>> Announcer: Live from San Jose it's The Cube presenting Big Data, Silicon Valley brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Good morning. Welcome to The Cube. We are on day two of our coverage our event Big Data SV. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're down the street from the Strata Data Conference. This is The Cube's tenth big data event and we had a great day yesterday learning a lot from myriad guests on very different nuances of big data journey where things are going. We're excited to welcome back to The Cube an alumni, Octavian Tanase, the Senior Vice President of Data ONTAP fron Net App. Octavian, welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> So you've been at the Strata Data Conference for the last couple of days. From a big data perspective, what are some of the things that you're hearing, in terms of from a customer's perspective on what's working, what challenges, opportunities? I'm very excited to be here and learn about the innovation of our partners in the industry and share with our partners and our customers what we're doing to enable them to drive more value out of that data. The reality is that data has become the 21st Century gold or oil that powers the business and everybody's looking to apply new techniques, a lot of times machine learning, deep learning, to draw more value of the data, make better decisions and compete in the marketplace. Octavian, you've been at NetApp now eight years and I've been watching NetApp, as we were talking about offline, for decades and I've seen the ebb and flow and this company has transformed many, many times. The latest, obviously cloud came in, flash came into play and then you're also going through a major transition in the customer based to clustered ONTAP. You seemed to negotiate that. NetApp is back, thriving, stock's up. What's happening at NetApp? What's the culture like these days? Give us the update. >> I think we've been very fortunate to have a CEO like George Kurian, who has been really focused on helping us do basically fewer things better, really focus on our core business, simplify our operations and continue to innovate and this is probably the area that I'm most excited about. It's always good to make sure that you accelerate the business, make it simpler for your customers and your partners to do business with you, but what you have to do is innovate. We are a product company. We are passionate about innovation. I believe that we are innovating with more pace than many of the startups in the space so that's probably the most exciting thing that has been part of our transformation. >> So let's talk about big data. Back in the day if you had a big data problem you would buy a big Unix box, maybe buy some Oracle licenses, try to put all your data into that box and that became your data warehouse. The brilliance of Hadoop was hey we can leave the data where it is. There's too much data to put into the box so we're going to bring five megabytes to code to a petabyte of data. And the other piece of it is CFOs loved it, because we're going to reduce the cost of our expensive data warehouse and we're going to buy off the shelf components: white box, servers and off the shelf disk drives. We're going to put that together and life will be good. Well as things matured, the old client-server days, it got very expensive, you needed enterprise grade. So where does NetApp fit into that equation, because originally big storage companies like NetApp, they weren't part of the equation? Has that changed? >> Absolutely. One of the things that has enabled that transformation, that change is we made a deliberate decision to focus on software defined and making sure that the ONTAP operating system is available wherever data is being created: on the edge in an IoT device, in the traditional data center or in the cloud. So we are in the unique position to enable analytics, big data, wherever those applications reside. One of the things that we've recently done is we've partnered with IDC and what the study, what the analysis has shown is that deploying in analytics, a Hadoop or NoSQL type of solution on top of NetApp is half the cost of DAS. So when you consider the cost of servers, the licenses that you're going to have to pay for, these commercial implementations of Hadoop as well as the storage and the data infrastructure, you are much better off choosing NetApp than a white box type of solution. >> Let's unpack that a little bit, because if I infer correctly from what you said normally you would say the operational costs are going to be dramatically lower, it's easier to manage a professional system like a NetApp ONTAP, it's integrated, great software, but am I hearing you correctly, you're saying the acquisition costs are actually less than if I'm buying white box? A lot of people are going to be skeptical about that, say Octavian no way, it's cheaper to buy white box stuff. Defend that statement. >> Absolutely. If you're looking at the whole solution that includes the server and the storage, what NetApp enables you to do if you're running the solution on top of ONTAP you reduce the need for so many servers. If you reduce that number you also reduce the licensing cost. Moreover, if you actually look at the core value proposition of the storage layer there, DAS typically makes three copies of the data. We don't. We are very greedy and we're making sure that you're using shared storage and we are applying a bunch of storage efficiency techniques to further compress, compact that data for world class storage efficiency. >> So cost efficiency is obviously a great benefit for any company when they're especially evolving, from a digital perspective. What are some of the business level benefits? You mentioned speed a minute ago. What is Data ONTAP and even ONTAP in the cloud enabling your enterprise customers to achieve at the business level, maybe from faster time to market, identifying with machine learning and AI new products? Give me an example of maybe a customer that you think really articulates the value that ONTAP in the cloud can deliver. >> One of the things that's really important is to have your data management capability, whatever the data is being produced so ONTAP being consumed either as a VM or a service ... I don't know if you've seen some of the partnerships that we have with AWS and Azure. We're able to offer the same rich data management capabilities, not only the traditional data center, but in the cloud. What that really enables customers to do is to simplify and have the same operating system, the same data management platform for the both the second platform traditional applications as well as for the third platform applications. I've seen a company like Adobe be very successful in deploying their infrastructure, their services not only on prem in their traditional data center, but using ONTAP Cloud. So we have more than about 1,500 customers right now that have adopted ONTAP in the AWS cloud. >> What are you seeing in terms of the adoption of flash and I'm particularly interested in the intersection of flash adoption and the developer angle, because we've seen, in certain instances, certain organizations are able to share data off of flash much more efficiently that you would be, for instance, of a spinning disk? Have you seen a developer impact in your customer base? >> Absolutely I think most of customers initially have adopted flash, because of high throughput and low latency. I think over time customers really understood and identified with the overall value proposition in cost of ownership in flash that it enables them to consolidate multiple workloads in a smaller footprint. So that enables you to then reduce the cost to operate that infrastructure and it really gives you a range of applications that you can deploy that you were never able to do that. Everybody's looking to do in place, in line analytics that now are possible, because of this fast media. Folks are looking to accelerate old applications in which they cannot invest anymore, but they just want to run faster. Flash also tends to be more reliable than traditional storage, so customers definitely appreciate that fewer things could go wrong so overall the value proposition of flash, it's all encompassing and we believe that in the near future flash will be the defacto standard in everybody's data center, whether it's on prem or in the cloud. >> How about backup and recovery in big data? We obviously, in the enterprise, very concerned about data protection. What's similar in big data? What's different and what's NetApp's angle on that? >> I think data protection and data security will never stop being important to our customers. Security's top of mind for everybody in the industry and it's a source of resume changing events, if you would, and they're typically not promotions. So we have invested a tremendous deal in certifications for HIPAA, for FIPS, we are enabling encryption, both at rest and in flight. We've done a lot of work to make sure that the encryption can happen in software layer, to make sure that we give the customers best storage class efficiency and what we're also leveraging is the innovation that ONTAP has done over many years to protect the data, replicate its snapshots, peering the data to the cloud. These are techniques that we're commonly using to reduce the cost of ownership, also protect the data the customers deploy. >> So security's still a hot topic and, like you said, it probably always will be, but it's a shared responsibility, right? So customers leveraging NetApps safe or on prem hybrid also using Azure or AWS, who's your target audience? If you're talking to the guys and gals that are still managing storage are you also having the CSO or the security guys come in, the gals, to understand we've got this appointment in Azure or AWS so we're going to bring in ONTAP to facilitate this? There's a shared responsibility of security. Who's at the table, from your perspective, in your customers that you need to help understand how they facilitate true security? >> It's definitely been a transformative event where more and more people in IQ organizations are involved in the decisions that are required to deploy the applications. There was a time when we would talk only to the storage admin. After a while we started talking to the application admin, the virtualization admin and now you're talking to the line of business who has that vested interest to make sure that they can harness the power of the data in their environment. So you have the CSO, you have the traditional infrastructure people, you have the app administration and you have the app owner, the business owner that are all at the table that are coming and looking to choose the best of breed solution for their data management. >> What are the conversations like with your CXO, executives? Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's kind of an overused term, but there's real substance when you actually peel the onion. What are you seeing as NetApp's role in effecting digital transformations within your customer base? >> I think we have a vision of how we can help enterprises take advantage of the digital transformation and adopt it. I think we have three tenants of that vision. Number one is we're helping customers harness the power of the cloud. Number two, we're looking to enable them to future proof their investments and build the next generation data center. And number three, nobody starts with a fresh slate so we're looking to help customers modernize their current infrastructure through storage. We have a lot of expertise in storage. We've helped, over time, customers time and again adopt disruptive technologies in nondisruptive ways. We're looking to adopt these technologies and trends on behalf of our customers and then help them use them in a seamless safe way. >> And continue their evolution to identify new revenue streams, new products, new opportunities and even probably give other lines of business access to this data that they need to understand is there value here, how can we harness it faster than our competitors, right? >> Absolutely. It's all about deriving value out of the data. I think earlier I called it the gold of the 21st Century. This is a trend that will continue. I believe there will be no enterprise or center that won't focus on using machine learning, deep learning, analytics to derive more value out of the data to find more customer touch points, to optimize their business to really compete in the marketplace. >> Data plus AI plus cloud economics are the new innovation drivers of the next 10, 20 years. >> Completely agree. >> Well Octavian thanks so much for spending time with us this morning sharing what's new at NetApp, some of the visions that you guys have and also some of the impact that you're making with customers. We look forward to having you back on the program in the near future. >> Thank you. Appreciate having the time. >> And for my cohost Dave Vellante I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live on day two of coverage of our event, Big Data SV. We're at this really cool venue, Forager Tasting Room. Come down here, join us, get to hear all these great conversations. Stick around and we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat techno) >> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by, NetApp. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our Cube coverage, exclusive coverage here at the NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-host, co-founder of the SiliconANGLE Keith Townsend CTO advisor here in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Mandalay Bay, our next guest is Jennifer Meyer, senior director cloud product marketing, and Ingo Fuchs who's the senior manager cloud product marketing. You guys are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the front lines for NetApp on the cloud, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Okay, so, we've been covering it, but now it's pretty clear there's a cloud play, there is a cloud play for Netapp, you guys are showing product, lot of products in the keynotes, both in the data center in the next generation but the cloud's the big part of the story, it's certainly we hear resonating with customers, and all the guests that have come up on the A teams, and your partner channels, all are like this is really, really great thing. >> Yeah, I think -- >> Part of the plan? >> Absolutely part of the plan, I mean if you caught any of the latest messaging which, you know, Jean and the team have worked really hard on, it's all about us being the data authority and the hybrid cloud, right, and so, if you think about, let's unpack hybrid cloud, there's only about 1% of the population of the planet that's not adopting cloud in some way, and we believe that after the last 25 years of our history in data management and our leadership with things like ONTAP that we are well-equipped to help people get there, how they want to get there and with what, right. >> And you have an install base too, so you've been selling boxes, everyone knows you for selling, that's an old term but I'm showing my age, (Jennifer laughs) hardware, but hardware's not going away either, Amazon makes their own stuff too, so you got to still store stuff, so storage will be there, servers will be there, hyperconverging, all that's happening under the hood, but the software's where the value is, certainly, you know, we have expression at SiliconANGLE, software's eating the world as Mark Andreesen said, but data's eating software, Anthony, your general manager came on and said, you know, data is trumping applications, used to be applications had data, now data has applications. >> Right. >> So that flips things, upside-down, and you guys got to go build that market out for your customers. How do your customers at NetApp, and prospective customers, new customers, NetNew, engage with NetApp and what's the positioning, what's the value? >> Yeah, there are a lot of different ways to do it. So if you're an existing NetApp customer today, a really really easy way to get into the cloud, so we have one of our product called ONTAP Cloud, it's our storage operating system, the number one operating system in the world, running inside Azure and AWS hyperscalers so you use all the same tools, all the same mechanisms that you would use on premises, but you're now running in the cloud, so that makes it really easy to lift and shift applications that are using NFS or CIFS or iSCSI protocols, straight into the cloud, because you have the same storage operating system that you have on premises, you have datafication, you have snapshot, you have cloning, you have all of the advantages of data management infrastructure that has been developed over the last 25 years. >> So some of the push-back that I've seen is that, yeah, you have the tooling, but isn't the cloud all about the new? Can you actually build new apps with on, using ONTAP and Microsoft Azure NFS, can you talk to us a little bit about the story, about not just bringing your legacy tools, quote unquote, but also, the new capabilities that developers will find as a result of the cloud offerings. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think in my opinion the most exciting announcement this week, and others may argue differently -- >> You're a little biased. >> You're a little bit, yeah. >> I'm a little bit biased, because you know, >> We'll take it with a grain of salt. >> It's my baby so I do care about it, is that we, that Microsoft announced, and that we announced that we are the technology provider for Microsoft launching an Enterprise-class NFS service natively in Azure. Now, if you think about that, if it runs natively in Azure, it sits right next to the infrastructure that is processing HDInsight, that's running SQL server, Microsoft announced that they are having SQL running on Linux, so suddenly having an Enterprise cloud very very fast, high performance, managed by NetApp NFS service running natively in Azure opens up the opportunities to do IoT, run your Enterprise databases against this infrastructure and really opening up the door for customers to do more. And because you're using tools like HDInsight, you can run analytics, you can now expand into AI, into machine learning, all of that is now open to people that are cloud-native, and cloud natives don't want to go back and learn how to manage a storage infrastructure, that's not a good use of their time, so something like the NFS service in Azure, you don't have to learn how to do storage, all you do is go to the portal, you provision it, you click on it, it's running, it's done. >> I think that's a really important point, because everybody just hears it's a new native or first-party service in Azure, which frankly is industry-first. I mean, nobody, especially from the storage provider standpoint is doing that today, but I think the ability to get all those Enterprise-class services without it feeling like a prostate exam is probably a first for everybody. (men laughing) >> Probably you get, you get put under for that these days, but I mean, my point is, the multi-cloud thing's interesting to me, and I think you guys have hit on something with the Cloud Orchestrator product we saw on stage, the demo, is that multi-cloud, customers don't want to be locked in. >> That's right. >> That's the number one thing we hear in theCUBE, and the suppliers, whoa, we don't lock in, now open-source has been growing, that's great, but you know, the new lock-in as we still call it, is functionality, are you helping customers scale up and scale out at the same time, so the question for you is, how far along is that cloud orchestrator, and is that the guiding principle of the cloud group to seamlessly, first of all the cloud orchestrator allows you to move data around just by clicking buttons, so it takes away all the under-the-covers work that's needed. >> That's right. >> 'Cause each cloud has its own architecture. >> That's right. >> How they do things. So, that's a value quotient I think will be a home run. >> It is, and a big priority for NetApp and specifically in our cloud business unit and our cloud marketing is to make sure that people feel like they have the freedom to choose where they want to go and how, right, and so think about it like a compass, a compass still needs you to pick the destination, and it tells you the best way to get there. That's really sort of what we're trying to do and the orchestrator is just a very flexible way to help people do it, even at the API level. >> Alright, so for all the naysayers out there that are, oh NetApp, they're just cloud washing, they're not really in the cloud game, what does this mean, how do you put that to rest, 'cause I know you've been involved in Amazon for some time, now with the Microsoft deal pretty significant, what do you say to the naysayers or customers that might learn for the first time wow, good story there, or there's a path to the cloud. >> You know, we joked one time we should have an entire marketing campaign that said, oh, I didn't know NetApp did that, because there are so many things, even me, being fairly new to NetApp that I didn't even know we were doing, let alone how long we were doing them for, so it might shock some people to know that we've been doing the ONTAP cloud product for four years, I mean four years, and that product frankly was born out of our own need to abstract the software and test it on our own for TestApp, right, >> Well Jean's in town so she's a good marketer so she should do a good job of changing the marketing angle, but the tell sign to me at events is on keynotes, right, this is to me the relevance barometer, I think Amazon has really nailed this, they have so many announcements they can't even keep track of them, they actually, there's just a tsunami, and that is an indicator of success, and that's to me the competitive advantage, keep on introducing new products. You guys had how many products introduced on stage today, I mean, it was just not enough time. >> A lot, the payload was huge. >> There's a huge -- >> It's a really good sign of momentum and what's to come, yeah. >> Great sign, great sign. And I think what's going to, I'm sorry, we're so excited we can't even help ourselves. (men laughing) I think what's going to be interesting and a challenge for marketing moving forward is how do you put a net around it when you want to announce it, because when you look at continuous innovation and delivery, we're going to be doing something every few days, right, once a month, once every two weeks, so -- >> Well you guys have a good install base, and I always said you can't go out of business if you have money in the bank and if you have customers, thousands of customers do you guys have, not losing that core, building on the core, so how are you guys, from a product marketing standpoint, you got to package to the core, you got to have your core base, but now you have new constituencies, new personas in your base, now, developing, you have analytics, you have chief data officers, you have the guy who's going to be thinking about governance now and GP, GS, >> GDPR. >> G, D, >> G, D, P, R, >> G, E, P, R. Gettin' late in the day. (Jennifer laughing) But it's a global skill, you guys now have a new territory to take down, what's the plan? >> You take that one. >> Yeah, I think it's a really interesting one. Let me give you a specific example, and then we can broaden the story a little bit, but we recognize that one of the problems that our customers have is packing up their SAS environments. So that they have come from on-premises environments, where they were maybe using our storage, maybe not, moved into the cloud, and now, like one of our customers was talking recently about, he has hundreds of SAS providers, and he doesn't really know what data they have, so he's concerned about data protection, he's concerned about losing that data, obviously hacking attacks and similar things. >> Yeah. >> So we actually started a program around a product that we call Cloud Control, and Cloud Control for Office 365 is a first iteration of that that we launched just a few months ago, and it takes the Office 365 data and protects it and retains that data so that if something happens, somebody hacks, somebody corrupts your files, your CEO deletes emails and three months later you want it back, that data is there and it's protected and it's secure, so that's a native cloud service, you don't buy any equipment from us, your earlier comment about moving boxes, so the cloud for us is a great vehicle to get to these new buyers, and the interest that we're getting back is tremendous, but you're absolutely right that we need to find different ways and we are finding different ways to get to these buyers, to get to these personas that are out there. >> Well, not having a hardware-specific thing is certainly a great way, cloud, I mean. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> you got a lot of data back in the recovery, there's no walls in the cloud, so the on-premises paradigm changes it a lot. >> Yeah, and this time we're talking SAS to SAS, right? >> That's great, so ecosystem partners, one of the big successes is partnerships. What's the strategy on partners, I mean cloud-native foundation, cloud CNCF cloud native compute foundations has grown, who's in there are you guys getting involved in that, what's your position, what's the strategy for partnering. >> Yeah, so as you would expect, you know, cloud is different enough that one framework doesn't match the things that we've been doing for those 25 years that we've been so successful in this business, so what we've tried to do in this new cloud first partner program that we've launched several months ago is really target our cloud native partners, these guys that couldn't care less about on-prem, they don't even know how to spell the word storage, and see how do we help service them with some of these great data services that we're bringing to bear, really, and these guys have no previous NetApp history with us. And we've got, you know, a couple dozen partners that have already signed up on our behalf, and we'll continue that momentum, but we're certainly excited to give them a new level of treatment that NetApp hasn't done before. >> So I would love to hear feedback from the lower-level from the ecosystem. NetApp I think, which is I think is a good thing, is very opinionated when it comes to its approach to cloud. This isn't oh, bring any old object store to the, it's you know what if you adopt ONTAP, if you adapt NetApp, data-driven vision, the data fabric, if you adopt that, then you enable a new level of cloud mobility. So if you, as you've brought that nest to the ecosystem, what's been the response, I mean a lot of these guys are pretty opinionated themselves. >> I was going to say you've already talked to Anthony and he's pretty opinionated. >> Yes (laughing). >> Yeah, no I think it's well-received, right, I mean, who doesn't want the ability to have some freedom to move around and choose their partners as we go, and I think one thing that Ingo was alluding to earlier is the fact that we're pretty heterogeneous in our data services, you don't have to have NetApp to be able to benefit from Cloud Control, or Cloud Sync, or OnCommand Insight, which is one of our sort of business insight tools for infrastructure and cloud-cost monitoring. So, it's nice to be able to give them a more sort of open message, but still have a pretty strong opinion on where people need to go and why. >> So let's talk about Cloud Control a little bit more, is Cloud Control an API, or is that just a, is that only control plane? >> It's a service, so it's a native cloud service, you can buy it on the marketplace, you can do free trials, you don't buy any hardware anywhere, it will grab the data through official APIs out of Office 365 and store it in a choice of locations, so we can host the storage for you, or you can store it in AWS, you can store it in Azure, or you can store it on-premises and storage with AppScale, which is our object store, so you know, for some customers it's important for compliance reasons to have an off-site on-premises copy, other customers would prefer to use Azure, use AWS, depends on what kind of licensing agreement, or massive purchase agreements they might have, so we give our customers that flexibility, but that is an example for native cloud service. We have another one that's called Cloud Sync, which is a data migration tool, you can go from CIFS, NFS, or S3, to CIFS, NFS, or S3. To, and it transforms the data, so you can go from an NFS source and move it natively into an S3 object in the cloud. It's another example for a native cloud service, it's not a license, it's not something that you buy and install on-premises. >> So that brings a question about data mobility today, I know cloud orchestrator is something that's coming in the future, but as far as data mobility, can I do something as simple as, say, or as complex, depending on your perspective, say I have two AWS regions, I'm front-ending this with ONTAP and I'm using ONTAP as a filer, and I want to replicate storage from one AWS region to another one, can I do that with object in the back-end and then use ONTAP to present that as files on both coasts, for example? >> Yeah, it depends a little bit on your application, the database that you're using, but say you're using ONTAP cloud, you can replicate between regions using cross-region replication, that's easy. But what's different is we have HA, so what you can do with ONTAP cloud is that you can do a fail-over from one availability zone to another availability zone, and that's all managed within the software. So if you're thinking about moving Enterprise application, mission-critical applications running production inside the cloud, you definitely do want to have HA, we did, we tackled this a little bit different for the NFS Azure service 'cause we were running and operating the infrastructure that is underneath the Azure portal so we have the reliability built into our product because it's running on our equipment. So we have complete control over that. >> Guys, final question, I know we got to go but I want to get your thoughts on management software, because the management game is changing the cloud too, as the trend of having the same code bases running on-prem or on the cloud, or applications working across multiple clouds brings up the role of the folks that are being shifted to high-value activities. One of them is, you know, managing dashboards automating some of the system management, application management, OnCommand has been around for a long, long time, NetApp has a history of good management tooling. How does that translate to the products in the cloud? >> It does, and I want to pull back to talk a little bit about OnCommand Insight 'cause we kind of overlook it because it's been around for a little while and it's more traditionally thought of as an SRM tool, but really, some of the capabilities that we've talked about even as early as today, was the fact that now we're extending sort of those infrastructure analytics and those business insights so you can identify resources that are wasted or places where you're out of capacity and you're bottlenecking, now into the cloud for things like cost-monitoring. So, imagine you're a CIO and you have people going around your back swiping credit cards to find whatever tools they want to use in the SAS universe to get their jobs done, only you have no idea where they're spending your money. Now you'll have the ability to look at almost a unified bill and see which departments are charging what money, and charge back those departments to keep them accountable in your budget. >> John: We call that the toolshed problem. >> Toolshed >> All these tools. >> They're everywhere. >> They're everywhere, don't be a tool, get out, get that toolshed, there's too many things in a tool, you get too many tools >> We have a lot of tools. Yeah, so we're happy to have things like that that help to give people a little bit more empowerment to first identify what's going on and how to fix it. >> The problem is though, in tools, they buy a tool, sometimes it turns into something else, like you buy a hammer and it turns into a lawnmower, but that's not what it's designed for. >> That's right. >> You can't mow your lawn with a hammer. >> You can't. >> So a final question before we break is product marketing focus. What's your to-do items, you guys got your list, I know you're making decisions on there with the product teams on how to take it to market, what's the to-do list for you guys. >> I'll give my answer and then I'll let you close, but it's messaging, messaging, messaging, right? I think in marketing we traditionally get sick of our own message before sometimes our audiences have heard it, and certainly we don't want to let Jean down, because she's done such a phenomenal job of getting the ship steered in a singular direction, so you're going to see a lot of big bold messages from us, a lot of us not being apologetic about some of the great IP that we've got and some of the things that we're doing, so we want to be sort of out there, reiterating that we're helping people harness the power of the hybrid cloud, and that we are the data authority on the hybrid cloud. >> And they say position it and they will come. That's absolutely right, anything you'd like to add? >> You know, so I spend a lot of time both with our internal product team and with our partners like Microsoft for example, it's really exciting the last few weeks, and the great thing for me is that we have more and more partners coming to us, wanting to leverage our products and working with us and understanding how they can participate in the data fabric vision, how can they be part of this network of partners and solutions and services that we're building, and that has been really, really exciting, cloud is real, and we're making it work. >> We're a little excited. >> Cloud is real, we look forward to following up, I'll have to get you guys into the studio in Palo Alto, a lot to talk about, lot more certainly, Kubernetes containers, we're getting a huge renaissance in application development that's going to create a lot of value, you guys are at the center of it. That's the keyword, the center of the action, here in Las Vegas with NetApp Insight 2017, we'll be right back with more live coverage afterwards I'm John Furrier, Keith Townsend, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our live exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Dave Hitz, who's the co-founder of NetApp, and Anthony Lye, who's the EVP in Cloud Business Unit Manager. Welcome to theCUBE, and welcome back, good to see you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> I always love, I wrote a post years ago called Keep the Founders Around. I always joke with you on this, but the DNA of a company is super critical, and how the products get positioned even as the evolution, the DNA's critical, great to see you out on the front lines, pressing the flesh with the customers here. >> Keep the founders around, so I have a theory about that, 'cause some people say companies where the founder stays around are more successful, and therefore, I must be awesome. I have a different theory, which is companies that are really successful are a more interesting place for founders to continue to be interested to stay. I think that the causality may be the other way around. >> Don't have 'em as a placated-- >> The founders want to keep staying and playing, you must be doing really cool stuff. >> It's a cultural issue, and this is a big DNA discussion. We go back seven years, we've talked, I've talked with your former CEO, Tom Georgens, about this. Why are you going with Amazon? Everyone's saying that's a bad move, contrarian move. You guys said, hey, the customers are asking for it. Now it's all cloud all the time, data as a fabric. This is now mainstream. Really good tailwinds for NetApp right now, 'cause you got the core base, the shiny new toys not winning the day, but blocking and tackling good technology and the right customer focus. Talk about the cloud impact, Anthony. >> Yeah, just to make a point just on the last comment, I mean, what Dave does I think is you lean into things that are disruptive, and I think very few founders have that ability to sort of. >> Sometimes, I think the biggest value add I can bring to NetApp is to give people permission to let go of the old stuff, and some of it's hard. I'm the guy that wrote WAFL for ONTAP, and so, I'm not saying, I mean, we're still >> That was a big deal. >> We're still shipping a lot of that stuff, and it's awesome, but some people struggle to say what do you mean we're going to sell another storage system? This is always the best one for everything. That's what we've been saying for so long. >> ONTAP everywhere. >> And so, if I can let go, it's like it's my baby, and I still love it, but can we have another kid, too? I think that's a valuable role. >> You've been instrumental in the cloud strategy, and you tell that cloud story first, and it's not what you'd expect. And I think that's what gives NetApp its sort of unique and, I think, its 25 years is you go out, and you could easily talk about all the things that NetApp has done, but you choose to talk about where you think NetApp has to go. >> You do, yeah. >> You know, what was interesting to me about today's general session, 'cause we had so much new stuff, I think you almost can't get your head around it. We had to divide it into categories, and the categories we chose really align with how we see customers working. And so, the first category is a lot of people have and will continue to have for years the traditional style of data center with client servers and Linux, Windows. You rack and design it, like what should the fiber channel be? And it's virtualized, but here's the chunk for Oracle, here's the chunk for Virtual Desktop. >> It's running apps, by the way, running critical apps for the incoming. >> Yeah, of course. All of this stuff, and then, you've got this new style, which is all when you racks and wired to the top HCI, and you know, this whole next generation data center. And then, all the cloud stuff that, you know, it's services running entirely in Amazon. We've got services where we're moving data from one hyperscalar public cloud to a different hyperscalar public cloud with no NetApp hardware involved. I mean, these are entirely cloud-native, cloud-resident services. >> Help me solve, like one, from one region to another region of AWS. So, you're saying that the solution can move from one cloud provider to another. >> We've been doing that for a while. I mean, ONTAP itself, you can buy ONTAP Cloud for AWS, and you can buy it for Azure, and so, you can establish a cluster on one and connect it to a cluster on a different one and let ONTAP snap between the two, move workloads between the two, backup between the two. We've always had that. Now, the orchestrator that we showed today pushes us much, much higher and provides our customers with a true multi-cloud platform, but a multi-cloud platform that really starts to blend compute and storage together. And it's a platform that's built from the ground up on Kubernetes, which is now, I think, the sort of universally accepted container strategy for microservice-based applications. And yes, that platform will allow you to deploy an application package at the same time on any of the big three hyperscales. >> A lot of the pushback that I saw on social media was from the announcement yesterday, where Microsoft Azure NFS. Why are? >> Anthony: You got pushback? >> Yeah, pushback, like why, the object storage is no future in this. It's the best way to do cloud, period. Actually, it was the only way. Can you talk about the importance of NFS in the data fabric? >> Well, can I back up a step? Just to be clear, object storage is awesome. >> Keith: It is. >> And NetApp has an object storage solution, and I'm not going to diss object storage, right. It's great. However, NFS is cool, too, and a lot of people have a whole bunch of apps on-prem, and they've written them already. They run whatever they run. And if it uses NFS and you'd like to have it in the cloud, you don't want step number one is let's rewrite it. >> Keith: Exactly. >> You want step number one is it already works, and I would just like to be working over there so I don't have to mess with physical hardware. >> I know this might be sacrilegious for me to say to be from Silicon Valley and you are, too, but the shiny new toy doesn't win the day, and what we learned from the Hadoop, and we've seen it a little bit OpenStack, but they caught it early before it became a tumor, was the cost of ownership to write stuff from scratch is problematic. There's an issue of, legacy's not a bad thing, look with containers, your point about Kubernetes. So, you have to run these apps. No one wants to rewrite code. >> I'm not going to argue if it's a bad thing or not a bad thing, it exists. >> Accurate. >> And we want to help take care of it. >> But rewrite code as a mandate to get this? Nobody, I mean, if it makes total sense, okay you look at it, but it's not. >> I think IDC pegs file-based workloads at more than 24 exabytes with on-prem growing at somewhere around 18% K year and cloud growing at 25%. You know, objects are not the answer to everything, old or new, actually. As an application developer, I like the opportunity to have both, and I think applications will consume both. >> Let me jump into the announcements that were on-stage here, the conversations, a lot of stuff as you mentioned, so the folks should look at the keynote. We've streamed it live, so you can go to SiliconANGLE, or go to NetApps.com, check it out. But a couple things jumped out at me. The ONTAP, was it 9.3? And SolidFire, interesting integration there, shipped, great stuff. The cloud orchestrator, seamless moving data across multiple clouds. Everyone knows me, I've been critical of this. >> And applications. >> This is, I've been looking for someone to actually show me, just multi-cloud is hard, you got latency issues, there's a ton of stuff. But you're not rewriting code to do it. >> Exactly. >> You can do it on-prem, huge deal. And then, the other thing is just a general sentiment of the 18 guys around the channels, the channel partners are energized. They see an opportunity to build a business, sales channel for NetApp, but more importantly, they can come and deliver the customers. Guys, unpack those dynamics. Obviously, the SolidFire thing flashed. >> Can I start with the channel? When I look at how the channel interacts with a lot of customers, they make their money selling stuff, often gear. But if you look at what are they really providing, a lot of them are acting as IT consultants, in some cases with smaller companies as CIOs for hire. And so, it doesn't, people are, oh, well, what do they do if it's cloud? Or what they do if it's on-prem? It's like, the customer still needs that same advice and consulting. >> Your studio has cloud concierge, they have have their own cloud service for their customers. >> And so, I just think that there's a big opportunity for the people who choose to embrace it. Anyone who's telling their customers, whoa whoa whoa, slow down, you don't want to go on the cloud, we'll help you not go on the cloud. Like, I don't think that's a long-term business model anymore. >> Cloud is destinations happening. >> The only thing I would say on the partner side that we've seen is that we now have, I think, credibility in the cloud, so much so that we are signing partners that only work in the cloud. A lot of Amazon partners, a lot Azure partners have come to us and said, hey, you know, we didn't realize you had all of these data services, and we are running customers' infrastructures on the hyperscalars, and we'd like to use your software to make our lives easier, we'd like to use ONTAP Cloud, we'd like to use classing. As well as our traditional partners, there are other partners here at this event that are first timers at Insight. >> Talk about the cloud dynamic because certainly it's a lift, rising tide floats all boats or tailwind, whatever you want to call it, but now, I'm a CEO having a conversation, like, whoa, you got my attention. NetApp on my old trusted NetApp guys, the storage guys, and they're talking data, which music to my ears, 'cause I got all this stuff going on, GPPR. All of a sudden cloud, I didn't know they had a cloud. And you don't get a cloud strategy. You either do cloud or you don't, so this has come up on theCUBE a lot. Talk about the dynamic of how you talk about the damages. I'm like, okay, I know I got to build through the cloud. How does NetApp fit into my strategy? 'Cause I got to cross the bridge to the future, I got business to take care of today, both on-prem, in the three pillars, but I got to have a cloud vision. >> Let me back up a little bit. One of the reasons we think we can help, that we're very well-positioned to help, it's very easy to fire up 1,000 CPUs in the cloud. You want 1,000 CPUs, you fire 'em up, and you unfire 'em up, and everything is easy, until there's any data. What do they want to look at? How do you get it in there? What do they create? How are you going to keep it safe? Do you want to leave it in that cloud or a different cloud, or do you want it on-prem, or all three? And as you soon as you getting yourself into those questions, you go, whoa, that's the hard part of the cloud. The good news is that's exactly what NetApp does. That's the kind of work that NetApp focuses on. And so, the starting point is, look, CPUs, computes, lambdas, container, all that stuff is easy until you get to the data, which lives forever, and you're legally required to do something with it. Now, let's talk about what you're trying to accomplish and where you're going, like that now is. One of my goals these days, how long can we talk without mentioning a product? Because it's not, eventually you're going to have to get to, oh, by the way, we have a backup tool that'll reach into Office 365 and suck it out as objects and put it on your on-prem object storage. >> Well, backup's a whole other story. >> It's AWS or something like that. >> There's no laws in the cloud. >> So eventually, you get to some tool or some product, but you want to talk for a long time about where they're going, what they're trying to solve, what they care about. Often they don't care about a thing you think they should, like aren't you really concerned about budget? No, actually, we're dying, 'cause we can't solve this problem. The budget comes after we solve that. Okay. >> We were talking last week about the, I was calling it the toolshed paradigm, or paradox, and the toolshed paradox is that they're focusing so much on the tools that they have, that they have this bloated tool chest. Some of these are getting, collecting dust. They bought a hammer that they're trying to mow their lawn with. You have problem of too many tools, pun intended. The question is is that, as it kind of distracts from the focus, to your point, data. Data seems to be the killer app in the cloud because now, not just moving data around cloud, developers are using data in real time, so batch in real time is huge. >> How are they enriching the data? >> How is the application developed, because I'm a CIO, I've a lot of things going on, on my plate, I'm ramping up dev ops and more application development, new developers, open source, blah blah blah, security, governance. >> To me, I sort of think a really nice soundbite that I got was, I was an application developer, and my career has always been building applications, and it's always been the applications that own the data. There was an application server, and it executed business logic that read or wrote into a repository. >> A data bank. >> I am at the point where I believe we are in an inflection where now the data will own the application. And what I mean by that is the data has to be fluid and available for many applications to consume it. Some of them will enrich it, some of them will replace pieces of it, and so, architectures have to change. And I think NetApp's incredibly fortunate that we have such a strong data story at a time where the data itself will be the primary asset on a company's balance sheet. >> If you believe that point, which I do, by the way, I think you're 100% right, that changes the paradigm, flips it upside down, but this also creates the conundrum of data governance because I got a policy, I'm going to put the brakes on that because you're freeing the data to be addressable, to be more Alchemist kind of model where I can't control it, but I need to control it because I've got regulations, I've got governance issues. Give me a pause, how do you guys address that? I know you got governance to it, but that's a dynamic, that's a psychology. >> To add on to that, you talk about-- >> How are you going to do that? >> In governance, so there's the policy piece of it, and then, there's the availability piece of it. Just because I can move from an application developer's perspective, just because I can move an application to the cloud, doesn't mean that it will perform like it will when I use in 100 microseconds of latency in my private data center. So, how do I get the policy and the technology governance that combine together in the cloud? >> I think, I'll make two points. I think the obvious answer to the first question is we have the data fabric, and I think NetApp has pioneered its strategy around a set of data services that do certain tasks that can be consumed as applications or as APIs, but then, we've gone one level higher, and now, we orchestrate and connect those things up and provide meaningful solutions. And data has a fantastic, you know, we were talking about a fantastic demo with StorageGRID. I'll let Dave explain that. The second point I would make, though, is what you've got to understand is that the customer that we talk to isn't AT&T, that's just a big building with a logo on it. A customer is the person inside the organization, and we all now know that there is a new customer, and that customer people refer to as the data scientist. And there haven't been data scientists before, but now, every company is hiring data scientists, why? Because the data itself has become the primary asset. Application developers are now serving the data scientists. >> So, dev ops was developers making infrastructure as code with operations. You're essentially describing a new paradigm data ops. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Data as code, 'cause you need to have it programmable. >> And I think that's what most people call meta-data, or they talk now about APIs for everything. And so, I think that's the new norm, I think that there will be very large catalogs of data, surrounded by policy and governance, but expressed essentially as an API and that the data itself can be manipulated in real time or through batch, using a set of RESTful APIs. And I think, Dave, you should share the demo, the StorageGRID guys today. It's just a fantastic data fabric use case. >> Some of my favorite use cases with the data fabric is where you're confused, the line is blurred even. Is it cloud, or is it on-prem, or what is it? And we've been working hard to integrate those things. Here's an example: we showed, and this a made-up use case, but it was an on-prem solid storage grid, so it's a bucket of objects. Did I mention we love objects? It's a bucket of objects and their faces, and the problem was, how do we identify what's going on with these faces? Are they happy, are they sad, are they angry? And you don't want to write your own face recognizer. And Amazon has good face recognition technology, Recognize. And so, the use case that we constructed is here's the bucket, we have integrated our StorageGRID object storage with Amazon Simple Notification Service. And so, any time a new object gets put into the bucket, it notifies Amazon. Amazon can do whatever it want with that information. Hey, here's the bucket, here's the new object added. What we had it do is issue a lambda, connect up the notification to a lambda, have the lambda come back out, grab the data from on-prem, look at it with the face recognizer. Okay, happy, and then go back on-prem and update that meta-data. Is that cloud, or is that on-prem? We used Amazon's lambda, where this is data fabric. >> This is the new development reinvention. This is what I think a renaissance is coming big time because making that happen takes creativity. The barriers to pull that off now are almost down to just knowing what's available. And so, I think a renaissance is coming because that's amazing, but now you got to say, how do you scale that, and this is the channel CXO's at. >> These are what people call microservices, or serverless computing environments, where they're breaking down the basic construct of an application to be a set of consumable services that can be orchestrated around particular data flows. >> And I think a problem with data, how do you discover those microservices? So, having a trusted provider to go and aggregate all of those microservices is a helpful approach. >> Guys, I know we're tight on time, you got to go, and super thankful for your time coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight and color commentary, what's going on. >> Thank you. >> Final question for both of you guys before you split is this. I've been watching NetApp for years, big fan of the company, obviously, Silicon Valley darling. Sometimes takes a lot of heat. "NetApp's dead," and they never die, but you guys are always winning. Reinvention's been a big part of your culture, but that's not about pivoting, it's about building and just adjusting. Secret to the success, how do you guys do it? Advice for others? >> We have repeatedly leaned in to the thing that was going to kill us. So, when VMWare came along, everyone was like, oh, software-defined data center, nobody's going to need data storage services anymore, data management, VMWare will do it all. And we said, you know what, that's not right. It's hard to do the data part, and we're going to go make VMWare better, and if we do that, our customers will pay us money to help them move to VMWare faster. We leaned in on the thing that was going to kill us, and we're doing exactly the same. I mean, everyone's going, oh cloud's going to kill NetApp. >> You built around it rather than let it roll over you. >> Not just built around it, we said we'll make it better. And we did the same thing again with the cloud. Oh, the cloud's going to kill you, and we're like, you know what, let's go figure out how to make Amazon better, make Microsoft better. If we can make them better, I mean, if you solve a hard problem for a customer, some way or another you can figure out how to get paid for that, and I think that's what we've been doing. >> And you get in early, too. The timing is critical. It's not like you're late to the game and saying there's a pony in there somewhere. You look at it, although a little bit maybe applied. >> We first announced that we were working on this cloud stuff three years ago. 2014, we had been started working in 2013, we were there from the ground with Amazon and with Azure running our ONTAP code, and they were changing their environment to fit with us, and we were changing our code to fit with them, and years later when Microsoft says, who are we going to go to to help us manage the enterprise? They came to NetApp because we've been working with them for so long, I love that. >> Guys, I wish you had more time, we're going to get in our studio in Palo Alto. Great conversation, real fire energy going on here from the execs here at NetApp. This is theCUBE, more live coverage in Las Vegas at NetApp Insight 2017 after this short break. (upbeat electronic keyboard music)