(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. Day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets called theCube Cannon. We've got the Cannon of Content, interviews all day long, out at night at the analyst briefings, meet-ups, receptions, talking to all the executives at Dell Technologies VMware and across the industry. Stu, Dave, today is product announcements on the keynotes. Yesterday was the grand vision with Michael Dell and the big reveal on the Microsoft partnership with Satya Nadella's surprise visit onstage, unveiling new Azure-VMware integrations with Dell Technologies. Dell announced the Dell Cloud, which is a little bit of Virtustream, but they're trying to position this cloud, I guess it's a cloud if you want to call it a single cloud of glass. Dave, single pane in the glass with a variety of other things, unified workspace and some other things. This is Dell trying to be a supplier end-to-end. This is the pitch from Dell Technologies. We'll be talking to Michael Dell, also Pat Gelsinger, the CO of VMware. Dave, were you impressed, were you shocked, were you surprised with yesterday's big news and as the products start coming online here, what's your analysis? >> Well yesterday, John, was all about the big strategic vision, Michael Dell laying out check for good and then the linchpin of Dell strategy which of course is VMware for cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, kind of VMware everywhere. I was surprised that Satya Nadella flew down from Seattle and was here on stage in person. Didn't come in from the big screen. So I thought that was pretty impressive. You had the three power players up on stage. Today of course was all about the products. Both Dell and EMC have always been very practical in terms of their engineering. Stu, you used to work there. Their R&D is a lot of D. It's sort of incremental product improvements to keep the customers happy, to keep ahead of the competition, to keep the lifecycle going. They had like 10 announcements today. I can go through 'em real quick if you want, but they range from new laptops to talking about new branding on servers, new storage devices. You had PowerProtect which is their new rebranded backup and data protection and data manage portfolio, an area where Dell EMC has been behind. So lots of announcements. Another kind of mega launch tradition and again, a lot of incremental but important tactical improvements to the product line. >> Last year, what we heard from Jeff Clarke is they're looking to simplify that portfolio. Back in the EMC days, it was oh my gosh, look at the breadth of this. Every category, they had two or three offerings and you know, the stated goal is to simplify that and that means most categories are going to get one product. It's interesting. You talk about networking just got rebranded with that Power branding. I kind of said there there's marketing behind it. If you know what that product is because it's the Power brand and they put it out there. So you know, PowerMax, has been their tiered storage. They had a good update for Unity. It's Unity XT. Doesn't have a power name yet so maybe there's still some dry powder left in the product portfolio there, but they're making progress going through this 'cause these things don't happen overnight. It's great to spin up the clouds, but in the storage world, customers, they trust, they have the code, they test it out. So going to new generations, making that change, does take time but you've seen that progress. The tail end of that integration between Dell and EMC on the product side. >> Stu, what's your analysis of the products so far 'cause again like Dave said, it's a slew of announcements. What's resonating, what's popping out, what's boiling up to the surface? >> Yeah so look, the area that I spent so much time on, John, that hyper-converged infrastructure. If you look at a lot of the pieces underneath it all, it's VxRail. One of the things we've had a little bit of a challenge squinting through is oh wait, there's this managed service stack, it's VxRail underneath. Oh wait I've taken the appliance and I put VCF. Oh that's VxRail and then I've got this other, it's like I see three or four solutions and I'm like is it all just VxRail with like a VMware stack on top of it? But it's how do I package it, what applications live on it, how is it consumed, manage service, op ex, cap ex. So they've got that a little bit of complexity when VxRail itself is you know, dirt simple and really there so they're making progress on the cloud piece. Dell is the leader in hyper-converged. I'll point out, you don't hear anybody talking about Nutanix here, but Dell still has a partnership on the XC Core. They're going to sell a lot of Dell servers into Nutanix environment so I expect you'll still have the Nutanix show. John you're going to be at that next week. They're still going to talk about Dell. I'm sure you'll talk to Dheeraj. Yes they made a partnership with HP, but that does not kill the relationship with Nutanix just like Microsoft, heck. I'm going to see Satya Nadella on stage at Red Hat Summit next week and you're like oh well VMware and Red Hat. Red Hat's here. Red Hat's a Dell-ready partner. If you want to put open shift on top of their stack, they can do that so hardware and software, everybody's got their pieces, everybody's got their pieces, everybody competes a lot, but they partner across the board. IBM Global Services is here. There's so many companies here. Dell's a broad company, deep partnerships. The question I have is Pat Gelsinger was just on stage saying that this SDDC will be the building block for the future. I said kudos to them. They've got it on AWS, they've got it announced with Azure, we announced it with Google, but that is not necessarily the end state. VMware is a piece of the puzzle. I don't know if VMware will be the leader in multicloud management. vCenter was the leader in virtualization management so how much of that will there or do I get an Amazon and then start moving some stuff over? Do I get to Azure and start modernizing my environment so that I don't need to pay VMware and I don't need virtualization. VMware and Dell are going to containerize everything so in the future, are they containerware, you know? That's the competition kind of post-it note. They are VMware at their core. VMware is centra of the strategy and there's still some work to go, but they're making some good progress. >> I want to get your thoughts, guys, on the role VMware is playing here at the show. Normally they're here, usually they're here, but this year it seems to be much more smoother integration of talking points, messaging, product integrations. The show's got a good beat to it. Pretty packed, but the role of VMware, Dave, Stu, what's your reaction and thoughts? We've seen them dance all the time. Obviously VMware, Dave as you pointed out yesterday, a big part of the valuation of Dell Technologies, but what's your observation on the presence of VMware here at Dell Technologies World? >> I mean I've said many times that this company and I said this about EMC, it's kind of a boring company without VMware. You put VMware in the mix and all of a sudden, it becomes very strategic and very interesting from a lot of standpoints. Certainly from a financial standpoint. Remember, the Class V transaction that took Dell public was the result of an $11 billion dividend because of VMware. They took VMware's cash and they said okay, we're going to give nine billion to the shareholders. Without VMware, that wouldn't have happened. As well, the multicloud strategy, the underpinning of that multicloud strategy is VMWare. What strikes me, John and Stu, is that the cultural change. You had Dell, you had EMC. They said ah yeah the companies are compatible, but they're different companies. They maybe had shared kind of goals and values, but they had different cultures and really in a short timeframe, Michael Dell and his team have put these two companies together and they have aligned in a big way. I mean they are basically saying VMware and Dell, boom. That's how we're going to market and you know, Pat's coming on later today and I'm sure he'll say hey we love NetApp, we love HBE, we love IBM, but it's clear what the preferred partnership is. >> Dave, when the acquisition happened, there was talks of synergies and we were like oh where are they going to cut everything? If I look around here, they've got the seven logos of the primary companies. It's Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware. They're one company. Michael Dell will go on calls for any of them. Friends of mine at Pivotal says you talk to Michael quite a bit. You know, he's out there. We talked about it yesterday. Dell and VMware are closer and tighter aligned than EMC and VMware ever were. Now on the one hand, EMC kept them separate because the growth of virtualization required that. Today in this cloud environment, it's a different world and it's matured so VMware, sure, there's still work on HP and IBM and all this other stuff, but Dell leads that move as you said, Dave. >> John, you're big on culture. This is a founder culture. What's your take on what Michael Dell has accomplished and how does it stand to compare with sort of other great cultural transformations that you've seen? >> Well I think HBE is a great example of a culture that split, was uncharged there. We know what happened there and I think they're hurting, they're losing talent and they're not winning in categories across the board like Dell is. I think Michael Dell, the founder-led approach that he's having 'cause he told us years ago, if you guys remember, here on the record, also privately that I'm going to take this off the table with EMC and I'm going to do all these things. We're going to execute. So he brought his execution mojo and ecos of Dell and become Dell Technologies, as Stu pointed out, a portfolio of multiple companies under one umbrella and he brought the execution discipline and this is a theme, Dave. Last night at the analysts reception, as I was talking to other analysts and talking to some of the execs, both from VMware and Dell Technologies, that the execution performance across the board both on product integration, which was a weak spot as you know, is getting better, the business performance discipline. We're going to have the CFO on here to talk more about it, they're executing. Howard Elias is going to be on this afternoon. He called this three years ago when he was talking about the integration that they saw synergies, they saw opportunities and they were going to unpack those. They stayed relentless on that. So I think this is a great example of keeping the founders around for all the VC-backed companies. You're thinking about getting rid of founders. Never let a founder leave a company. They bring the vision, they bring also some guts and grit and they bring a perspective and you can put great talent and team around that, that attract and retain great executives like Michael's done and he's poaching HPE, other companies and pulling talent in 'cause they're executing. They pay well, it's a great place to work according to the statistics. So again, this is all because of the founder and if the founder's not around, you have all the fiefdoms and the policists who kick in and then it becomes kind of sideways. So that's kind of what I see other companies that don't have founders around and HP lost their founders obviously and then the culture kind of went a little bit sideways. So they're trying to get back in the game, seeing them go back to their roots. We'll see how they do. We don't do that show anymore and again we don't have a lot of visibility into what HP's doing but we do know, Dave, that they do not have a lot of the pieces on the board that Dell does. So if you want to have an end-to-end operating model, and you're missing key value activities of an end-to-end value chain, that's going to be hard to automate, it's hard to be a performant, it's going to be hard to be successful. So I think Dell is showing the playbook of how to be horizontally scalable operationally and offer perspectives and data-driven specialism in any industry in any vertical. >> Yeah Dave, if I can just on the cultural piece 'cause it's really interesting. You talked about EMC, East Coast hard driving versus VMware, software, Silicon Valley company. While they're working together, a lot of it, you know, I talk to VMware people and they're like well it's great the Dell force is just selling our stuff. It's not like I'm having storage shoved down my throat or we have to have our arms twisted. It's the product portfolio that they're selling, the vSAN, NSX, the management software suite and those pieces, things like SD-WAN, there's some good synergies there. So the product portfolio is a nice fit that just jointly go out to market that they just really line up well together and Dell's a very different cultural beast than EMC was. >> Well again, staying on culture for a moment, when I discussed with some of the folks that I know out of Hopkinton the narrative early on was oh Dell's ruining EMC, tearing it apart and so forth. When you talk to people today, they say, you know what, it was painful. Dell came in and said okay, you're going to be accountable, really had an accountability culture, but now they've come out the other side, the narrative is it was the right thing to do. Jeff Clarke came in and sort of forced this alignment. There's like no question about it. People, this is a guy who you know, his calendar's set for the year. People know where he's going to be, what meeting he's going to have, what's expected and they're prepared and it seems to be taking hold. I mean if a $90 billion company that's growing at 14% in revenues, in profitable revenues, that's quite astounding when you think about it and I think it's a big result of the speed at which Dell has brought in its operating model to the broader EMC and transformed itself. It's quite amazing. >> Awesome show, guys. We've got clips out there on the #DellTechWorld on Twitter. We've got a lot of videos. We've got two sets here, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Final word on this intro for day two, guys. Thoughts on the show? It's not a boring show. It's a lot of activities, a lot of things. They've got an Alienware eSports gaming studio which I think is totally badass. A lot of kind of cool things here. It's not the glitz and glam that we've seen in other EMC Worlds before or Dell Worlds, but it's meat and potatoes and it's got a spring to its step here. I feel it's not, it feels good. That's my takeaway. >> Well the big theme is hybrid cloud and multicloud. Jon Rowe as we were leaving the room today that we were early with that multicloud. Thanks for everybody else in the industry for hopping on board. The reality is the first time I heard the sort of hybrid cloud was called private cloud. Chuck Hollis wrote a blog back in the mid to late 2000s. Now I will make an observation in the customers that I talk to. Multicloud is not thus far, has not thus far has been a deliberate strategy. In my opinion, it's been the outcropping of multivendor, shadow IT, lines of business and I think the corner office is saying hold on, we need to reign this in, we need to have a better understanding of what our cloud strategy is, build a platform that is hybrid and sure, multicloud, to build our digital transformation. We need IT to basically help us build this out to make sure we comply with the corporate edicts and that's what's happening. It is early days. There's a long way to go. >> Yeah, as Dave, as you know, I sat right down the hallway from Chuck Hollis when he wrote that piece and I went and I called up Chuck and I was like hey Chuck, this sure sounds like my next generation virtual data center stuff that I joined the CTO office to work on and he's like yeah, yeah, new marketing branding and I wrote a piece, exactly what you said, Dave, on Wikibon.com, hybrid and multicloud were a bunch of pieces, you know. It's not a cohesive strategy. The management's not there. We're starting to see maturation. Some of the point products, you know, developed really fast. When we talk about VMware on AWS, that happened really fast. I heard if you stop by the VMware booth here at the show, they're showing outposts and I said is a diagram? No, no, I've got customers in production running this. I'm like hold on, I need to hear about this. Outpost in production? But that strategy as you said, hybrid and multicloud, we're starting to get there, starting to pull it together. David Foyer wrote a phenomenal piece about hybridcloud taxonomy. We've spent a lot of time on the research side. Really what does the industry need to do, how should customers think about all of the layers? You know, data and networking and all of these components to help make not just a bunch of pieces but actually drive innovation and help be better than the sum of its parts. >> Well ironic followup on that post, the Chuck Hollis post was around they called it the private cloud and it was all about homogeneity and now multicloud is everything but homogeneous. Outpost, however, is. Same hardware, same software, same control plane, same data plane so interesting juxtaposition. >> We'll see Amazon Outpost. Guys, go to SiliconAngle.com, Wikibon.com. Great hybridcloud, multicloud analysis coverage and news. And some of the headlines hitting the net here. Dell Technologies makes VMware linchpin of hybrid cloud, data center as a service, end user strategies from Zdnet. eWEEK, Dell makes major hybrid cloud push. Obviously great analysis, guys, right on the number. Day two, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We've got two sets. Rebecca Knight, Lisa Martin and more. Stay tuned for more coverage of day two after the short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Chhandomay Mandal, he is the Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Direct from Boston. This is a Boston panel, I love it. >> Yes, and we were on the same flight yesterday. >> (laughing) There you go! >> Ah, so half of Hopkinton. >> Yeah. So, we're here at Dell Technologies World, but you're here to talk to us about SAP. Explain to our viewers a little bit about the connection between your companies. >> Sure, so SAP connects a lot of our customers. They are running their ERP, CRM, digital procurement, HR systems, and many other workloads on SAP, and we, Dell Technologies, as a company, have a portfolio of solutions to support SAP workloads. So, that's the big connection. SAP and Dell EMC, we are big partners, and we work hand in hand as well. >> Talk a little bit about what SAP customers are doing. You know, everybody knows the stories of SAP multi-year implementation, very complicated, although driving business value, but today people want to be more agile, cloud, Hana, who's been around now for quite a number of years. SAP obviously pushing hard for a number of reasons. What are you seeing in the customer base? >> Yeah, SAP customers are in a journey. As you mentioned, the SAP landscapes implementations. In fact, in 2016, greater than fifty percent of SAP landscapes were running on Oracle. SAP has come up with the in-memory database, SAP Hana, and there is a mandate that by 2025, the customers need to be running on SAP Hana to run any SAP workload. So, customers need to go through that transition, and as the data explodes from IoT, Big Data, BlockChain, our next gen intelligent applications, they are driving a lot of analytics, and SAP has come up with a platform called SAP Leonardo for mission learning. So, customers are trying to consolidate their old SAP landscapes on an agile, modern infrastructure. They are planning to migrate all the older databases to SAP Hana. At the same time, they are looking into deploying SAP Leonardo to take advantage of IoT, AI, BlockChain, all those things. >> So SAP is dangling the carrot. With Hana, it's in memory, performance, efficiency. With Leonardo, it's the promise of machine intelligence, but there are challenges in migrating off of Oracle. How are customers dealing with that? Are you guys in a position to help with the partnership with SAP? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yes, SAP implementations, as you know, is fairly complex, takes many months, years, and customers have been running SAP for a long time, so their challenge are, "How do we keep our businesses running while we need to transition from what we have to these SAP Hana based deployments." They are looking into modern infrastructures that will be able to consolidate all of this around their applications with the same SLS, and at the same time when they migrate one application to the next on SAP Hana, that platform should be able to add up and deliver all the SLS. So, refactoring what they have into this SAP Hana is really big for all of our customers, and how to have a better performing platform, how to deliver the agility's simplification, as well as lower the TCO. These are the projects that CIO's are running for our customers. >> So, as we know, simpler is always better. Can you talk about some of the ROI? What are companies actually seeing in terms of these benefits? >> So, let's take specific examples. Dell EMC PowerMax is the backbone of running SAP applications for a long time. Our previous generations in terms of VMAX, VMAX All Flash, now with our PowerMax, it has the highest skill ability of SLP Hana. It can actually run 162 SAP Hana nodes on a single array, but that's not the end game. The thing is, it can consolidate SAP, traditional SAP workloads, SAP Hana, as well as other mixed workloads while delivering the same performance masking the SLS, with it's built-in mission learning capabilities. Now, what does that translate to? We have several customers seeing benefits out of this. For example, a big sports equipment manufacturer, when they move to this platform, there are software quality assurance process. It used to take like ten days in all the infrastructure. Now they could run on this new platform in two days. That's literally eighty percent improvement, because of the higher performance, the more consolidation that they were able to access. So that's one example just from the performance perspective, but if you take a consolidation simpler to run, there are other examples I can actually walk you through. >> So, I want to double click on that, because every storage company wants to partner with SAP, target that stuff, because Oracle's not that friendly these days. They have their own hardware, right? They're trying to elbow you out with Exadata. So, talk a little bit more about the differentiation that Dell EMC brings relative to some of your other storage competitors, specifically within SAP environments. >> Sure, so first Dell comes in with a portfolio of solutions. As you are mentioning, these are fairly complex deployments, and customers are looking for cross state partner, with professional services, experience, and a portfolio of solutions, not just one solution fits all. Just to continue on that aspect, I talked about Dell EMC PowerMax. It's great for consolidation, for running Hana and the existing workloads, but then when you look at the next generation of applications, the IoT, AI, BlockChain, the unstructured world, Dell EMC Isilon is a great platform which has already been in the market and in the forefront of AI workloads. Dell, as a company, offer a portfolio of solutions, and it's not piecemeal. We see the broader picture, and plug in all the right pieces with the right consulting surfaces as well, so that the customers can run their applications day in and day out, and transition as well as bring in new deployments like SAP Leonardo. I'll give you one example here. Another big service provider, their analytics, their SAP APOs, used to take like 32 hours of run time, and they could only do in weekends. Now, with this Dell EMC storage solutions, they are actually down to, give or take, seven hours. So that's like 78% improvement in terms of how fast they can run this analytics, and this is turning into better decision making for the procurement manager, for the business analyst, and they are able to drive value from time to market, time to value, from all the data that's captured in these SAP landscapes. >> And these are realtime or near realtime analyses that are going on, right? But then ultimately you have to persist the data, that's where things like PowerMax come in, and then sometimes you got to bring it back in, and so are you guys architecting high speed interconnects and InfiniBands and all kinds of crazy stuff? >> All kinds of things-- >> NVMe's... >> And actually, you brought up a very good point. SAP Hana is an in-memory database, so everything is running in the memory speed. Why do you need high performing array like Dell EMC PowerMax? Guess what? Everything is in memory, but this is all critical databases. Everything needs to be persisted back to the storage array, and then when something reboots, you cannot stay still til all the data is back from the storage array into the memory. So, persisting the data quickly and fast reboots are also necessary. Driving the needs of throughputs like what PowerMax provides, 150 gigabits per second throughput, so that's where the connection comes in. >> So the throughputs you're describing really were unthinkable five years ago. Can you reflect on that a little bit in terms of what you've seen the technology do that you really couldn't have even imagined it doing, even in very recent times. >> In fact, that's a very good point. One of the customers that participated in this TOI study, they mentioned they wanted to go to the cloud, public cloud. When they wanted to go to the cloud at the time the maximum size of our database you could do was 2.5 terabyte, and they already had a 4 terabyte SAP database, so there was no way they could go to a public cloud. What they were looking into, the cloud operating model, so that you can actually be flexible with your infrastructure, consume as you go, and we were able to help in that transition with all of the solutions. >> Great. So where you think we're going to be going? I mean in terms of next year's Dell Technologies World 2020, which will be big just because it's a cool number. What do you think we'll be talking about next year's conference? >> That's a very good point, and as you mentioned 2020, we are already seven billion people, and by 2020 it's predicted to be like 30 billion devices generating 44 zettabytes of data, so managing all of this data, putting the data at the right tier, the data that needs to be accessed quickly to make realtime analysis process. The data that's seven days old, putting them in the right tier, accessing them, and driving the value from your data, from this past amount of data, so that you can make decisions, you can gather intelligence, and take this value to drive competitive differentiation will be where we are. And the form factor? Yes, everybody will be able to do all of this pretty much like realtime in phones or even smaller devices. >> It's the march to 2025, when everybody's going to be off Oracle. >> Well exactly! You're right. >> Oh, that's your mandate. >> Anyway, @dvellante if you want to talk about that. We've got a lot pf research on it, so... >> Exactly. >> Not trivial. >> Well Chhandomay, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Same here. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to Wikibon's Action Item. (funky electronic music) We're broadcasting, once again, from theCUBE studios in lovely Palo Alto. And I've got the Wikibon research team assembled here with me. I want to introduce each of them. David Floyer. >> Hi. >> George Gilbert are here in the studio with me. Remote we have Jim Kobielus, Stu Miniman, and Neil Raden. Thanks everybody for joining. Now, we're going to talk about something that is increasingly overlooked, that we still think has enormous importance in the industry. And that is, does hardware matter? For 50 years, in many respects, the rate of change in industry has been strongly influenced, if not determined by the rate of change in the underlying hardware technologies. As hardware technologies improved, the result was that software developers would create software that would fill up that capacity. But we're experiencing a period where some of the traditional approaches to improving hardware performance are going down. We're also seeing that there is an enormous, obviously, move to the cloud. And the cloud is promising different ways of procuring the infrastructure capacity that businesses need. So that raises the question with potential technologies constraints on the horizon, and an increasing emphasis on utilization of the cloud, is systems integration and hardware going to continue to be a viable business option? And something that users are going to have to consider as they think about how to source their infrastructure? Now there are a couple of considerations today that are making this important right now. Jim Kobielus, what are some of those considerations that increase the likelihood that we'll see some degree of specialization that's likely to turn into different hardware options? >> Yeah Peter, hi everybody. I think one of the core considerations is that edge computing has become the new approach to architecting enterprise and consumer grade applications everywhere. And edge computing is nothing without hardware on the edge, devices as well as hubs and gateways and so forth, to offload and the handle much of the processing needed. And increasingly, it's AI, artificial intelligence. deep learning, machine learning. So going forward now, looking at how it's shaping up, hardware's critically important. Burning AI, putting AI onto chipsets, low power, low cost chips that can do deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, fast, cheaply, in an embedded form factor, critically important for the development of edge computing as a truly end-to-end distributed fabric for the next generation of application. >> So Jim, are we likely to see greater specialization of some of those AI algorithms and data structures and what not, drive specialization and the characteristics of the chips that support it, or is it all going to be just default down to tensor flow or GPUs? >> It has been GPUs for AI. Much of AI, in terms of training and inferencing, has been in the cloud, and much of it has been based historically, heretofore, on GPUs, and video being the predominant provider. However, GPUs historically have not been optimized for AI, because they've been built for gaming and consumer applications. However, the next generation, the current generation, from Nvidia and others, are chipsets in the cloud and other form factors for AI, incorporates what's called tensor core processing, really a highly densely packed tensor core processing components to be able to handle deep learning neural networks, very fast, very efficiently for inferencing and training. So Nvidia and everybody else now is making a big bet on tensor core processing architecture. Of course Google's got one of the more famous ones, their TPU architecture, but they're not the only ones. So going forward, we're looking at, in the AI ecosystem, especially for edge computing, there increasingly will be a blend of GPUs like for cloud based core processing, TPUs or similar architecture, or device-level processing. But also, FPGAs, A6, and CPUs are not out of the running because for example, CPUs are critically important for systems on the chip, which are quite fundamentally important for unattended operation as well as attended operation in terms of edge devices to handle things like natural language processing for conversational UIs. >> So that suggests that we're going to see a lot of new architecture thinking introduced as a consequence of trying to increase the parallelism through a system by incorporating more processing at the edge. >> Jim: Right. >> That's going to have an impact on volume economics and where the industry goes from an architecture standpoint. David Floyer, does that ultimately diminish the importance of systems integration as we move from the edge back towards the core and towards cloud in whatever architectural form it takes? >> I think the opposite, it actually is, systems integration becomes more important. And the key question has been can software do everything? Do we need specialized hardware for anything? And the answer is yes, because the standard x86 systems are just not improving in speed at all. >> Why not? >> That's a long answer to that. But it's to do with the amount of heat that's produced, and the degree of density that you can achieve. Even the chip itself-- >> So the ability to control bits flying around the chip-- >> Correct. >> Is going down-- >> Right. >> As a consequence of dispersion of energy and heat into the chip. >> Right, There are a lot of other factors as well. >> Other reasons as well, sure. >> But the important thing is, how do you increase the speed? And a standard x86 cycle time with it's instruction set, that's now fixed. So what can you do? Well, you can obviously, reduce the number of instructions and then parallelize those instructions within that same space. And that's going to give you a very significant improvement. And that's the basis of GPUs and FPGAs. So GPUs for example, you could have floating point arithmetic, or standard numbers or extended floating point arithmetic. All of those help in calculations, large scale calculations. The FPGAs are much more flexible. They can be programmed in very good ways, so they're useful for smaller volume things. A6 are important, but what we're seeing is a movement to specialized hardware to process AI in particular. And one area is very interesting to me is, to take the devices at the edge, what we call the level one systems. Those devices need to be programmed very, very intently for what is happening there. They are bringing all the data in, they're making that first line reduction of data, they're making the inferences, they're taking the decisions based on that information coming in and then sending much less data up to the level twos above it. So what are examples of this type of system that exist now? Because in hardware, volume matters. The amount of stuff you produce, the costs go down dramatically. >> And software too, in the computing industry, volume matters. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> I think it's pretty safe to say that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So volume matters, so it's interesting to look at one of the first real volume AI applications, which is in the iPhone X. And Apple have introduced the latest chipset. It has neural networks within it. It has GPUs built in, and it's being used for simple things like face recognition and other areas of AI. And the interesting thing is the cost of this. The cost of that whole set, the chip itself, is $27. The total cost with all the senors and everything, to do that sort of AI work is $100. And that's a very low bar, and very, very difficult to introduce in other ways. So this level of integration for the consumer business in my opinion, is going to have a very significant effect on the choices that are made by manufacturers of devices going into industry and other things. They're going to take advantage of this in a big way. >> So Neil Raden, we've heard, or we've been down the FPGA road for example, in the past, data warehousing introduced, or it was thought that data warehouse workloads which did not necessarily lend themselves to a lot of the prevailing architectures in the early 90s, could get this enormous acceleration by giving users greater programmable control over the hardware. How'd that work out? >> Well, for Intersil for example, what actually worked out pretty well for awhile. But what they did is they used that PGA to handle the low-level data stuff and maybe reducing the complexity of the query before it was passed on to the CPUs where things ran in parallel. But that was before Intel introduced multi-core chips. And it kind of killed the effectiveness. And the other thing was, it was highly proprietary which made it impossible to take up to the cloud. And there was no programming. I always laugh when people say FPGA because it should have been called FGA. Because there was no end user computing of an FPGA. >> So that means that, although we still think we're going to see some benefit from this. But it kind of brings us back to the cloud, because if hardware economics are improved to scale, then that says that there are a few companies that are likely to drive a lot of the integration issues. If things like FPGAs don't get broadly diffused and programmed by large numbers of people, but we can see how they could, in fact, dramatically improve the performance, and quality of workloads, then it suggests that some of these hyperscalers are going to have an enormous impact ultimately on defining what constitutes systems integration. Stu, take us through some of the challenges that we've heard recently on the cloud, or on theCUBE at reinvent and other places, about how we start seeing some of the hyperscalers make commitments about specialized hardware, the role that systems integration's going to play, and then we'll talk about whether that could be replicated across more on-premise types of systems. >> Sure Peter, and to go back to your opening remarks for this segment, does hardware matter? When we first saw cloud computing roll out, many people thought that this was just undifferentiated commodity equipment. But if you really dig in and understand what the hyperscalers, the public cloud companies are doing, they really do what I've called hyperoptimize the solution. So when James Hamilton and AWS talks about their infrastructure, they don't just take components and throw a bunch of stuff from off the shelf out there. They build for every application, a configuration, and they just scale that to tens of thousands of nodes. So like what we had done in the enterprise before, which was build a stack for an application, now the public cloud does that for services and for applications that they're building up the stack. So hardware absolutely matters. And if we look not only at the public cloud, but you mentioned on the enterprise side, it's where do I need to think about hardware? Where do I need to put time and effort? What David Floyer's talked about is that integration is still critically important. But the enterprise should not be worrying about taking all of the pieces and putting them together. They should be able to buy solutions, leverage platforms that take care of that environment. Very timely discussion about all of the Intel issues that are happening. If I'm using a public cloud, well I don't have to necessarily worry about, I need to worry about that there was an issue, but I need to go to my supplier (chuckles) and make sure that they are handling that. And if I'm using serverless technology, obviously I'm a little bit detached from what that, whether or not I have that issue, and how that gets resolved. So absolutely, hardware is important. It's just, who manages that hardware, what pieces I need to think about, and where that happens. And the fascinating stuff happening in the AI pieces that Jim's been talking about, where you're really seeing some of the differentiation and innovation happening at the hardware level, to make sure that it can react for those applications that need it. >> So we've got this tension in the model right now. We've got this tension in the marketplace, where a lot of the new design decisions are going to be driven by what's happening at the edge. As we try to put more software out to where more human activity or system activity's actually taking place. And at the same time, a lot of the new design and architecture decisions being, first identified and encountered by some of the hyperscalers. The workloads are at the edge, the new design decisions are at the hyperscaler, latency is going to ensure that there is a fair amount of, a lot of workload that remains at the edge, as well as cost. So what does that mean for that central class of system? Are we going to see, as we talk about, TPC, true private cloud, becoming a focal point for new classes of designs, new classes of engineering? Are we going to see a Dell-EMC box that says, "designed in Texas," or "designed in Hopkinton," and is that going to matter to users? David Floyer, what do we think? >> So it's really important from the consumer point, from the customer's point of view, that they can deal with a total system. So if they want a system at the very edge, the level one we want, to do something in the manufacturing, they may go to Dell, but they may also go to Sony or they may go to Honeywell or NCL-- >> Rahway, or who knows. >> Rahway, yes, Alibaba. There are a whole number of probably new people that are going to be in that space. When you're talking about systems on site for the high level systems, level two and above, then they are going to be very, it will be very important to them that the service level that comes from the manufacturer, the integration of all the different components, both software and hardware, come from that manufacturer. He is organizing it from a service perspective. All of those things become actually more important in this environment. It's more complex, there are more components. There are more FPGAs and GPUs and all sorts of other things, connected together, it'll be their responsibility as the deliverer of a solution, to put that together and to make sure it works, and that it can be serviced. >> And very importantly to make sure, as you said, that it works and it can be serviced. >> Yeah. >> So that's going to be there. So the differentiation will be, does the design and engineering lead to simpler configuration, simpler change. >> Absolutely. >> Accommodate the programming requirements, accommodate the application requirements, all that are-- >> All in there, yes. >> Approximate to the realities of where data needs to be. George, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I got to say, having gone to IBM's IOT event a year ago in Munich, it was pretty clear that, when you're selling these new types of systems that we're alluding to here, it's like a turnkey appliance. It's not just bringing the Intel chip down. It's as David and Jim pointed out, it's a system on a chip that's got transistor real estate for specialized functions. And because it's not running the same scalable clustered software that you'd find in the cloud, you have small footprint software that's highly verticalized or specialized. So we're looking at lower volume, specialized turnkey appliances, that don't really share the architectural and compatibility traits of the enterprise and true private cloud cousins. And we're selling it, for the most part, to new customers, the operations technology folks, not IT, and often, you're selling it in conjunction with the supply chain master. In other words, auto OEM might go to their suppliers in conjunction with another vendor and sell these edge devices or edge gateways. >> And so that raises another very important question. Stu, I'm going to ask this of you. We're not going to be able to answer this question today. It's a topic for another conversation. But one of the things that the industry's not spending enough time talking about is that we are in the midst of a pretty consequential shift from a product orientation in business models to a service orientation in business models. We talk about APIs, we talk about renting, we talk about pay-as-you-go. And there is still an open question about how well those models are going to are going to end up on premise in a lot of circumstances. But Stu, when we think about this notion of the cloud experience, providing a common way of thinking about a cloud operating model, clearly the design decisions that are going to have to be made by the traditional providers of integrated systems are going to have to start factoring that question of how do we move from a product to a service orientation along with their business models, their way of financing, et cetera. What do you think is happening? Where's the state of the art in that today? >> Yeah, and Peter, it actually goes back to when we at Wikibon launched the true private cloud research a little bit over two years ago. It was not just saying, "How do we do something "better than virtualization?" It was really looking at, as you said, that cloud operating model. And what we're hearing very loud from customers today is, it's not that they have a public cloud strategy and an private cloud strategy. They have a cloud strategy (chuckles). And one of the challenges that they're really having is, how do they get their arms around that? Because today their private cloud and their public cloud a lot of times it's different suppliers, it's different operating environments as you said. We could spend a whole nother call on just discussing some of the nuance and pieces here. But the real trend we've been seeing, and kind of the second half of last year, and big thing we'll see, I'm sure, through this year, is what are the solutions? And how can customers manage this much simpler? And what are the technology pieces? And operational paradigms that are going to help them through this environment? And yeah, it's a little bit detached from some of the hardware discussion we're having here. Because of course, at the end of the day, it shouldn't matter what hardware or what locale I'm in, it's how I manage the entire environment. >> But it does (laughs). >> Yeah. >> It shouldn't matter, but the reality is, I think we're concluding that it does. >> Right, we think back to, oh back in the early days, "Oh, virtualization, great. "I can take any x86. "Oh wait, but I had a BIOS problem, "and that broke things." So when containers rolled out, we had the same kind of discussion, this, "Oh wait." There was something down at the storage or networking layer that broke. So it's always, where is the proper layer? How do we manage that? >> Right, I for one just continue to hope that we're going to see the Harry Potter computing model show up at some point in time. But until then, magic is not going to run software. It's going to have to run on hardware, and that has physical and other realities. All right, thanks guys. Let's wrap this one up. Let me give some, what the action item is. So this week, we've talked about the importance of hardware in the marketplace going forward. And partly, it's catalyzed by an event that occurred this week. A security firm discovered a couple of flaws in some of the predominant, common, standard volume CPUs, including Intel's, that have long term ramifications. And while one of the fixes is not going to be easy, the other one can be fixed by software. But the suggestion is that the fix, that software fix would take out 30% of the computing power of the chip. And we were thinking to ourselves, what would happen if the world suddenly lost 30% of their computing power overnight? And the reality is, a lot of bad things would happen. And it's very clear that hardware still matters. And we have this tension between what's happening at the edge, where we're starting to see a need for greater distribution of function that's performing increasingly specialized workloads, utilizing increasingly new technology, that's not, that the prevailing stack is not necessarily built for. So the edge is driving new opportunities for design that's going to turn into new requirements for hardware that will only be possible if there's new volume markets capable of supporting it, and new suppliers bringing it to market. That doesn't however mean that the whole concept of systems integration goes away. On the contrary, even though we're going to see this enormous amount of change at the edge, there's an enormous net new invention in what does it mean to do systems integration? We're seeing a lot of that happen in the hyperscalers first, in companies like Amazon, and Google, and elsewhere. But don't be fooled. The HPE's the IBM's, the Dell-EMC's are all very cognizant of these approaches and these changes, and these challenges. And in many respects, a lot of the original work, a lot of the original invention is still being performed in their labs. So the expectation is the new design model is being driven by the edge. Plus the new engineering model's being driven by the hyperscalers, will not mean that it all ends up in two tiers. But we will see a need for modern systems integration happening in the true private cloud, on the premise, where a lot of the data and a lot of the workloads and a lot of the intellectual property is still going to reside. That however, does not mean that the model going forward is the same. Some of the new engineering dynamics, or some of the new design dynamics will have to start factoring in how the hardware simplifies configuration. For example, FPGAs have been around for a long time. But end users don't program FPGAs. So what good does it do to reflect the FPGA capability inside a box, inside a true private cloud box, if the user doesn't have any simple, straightforward, meaningful way to make use of it? So a lot of new emphasis on improve manageability, AI for ITOM, ways of providing application developers access to accelerated devices. This is where the new systems and design issues are going to manifest themselves in the marketplace. Underneath this, when we talk about unigrid, we're talking about some pretty consequential changes ultimately in how design and engineering of some of these big systems works. So our conclusion is, lots that the hardware still matters, but that the industry continued to move and drive in a direction that reduces the complexity of the underlying hardware. But that doesn't mean that users aren't going to have to, aren't going to encounter serious, serious decisions and serious issues regarding which supplier they should work with. So the action item is this. As we move from a product to a service orientation in the marketplace, hardware is still going to matter. That creates a significant challenge for a lot of users, because now we're talking about how that hardware is rendered as platforms that will have long-term consequences inside a business. So CIOs, start thinking about 2018 as the year in which you start to consider the new classes of platforms that you're going to move to. Because those platforms will be the basis for simplifying a lot of underlying decisions regarding where is the best design and engineering of infrastructure going forward. Once again, I want to thank my Wikibon teammates. George Gilbert, David Floyer, Stu Miniman, Neil Raden, Jim Kobielus, for a great Action Item. From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, this has been Action Item. Talk to you soon. (funky electronic music)

>> Speaker: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Yeah we're here live the Cube coverage at VMworld 2017. Behind us is the floor of the VMvillage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next two guest Beth Phalen who's the President and General Manager of Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Yanbing Li who's the Senior Vice President General Management with Storage and Availability at VMware, vSAN, all the greatness; Welcome back to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Got the heavy hitters here, data protection, AWS lot of great relationships synergies happening. >> Yeah. >> Give us the update. >> Yeah well go ahead yeah. >> We've been working together for a long time but recently we've really amped it up to the next level. Great discussions around enabling data protection for vSAN and as announced this week you know with Dell EMC will be first vendor to have data protection for VMware cloud on AWS. So it's a really exciting time to be here and I've been in this business for a long time. This is the best VMworld that I've seen so far and so it's just really great to be here with Yanbing. >> It's been very cohesive, I want to just stay on that for a second. This is the big milestone for VMware. >> It is. >> To have this shipping of the general availability especially with on the heels of the vCloud Air and all that controversy. Andy Jassy's on stage from Amazon web services. >> Yeah. >> Really kind of looking right at the audience and saying we got your back, this is a real deal, and the bridge to the future. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say those exact words. >> Yeah yeah yeah. >> How do you get that data protection? Because that data protection in the cloud is hard. >> Yeah, well the nice thing is that since we've got all of our data protection running in a cloud environment now we could then use that to build the connections with VMC. So we had Data Domain Virtual Edition running, we have Data Protection Suite running in the cloud. So people can use the same technology they used on prem but now in AWS in conjunction with VMC. >> So you kind have hyper converged infrastructure meets cloud data protection. Yanbing, what is the difference? I mean what's the requirement of hyper converged infrastructure data protection? How does it differ from traditional storage and how is it evolving? >> Ah, great questions you know Beth and I we've known each other for quite a few years. I have to say our relationship hasn't been, you know, this close is and it's getting closer and closer. So coming back to your question in terms of hyper converged infrastructure. We're seeing two fundamental shifts around data protection. One is, the blurring of the boundary between backup and DR and these two really coming together as unified data protection. I think there has been a lot of discussion around this for a long time but this become even more compelling; now we talk about hyper converged infrastructure where you know our customers they so enjoy the benefit of having compute and storage combined together in a common management experience, they're looking for the same for data protection. So we're really seeing customers want to see data protection as a feature of hyper converged, as a capability that's part of that rather than yet another silo they have to manage separately. You know they want policy that manage storage, compute, and backup and DR altogether. So that's why you know that's really drive our partnership so much closer. >> You know it's interesting many of the clients that we've worked with over the years they'll have a backup strategy but they don't really have a DR strategy and they sleep with one eye open at night and they're afraid to go to the board because it's so expensive, it's expensive insurance. So you're seeing that there, sounds like they're blending those 2 together kind of killing 2 birds with one stone. Are there trade offs or things that customers should think about in that regard? How do they sort of go from where they are today which is sort of a backup bolt on to that integrated DR and backup? >> I think one of the key is the technology that we're leveraging now and we leverage something that has like CDP continuous data protection you can use that one to have data path to the secondary storage and you can use that same code to also initiate disaster recovery with near 0 RPO and RTO. So another thing that we announced this week is with our DPS for apps next edition that we now have hypervisor direct back up and what that means is that we're integrated directly with ESX and we are leveraging ProtectPoint through VM's to move data to data domain. That same technology is also leverage within RecoverPoint through VM's and so you can see the engine, the internal engine of the data movements, can be applied both to disaster recovery and to back up with different windows of RTO and RPO. >> I'm glad you said near 0 RPO causes no such thing as 0 RPO but you're seeing, more pressure to get as close to 0 as possible. What's driving that pressure and how are you meeting it? >> Well I think with all of us we know that an industry customers are expecting 24 by, you know 24 by 7 up time right. So they have many many applications that they need to have the confidence that if it does go down for any reason they're going to be able to bring it back up within minutes or hours not days. So that's really the drive for continuous availability. Getting as close to that as possible. >> If I may one more John, the challenge in data protection has always been it's, it's largely been a one size fits all and it's either I'm either under protected or I'm spending and breaking the bank. So are you able to through your technology and process improvements improve the level of granularity for different workloads that require different service levels. >> Two things come to mind, One, we're seeing more and more interesting customers integrating data protection directlywith their applications. Whether it SQL or Oracle and or the VM itself. So that's one thing. So we can custom the data protection to particular application and then on the second piece of that is where the different interfaces that VM offers we're able to do either V80P level integration or more fine grained integration like we do with CheckPoint through VM. So we are getting to the point that we can make different choices either application specific or something that is fine tuned based on the level of mission critical capabilities that application requires. >> I will get you guys perspective just a high level ballistic view for a second. We're seeing convergence of two worlds. The cloud native world that have no walls, have no perimeters they operate in a mindset of there's a security holes everywhere. Then the protections hard. >> They think of a differently. >> Yeah On prem the traditional methods, how are those coming together? Because you have customers that run VMware and do stuff with data protection and then one of them VMware in the cloud. What's different, what do customers need to know that are we on either side of that equation? If I'm on prem and I now want to use VMware in the cloud on AWS. How does data protection fit in that? Is it the same, is there tweaks, how they think about it? >> You want to answer that? >> In terms of on prem or VMware in AWS you know a big value prop is reading at the consistency in the operating model. I'm sure you have heard about this a million times said. >> Yes, talking about it all week. >> All week long. From data protection we're trying to do exactly the same. So for example VMware cloud on AWS, the very first data protection that we certify on that platform is from [Vast 00:07:39] organization is Avamar networker being the first set of solution certified and our customers definitely love the continuity of I already have the experience and licensing associated with my own prem protection solution and they want to carry that forward in today's cloud. >> So same operating module, so from the customers perspective I've been doing it this way >> Exactly. >> With VMware and Dell Data Protection, now it's the same in the cloud. No change in. >> Yeah I mean I think that's really the beauty of it, even with DDVE I mean you can have applications or you can do through different; You know you can have application in the cloud as well as another level of protection of your secondary storage. >> I think some of the changes probably not necessary. So RPD model consistency, Dave we touch upon, hyper convergence is driving a lot of functionality into a single control plate as opposed to these different silos and you know we would like to see that happen in the cloud as well and along that line you know best organization and my organizing are really looking at how we viewed the best next generation integrated technology that truly leverages the strengths of both organizations. >> That's simple and easy to use. >> Simple, easy to use, policy base, you know turn key solutions, so this is, you know what we're doing something pretty innovative by truly bring our engineering together and try to boost our next generation solution. >> Since the synergies that Michael was talking about when we interviewed Michael yesterday he's like look, the synergies are well beyond its expectations. Just it seems to be flowing nicely in the culture. When EMC had the federation there was always kind of like an interesting but now things are flowing differently. It seems to be smoother you guys. >> They are. >> Every action. >> I totally agree with what you said. I mean it feels different and I think as we go forward we have even more opportunities but we're not even a year into it and there was a distinct difference in terms of recognition around the joint opportunity and like you said the smoothness of the conversation I think is >> It's clear, it's clarity. >> It's really helpful. >> Well also you know, the rising tide floats all boats, well VMware stock as gone like this. >> It makes us all happy. >> Its got a nice slope to it. >> I definitely want to hackle Beth on that and the type of collaboration we're seeing between our two organizations, might be you is actually having multiple touch point into Dell and Dell EMC organization whether it's our VxRail and you know the vSAN based collaboration or the data protection angle and we're really seeing that happen across different functions. So we are starting from go to market collaboration you know how we provide the best set of solutions to our customers in joint go to market effort. vSAN is gaining a lot of free print in mission critical workloads and a critical requirement is data protection. So so we're doing a lot of joint solution, joint selling together. And really in the next step is that joint engineering effort leveraging the best of both worlds to build next generation products that's optimized for hyper converged, that's optimized for the cloud. >> For the software defined data centers. >> If I dial back a decade let's say as virtualization generally in VMware specifically saw its ascendancy, data protection totally changed. For a number of reasons, you had less physical resources but backup was still very resource intensive application and so; That's really where Avarmar came before. He walked the floor, back up and data protection is exploding again. It's like the hottest area. So two part question. Why is that and then how does Dell EMC with you know its large portfolio, its big install base, how do you maintain competitiveness with all that new emerging innovation? >> Yeah well I think the first question and I want to hear your answer too but what I would say is because the industry is changing so dramatically it's requiring data protection to change just as dramatically. >> Right. >> Right, so that is a lot of people are seeing opportunity there. Where is maybe, I've had people say, you know, well you don't really have to protect data in the cloud it's all stuff that's magically protected, I've had customers say that to me and I think that we're now beyond that, right and people are realizing, wow you know, just as much of a need or more of a need than it was before. So I think there's plenty of you know companies appreciate opportunity and they see opportunity right now as data protection evolves quickly to address the new IT world that we live in. On anything you would add to the first answer? >> Yeah so I think, several years ago VMworld feels like a storage shelf you know. I think there is still a lot of exciting interesting storage company but there has been quite a bit of consolidation you know. Software defined storage it seems like that market's landscape is becoming clearer and clearer and we're definitely seeing that spreading into secondary storage is now right for a disruption and we're also seeing that is disruption around secondary storage isalso impacting data protection software. It's not just the secondary storage element but you know extent to the entire software stack. I think it's very exciting and also thinking about you know what is going to be the economical benefit of cloud and how do we take best advantage of that and this is why you know our AWS relationship. You know we are rejuvenizing our DR effort. We have successful on prem product like SRM but we're seeing tremendous new opportunity to look at that in the context of cloud to truly leveraging the economy is scale of what cloud has to offer. So lots of driving factors to really revitalize that. >> It's a cloud show and you have no cloud. >> Okay Beth second part of my question is how do you keep pace, it's a pretty tremendous innovations going on, how do you keep pace, what are your thoughts on all that? >> So the really cool thing is because where you know we're Dell Technologies we have not only data protection assets, we also have servers, we also have switches, we have everything we need to build a full integrated stack which we now have without EPA. So within a integrated data protection appliance we have the best of data domain, we have the best of our software, we're leveraging also power at servers and dellium C switches. So we have everything that we need to build that end to end best in class integrated appliance and as customers change how they consume data protection to more like a converged consumption model or hyper converged consumption model we have all the pieces that we need to make that a reality and then to continue to move forward. So when you combine that with our relationship with VMware and the ability that we have to drive innovation jointly I have no doubt that we're going to be really moving ahead into you know modern data protection. >> Final question before we rap. R&D comes up, Micheal also mention and so do Pat, billions of dollars now are in R&D. Free cash was a billion dollars. Three billion for VMware. A lot of observations this week that we kind of looked and read the tea leaves one of them was at least for me was the stack a collision between hardware software stacks as IoT and servers and devices, you have hardware stacks and software stacks. Untested scenario certainly in vSAN; You see a lot of activity around untested new use cases and so it's going to put pressure on engineers. So the question is what's the vision for the R&D for you guys around data protection, because it's not just data protection anymore it's a fundamental linchpin in the equation of cloud >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on engineering road map I mean engineering R&D. >> One thing we're doing actually right now this week is we're restructuring our EMC lab dellium c lab back in Hopkinton to move to more of an open shared pivotal type environment. So you know it's clear that as we go forward doing things like pere programming on test driven development. You know enabling continuous always good known stayed like there is definitely advancements happening in software development that are accelerating innovation and so as we take advantage of that, that's how we keep pace with what's going on around us. Because you're right the number of things to get involved in is endless. >> I just want to point out before we end the segment you guys are very inspirational women in tech. I think you guys are amazing. We talk about the engineer resources. >> Thank you John. Your thoughts on the industry, as there's a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley and around the world around STEM and women in tech. Thoughts that you'd like to share to all the men watching and all the folks and young girls who might inspiration. You know it's passionate for us. >> Yeah, I'll start. So I think, first of all I want to tank the Cube for having such awareness in this topic and you know constantly featuring women in tech on your shows. You guys have been doing a great job raising the visibility women leaders. >> Thank you >> Thanks >> in the industry. Thank you. So certainly this is a topic very dear and near to my heart. This week you know we can still see not only our employee base but our customer base is heavily men dominated. But I think we're seeing unprecedented levels of awareness and attention to this topic in Silicon Valley and across the world. Really I do think we are starting to see much better transparency metric. We're seeing increased accountability in business and business leadership. So I think those and we're seeing a lot of social awareness I think those are going to drive a positive change. So let me give you a concrete example of fuzz for example things we do in VMware, we just gone through bonus allocation and compensation adjustment. I would get a report from it make sure, comparing the percentage of what we have done for the men population and women population and so you get a real time feedback in data and when we see the data is actually quite shocking hopefully we do see, unconsciously you know we may be allocating those >> Unconscious bias if you will. >> Yeah those differently. But because of those real time data and feedback we're good able to you know keep ourself accountable. So just you know this is no longer just talk this is a real data you know in the real HR practices that we are already building into our day to day practice. So I think I'm very optimistic, this will take time but this is you know we're moving in the right direction. >> Historical moment in the world if you think about it. This is super important time. The inspiration and also the young women out there too and also for the men. They need to be aware as well because inclusion includes not just women it's everyone. That seems to be >> Absolutely. >> In fact a trend we had an interview on the Cube and our Simpson who works for Mozilla she's doing some work for Tech Nation, she said they're changing it from diversity inclusion to inclusion and diversity. They're flipping it around where inclusion leads diversity cause they want to lead with the message of inclusion; >> Yeah. >> as a primary message with diversity. So it's not just the diversity message it's inclusion. >> Yeah. >> Love that. >> Yeah the only thing I would add would be the phrase "She can be it if she sees it" I think having people like myself and Yanbing be visible role models it's very impactful, especially for young women to see you know women in tech leadership positions. It's hard to imagine yourself in a role if you don't see anyone similar to in a role. So I think the more that people like us and our peers get out there and really put an effort into being visible. >> Do you see the networks forming more, I mean is there more action flowing happen. Can you compare and contrast just even a few years ago is it on the rise significantly? >> I think it's on the rise. >> Yeah I do get us to be involved in a lot of opportunistic situations, yeah. >> And of course your Twitter handle puts it right out there, @ybhighheels. >> Yeah. >> Right, your not shy about it. >> Yeah, there's nothing shy about it. I realize you know Beth and I, we are both addressed in very feminine way. I do think. >> Your capabilities are off to chart you to great and impressive executives. >> Society is increasingly more inclusive about their notions of female tech leader. It's not just one size fits all and I think it's encouraging us to show who we really are and the authentic self and I think that's very important for young girls to see because I remember when I was a young girl I didn't go into tech expecting I do not get to be who I am >> Yeah and that shouldn't reflect your capability of anyway any kind and that seem to be the greater awareness. The Google memo that went around as all of it so getting us some great videos on Silicon Angle on that topic. Again you guys are great inspiration. We love working with you you guys are great executives. >> Thank you. >> Its great content. >> Your welcome. >> We super passionate about it. We'll be at Grace Hopper for our 4th year we do that. >> Fantastic. >> As we show every year, we're learning more and more and we're going to do a podcast for guys too. >> Nice. >> Different angle. >> Love that. >> A lot of guys want to do what to do. >> Okay that's great. >> Inclusion and diversity of course; I need the help. I'm John Furrier With Dave Vellante Here. Live at Vmworld. More coverage coming after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been an exciting almost two full days, and we're very excited to be joined by Joel Reich, the EVP of products and operations at NetApp. And none of us can believe you haven't been on the Cube before! >> I haven't been. I'm sure I've sure I've watched a lot of the episodes, but I've never been a guest. >> I apologize for that. I'm shocked, given our past history and relationship, but welcome. >> Thank you. >> And we like to hear that- >> We'll see how I do before you invite me back again. (laughing) >> As a former NetApp-ian, I have high hopes. So Joel, NetApp is positioning itself as a storage software company for multi-cloud world. What does that really mean? >> So what it means is that, you know, when I think about it, when I talk to customers, the problem space about how do I manage my data has gotten so wide and so broad in the last three years because, you know, it used to include to walls, just the space between the four walls of the data centers that you owned. And now the problem space is that plus other data sources you might need to take to grow your business. It might be infrastructure as a service that you built in the cloud. It might be a software as a service application that you're running that's still your data, but it's in some other person's data center. So what it means is that we've really focused on the fact that the world is going to be hybrid cloud and that it's going to be multi-cloud. And the problems that, a high-class problem to solve is how to allow people to manage their data in that world. >> And we've been talking all week on the Cube, and you see it now at VMware's results, there's a lot of tailwinds, but part of that is the customer reality that they can't bring their business into the cloud and reformulate it to force fit it into the cloud. Rather, they have to bring the cloud to the data. >> Joel: Yep, exactly. >> That's sort of your wheelhouse. When you think about multi-cloud, are you talking about being the data store that multiple clouds can access? And do you see it going beyond that, where people are, you know, cross-clouding, if you will, inter-clouding? >> Sure, yeah, I mean, and the mechanisms vary by which people will do that. You know, we see people wanting to still own their data, in other words still have it behind their firewall. So one of the ways they can cross connect to multiple clouds is they can put a storage system, you know, NetApp storage system, in a cold location facility, let's say an Equinix facility, and there they have access to all of the fastest, broadest pipes that you could find anywhere on the network. And you can do a direct connect to Azure. You can do an express connect, or direct connect to Amazon or express connect to Azure, and make a decision about, you know, who has the best pricing plan or who has the best contractual terms or legal terms for you to go to the cloud. So you know, there's that way to do it when you're trying to manage, really just physically own your data when you're concerned about the privacy or sovereignty of it. There's other ways of doing it also, where our storage management software can sit in the cloud. We have a product called Cloud ONTAP, and you can buy it as a service in Amazon, or you can buy it as a service in Azure. And you could store your data in their infrastructure, and because it has a built-in capability of moving from one, you know, from one vendor to another, you don't have to worry about format differences between the cloud vendors. So you can migrate, you know, across, you could SnapMirror, which is a replication capability that we've had for 20 years, and you could be multi-cloud in that sense also. >> You know what's interesting about that, Joel, is when I first started looking at NetApp, and there was no such thing as cloud, but it struck me that you guys were early on with the concept of storage as a service. You had many, many services within your solutions, whether it was copy services or even data reduction services, well ahead of its time, that were bundled in to the platform. And you would invoke those as necessary. Very sort of cloud-like or, you know, we all talk about serverless today, and that's sort of the model, is invoking services as I need them. >> Yes. >> Kind of composable, if you will. So very compatible, in concept anyway, with cloud. So take us through kind of where you are today, with the architecture, you know, used to be so simple. EMC block, NetApp file, right? And that's changed dramatically. And of course I'm oversimplifying. Where are we today with the portfolio and the company strategy? Maybe you could talk to things like all-flash arrays, hyper-converged, bring us up to date. >> So I mean, I think there's, we look at, you're right, we do take a services perspective of what we're building. And what I do, we look at that there's a consumption continuum that people actually want to buy those services in different shapes or forms. So when we think about it, it's not, we don't have a separate clustered data ONTAP roadmap for, you know, our next high-end FAS system that has different features than the roadmap for the version of ONTAP that's going to run in the cloud. It's actually one product, right, that we build to be able to be consumed in different ways. And that, you know, when you think about it, that's kind of like a microcosm of our strategy, which is that what we're trying to do is make those data services available no matter where the data happens to be. And so to give you an example of a new service that we've implemented as part of cluster data ONTAP, it was in a new release that we did this past spring called 9.2. So it has a feature in it called Fabric Pools. And what Fabric Pools allow you to do is, you know, we have this idea that over time, storage becomes a service-level based thing and you have a capacity tier and you have a performance tier. And over time whatever that performance tier is going to be built of is going to be, you know, as flash progresses to Optane and things like that, that capacity tier is going to get faster and faster and faster, and it's always going to be a little bit more expensive than the, I mean, the performance tier is going to get, you know, it's going to get bigger, it's going to get faster, it's always going to be more expensive than the capacity tier. So Fabric Pools is essentially designed, if you forward think a bunch of years, when what you've got in the data center is all flash, you know, where's your capacity tier going to be? Well so in essence what we're doing is we're doing tiering between all flash and any S3 target. So that S3 target could be Glacier. The S3 target could be S3, I mean the S3 target could be, you know, it could be any S3 target. It could anybody's object store. And essentially what happens is, the system will manage secondary data and snapshot data into that capacity tier, but it'll manage it all together so that you're getting the most efficient use you can of flash. So you look at that and say, okay, that's the consumption model. That's a traditional consumption model, where you're buying controller-based functionality. Well it turns out that cloud ONTAP can use Fabric Pools also. So what that means is I can deploy, I could go to Amazon's Marketplace, I can buy Cloud ONTAP for I think it's $1.45 an hour, and I can run an instance, I can set up a cluster in the cloud, and I could use EC2 storage. And I could use Amazon storage and I could run ONTAP on it, and then if I want to I could implement Fabric Pools and I could tier to S3 or Glacier, right, within the cloud. >> The point is, the value of that is single point of control. >> Joel: Yeah. >> And customers will pay for that value. >> My point is actually, the point is was trying to make is that it's a consumption model choice. I'm not going to force someone, I view the cloud as our friend, right, what we're trying to do is find ways for people to leverage either the infrastructure of the public cloud or their on prem infrastructure to be able to manage their data in ways that they can't. >> And discretely selling that software as a service. >> Joel: Yes. >> Yeah. >> Exactly, or as a feature of our standard appliance product. >> But a much different model than taking a Seagate disk drive, packaging it into a controller, and selling it for 10X what you paid for it. >> Right, exactly. So you know, that's really the exciting thing is trying to find ways of making what we have portable into the different ways that people want to consume data management services these days. >> A couple questions for you, Joel. You mentioned the word "friends." You've been, NetApp, long-time friends with VMware. >> Yes. >> Since we're one year post combination of Dell EMC, how has the NetApp VMware relationship evolved? One of the things we heard Michael Dell say this morning was it's very important to maintain the independence of the VMware ecosystem. Talk to us about how in the last year that relationship has progressed and how that's helping NetApp continue its history of being very innovative. >> Yah, so there's always been coopetition, there's always been places where, you know, our products overlapped and where you could do similar things with VMware at the server level that we could do at the storage level. But from the beginning, you know, the integrations that we did with them I think were, you know, really helped move the market and really helped move both of our businesses. I think there's like three things that we're doing right now that are new, you know, in the last year with them. One of them is we built another version of ONTAP, which we call vNAS, which can run on top of VSAN. And you know, in an ESX environment and provide, you know, NFS and CIFS file services on top of VSAN, right? So that's a really interesting combination of both of our software-defined products that solve a customer problem. Another thing we've done is, you know, we've announced our HCI product, NetApp HCI, and we have a really close partnership with VMware. We decided that that was the way to go, that we didn't want to build our own hypervisor, and that they did a really good job on the management side, and you know, that our integration of those three things would build something, you know, with our strength being at the storage management layer and their strength being at the hypervisor and management layer, that that would help us build a really effective, competitive product. So you know, I think those are two really good examples of that the partnership is moving forward. Lots of interesting integrations, we're working on figuring out how to bring value to what VMware is now doing with AWS. Cause we have a very large install base. I came to the show and I asked, well how many combined customers do we have with VMware? And it's 50,000 combined customers over the years we've been doing this. So you know, our customers want to know how to get access to that capability, how to move into AWS in a way that provides them an interim step. So there's some really good cooperative work going on between our developers in that area. >> And a couple of strong GTM routes, right, through, you mentioned a new version of ONTAP for VSAN. Yesterday Pat Gellsinger mentioned there's now 10,000 customers on VSAN, talked about obviously with AWS as another GTM opportunity for you. >> Yeah, I mean, our teams work together great. There's no question about it. >> Yeah, I mean you guys have always been right there, in the inner circle of integration with VMware. I mean, in the days where, you know, EMC was trying to control the chessboard, NetApp was always able to have products like, same day, you know, as integrated as anybody. And that was important for VMware to show its independence. >> Well you know, Mountain View is much closer to Sunnyvale than Hopkinton. (laughing) >> It's true. >> So you talked about, you chose not to develop your own hypervisor. Others have. So maybe talk about that a little more, how you differentiate from some of the other hyper converged players. >> I mean, I don't, you know, there are other ways of dealing with, you know, when people don't want to spend money on a license, there are other ways of dealing with that problem than building your own hypervisor. You know, for example, so in our HCI product, we can scale server and, we can scale compute and storage independently. So you don't actually get locked into buying, you don't have to buy another VMware license if all you're doing is selling combined storage, you know, combined HCI nodes. By breaking them apart and having separate HCI nodes, we don't drive people into consuming VMware licenses that they might not need, right, in order to meet the demands of, you know, what they're trying to build. So I think we've taken a much different approach to HCI. We talk about it as second generation. The core, there's a lot of value to it. The core value in differentiation is really ease of setup and use that people have grown to expect from HCI combined with an amazing amount of quality of service and workload guarantee, you know, guaranteed workload per workload performance and scaling to, you know, 100 nodes, which, you know, we think really makes HCI a data center class technology. You know, not an edge technology, not a single application technology, but by adding data management features and having that real ability to scale to very large systems, we think we really, you know, come into the market at a time when HCI is ready to move to that next step of not just being single workload, single application. So we think we're there at a good time, with the right product. >> How about all-flash arrays? Bring us up to speed on that. You guys made an acquisition of SolidFire, great acquisition, picked it up at a good time in the marketplace, got it for I think a relatively good price, really good company, true software defined, built for sort of cloud-oriented applications. So how have you integrated that asset, where do it fit in your portfolio? And maybe you can share some proof points. >> Yeah, so we've seen a lot of success with that. You know, what we were doing, when we bought SolidFire, there were a whole bunch of motivations for it. One of the motivations was we knew we needed access to the new buyers. We knew we needed access to people who were making decisions about deploying applications independent of the infrastructure that they happened to have in their data center. Right, they were trying to find new ways of doing things. So when we bought SolidFire, you know, a lot of it was, we loved the technology. A lot of it was getting access to the new buyers and bringing them to the table. And it's funny cause I was noticing today in a bunch of customer meetings that I had here, that you know, in the past I'd have meetings and it would be like sort of the same IT stack, here's the system admin, here's the server admin, here's the network admin, here's the storage person sitting around the table. And when I talk about, you know, we talk about the data fabric, which is the way we tie together, you know, our hybrid clouds. When I talk about that, you know, either people would start to yawn or they'd start to feel threatened because you know, we're talking about something that was a new world for them that they didn't quite know how they would fit in. One of the things I'm seeing now, especially this year, is that customers are coming to the table with both with a cloud architect, and you know, the person who's trying to figure out how they get to the next place, plus the person who owns the existing infrastructure, and they're trying to figure out how to modernize it. So it's something, you know, when we bought SolidFire, we had this theory, okay, we got to go, we have this new technology, it's aimed at a new buyer. And one of the things I'm seeing now is that the portfolio sale of the things that we're offering is starting to be relevant to actually, we don't have to go find the different people. We're actually starting to see them come to the table and talk to us together. So you know, all-flash for us, that's been what's driving the company. We went, we made a big investment about two and a half years ago. It started to pay off last year. We're still growing much faster than the market, much faster than companies who are a lot smaller than us, and the last, you know, market research data that I saw had us as number two in the world, after really not even, you know, being in the top single digits about three years ago. So that's been a really good thing for us, both for our install base but also winning new footprint and winning new business that we didn't have before. We're displacing legacy competitors, one a day. I think George talked about it in our last earnings call. We're replacing EMC once a day, right, at least, and accelerating past that. And it's replacing the old stuff. And a lot of it is because of what we've done with flash. A lot of it is also because it's a future proof. Okay, well, how am I going to, so let's say I decide I want to move this part of this workload that's on here, one workload that's on here to the cloud next year. Alright, NetApp, how could you help me do that? And we'll go through and talk about, this is what we do with Azure, this is what we do with Amazon, right, this is what we do with IBM Cloud. None of our competitors can do that. >> Excellent, and so, sorry to cut you off, we've got to wrap. But you've got a NetApp Insight 2017 Change the World with Data coming up in, you're going to have to come back to Vegas in October and Berlin, and I'm sure, >> Right here, I might even be sitting in the same place. (laughing) >> I hope you get some fresh air. >> Let's make that happen. Let's get the Cube to Insight. >> There we go! Thank you so much for joining. You're now a Cube alumni, which is fantastic. >> Thank you, do I get a t-shirt? >> Congratulations, a pin I think. >> Yeah, a pin. Alright, well for my cohost Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, we want to thank you for watching. Come right back. We've got more exciting coverage from day two of VMworld 2017 right now. (bright music)

Las Vegas expensing the signal from the noise it's the kue covering you interconnect 2016 brought to you by IBM now your host John hurry and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are live here in Las Vegas this is silicon angles the cube our flagship program when we go out to the events and extract the signal annoys we are at IBM interconnect 2016 it's our fifth year now doing all the IV meds now interconnecting out the cloud show I'm John furrier with my coach Dave vellante our next guest is Eric Herzog vice president of storage and software-defined at IBM welcome back you belong great to see you great thank you very much always loved helping guys out of the cube thank you very much for including us pleasure we are very cognitive today we get cognition going on the cube we have all kinds of real-time we've got api's and notifications or and we're going to stract some insight and predictive and prescriptive analytics from you right first what's going on with storage and software obviously storage right now you're seeing huge change Dell buying EMC which you know a lot about emc IBM buys the weather company two contrasting strategies but Stewart still it's the center of the value proposition we also heard Robert de Blanc say on stage today cheap compute he didn't say cheap storage storage visited it did he didn't say so long about cheap storage okay I stand corrected but you talk about a commoditization of resource still valuable I always said what's wrong with cheap compute want more of it I want more and more compute so storage does he changing the software values their last time we spoke about that what's the update in context to cloud what's the storage equation was a storage angle well for us there's a huge value proposition when both the cognitive side and in the cloud infrastructure side obviously with the tumultuous change in storage both from just where the world is going we believe that you ride the wave a flash and software-defined and that is our mantra as you know one of the industry analyst firms who tracks the numbers we were number one in flash capacity shift and number one in flash units last year are all flash and we've been number one several years in row and software-defined storage so while the storage envelope is changing if you open up that envelope we're writing the change inside that omelet which is flash software to find converged infrastructure with our pure power product and also with our partnership with Cisco on the verses stack that's two years in a row for flash leadership right yes charge same thing with software to bunt well the good thing is well the other guy leads in revenue we believe in a fair price for an outstanding award-winning product line on the software value now the cell where that fits in we had multiple guests on today we had you know Jamie Thomas former GM and storage now thinking a more systems view its horizontally composable infrastructure now our dead loss infrastructure as code how does that change the equation certainly we want storage but now you've got software driving the change where's the wisdom value points there well when you look at the software-defined infrastructure the magic fairy dust is in the software so we can work with our own hardware we can work with our competitors hardware over 300 different raise from our competitors are completely compatible with our software to find solutions for storage and we can use with white box if one of our channel partners our end users would rather have a white box storage bear hard drives from seagate OWD and some some flash and just a wrapper of metal we are software provides the value add for integration into hybrid cloud configurations in the cognitive configurations into the oceans of data and big data and into analytic environments all powered by software-defined storage ok so you've been on less than a year now all right you came on last summer right yes mid year so what nine months roughly yes inland what are the big learnings that you've encountered and then we'll start from there and then we're going to get into result are you going to transfer yeah I think the big learning is the world is evolving and a lot of the customer base hasn't gotten there yet so we're going to take them on that journey with flash software-defined converged infrastructure so we're going to lead that charge we're going to ride the wave not fight the wave sometimes iBM has fought the wave we've changed that in the storage world so we're going to be a leader we're are a leader in flash we're leader and software-defined are converged infrastructure particularly with Cisco had an incredible year last year you know for our first year we had over 250 customers over 400 units sold and while there are others who are bigger in our first year that was one of the best first years in the converging instructor of any vendor and that's the power of our software to find portfolio our flash portfolio and the things we deliver from a storage perspective that helps customers they convert either the software-defined infrastructure or converged infrastructure so that case so that sort of answers the question as to how you're going to deal with immediate it's not unique you got old stuff that's declining you got new stuff that's growing like crazy but still not big enough to offset the decline of the old stuff you got currency headwinds but the there's light at the end of the tunnel in terms of that transformation to those newer architectures is that fair yes absolutely last year if you look whether it was in the channel with our award from computer reseller news as the best enterprise storage provider in the world and that was in the fall of 2015 so when you look at the channel and what they're looking for from their provider unlike the guys in hopkinton in Austin who are merging they didn't win that IBM one that so great solution for our Channel Partner base we've won awards for software-defined for all flash we did very well in the hybrid or a category last year with several product of the Year awards so again yes we have an older installed base one of our big goals this year is to refresh that installed base with software-defined with all flash with a comprehensive family of hybrid raise to make sure that people understand this is where the market is going this is where you need to go to drive cognitive value hybrid cloud value quite honestly it's all about applications workloads and use cases and even though I've done storage for 31 years let's face it most CEOs can't stand storage have to put it in the language that they understand which is software value-add and how it can enhance their ability to meet the business SLA s that the CIO is under pressure from the VP of Operations the VP of Marketing the finance side and of course ultimately the CEO so in this business I've been in the business maybe not 31 years but maybe 35 okay so the product portfolio is very very important one of the criticisms I've had of IBM over the years has been just not enough product innovation coming out great R&D but doesn't hit the pipeline so when you came to see us in Boston you showed us a little you know glimpse of the roadmap and it's very clear that's accelerating I wonder if you could talk about that what can you share with our audience sure we've done it we've done a couple things first of all we have the flash religion we acquired a flash company get started but so did several of our competitors in addition to spending money on that acquisition we've invested over a billion dollars in engineering resources on the flash site software-defined we're spending a billion dollars in that as you know we recently bought the award-winning and market-leading object storage technology with clever safe and we spent money on that so IBM is putting its money where its mouth is its focus is on storage and how storage enhances hybrid clouds cognitive big data analytics and you know deals with these oceans of data that our customers are facing and how do you manage that and how do you make the data more valuable and more productive to the business because that's what about it's not about storage it's about the management that data to optimize our customers business and how we can deliver that with effective cost so clever save was mentioned in the keynote in context to LeBlanc's reference to the digital transport transit of you know new stream the video stuff interesting how he plugged in clever see how it is that relate I mean honestly I know it's a recent acquisition is it's just the objects towards an unstructured data why is clever stay plugged into that kind of portfolio of those four companies you mentioned around you know is when you develop that type of technology you end up with incredible amounts of data and an object store is designed to handle exabytes of capacity and exabytes of information it doesn't necessarily have to be fast for example video surveillance data and all kinds of other data may be hot for a while and one of the values of clever say for example is on our spectrum scale product which is our scale out network attached storage actually will automatically cheer too clever safe we're in a public beta right now our spectrum protect product we've also talked about is going to support clever safe either as an source so you could back it up but more importantly as a target so you could take gobs of data and back it up into a clever safe repository when you've got oceans of data and people are generating exabytes and exabytes of data what you can get with clever safe on premises or in a cloud configuration allows you to handle this extensive data growth cost-effectively and in an easy to manage and configure way about the end where relationship with storage obviously there in an announcement today with IBM EMC recently had an announcement with VMware and VX rail rom and the big debate was I see his hybrid cloud was deposition using their software stack to be a glue and into the hybrid cloud journey but one of the comments that we made note of that we captured on the prowl chat was from Keith Townsend one of our members of our community he wrote it took Netflix seven years to move to the public cloud meaning everything all flash they had one of the first all flesh implementations that Amazon ever rolled out what does that mean for the average VMware customer in this case IBM customer from a product perspective so you got you know your relationship VMware you have this notion of hybrid cloud right it took Netflix seven years there in the cutting edge what does that mean for the average customer this whole notion of using software in storage plugging the hybrid cloud it took them seven years was it 70 years for an average company well you've got to remember that that started a while ago and the move to the hybrid cloud is just accelerated dramatically so our spectrum scale product our spectrum accelerate product our spectrum protect product all are designed for hybrid cloud configurations right this minute they're easy to employ they're easy to use they're all available in softlayer they're also filled with other cloud providers spectrum protect as close to a hundred different msps and csps who provide backup and archive services with award-winning spectrum protect so our specialist families and I've different than it was seven years ago today actually its accelerated easy-to-deploy it's easy to use you have a wide choice of msps and csps to use whether it's soft layer or other providers in the industry and our software-defined storage supports all of that vendor base regardless of whether it's IBM SoftLayer or other cloud providers as well well you could argue to Netflix did it at a time when it was early days right it was near the Pioneer they were they were final trees hack and you know right they're the ones with the arrows in motion tracking chaos monkeys everywhere so so Tommy you guys okay all right sorry John I want to talk about the state of the industry it's a lot of interesting stuff going on even in the business for four decades you understand some of the trends you've seen a lot of the ebb and the flow how would you describe where we're at right now seems like an uncertain time so storage is incredibly tumultuous right now one of the good things about storage it's constantly filled with innovation as you know from my past I've done seven startups thank God five have been acquired so I can wear a Hawaiian shirt they're expensive these days ISA why insurance so every five six years you have a wave of startups of the storage business that's not common in most other segments of the IT market space but in storage it is so you have a constant wave of startups that happens on a normal basis and we're in one of those phases right now at the same time you have massive change in the Tier one vendor base EMC and Dell emerging HP splits into two network appliance which had been an incredibly great company it's fast has now missed their numbers almost eight quarters in Rowan just last week announced they're laying off 1500 people so the world is changing dramatically also the applications workloads and use cases are changing dramatically so you've gone to a cognitive ear you don't have cereal management of data you now have parallel management of data you don't want databases that react or let's say a data warehouse it takes 30 hours to run a report you want the report to run in one so if you will real-time cognitive data availability and ability to analyze that data and that is dramatically changing what startups are out how successful they'll be how the tier 1 vendors are reacting you know for example one of the great things about IBM is we are focused on flash which is the fastest grain storage systems market and software to find which was one of the fastest growing storage software markets and we're leaders in both market spaces so when you open up the envelope of what's inside storage it's a slow growth market three to four percent per year is all it's growing but certain segments are growing rapidly and IBM focuses on those rapid growth segments now but the cloud piece right so you make you guys are talking about clever safe before I was thought that was a cloud acquisition which it was in part right but it's also something that falls into the storage portfolio right and that's because clever safe can be configured in a number of different ways on-premises only cloud only or hybrid configuration we can have an on-premises clever safe configuration talking to a cloud-based configuration so again part of IBM strategy to make sure that from a storage perspective all of our software to find infrastructure and what we acquired with clever safe are designed for hybrid cloud configurations or private cloud configurations or public again our spectrum family is used by hundreds of public cloud service writers to deliver a backup service for example a spectrum protect so the reason my question was this very clearly in effect on that you talked about three percent or whatever you know the the latest numbers are it's flat Marcus gases and flat is flat but the cloud market of course is growing like that from a smaller base but it's clearly having an impact on demand is that a fair statement yeah I think what's happening when you look at it from a storage perspective where you're really having the biggest impact on cloud is in the lower end in the entry space yes the capacity is growing exponentially but whether it's the department level of a giant at global fortune 500 whether it's Herzog's bar and grill or a midsize company when they need a small array a lot of times are going to a public cloud configuration so that low end of the market is shrinking at the same time when you do software-defined if you're one of the tier 1 vendors the storage could come from off-the-shelf hard drives so the values in the software but that also delivers a revenue hit to the vendor base and Ashley when you think about how would you get incredible performance five or six years ago you would have bought an array that was five to eight million dollars best case if not closer to 10 you'd be lucky if you could get 200,000 I ops maybe you could get five milliseconds latency today at an average sale place of 300,000 dollars we can deliver over a million I ops and sub hundred micro center and latency so you don't need to buy your big iron at five eight 10 million you can do it with something for three hundred thousand dollars huge the bottleneck John okay I mean this is back to our kena brian.krall from Apple was on stage another great company leaders in the delivering great value but he made a comment I want to get your reaction to because I know it's a phone analogy but I want to bring into storage if the values and the software and all flash is the bet you guys are making the numbers are impressive in terms of performance in terms of I ops throughput and and cost per puss per megabyte he said you got to get closer to the hardware to write your native apps and he's referring to the iphone software app using Swift and xcode to the hardware so in storage look different how does the software piece take advantage of the hardware and is that built-in is an obstacle the customer because we're seeing this notion of okay take care of it take advantage of the hardware so what was how do you reconcile the we've done some very strong things there so let's take for example our spectrum virtualized software spectrum virtualize allows enterprise class data services across heterogeneous storage environments hours our competitors and anything that's white box over 300 arrays we have taken the spectrum virtualized platform and integrate it into our v nine thousand flash systems all-flash array into our mid tier storwize v7000 and our mid tier storwize v5000 which we just launched last week three new configurations we also have the sand volume controller but what we've done is integrate that spectrum virtualized software which rides a virtual back end of all storage not just our own provides a single way to replicate a single way to snapshot transparent block migration on the fly and integrate that right into flash systems and storwize as a software comes as a hard annick Stauffer comes with it exactly it's built into the size of Jeff managed as a code or estructuras code like an apple programa billion native app to the iphone what does that develop or doing with you guys is it through that software layer or how they could be right i mean the key thing when you look from a DevOps perspective they want to quickly be able to provision storage okay and with things like all the spectrum family and with the gooeys we've implemented into our store wise our XIV and all of our storage products it's very easy to deploy storage you can do it in minutes so whether the DevOps guy does or where the deadlock flight calls the storage guy the bottom line is they can get the storage up and running in a virtual environment a containerized environment in a matter of minutes and from a DevOps perspective that's what they want so we're able to meet the needs of the DevOps guy but also the traditional storage vendor as well don't get one last question for me for the henna we've run out of time they might have one more but I want to get your take on this because it's really been an interesting industry chess game with VCE and VMware and EMC doing the hyper converged x4 star calling it this hyper conversion without Cisco right this is because no longer you mentioned you in partnership with Cisco so VCC and bx rails was talked about last week what's going on with VCE is it still going to be around you see you're taking multiple forms is the increased breadth of solution is going to be multi-vendor what's your in it what you're taking on so you were at IBM cell you have relationship with cisco has that how does that what a customer's deal and what does the customer do because they're like okay who do I so I think there's a couple things that customers to look at first of all there's going to be a transformation VCE as it was originally constructed a partnership with cisco EMC and VMware will not exist after the acquisition this is my theory what will happen this distinctive sorry Cisco is go in there's no luck involved so all happen is those Cisco servers will be transitioned now and dell servers will be tradition did it's exactly what's going to happen so cisco is aware of this and cisco has been engaging with other partners like i mentioned the vs. tak had the best first year of any converged infrastructure in the history within its first year why well in the middle of last year what happened Dell an EMC an announced a merger so a lot of the business partners a lot of the end users there's cause for concern and EMC is already taken Cisco out of a number of configurations and there's a number of things for an end-user to think about one look at the development budgets what was the EMC development budget what's the dell development budget and substantially lower EMC did an outstanding job of acquiring startups with the debt load that's been written about publicly not just in the storage fresh but really in the financial press will be able to afford to buy a bunch of cool startups like EMC used to do the old days hard to say an EMC well I thought of stata domain was a great acquisition for uniting isilon same thing will they be able to continue to do that and like IBM EMC has a pretty good reputation for support and service that's not really reputation of the guys in Austin their reputation is cost-effective rapid delivery not necessarily the best important service the enterprise side people looking for that enterprise-class important service so those the questions that a customer needs to ask at the end user level where a channel partner use a civ as this merger goes for how's it going to impact the roadmap for the future the development expense my support capability those are things that have different models in those two companies so being should see how it pans out unfortunately we're out of time because we could do a whole cube second just on that area thanks for coming by give you the last word what does the digital transformation for the customer of IBM the buyer when they talked to you in the elevator and they say hey what's the storage angle on this digital treasure where the stores fit into my digital transformation what's the what's the bumper sticker what's the value proposition well the key thing digital transformation is a different sort of data it's been data for years and years and years data has to sit on storage the better the storage is your better the digital environment is the faster it is things like flash systems or our spectrum scale for cognitive the better that date is going to be so the digital era is powered by storage underneath it's like the foundation of a home good foundation great home good foundation great digital data great foundation the cube day one here more foundational coverage tomorrow the cube conversation will continue tomorrow day two we had more interviews today but tomorrow a lot of big names the biggest names in tech most powerful people here IBM interconnect is the cube we right back with more coverage here on day ones wrap up after the short break