>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to be you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Prince Martin with Dave The Who Vellante, and we're with David Hatfield, or Hat, the president of Purse Storage. Hat, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, great to be here. Thanks for being here. How fun is this? >> The orange is awesome. >> David: This is great. >> Super fun. >> Got to represent, we love the orange here. >> Always a good venue. >> Yeah. >> There's not enough orange. I'm not as blind yet. >> Well it's the Bill Graham, I mean it's a great venue. But not generally one for technology conferences. >> Not it's not. You guys are not conventional. >> So far so good. >> But then-- >> Thanks for keeping us out of Las Vegas for a change. >> Over my dead body I thin I've said once or twice before. >> Speaking of-- Love our customers in Vegas. Unconventional, you've said recently this is not your father's storage company. What do you mean by that? >> Well we just always want to do things a little bit less conventional. We want to be modern. We want to do things differently. We want to create an environment where it's community so our customers and our partners, prospective customers can get a feel for what we mean by doing things a little bit more modern. And so the whole orange thing is something that we all opt in for. But it's more about really helping transform customer's organizations think differently, think out of the box, and so we wanted to create a venue that forced people to think differently, and so the last three years, one was on Pier 48, we transformed that. Last year was in a big steelworkers, you know, 100 year old steel manufacturing, ship building yard which is now long since gone. But we thought the juxtaposition of that, big iron rust relative to what we're doing from a modern solid state perspective, was a good metaphor. And here it's about making music, and how can we together as an industry, develop new things and develop new songs and really help transform organizations. >> For those of you who don't know, spinning disk is known as spinning rust, right? Eventually, so very clever sort of marketing. >> The more data you put on it the slower it gets and it gets really old and we wanted to get rid of that. We wanted to have everything be online in the data center, so that was the point. >> So Hat, as you go around and talk to customers, they're going through a digital transformation, you hear all this stuff about machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, what are the questions that you're getting? CEO's, they want to get digital right. IT professionals are wondering what's next for them. What kind of questions and conversations are you having? >> Yeah, I think it's interesting, I was just in one of the largest financial services companies in New York, and we met with the Chief Data Officer. The Chief Data Officer reports into the CEO. And he had right next to him the CIO. And so they have this development of a recognition that moving into a digital world and starting to harness the power of data requires a business context. It requires people that are trying to figure out how to extract value from the data, where does our data live? But that's created the different organization. It drives devops. I mean, if you're going to go through a digital transformation, you're going to try and get access to your data, you have to be a software development house. And that means you're going to use devops. And so what's happened from our point of view over the last 10 years is that those folks have gone to the public cloud because IT wasn't really meeting the needs of what devops needed and what the data scientists were looking for, and so what we wanted to create not only was a platform and a tool set that allowed them to bridge the gap, make things better today dramatically, but have a platform that gets you into the future, but also create a community and an ecosystem where people are aware of what's happening on the devop's side, and connect the dots between IT and the data scientists. And so we see this exploding as companies digitize, and somebody needs to be there to help kind of bridge the gap. >> So what's your point of view and advice to that IT ops person who maybe really good at provisioning LUNS, should they become more dev like? Maybe ops dev? >> Totally, I mean I think there's a huge opportunity to kind of advance your career. And a lot of what Charlie talked about and a lot of what we've been doing for nine years now, coming up on nine years, is trying to make our customers heroes. And if data is a strategic asset, so much so they're actually going to think about putting it on your balance sheet, and you're hiring Chief Data Officers, who knows more about the data than the storage and infrastructure team. They understand the limitations that we had to go through over the past. They've recognized they had to make trade offs between performance and cost. And in a shared accelerated storage platform where you have tons of IO and you can put all of your applications (mumbles) at the same time, you don't have to make those trade offs. But the people that really know that are the storage leads. And so what we want to do is give them a path for their career to become strategic in their organization. Storage should be self driving, infrastructure should be self driving. These are not things that in a boardroom people care about, gigabytes and petabytes and petaflops, and whatever metric. What they care about is how they can change their business and have a competitive advantage. How they can deliver better customer experiences, how they can put more money on the bottom line through better insights, etc. And we want to teach and work with and celebrate data heroes. You know, they're coming from the infrastructure side and connecting the dots. So the value of that data is obviously something that's new in terms of it being front and center. So who determines the value of that data? You would think it's the business line. And so there's got to be a relationship between that IT ops person and the business line. Which maybe here to for was somewhat adversarial. Business guys are calling, the clients are calling again. And the business guys are saying, oh IT, they're slow, they say no. So how are you seeing that relationship changing? >> It has to come together because, you know, it does come down to what are the insights that we can extract from our data? How much more data can we get online to be able to get those insights? And that's a combination of improving the infrastructure and making it easy and removing those trade offs that I talked about. But also being able to ask the right questions. And so a lot has to happen. You know, we have one of the leaders in devops speaking tomorrow to go through, here's what's happening on the software development and devops side. Here's what the data scientists are trying to get at. So our IT professionals understand the language, understand the problem set. But they have to come together. We have Dr. Kate Harding as well from MIT, who's brilliant and thinking about AI. Well, there's only .5% of all the data has actually been analyzed. You know, it's all in these piggy banks as Burt talked about onstage. And so we want to get rid of the piggy banks and actually create it and make it more accessible, and get more than .5% of the data to be usable. You know, bring as much of that online as possible, because it's going to provide richer insights. But up until this point storage has been a bottleneck to making that happen. It was either too costly or too complex, or it wasn't performing enough. And with what we've been able to bring through solid state natively into sort of this platform is an ability to have all of that without the trade offs. >> That number of half a percent, or less than half a percent of all data in the world is actually able to be analyzed, is really really small. I mean we talk about, often you'll here people say data's the lifeblood of an organization. Well, it's really a business catalyst. >> David: Oil. >> Right, but catalysts need to be applied to multiple reactions simultaneously. And that's what a company needs to be able to do to maximize the value. Because if you can't do that there's no value in that. >> Right. >> How are you guys helping to kind of maybe abstract storage? We hear a lot, we heard the word simplicity a lot today from Mercedes Formula One, for example. How are you partnering with customers to help them identify, where do we start narrowing down to find those needles in the haystack that are going to open up new business opportunities, new services for our business? >> Well I think, first of all, we recognize at Pure that we want to be the innovators. We want to be the folks that are, again, making things dramatically better today, but really future-proofing people for what applications and insights they want to get in the future. Charlie talked about the three-legged stool, right? There's innovations that's been happening in compute, there's innovations that have been happening over the years in networking, but storage hasn't really kept up. It literally was sort of the bottleneck that was holding people back from being able to feed the GPUs in the compute that's out there to be able to extract the insights. So we wanted to partner with the ecosystem, but we recognize an opportunity to remove the primary bottleneck, right? And if we can remove the bottleneck and we can partner with firms like NVIDIA and firms like Cisco, where you integrate the solution and make it self driving so customers don't have to worry about it. They don't have to make the trade offs in performance and cost on the backend, but it just is easy to stamp out, and so it was really great to hear Service Now and Keith walk through is story where he was able to get a 3x level improvement and something that was simple to scale as their business grew without having an impact on the customer. So we need to be part of an ecosystem. We need to partner well. We need to recognize that we're a key component of it because we think data's at the core, but we're only a component of it. The one analogy somebody shared with me when I first started at Pure was you can date your compute and networking partner but you actually get married to your storage partner. And we think that's true because data's at the core of every organization, but it's making it available and accessible and affordable so you can leverage the compute and networking stacks to make it happen. >> You've used the word platform, and I want to unpack that a little bit. Platform versus product, right? We hear platform a lot today. I think it's pretty clear that platforms beat products and that allows you to grow and penetrate the market further. It also has an implication in terms of the ecosystem and how you partner. So I wonder if you could talk about platform, what it means to you, the API economy, however you want to take that. >> Yeah, so, I mean a platform, first of all I think if you're starting a disruptive technology company, being hyper-focused on delivering something that's better and faster in every dimension, it had to be 10x in every dimension. So when we started, we said let's start with tier one block, mission critical data workloads with a product, you know our Flash Array product. It was the fastest growing product in storage I think of all time, and it still continues to be a great contributor, and it should be a multi-billion dollar business by itself. But what customers are looking for is that same consumer like or cloud like experience, all of the benefits of that simplicity and performance across their entire data set. And so as we think about providing value to customers, we want to make sure we capture as much of that 99.5% of the data and make it online and make it affordable, regardless of whether it's block, file, or object, or regardless if it's tier one, tier two, and tier three. We talk about this notion of a shared accelerated storage platform because we want to have all the applications hit it without any compromise. And in an architecture that we've provided today you can do that. So as we think about partnering, we want to go, in our strategy, we want to go get as much of the data as we possibly can and make it usable and affordable to bring online and then partner with an API first open approach. There's a ton of orchestration tools that are out there. There's great automation. We have a deep integration with ACI at Cisco. Whatever management and orchestration tools that our customer wants to use, we want to make those available. And so, as you look at our Flash Array, Flash Deck, AIRI, and Flash Blade technologies, all of them have an API open first approach. And so a lot of what we're talking about with our cloud integrations is how do we actually leverage orchestration, and how do we now allow and make it easy for customers to move data in and out of whatever clouds they may want to run from. You know, one of the key premises to the business was with this exploding data growth and whether it's 30, 40, 50 zettabytes of data over the next you know, five years, there's only two and a half or three zettabytes of internet connectivity in those same period of time. Which means that companies, and there's not enough data platform or data resources to actually handle all of it, so the temporal nature of the data, where it's created, what a data center looks like, is going to be highly distributed, and it's going to be multi cloud. And so we wanted to provide an architecture and a platform that removed the trade offs and the bottlenecks while also being open and allowing customers to take advantage of Red Shift and Red Hat and all the container technologies and platform as a service technologies that exist that are completely changing the way we can access the data. And so we're part of an ecosystem and it needs to be API and open first. >> So you had Service Now on stage today, and obviously a platform company. I mean any time they do M and A they bring that company into their platform, their applications that they build are all part of that platform. So should we think about Pure? If we think about Pure as a platform company, does that mean, I mean one of your major competitors is consolidating its portfolio. Should we think of you going forward as a platform company? In other words, you're not going to have a stovepipe set of products, or is that asking too much as you get to your next level of milestone. >> Well we think we're largely there in many respects. You know, if you look at any of the competitive technologies that are out there, you know, they have a different operating system and a different customer experience for their block products, their file products, and their object products, etc. So we wanted to have a shared system that had these similar attributes from a storage perspective and then provide a very consistent customer experience with our cloud-based Pure One platform. And so the combination of our systems, you hear Bill Cerreta talk about, you have to do different things for different protocols to be able to get the efficiencies in the data servers as people want. But ultimately you need to abstract that into a customer experience that's seamless. And so our Pure One cloud-based software allows for a consistent experience. The fact that you'll have a, one application that's leveraging block and one application that's leveraging unstructured tool sets, you want to be able to have that be in a shared accelerated storage platform. That's why Gartner's talking about that, right? Now you can do it with a solid state world. So it's super key to say, hey look, we want consistent customer experience, regardless of what data tier it used to be on or what protocol it is and we do that through our Pure One cloud-based platform. >> You guys have been pretty bullish for a long time now where competition is concerned. When we talk about AWS, you know Andy Jassy always talks about, they look forward, they're not looking at Oracle and things like that. What's that like at Pure? Are you guys really kind of, you've been also very bullish recently about NVME. Are you looking forward together with your partners and listening to the voice of the customer versus looking at what's blue over the corner? >> Yes, so first of all we have a lot of respect for companies that get big. One of my mentors told me one time that they got big because they did something well. And so we have a lot of respect for the ecosystem and companies that build a scale. And we actually want to be one of those and are already doing that. But I think it's also important to listen and be part of the community. And so we've always wanted to the pioneers. We always wanted to be the innovators. We always wanted to challenge conventions. And one of the reasons why we founded the company, why Cos and Hayes founded the company originally was because they saw that there was a bottleneck and it was a media level bottleneck. In order to remove that you need to provide a file system that was purpose built for the new media, whatever it was going to be. We chose solid state because it was a $40 billion industry thanks to our consumer products and devices. So it was a cost curve where I and D was going to happen by Samsung and Toshiba and Micron and all those guys that we could ride that curve down, allowing us to be able to get more and more of the data that's out there. And so we founded the company with the premise that you need to remove that bottleneck and you can drive innovation that was 10x better in every dimension. But we also recognize in doing so that putting an evergreen ownership model in place, you can fundamentally change the business model that customers were really frustrated by over the last 25 years. It was fair because disk has lots of moving parts, it gets slower with the more data you put on, etc., and so you pass those maintenance expenses and software onto customers. But in a solid state world you didn't need that. So what we wanted to do was actually, in addition to provide innovation that was 10x better, we wanted to provide a business model that was evergreen and cloud like in every dimension. Well, those two forces were very disruptive to the competitors. And so it's very, very hard to take a file system that's 25 years old and retrofit it to be able to really get the full value of what the stack can provide. So we focus on innovation. We focus on what the market's are doing, and we focus on our customer requirements and where we anticipate the use cases to be. And then we like to compete, too. We're a company of folks that love to win, but ultimately the real focus here is on enabling our customers to be successful, innovating forward. And so less about looking sidewise, who's blue and who's green, etc. >> But you said it before, when you were a startup, you had to be 10x better because those incumbents, even though it was an older operating system, people's processes were wired to that, so you had to give them an incentive to do that. But you have been first in a number of things. Flash itself, the sort of All-Flash, at a spinning disk price. Evergreen, you guys set the mark on that. NVME you're doing it again with no premium. I mean, everybody's going to follow. You can look back and say, look we were first, we led, we're the innovator. You're doing some things in cloud which are similar. Obviously you're doing this on purpose. But it's not just getting close to your customers. There's got to be a technology and architectural enabler for you guys. Is that? >> Well yeah, it's software, and at the end of the day if you write a file system that's purpose built for a new media, you think about the inefficiencies of that media and the benefits of that media, and so we knew it was going to be memory, we knew it was going to be silicon. It behaves differently. Reads are effectively free. Rights are expensive, right? And so that means you need to write something that's different, and so you know, it's NVME that we've been plumbing and working on for three years that provides 44,000 parallel access points. Massive parallelism, which enables these next generation of applications. So yeah we have been talking about that and inventing ways to be able to take full advantage of that. There's 3D XPoint and SCM and all kinds of really interesting technologies that are coming down the line that we want to be able to take advantage of and future proof for our customers, but in order to do that you have to have a software platform that allows for it. And that's where our competitive advantage really resides, is in the software. >> Well there are lots more software companies in Silicon Valley and outside Silicon Valley. And you guys, like I say, have achieved that escape velocity. And so that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Well thank you, we're just getting started, and we really appreciate all the work you guys do. So thanks for being here. >> Yeah, and we just a couple days ago with the Q1FY19, 40%, you have a year growth, you added 300 more customers. Now what, 4800 customers globally. So momentum. >> Thank you, thank you. Well we only do it if we're helping our customers one day at a time. You know, I'll tell you that this whole customer first philosophy, a lot of customers, a lot of companies talk about it, but it truly has to be integrated into the DNA of the business from the founders, and you know, Cos's whole pitch at the very beginning of this was we're going to change the media which is going to be able to transform the business model. But ultimately we want to make this as intuitive as an iPhone. You know, infrastructure should just work, and so we have this focus on delivering simplicity and delivering ownership that's future proofed from the very beginning. And you know that sort of permeates, and so you think about our growth, our growth has happened because our customers are buying more stuff from us, right? If you look at our underneath the covers on our growth, 70 plus percent of our growth every single quarter comes from customers buying more stuff, and so, as we think about how we partner and we think about how we innovate, you know, we're going to continue to build and innovate in new areas. We're going to keep partnering. You know, the data protection staff, we've got great partners like Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik that are out there. And we're going to acquire. We do have a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be able to go do that. So we're going to listen to our customers on where they want us to do that, and that's going to guide us to the future. >> And expansion overseas. I mean, North America's 70% of your business? Is that right? >> Rough and tough. Yeah, we had 28%-- >> So it's some upside. >> Yeah, yeah, no any mature B2B systems company should line up to be 55, 45, 55 North America, 45, in line with GDP and in line with IT spend, so we made investments from the beginning knowing we wanted to be an independent company, knowing we wanted to support global 200 companies you have to have operations across multiple countries. And so globalization is always going to be key for us. We're going to continue our march on doing that. >> Delivering evergreen from an orange center. Thanks so much for joining Dave and I on the show this morning. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks Dave, nice to see you guys. >> We are theCUBE Live from Pure Accelerate 2018 from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back with our next guests.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas at the Sands, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, of course, Dell Technologies World 2018. It's now a pleasure to welcome to the set, we have Bryan Bond, director of IT Infrastructure at Siemens eMeter. Bryan, thank you for being with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> John: And Andre Leibovici, who is the Vice President of Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Andre, good afternoon to you. Good to see you. >> Great to see you. >> Alright, Bryan, tell us about Siemens eMeter, first, just for viewers who might not be familiar with the company and your mission. >> eMeter, basically, is a software development company. We do enterprise-level software for utilities, so gas, power, water, just about anything that has a meter. We do not make meters, but we deal with all the data that comes from those meters. So, data acquisition, meter data management, loss prevention, all those types of things that come from that data that's leaving your house or your business. We deal with that for the utilities. So, back-in billing systems, longterm data analytics, all of those types of things, that's what we do. >> Yeah, so, Bryan, most companies I talk to, it's like your industry's changing so fast, digital transformation, software, everything. Utilities are considered by most to be one of the slower moving pieces, so what's the reality in your world? >> It's like selling to a rock. (Stu laughs) A rock, right? It's tough, historically, it is very tough. Especially in the United States, with PUC regulations, with the way you can charge customers and can't, it makes it very hard. And I wish I was a real expert at that type of stuff, but... It's a slow-moving process. The good news is most countries in the planet have decided that they need to go full-on smart grid and they need to do it fast. So, in a lot of countries in Europe, there's an edict out, we're going to do this and that has helped move this along. So it's very helpful to us, as a business. I also think it's very helpful to us in general, you know, on the planet, being able to manage grids better and more efficiently. >> Okay, so we're not going to be talking about power grids and all the things on the utility. You're an IT guy. And that's what we love talking about on theCUBE here. So, give us a thumbnail sketch of your environment, your purview. What's going on? >> All right. So, like I said, so we're a software development house. It's all developers: dev test QA, sales, support, you know, all that type of stuff. I'm fortunate to be part of a very large company, so I don't have to worry about e-mail, SharePoint sites, or any of that stuff. I get to deal with the real fun stuff, which is our product, how it's deployed, how it's developed and tested. We're a pretty much a 100% virtualized. VMware shop. We use VMware-based cloud services for the appropriate things for that. And we do all of that work ourself with our own team. So we have a small team in the U.S., we have a small team in India, and we handle all of that ourselves, we don't really outsource any of that. >> Alright, so Andre, I want to pull you in here. You're software development in VMware environment. Brings me back; I remember early days of VMware was always only for test dev. Today, I hear developers, I hear this stuff, and it's like, "Oh, isn't that kind of public cloud "and some of those things?" So, give us your viewpoint on customers like Bryan and what kind of things Datrium brings to that environment, obviously virtualized and all that. >> Yeah, no, that's a good point. So... All types of customers know suddenly looking at how they can leverage private cloud, but also public cloud. Create the ideal, hybrid cloud. What does that mean, right? So we have Fortune 100 companies like Siemens who are leveraging our technology to deploy the private cloud, run the VMware infrastructure on us. At the same time, create, you know, DR strategies to their secondary sites. But there is also those customers who are looking to, "How can I actually push workloads to the cloud? "How can I create a strategy around disaster recovery "to the cloud?" And I believe that, as part of our journey as a company, embracing private data centers, we got to embrace, also, the cloud. And this is the next big thing for us at Datrium. Where are we going to help customers on the journey to take their workloads running on-premise to the cloud, but at the same time enabling them to use as as DR and also move back when needed. I may as well just spill the beans here. I'm not sure if I'm getting trouble with marketing or not. >> John: I'm sure you're not. >> So we actually releasing very soon a fully orchestrated DR from our platform to the VMware cloud, to VMC. Fully orchestrated and enables you to fire over environment to the cloud and back, once your DR site or your primary site is actually back. There's a lot of promise on this market. There's a lot of companies doing, saying that they would do, but, you know, I see that's something that customers are really excited... >> You know, how does it work when you're dealing with a customer who is dealing with a customer, who's dealing with customers who... You know, privacy's essential, right? And there's a lot of concern... They have to be the customer of a utility. So how do you treat them, you know, because they have very unique needs, I would assume and that's a major consideration, because of their position with their customer. I mean, that's got to create a new dynamic, or an interesting dynamic, for both of you to handle. >> Yeah, it does. You know, from a development standpoint, you know, you may not be actually dealing with that particular customer's data, but you're helping that customer deal with that data. So, we're having to go through and make sure that our software doesn't have any holes in it and it's patchable, and that it follows, you know, simple guidelines. But, at the same time, we make recommendations to customers all the time, you know. "Well, how are you guys doing X, Y, Z in-house, "because you seem to be doing okay." And we say, "Well, we're using this particular platform." And, their encryption is probably the best there is right now out there. De-duped encryption, it's just fantastic. And across different storage arrays. And being able to that to the cloud and be encrypted there, and not have to worry about that is a big bonus. And that's definitely something that we look at. Obviously, we don't encrypt all of our data, because a lot of it's just nonsense. But, we do have stuff that we do that with. And we do it both for testing purposes and to prove that this meets the requirements of the customer. Because those requirements are different, not just in different countries, but in every state you go to. So, being able to provide that level of assurance of yeah you can meet your requirements with our software regardless of what platform you're running on. >> Bryan, you mentioned a couple of features there. But I wonder if you could back us up a second. You've got a virtualized environment. There's, you know, so many options that you can choose on there. Walk us a little bit through the problems that you were having, the decision process, and ultimately what led to Datrium. >> So... The set of primary goals for us was the typical thing you see in IT is you're doing the same thing for a long period of time. You're buying the same stuff, you buy more of it, you renew, and then they tell you that the price is going to go way up on support. So you buy a new one and start over again, right? The hockey stick approach. And so that's the time I like to actually stop and say, "Hey, am I doing this right, still?" Because what I did five years ago may not be right, you know, going forward, knowing what the changes are in the business. We were looking for great cost to capacity. Right? And ease of management and overall cost of the deployment. And when we started looking at all the different players in the space... For us, the big thing was going to NFS. So, single file system for management. Prior to that, we were either fibre channel on or iSCSCI. So, mini management points. Hundreds of LUNs. Hundreds of LUNs. We're managing storage, right? A small group of people, three, four guys? You're spending 20 hours a week managing storage? That's nuts, right? So, day one, we put these guys in in a POC. And my guys are like, "This stuff's never leaving." Because now I'm down to one management point, right? Six months, seven months later, I'm down six hundred LUNs from where I was with three management points. I don't manage storage anymore. None of my guys manage storage anymore. That's a hidden cost, you know? And I'm not suggesting reduction in FTE or anything like that. I'm saying, "Oh, now those guys can go work "on operating system patching." You know, the other paying points that you've got in the business, rather than managing, you know, that platform. So, all of those things rolled in together. And when we tried to compare them to other vendors, we couldn't get an apples to apples comparison. We had to go with multiple vendors to get the same performance, to get the same capacity, and we could never get the pricing. The best-case scenario we got for capacity and performance was three times the cost. Best-case scenario. And I still had to manage LUNs. >> Yeah, Andre, I used to always joke simplicity in the enterprise was an oxymoron, because there's so much happening. You hear, "Okay, get rid of one thing, I got to patch the other thing." There's no such thing as eliminating bottlenecks, you just move them. But, you know, sounds like some common problems we've been hearing out there. What's typical about his environment? What are you hearing from customers in general that Datrium's helping? >> So, I think the first point is simplicity. And it's something that I know we've been evolving, it's a journey not only for Datrium, but the whole data center industry, right? Went through ACI and now it's open conversions. So the whole simplification of the data center and make sure that most of the task can be automated. So some of the things that we do, that we simplify from a management perspective: we have no knobs, you don't decide if it's compression, the de-duplication enable, the erasure codings. Everything is owned by default and that's the way it's going to be because it doesn't make sense for an organization with thousands of virtual machines and applications to start tweaking every single knob to make sure they're going to get the best possible performance. Across the board, once we've actually verified, you might get like one or 2% CPU back. So, simplicity's a big point. Also, the other point that we mitigate in the organization, especially compared to ACI's solutions, is the data resiliency. So we actually offer enterprise-grade data resiliency that for ACI... And when talking about evolution with data center, you know, taking like putting SSDs into the servers, ACI clusters, and moving forward. So we actually make all the management of this SSDs much simpler. I forgot the line, where I was going to, but I... (laughs) I think the message is simplicity, skill ability, back data resiliency. Making sure you get enterprise-greater data resiliency in the data center. And you don't compromise on that. You get capacity, data resiliency, simplicity at the same time. >> Keep it simple, make it work. >> Andre: Exactly. >> Right. Faster. Gentleman, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time. Thanks for telling the Siemens eMeter story. We look forward to seeing you down the road. And good luck, continue success at Datrium, as well. Thanks, Andre. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, thanks for having us. >> Back with more. You're watching Dell Technologies World 2018 right here on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live! From Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE's Cube exclusive coverage of three days of wall to wall interviews here at HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante, cohost. And our next two guest is Rod Bagg, VP of Analytics, Customer Support, Data Center, Infrastructure, HPE, formerly Nimble now HPE. and Paul Sabin, Senior Network and Infrastructure Manager at Baker Botts LLP. Guys, thanks for joining on theCUBE. >> Male Voices: Thanks for having us. >> So we talked before we came on camera about all the great stories Nimble obviously part of the fold here at HP Enterprise. Your customer stories. Let's get right into it. Tell your story about how Nimble put you out of a job. That's my favorite one. Go. >> Okay, so when I started or when we bought Nimble Storage, I was the senior storage engineer. So we purchased it, we brought it in-house. It was up within, within an hour, I was already starting carve out LUNs. At that point, I'm using the restful APIs to carve out the rest of the 200 LUNS that we needed. Presenting it to the hosts. And by the end of it, it ran itself. Between InfoSight and the fact that the product just is so easily automated, I kid you not, true story, at the end of the year when we were doing our self evaluations, my evaluation said, and congratulations, you don't need me anymore. My position is obsolete. And the management came back and said, Paul, you're absolutely right. We agree that we don't need this position anymore so we're going to promote you to the senior network infrastructure team. (John laughs) So I manage that now. >> So you got promoted. But this is a trend in automation. This is the DevOps, this is the programmable infrastructure world we're moving into with hybrid. >> Exactly. Rod, this is big deal. >> Yeah, yeah exactly. InfoSight as we see it plays a big role in that. Really the product is simple and being able to automate that. But InfoSight giving our customers sort of visibility at a very deep level into how the systems are performing. And what we do on the backend to drive availability really takes a lot of pain off of our customers. Not sure that we put everybody out of work but we certainly make life easier. So that they can focus on the business aspect. >> And you automate those tasks the way that really should be automated and that's a cool thing. >> Yup. >> Take a minute. I'll like you to take a minute just to explain what the product is and what you guys are doing. Just so we can get that out there as context. And then jump into some more stories. >> Yeah so from an InfoSight perspective? >> John: Yeah. >> So InfoSight is our predictive cloud analytics platform that uses machine learning to predict and prevent problems from occurring to our customers. So we're not disrupting their business. And so we collect somewhere in the order of, about maybe 25 million pieces of information from every array and the virtual environment. Everyday from every single array. All of that gets into a galactic database, where we have a team of data scientists working with our support engineers and our product engineers to build wellness rules. We have about eight hundred health checks that are really looking out at every part of the infrastructure for our customers and really avoiding issues for them. >> So you take the data across your entire install base. >> Rod: Yup. >> I'm sure you take care of the data so it's not all-- >> Rod: Oh yeah, it's all secure. >> Secure and nanomized. And then use that as predictive to prescribe or both or how are you-- >> Yeah both. So our real goal there is that if we know of an issue, that's either we found in our labs or maybe one customer has experienced it. Really, we're doing everything we possibly can to analyze that issue across the entire install base. So we're learning from peers. >> Male Voice: Yup. >> And applying those learnings across the install base and preventing other customers from hitting that issue. >> The system is autodidactic in this sense. It learns and then applies, is that right? >> Yeah. So we do machine learning. Semi-supervised in a lot of cases. So where we've seen and issue and we can train the models. And then it will look out for those sort of issue across the entire install. >> John: I like the notion of wellness. >> Yup. >> Brings some of the people we relate to. We also heard terms like self-driving storage. >> Yup. >> Layoff testers. >> Yeah. >> But this is again, the trend that really is needed. Share other stories that you have because this is really where IT is going as it moves to a different kind of application and consumption model for you guys. >> Right so, well, kind of touching about what he was talking about, when you're as a storage guy, what's the number one thing that us storage guys have to do, is we have to prove that it's not the storage that's the problem. So usually, what happened was, in the old world, I would produce some statistics of, okay, and here's the IOPS that we're producing and here's the latency during this time. So based on this, it wasn't me, I don't know who it was. I'm just going to tell you it's not me. In the new world-- [John] That was the finger pointing world. >> Yes it was! >> The other guy got it. >> But with InfoSight, it's like hey, I can tell you but you're also welcome to go here as well. But let me show you VMM site where it's going to show you, not only what was happening at the storage. But let me take you all the way down to the host and then the VM and we're going to find this problem. And yeah, turns out sometimes it's going to be the VM that's all of a sudden taking whatever reason adding a huge amount of latency. And that, is something that, there's no more finger pointing in it anymore. All of a sudden, we're in the same team, it's like this kumbaya thing. >> That's awesome. It's good for the cohesiveness as a team. But also it's time savers too. When you reduce the steps to do things, you get your weekends back as you guys say before you came on camera. Tell the story about how you had to do all this work on the provisioning on the replication side, >> Sure. When we deployed the arrays, we decided it was business decision to go ahead and put the production arrays into our production data center and then we would do the DR at a later time. So I've got all of my data live, on production. And they say, okay, we're adding our Nimble storage at our DR site. Paul, how much replication bandwidth do we need? And so, same story. In the old world, you go and you pull your statistics from your replication technology, you put it in excel spreadsheet, you figure out, okay, here's my peaks and I just want to say, if we fall behind just a little bit, this is what we can do. And so usually what happens is, I say, guys, in my best guess, based on what I can see from my limited scope because my eyes are bleeding at this point. >> From the spreadsheet. You're in a spreadsheet right now. >> Paul: Yes, exactly. >> You're in spreadsheet hell. >> I'm in spreadsheet hell. And so what I do is, after about a weekend's worth of work, I put in this recommendation and I usually fluff it because I could be wrong in my statistics and so this is what I end up creating. >> You don't want to be under. You want to be over. >> Exactly, I'm always trying to do that. So the firm, I'm, hopefully this is, nobody's watching at the office, but sometimes they maybe overpaying for something because I just don't want to make that chance. In the new world, this is actually the coolest thing ever. So I'm on InfoSight and I go to this little dropdown, it's like the tool planner, okay, what's that? Where it's going to tell you what you need for bandwidth based on your actual real data. So then I'm pulling, like okay, based on this time, what is the replication if I want to do it every hour. And what if I want to do it every two hours? So then I just take that and I turn it into this report that I got to present to the executive team and they're like, oh my goodness, you have certainly stepped up. How many weekends did you use on this one? And you know, I'm not going to tell them it took me five minutes in InfoSight (John laughs) to be able to create this report. >> Now that they. >> But now they know. >> Cat's out, but you already got promoted. >> Oh that's true. >> Hey Rod, can you talk about the decision to acquire Nimble. What was the genesis. Obviously there's a portfolio component, tuck-ins, fill in some gaps. But there's this other sort of IP piece. Maybe take us back. >> Yeah, so certainly, there was the portfolio fit with the storage platform. So that was obviously a big part of it. I think the other obviously big part was InfoSight. So the idea that what we're doing there with our customers and approving the availability of the systems and the operational performance of the system and keeping a close eye on that to make sure it's optimized. So all that value prop around InfoSight was a big part of the decision I think. We are working on extending InfoSight into the HP product line. Starting with 3PAR so we are working already with that engineering team. To be able to bring some of these features out as quickly as we can into the 3PAR world as well. >> So what is that, from an engineering standpoint, is that sort of the requirement there is to point InfoSight at the data, the 3PAR data? >> Yeah exactly. So 3PAR does collect a lot of data already. >> Yeah sure do. >> So really, we're just pulling that data into our pipelines and so on within InfoSight and taking advantage of some of the machine learning and algorithms and so on that we already do. Things like DMVision, would be possible and so on in that environment as well if you're a 3PAR customer. >> It's interesting. Back in, maybe 10 years ago, 3PAR was sort of the gold standard of what we used to call the hero report. >> Rod: That's right, yup, yeah. People love that. >> Thin provisioning. What impact it was. >> Rod: Yup. How much you save, et cetera. And then that predated the whole big data analytics years right? >> Rod: Yeah, exactly. >> So when Nimble started, they could have started with that premise. Right around that time. >> Yeah, yup. >> I remember when I first saw it, I was like wow this is magic. >> Yeah exactly. That was the premise, was to really apply data science to all of that data that was coming in. Really transform the support experience for Nimble. And I think that's the other big element for HP as well. There's lots of that we do in our support organization that, to be honest, it's quite enviable, by a lot of storage and high tech vendors. >> You guys took a different approach. I think what's really notable for me, which I'm impressed with is, everyone talks about this but very few put into action, is making the user experience center, >> Rod: Yeah exactly. >> Of the value. I mean all of the things you talk about, the benefits, is really centered around your experience right. Saving you time, making your life easier, shifting the automation, that could be automated with the right things. And moving into higher value things. So Paul, what's your thoughts on this as it goes forward. This world is evolving. We're hearing the message here, simplifying, hybrid IT, you got cloud right on the doorstep, multiple clouds are going to be the endgame, we'll know all this, so all said and done. Whole new infrastructure is going to be out there. What's your view of how that user experience for the practitioners will evolve. What's your vision. How do you see it playing out. >> Rod: Be out of a job again. (Paul laughs) >> No, true story. The firm decided that they were going to bring us some people to help us look into what cloud we should, or how we should utilize the cloud because even from us, we're trying to keep ourselves agile as a law firm. Because if we can provide our services in a better, more meaningful and faster way, that gives us a competitive edge. So we brought in this team and they went over all of our IOPS and at the time it was under the different storage system so it took at least 20, 30 hours of my time to get all these numbers that they wanted. And then they created this report for us. Which I thought was really meaningful and valuable. The last line was, you should do cloud work, cloud makes sense. So that was it. Solid advice you know. Money well spent. (laughs) >> And that's what Meg's basically saying in the key note. The right mix of cloud versus on-prem. Certainly law firms have proprietary information and they want it secure. I guess my question really is, fundamentally is, a provocative one, I'd love to get your thoughts on. Serious question, you can laugh at at it a little bit but with AI bots coming, you can almost see these kinds of legal tasks being automated away. So, you might be, next promotion is taking over the firm. That's where big data can in. So how are you guys looking at that as a firm because I'm sure the lawyers are saying, hey you know what, I can shift my value to higher yield activities >> Paul: Exactly. >> Where that makes sense. You guys talk about that at all? >> We do. And I actually use the example of NASA. I really love NASA, I'm a huge fan. And NASA decide, they declared, we're going to go to Mars. We're going to do this. How are we going to do this? We have to let go of our operational stuff. We have to let go, I mean we can launch the shuttle all day long, we're comfortable with that. We can go into the space station, we're comfortable with that. But now, we've got to go new. And the way we have to do that is, we have to drop this stuff. Let's let other people do this. Let's let the InfoSight team start handling a lot of that work for me. And now, I'm asking my team, guys, I want you to start dreaming. Get out of the operational work. Start dreaming out loud. Let's figure out ways we can deliver value to our attorneys. >> Exactly. >> To free them. And let's let them just, again, take that same freedom, with the business intelligence and the machine learning, you're right that they're document management, which is their bread and butter, is their document production. Even that's getting scrutinized or transformed through this machine learning. And so, you could take this as a, as a way of saying no, there goes my job. Or you can say no, now I've got the opportunity to do something even better and cooler and really bring the value. >> And stretching. That's the whole stretch goal. Having that moonshot, in this case Mars. >> Paul: Mars right. >> It's the stretch and leverage right. >> Paul: Yes. >> That's the concept. How do you apply that to storage because now HP's got the composability, they got synergy. >> Paul: Yeah, yup. >> They have all kinds of. Now glue layer's kind of developing. We heard Antonio Neri in the press and analyst queue. We heard Meg Whitman talk about, you know, most her acquisitions have been in software, except for maybe one or two, over the past couple years, have been software. >> Paul: Yup. >> So, hardware, software kind of blending. >> Yeah. I think so, from the storage perspective certainly, I think that's happening. I think from the InfoSight perspective, where we see that going, is again, today when we put a lot of effort into our recommendation models. And that's an area that's very much in the deep data sciences realm. So when we come up with those recommendations, >> John: Umhmm. >> you know, we do things where we can prevent people from hitting issues and not just sort of happen automatically but some of these things are, something needs changing in their environment. So maybe, maybe there's a QoS policy that should be applied on the array to optimize performance because of some peak workload during Christmas, something of that nature. So that's still a last mile problem for us because you've got a human at the other end that's got to go in there and fix it and hopefully do it right and not ignore it and everything else. >> I can see the headline now, storage wellness coming to HP. >> Rod: Yeah exactly. >> But this is really interesting, comes with self-healing right. >> So that's where we want to go with that. That is really the thing we're working towards in the vision is, how do go and do that, change those QoS policies for the customer where we could inject, let's say, a change control within their change management system. They can go hit a button which we orchestrate that change for them. It's all documented and well controlled. >> It's not just storing the data, it's being data driven for the data being stored in the self crafting storage. >> Rod: Exactly, yeah, exactly. >> Rod, Paul thanks so much for sharing the stories and congratulations on the promotion. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on InfoSight. You guys got great story there. >> But I never get promoted. (everyone laughs) >> Come in theCUBE, >> great story right. >> get promoted. >> Birds of a feather. >> Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. More live coverage here from theCUBE. Here at HP Discover 2017 after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (lively music)