>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's the CUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Big Easy everybody. This is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days of wall to wall coverage of VeeamON. Gavin Cohen is here. He's the Vice President of Product Marketing at Nimble, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise company now. Gavin, good to see you. Congratulations on the exit. >> Thank you Dave. >> So, new times. New, whole new lot of going on. I mean, first of all, what's it like to be part of HPE? You know, it's early days, but how's that going? >> So we're a few weeks into it. It's extremely exciting so far. We're running a thousand miles an hour. And what's been absolutely terrific is the acquisition, it's an expansion acquisition. So, that means the entire Nimble Storage product line continues to exist and stays alive. But we get access to massive global sales force that we didn't have as an independent company. So, very exciting stuff for us. >> And a huge channel as well. I mean, I haven't talked to folks at Nimble, on The Cube anyways, since, thought it was back at one of the SNWs, Stu. So maybe you can give us the, sort of, Nimble 101, if you wouldn't mind, Gavin. >> Sure, sure. So if you look, I mean, really the things, there are several things that set Nimble apart. We all, with a bunch of other flash start-ups, had first prites to market around 2010. Nimble really accelerated that. To the point of the acquisition, we had over 10,000 customers worldwide. We really managed to, very much, change the game in storage. From starting as a company focused hybrid storage, we had a very successful launch last year. The VAR All Flash and managed a very large portion of our business into all Flash. But, overriding that and probably the thing that sets apart more than anything from not just the storage start-ups but from all the large storage vendors is our use of predictive analytics and what we've been able to do with it. [Dave]- So talk a little bit more about that >> Sure. So, I mean, our platform's called Infosight. And the idea is in the infrastructure that we exist in, so the storage array standing all the way through the networks that compute, all the way up to they hypervisor. Everyday we collect millions of sensor data points. Actually, as a collective base, we're processing, every second, millions of these status sensor data points. And what we're doing with it, is we're passing it through all these techniques of predictive analytics and machine learning. And we use it, really, to predict and prevent problems. So our goal is not just delivering fast Flash performance from the array but really this end-to-end delivery of data up to the application in a better way than it's otherwise possible. >> So you kind of had in the early days, it was the original EMC phone home. We all remember that. And then around, sort of the, virtualization guys, the three PARS, the compellents, they had what we used to call the hero reports. And it was good. >> Yeah. >> And it was kind of a phone home on steroids What you're talking about is a whole new advancement in analytics that drives anticipatory actions, potentially. Is that right? >> Very much. I mean, they're from maybe three numbers that speak to it. So, 86% of problems that would normally involve a call to vendor support, So, in this case, Nimble support, We completely, end-to-end, automate. All the way from recognizing the problem before the customer even sees the problem through to resolution. And it's pretty remarkable, 'cause it's just the stuff you'd expect from a phone home, where we recognize the power supply is going wrong, or a SSD is not working correctly. We can recognize misconfigurations on the host or a bad HBA, or a MultiPar setting that's not correct that's impacting performance and then proactively tell the customer about it. They might not be aware. And actually tell them how to resolve it. So, it's kind of a remarkable one. >> You know, Gavin, I heard you say, if this announced today, you'd probably say that you're an artificial intelligence company. >> That's right. >> If that's going to help. >> We just hadn't quite coined that word when we came up. You know, it really is, 'cause you look at, you know, I said there were a few interesting metrics The other one that's sort of been astounding particularly for new technology in a world where storage has been around for many many years. We've hit well over six nines of measured availability across our install base. But not just across one configuration, across every Nimble array out there running every version of OS in every kind of environment. We're well over the six nines of availability. And then, probably the most astounding of all, is 54% of the issues that InfoSight resolves are not actually tied to the storage. So they're all these problems that are outside of storage. And that's the stuff that customers just love. 'Cause these are these needle in a haystack problems with VMware settings or problems on the network that get blamed on the storage and end up having a root cause outside of. >> How do you get visibility beyond your own little world of storage? >> Yeah. So that's part of our secrets. So we have these collectors that all stems from the array but we also collect up through the stacks. We have our V center agent as an example. And they all feed in analytics. A lot of what was built into Nimble from day zero was just this infrastructure of sending out sensor data and then collecting it and processing it. And then, over the years, we've just expanded. So we started where we just collected from the array. Now we push out of the array and sort of cover most of the infrastructure. And that's really where the differentiation is because when you correlate all those different data points you get some really interesting insights. >> So you ingest that data essentially in real time. >> Yep. Yep. >> And then process it and spit it back out. >> Gavin: Process it and help the customers. >> I love this new metrics, you know, when I think it gives substance to disruption when you have new metrics that you created. Like in particular 86%, you know, of the failures are automated. >> Yes. >> Or the problems are automated, that no human. So that I guess that's the fourth metric which it's hard to get but how much time you save people. >> It is and it's almost impossible to measure because no one publishes their amount of time wasted on storage. But we know, just anecdotally, when you talk to any customer, any customer with any vendor's products, when they run well, they run well. When they don't, hunting down those problems and dealing with multiple vendors and everything. It's an absolute nightmare. I think that's what we've managed to, sort of, crack into and really deliver something better for our customers. And the other, while we're on numbers, Net Promoter Scores get thrown around a lot. But as an independent company, Nimble has the highest storage Net Promoter Score in the industry. So we crossed over 85... >> Wow. as our Net Promoter Score. And it's mostly when you talk to customers. It's just that support experience. They've never seen anything like it from a vendor. >> That's great. I couldn't help but notice when the keynote was going on they put up the key sponsors that had different levels. Both HPE was there and Nimble was there. >> Gavin: That's right. >> So your team was already planning to be here prior to the acquisition. >> Gavin: Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about the partnership, you know, any specific products you have at Nimble that fit in this space. >> Yeah, so probably two pieces that are interesting. We have very deep integration with Veeam. And we're actually the first of the smaller storage vendors to be integrated with Veeam. If you look, initially, they integrated themselves with the big players that you'd expect. We were the first of the others. The integration lends itself to exactly what we do well. We do a really good job of snapshots and replications and supporting the number of snapshots and replication points. So it's just a really sleek integration where you can drive the entire backup process through Veeam but actually, behind the scenes, Nimble does all the data movement and the snapshot creation under Veeam's management. The second thing, and this is actually a product that we showcased for the first time at VeeamON, so at our stand, now the HPE stand, is what we call the Secondary Flash Array. And it's kind of a very unique device because when you think about backup, most backup repositories, they're a one way repository. You put stuff in, you access it when you need to, but when you access it needs to come back. You need to copy it back and it's slow. And what we have done is we have built a secondary storage device that's great at accepting Veeam backups. It's got inline, dedupe, and compression and everything. So it's very efficient but you can actually run real work loads on this device. So we've come up with this idea of put your backup data to work. Instead of having it sit there idle, you can spin up, dev/test, and QA, and do things with that data or verify your backups because now you have performance. >> Yeah, that's always been the problem with storage, right? If you make replicas or if you have backups you've got a certain amount of resources that aren't being used or that the other piece is so, you know, back up is great but recovery is everything. So, you need to be able to be fast. You need to be able to be nimble, I guess, would be the case, right? >> Gavin: That would be right. We love that. >> So it's really, I would infer that what that is is a productivity tool that you can also use for backups. Is that a fair way to think of it? >> Yeah, I think it's actually, I think, how it will end up getting used. I think the use case always starts a backup. You need to put your backup data somewhere. And most people will choose to put it somewhere that's highly cost optimized knowing full well the trade off is, when you need to restore it, it's not going to behave like your primary device. This is opening up a whole new, as you said, a new use case where, you get the data there but then really the interesting thing comes that you use that everyday. So you can run all these other secondary processes on it or you could fail over to it and actually run production on it if you needed to. >> And you can be cost competitive because of your data reduction techniques. Is that right? >> That's right. Exactly. >> Okay, so, for those of you out there that don't believe that, let's push on that a little bit. The spinning disc guys will tell us, you know it's true for so-called high spin speed devices but when you get to the cheap and deep stuff, we're still much, much cheaper. Your counter would be that you can't reduce, data reduce, that stuff effectively? Is that right? >> Yeah, you know, I think really you got to look at the usual, the cost trade offs, right? If you want then, now the portfolio that we're a part of is a perfect example. If you want the most cost effective place to put your back up data, It's the HP StoreOnce product. It's totally designed around being an efficient destination for backups. It's got, you know, dedupe like nothing else, that'll crunch that data down. And you can store it for, you know, months or years very cost effectively. >> Dave: And then you're done. >> Then you're done, right. Now, you can get the data back and it's absolutely rock-solid but it doesn't behave like a primary storage device. Our Secondary Flash Array is somewhere in between the cost of primary disc, or primary Flash, and hybrid disc and that, sort of, cheap and deep. In that it's got a lot of the low cost attributes because of compression and dedupe but it's not got IOPS, so you can do things with it. And that's really where no secondary device has gone before. >> Data sharing, it's got a cherry on top and some sprinkles. >> Gavin: That's it. >> Gavin, last question I have for you is the acquisition's done. You've talked a little bit about the channel. Many people look at Infosight as the, kind of the gem of your portfolio. Can you give us any guidance as to where we can expect to see that driven throughout the HP portfolio? >> Yeah, sure. So the best thing is I'm not yet, I think, subject to knowing about all the rules of what I can and can't talk about. >> Great. Give us all the info. (laughing) >> No, I mean, as a very clear state of direction, HP acquired Nimble, you know, a large reason was InfoSight and just looking at what we've done as an independent company, I mean, Imagine if you could start to transform the support processes that HP could offer and bring some of these capabilities to their own product line. So we're already embarking on looking at doing that first with the 3PAR product line. And while I won't give you dates, I can say that there a lot of people aggressively working to get something out. And I think you'll see that spread pretty quickly 'cause the IP that we have and the data scientists and the sort of infrastructure that we've built to perform these analytics is extensible and we're pretty excited about that. >> Excellent! Gavin, thanks very much for coming on the CUBE with us. >> Gavin: Thank you very much. >> It was good to see you, appreciate you coming out. >> Gavin: Thank you. Alright, keep right there everyboday. We'll be back with our next guest shortly. (upbeat music)