why from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors now you're your host John furrier and John wall's well welcome back to Mandalay Bay here at vmworld along with John furrier I'm John wall's glad to be with you here on the cubes to continue our coverage what's happening at vmworld exclusive broadcast a partner here for the show and along with John we're joined by eric Herzog's the vice president product marketing and management at IBM storage and Erica I just found out you're one of the all-time 10 most popular cute guests or most prominent cube guests most prolific congratulations well thank you we always love coming to the cube it's always energizing you love controversy and I love controversy and you get down to the heart of it you're the hard copy of high tech they're like oh I loved and we could probably mark each of your appearances by the Hawaiian shirt I think what do you think either Hawaiian shirt or one of my luggage share we could trace those back ever stop vibe about the show I mean just your thoughts about they've been here for three four days now just your general feel about about the the messaging here and then what's actually being conveyed in the enthusiasm out on the show floor well it's pretty clear that the world has gone cloud the world is doing cognitive and big data analytics vmware is leading that charge their strong partner of IBM we do a lot of things with them both with our cloud division on our storage division and vmware is a very strong partner of IBM we have all kinds of integration in our storage technology products with vai with vasa with vcenter ops all the various product lines at vmware offers and the key thing is ever wants to go to the cloud so by working with IBM and vmware together makes it easier and easier for customers whether it be the small shop Herzog's barn grill or whether it be the giant fortune 500 global entity working with us together allow them to get to the cloud sooner faster and have a better cloud experience so you got you know everybody cloud and virtualization and you know big themes big big topics so why does storage still matter well the big thing is if you're going to go to a cloud infrastructure and you're going to run everything on the cloud you think of storage as at solid foundation it has to be rock solid it has to be highly resilient it has to be able to handle error codes and error messaging and things failing and things falling off the earth at the same time it needs to be incredibly fast where things like all-flash arrays come in and even flexible so things like software-defined storage so think of storage as the critical foundation underneath any cloud or virtualized environment if you don't have a strong storage foundation with great resiliency great availability great serviceability and great performance your cloud or your virtual infrastructure is going to be mediocre and that's a very generous term so that's a key point so controversial II speaking to get to the controversy the whole complexity around converged infrastructure hyper converge or whatever the customers are deploying for compute they're putting the storage close to that whether it's a SAS and the cloud which is basically a data center that no one knows the address of as we were saying they always going to have stores has to sit somewhere what is the key trends right now for you because software is leading the way iBM has been doing a lot of work I know and soft we've been covering you guys will be at IBM edge coming up shortly in a couple weeks where's the innovation on the storage side for you guys well how do you talk to the customer base to say ok I got some sass options now for back and recovery weird one of your partners earlier i'm talking about that where is the physical storage innovation is that the software what's your thoughts on so we have a couple paths of integration for us first software-defined storage several the other analyst firms have named it's the number one software-defined storage coming in the world for several years in a row now software-defined storage gives a flexible infrastructure you don't have to buy any of the underlying media or underlying array controller from us just by our software and then you could put on anybody else's hardware you want you can work with your cloud provider with your reseller with your distributor enterprises create their own cloud whether it's a software-defined storage gives you a wide swath of storage functionality backup archive primary store grid scale out software only so ultimate flexibility so that one area of innovation secondary ish is all flash all flash is not expensive essentially I love old Schwarzenegger movies in the 1980s was all about tape he was a spy go and show what is supposedly the CIA was Schwarzenegger I'll take mid 90s Schwarzenegger another spy movie show a datacenter all hard drive arrays now in the next Schwarzenegger movie hopefully it'll be all flash arrays from IBM in the background so flash is just an evolution and we do tons of humor white shirts I keep swapping monitors it so he's intimated I get one from Maui went from kawaii one from the Big Island so flash is where it's at from a system level perspective so you've got that innovation and then you've got converged infrastructure as you mentioned already will you get the server the storage the networking and VMware hypervisor all packaged up dramatically so we have a product called the vs tak we do jointly with Cisco and vmware we were late to market on that we freely admit that but just give you an idea in the first half of this year we have done almost 2x what we did in the entire year of 2015 so that's another growth ending particularly cloud service providers love to get these pre-canned pre racked versus tax and deploy them in a number of our public references are cloud service providers both big and small essentially wheel in a versus stack when they need it whelan not own will another pre-configured ready to go and they get up and up and quit going so those are three trends we just had a client on Scott equipment not a Monroe Louisiana went to the Versa stack and singing your praises like a great example of medium size small sized businesses so we keep think about enterprises and all this and that it doesn't have to be the case their services that you're providing the companies of all sizes that are gaining new efficiencies in protocol al people everybody needs storage and you think about it is really how do you want to consume the storage and in a smaller shop you may choose one way so versus stack is converged infrastructure our software-defined storage like spectrum accelerate spectrum virtualize a software-only model several of the products like spectrum accelerate inspect can protect are available through softlayer or other cloud is he consumed it as a cloud entity so whether you want to consume an on-premises software only full array full integrated stack or cloud configuration we offer any way in which you want to eat that cake big cake small cake fruit cake chocolate cake vanilla cake we got kicked for ever you need and we can cover every base with that a good point about the diversity of choices from tape to flash and they get the multi multi integrated Universal stack so a lot of different choices I want to ask you about you know with that kind of array of options how you view the competitive strategy for IBM with storage so you know I know you're a wrestler so is there a is there a judo move on the competition how would you talk about your differentiation how do you choke hold the competition well couple ways first a lot from a technical perspective by leading with software-defined storage and we are unmatched in that capacity according the industry analysts on what we do and we have it in all areas in block storage we got scale-out file storage and scale out big data analytics we got back up we got archive almost no one has that panoply of offering in a software-defined space and you don't need to buy the hardware from us you can buy from our competitors two things I hear software and then after the array of eyelash what's specifically on the software are you guys leading and have unmatched as-safir already well spectrum protect is you know been a leader in the enterprise for years spectrum scale is approaching 5,000 customers now and we have customers close to an exabyte in production single customer with an exabyte pretty incredible so for big data analytic workloads with on gastronomic research so for us it's all about the application workload in use case part of the reason we have a broad offering is anyone who comes in here and sits in front of you guys and says my array or my software will do everything for you is smoking something that's not legal just not true maybe in Colorado or yeah okay me but the reality is workloads applications and use cases very dramatically and let's take an easy example we have multiple all-flash arrays why do we have multiple all flash arrays a we have a version for mainframe attached everyone in there wants six or seven 9s guess what we can provide that it's expensive as they're all is that our six or seven 9s but now they can get all flash performance on the mainframe in the upper end of the Linux world that's what you would consume at the other end we have our flash our store wise 50 30 f which can be as low street price as low street price as eighteen thousand dollars for an all-flash array to get started basically the same prices our Drive rang and it has all the enterprise data services snapshot replication data encryption at rest migration capability tiering capability it's basically what a hard drive array used to cost so why not go all flash threat talk about the evolution of IBM storage actually them in a leader in storage in the beginning but there was a period of time there and Dave when I won't talk handling the cube about this where storage my BMC it took a lot of share but there's been a huge investment in storage over the past i'd say maybe five years in particular maybe past three specifically i think over a billion dollars has been spent I think we thought the Jamie talent variety of folks on from IBM what is the update take a minute to explain how IBM has regained their mojo in storage where that come from just add some color to that because I think that's something that let people go hmm I great for things from my being but they didn't always have it in the storage so as you know IBM invented the hard drive essentially created the storage industry so saying that we lost our mojos a fair statement but boy do we have it back explain so first thing is when you have this cloud and analytic cognitive era you need a solid foundation of storage and IBM is publicly talked about the future of the world is around cloud on cognitive infrastructure cognitive applications so if your storage is not the best from an availability perspective and from a performance perspective then the reality is your cloud and cognitive that you're trying to do is basically going to suck yeah so in order to have the cloud and convey this underlying infrastructure that's rock-solid so quite honestly as you mentioned Dave we've actually invested over three and a half billion dollars in the last three years not to mention we bought a company called Texas memory systems which is the grandfather our flash systems knocks before that so we've invested well over three billion dollars we've also made a number of executive hirings ed walls just joined us CEO of several startups former general manager from emc i myself was a senior vice president at emc we just hired a new VP of Sales they're serious you guys are serious you guys are all in investing bringing on the right team focusing on applications work gloves in use case as much as I love storage most CEOs hate it yeah there's almost no cio that whatever a storage guy they're all app guys got to talk their lingo application workload in use case how the storage enables their availability of those apps workloads and use cases and how it gives them the right performance to meet their essays to the business guy what's interesting I want to highlight that because I think it's a good point people might not know is that having just good storage in and of itself was an old siloed model but now you mentioned could we cover all the IBM events world of Watson we should call insights edge and and interconnect the cloud show cognitive is front and center there's absolutely the moon shot and the mandate from IBM to be number one in cognitive computing which means big data analytics integrated to the application level obviously bluemix in the cloud Philip blank was here on stage about IBM cloud the relation with VMware so that fails if it doesn't have good steward doesn't perform well and and latency matters right I mean data matters well I add a couple things there so first of all absolutely correct but the other thing is we actually have cognitive storage ok if you automate processes automatically for example to your data some of our competitors have tiering most of them tier only within their own box we actually can tear not only within our own box for from our box to emc our box to netapp our box to HP HP to del Delta hitachi we can t r from anything to anything so that's a huge advantage right there but we tier we don't just set policy which is when data's 90 days old automatically move it that's automation cog nation is where we not only watch the applications and watch the data set we move it from hot to cold so let's take for example financial data your publicly traded company cuban SiliconANGLE going to be public soon i'm sure guys are getting so big your finance guys going to say Dave John team this financial data is white-hot got to be on all flash after you guys do your announcement of your incredible earnings and thank God I hopefully get friend of the company stock and my stock goes way up as your stock goes way up what are we spoking now come on let me tell you when that happens the date is going to go stone-cold we see that you don't have to set a policy two-tier the data with IBM we automatically learn when the data is hot and when it's cold and move it back and forth for you you know there's no policy setting cognition or cognitive its storage understand or stands out as the work for some big data mojo coming into the storage right and that's a huge change so again not only is it critical for any cognitive application to have incredibly performance storage with incredible resiliency availability reliability ok when there is cognitive health care true cognitive health care and Dave's on the table and they bring out their cognitive Juan because they found something in your chest that they didn't see before if the storage fails not going to be good for Dave yeah at the same time if the storage is too slow that might not be good for Dave either when they run that cognitive wand a that hospital knows that it's never going to fail that doctor says Oh Dave okay we better take that thing out boom he takes it out Dave's healthy again well that's a real example by the way not necessary Dave on the table but there was a story we wrote insult an angle one of our most popular post last month IBM Watson actually found a diagnosis uncured a patient the doctor had missed I don't know if you saw that story when super viral but that's the kind of business use case that you're in kind of illuminating with the storage yeah well in fact that one of the recent trade shows what's called the flash memory summit we won an award for best enterprise application commercial developer spark cognition they developed cyber security applications they recommend IBM flash systems and actually Watson's embedded in their application and it detects security threats for enterprises so there's an example of combining cognition with Watson the cognition capability of flash systems and then their software which is commercially available it's not an in-house thing or they're you know a regular software all right now we're a now we're in like the big time you know intoxication mode with all this awesome futuristic real technology how does a customer get this now because now back to IT yeah the silos are still out there they're breaking down the silos how do you take this to customers what's to use case how do you guys deploy this what's the what are you seeing for success stories well the key thing is to make it easy to use and deploy which we do so if you want the cloud model we're available in software IBM Global resiliency services uses us for their resiliency service over 300 cloud providers you spectrum protect for backup pick the cloud guy just pick one you want we work with all of them if you want to deploy in-house we have a whole set of channel partners globally we have the IBM sales team IBM global services uses IBM's own storage of course to provide to the larger enterprises so with your big shop medium swaps well flop we have a whole set of people out there with our partner base with our own sales guys that can help that and you get up and then we back it up as you know IBM is renowned for supporting service in all of our divisions in all of our product portfolio not just in storage so they need support and service our storage service guys are there right away you'd it installed we can install it our partners can install this stuff so we try to make it as brain dead as possible as easy as possible Jen being cognitive and are some of our user interfaces are as easy as a Macintosh I mean drag-and-drop move your lungs around run analytics on when you're going to run out of storage so you know ahead of time all these things that cut things people want today remember IT budget cut dramatically in the downturn of 08 09 and while budgets have returned they're not hiring storage guys there are hiring developers and they're hiring cloud guys so those guys don't know how to use storage well you got to make it easy always fast and always resilient that way it doesn't fail anyway but when it does you just go into the GUI it tells you what's wrong bingo and IBM service our partner service comes right out and fix it so that's what you need today because there aren't as many storage guys as you used to be no question you've got the waterfront covered no doubt about that and again congratulations on cracking the top 10 way back we consider that an honor and a privilege to be a part of that great welcome picture we really appreciate it thank you we'll continue the coverage here on the Cuba vmworld right after this