that can achieve what Spectrum Scale can do. We have customers running in the exabytes of data and the performance improves with scales. So you can actually deploy Spectrum Scale on-prem, build out an environment of it, consuming whatever storage you have. Then you can go into AWS or IBM cloud or Azure, deploy an instance of it and it will now extend your file system into that cloud. Or you can deploy it at the edge and it'll extend your file system to that edge. This gives you the exact same set of files and visibility and we'll cash in only what's needed. Normally you would have to make a copy of data into the other environment. Then you'd have to deal with that copy later, let's say you were doing a cloud bursting use case. Let's look at that as an example, to make this real. You're running an application on-prem. You want to spin up more compute in the cloud for your AI. The data normally you'd have to make a copy of the data. You'd run your AI. They have to figure out what to do with that data. Do you copy some of the fact? Do we sync them? Do you delete it? What do you do? With Spectrum Scale just automatically cash in whatever you need. It'll run there and you get assigned to spin it down. Your copy is still on-prem. You know, no data is lost. We can actually deal with all of those scenarios for you. And then if you look at what's happening at the edge, a lot of say video surveillance, data pouring in. Looking at the manufacturing {for} looking for defects. You can run a AI right at the edge, make it available in the cloud, make that data available in your data center. Again, one file system going across all. And that's something unique in our data foundation built on Spectrum Scale. >> So there's some metadata magic in there as well, and that intelligence based on location. And okay, so you're smart enough to know where the data lives. What's the sweet spot for this Eric? Are there any particular use cases or industries that we should be focused on or is it through? >> Sure, so first let's talk about the industries. We see certain industries going more container quicker than other industries. So first is financial services. We see it happening there. Manufacturing, Sam already talked about AI based manufacturing platforms. We actually have a couple clients right now. We're doing autonomous driving software with us on containers right now, even before Spectrum Fusion with Spectrum Scale. We see public of course, healthcare and in healthcare don't just think delivery at IBM. That includes the research guys. So the genomic companies, the biotech companies, the drug companies are all included in that. And then of course, retail, both on-prem and off-prem. So those are sort of the industries. Then we see from an application workload, basically AI analytics and big data applications or workloads are the key things that Spectrum Fusion helps you because of its file system. It's high performance. And those applications are tending to spread across core ,edge and cloud. So those applications are spreading out. They're becoming broader than just running in the data center. And by the way they want to run it just into the data center, that's fine. Or perfect example, we had giant global auto manufacturer. They've got factories all over. And if you think there isn't compute resources in every factory, there is because those factories I just saw an article, actually, those factories cost about a billion dollars to build them, a billion. So they've got their own IT, now it's connected to their core data center as well. So that's a perfect example that enterprise edge where spectrum fusion would be an ideal solution whether they did it as software defined only, or of course when you got a billion dollar factory, just to make it let alone produce the autos or whatever you're producing. Silicon, for example, those fabs, all cost a billion. That's where the enterprise edge fits in very well with Spectrum Fusion. >> So are those industries, what's driving the adoption of containers? Is it just, they just want to modernize? Is it because they're doing some of those workloads that you mentioned or is there's edge? Like you mentioned manufacturing, I could see that potentially being an edge is the driver. >> Well, it's a little bit of all of those Dave. For example, virtualization came out and virtualization offered advantages over bare metal, okay? Now containerization has come out and containerization is offering advantage over virtualization. The good thing at IBM is we know we can support all three. And we know again, in the global fortune 2000, 1500 they're probably going to run all three based on the application workload or use case. And our storage is really good at bare metal. Very good at virtualization environments. And now with Spectrum Fusion are container native outstanding for container based environments. So we see these big companies will probably have all three and IBM storage is one of the few vendors if not the only vendor that could adroitly support all three of those various workload types. So that's why we see this as a huge advantage. And again, the market is going to containers. We are, I'm a native California. You don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. and the wave is containers and we're riding that wave. >> If you don't ride the wave you become driftwood as Pat Gelsinger would say. >> And that is true, another native California. I'm a whole boss. >> So okay, so, I wonder Sam I sort of hinted upfront in my little narrative there but the way we see this, as you've got on-prem hybrid, you got public clouds across cloud moving to the edge. Open shift is I said is the linchpin to enabling some of those. And what we see is this layer that abstracts the complexity, hides the underlying complexity of the infrastructure that becomes kind of an implementation detail. Eric talked about skating to the park or whatever sports analogy you want to use. Is that where the park is headed? >> Yeah, I mean, look, the bottom line is you have to remove the complexity for the developers. Again, the name of the game here is all about agility. You asked why these industries are implementing containers? It's about accelerating their innovation and their services for their customers. It's about leveraging AI to gain better insights about their customers and delivering what they want and proving their experience. So if it's all about agility developers don't want to wait around for infrastructure. You need to automate it as much as possible. So it's about building infrastructure that's automated, which requires consistent API APIs. And it requires abstracting out the complexity of things like HA and DR. You don't want every application owner to have to figure out how to implement that. You want to make those storage services available and easy for a developer to implement and integrate into what they're doing. You want to ensure security across everything you do as you bring more and more of your data of your information about your customers into these container worlds. You've got to have security rock solid. You can't leave any exposures there and you can't afford downtime. There's increasing threats from things like ransomware. You don't see it in the news every day but it happens every single day. So how do you make sure you can recover when an event happens to you? So yes, you need to build a abstracted layer of storage services and you need to make it simply available to the developers in these dev ops environments. And that's what we're doing with spectrum fusion. We're taking, I think, extremely unique and one of a kind storage foundation with Spectrum Scale that gives you single namespace globally. And we're building onto it an incredible set of storage services, making extremely simple to deploy enterprise class container applications. >> So what's the bottom line business impact. I mean, how does this change? I mean, Sam, you I think articulated very well through all about serving the developers versus you know, storage, admin provisioning, a LUN. So how does this change my organization, my business? What's the impact there? >> I've mentioned one other point that we talk about an IBM a lot, which is the AI ladder. And it's about how do you take all of this information you have and be able to take it to build new insights, to give your company and advantage. An incumbent in an industry shouldn't be able to be disrupted if they're able to leverage all the data they have about the industry and their customers. But in order to do that, you have to be able to get to a single source of data and be able to build it into the fabric of your business operations. So that all decisions you're making in your company, all services you deliver to your customers, are built on that data foundation and information and the only way to do that and infuse it into your culture is to make this stuff real time. And the only way to do that is to build out a containerized application environment that has access to real-time data. The ultimate outcome, sorry, I know you asked for business results is that you will, in real time understand your clients, understand your industry and deliver the best possible services. And the absolute, business outcome is you will continue to gain market share and your environment and grow revenue. I mean, that's the outcome every business wants. >> Yeah, it's all about speed. Everybody's kind of, everybody's last year was forced into digital transformation. It was sort of rushed into and compressed and now they get some time to do it right. And so modernizing apps, containers, dev ops developer led sort of initiatives are really key to modernization. All right, Eric, we've got, we're out of time but give us the bottom summary. We didn't talk, actually, we had to talk about the 3,200. Maybe you could give us a little insight on that before we close. >> Sure, so in addition to what we're doing with Fusion we also introduced a new elastic storage system, 3,200 and it's all flash. It gets 80 gigs, a second sustained at the node level and we can cluster them infinitely. So for example, I've got 10 of them. I'm delivering 800 gigabytes, a second sustained. And of course, AI, big data analytic workloads are extremely, extremely susceptible to bandwidth and or data transfer rate. That's what they need to deliver their application base properly. It comes with Spectrum Scale built in so that comes with it. So you get the advantage of Spectrum Scale. We talked a lot about Spectrum Scale because it is if you will, one of the three fathers of spectrum fusion. So it's ideal with it's highly parallel file system. It's used all over in high performance computing and super computing, in drug research, in health care in finance, probably about 80% of the world's largest banks in the world use Spectrum Scale already for AI, big data analytics. So the new 3,200 is an all flash version twice as fast as the older version and all the benefit of Spectrum Scale including the ability of seamlessly integrating into existing Spectrum Scale or ESS deployments. And when Fusion comes out, you'll be able to have Fusion. And you could also add 3,200 to it if you want to do that because of the capability of our global namespace and our single file system across edge, core and cloud. So that's the 3,200 in a nutshell, Dave. >> All right, give us a bottom line, Eric. And we got to go, what's the bumper sticker. >> Yeah, bumper sticker is, you got to ride the wave of containers and IBM storage is company that can take you there so that you win the big surfing context and get the big prize. >> Eric and Sam, thanks so much, guys. It's great to see you and miss you guys. Hopefully we'll get together soon. So get your jabs and we'll have a beer. >> All right. >> All right, thanks, Dave. >> Nice talking to you. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

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