(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this "Cube Conversation." My name is Dave Vellante and you know, containers, they used to be stateless and ephemeral but they're maturing very rapidly. As cloud native workloads become more functional and they go mainstream persisting, and protecting the data that lives inside of containers, is becoming more important to organizations. Enterprise capabilities such as high availability or reliability, scalability and other features are now more fundamental and important and containers are linchpin of hybrid cloud, cross-cloud and edge strategies. Now fusing these capabilities together across these regions in an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity of the infrastructure, is where the entire enterprise technology industry is headed. But how do you do that without making endless copies of data and managing versions not to mention the complexities and costs of doing so. And with me to talk about how IBM thinks about and is solving these challenges are Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Storage Channels. For the IBM Storage Division is Sam Werner is the vice president of offering management and the business line executive for IBM Storage. Guys, great to see you again, wish should, were face to face but thanks for coming on "theCUBE." >> Great to be here. >> Thanks Dave, as always. >> All right guys, you heard me my little spiel there about the problem statement. Eric, maybe you could start us off. I mean, is it on point? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we see is containers are going mainstream. I frame it very similarly to what happened with virtualization, right? It got brought in by the dev team, the test team, the applications team, and then eventually of course, it became the main state. Containers is going through exactly that right now. Brought in by the dev ops people, the software teams. And now it's becoming again, persistent, real use clients that want to deploy a million of them. Just the way they historically have deployed a million virtual machines, now they want a million containers or 2 million. So now it's going mainstream and the feature functions that you need once you take it out of the test sort of play with stage to the real production phase, really changes the ball game on the features you need, the quality of what you get, and the types of things you need the underlying storage and the data services that go with that storage,. to do in a fully container world. >> So Sam how'd we get here? I mean, container has been around forever. You look inside a Linux, right? But then they did, as Eric said, go mainstream. But it started out the, kind of little experimental, As I said, their femoral didn't really need to persist them, but it's changed very quickly. Maybe you could talk to that evolution and how we got here. >> I mean, well, it's been a look, this is all about agility right? It's about enterprises trying to accelerate their innovation. They started off by using virtual machines to try to accelerate access to IT for developers, and developers are constantly out, running ahead. They got to go faster and they have to deliver new applications. Business lines need to figure out new ways to engage with their customers. Especially now with the past year we had it even further accelerated this need to engage with customers in new ways. So it's about being agile. Containers promise or provide a lot of the capabilities you need to be agile. What enterprises are discovering, a lot of these initiatives are starting within the business lines and they're building these applications or making these architectural decisions, building dev ops environments on containers. And what they're finding is they're not bringing the infrastructure teams along with them. And they're running into challenges that are inhibiting their ability to achieve the agility they want because their storage needs aren't keeping up. So this is a big challenge that enterprises face. They want to use containers to build a more agile environment to do things like dev ops, but they need to bring the infrastructure teams along. And that's what we're focused on now. Is how do you make that agile infrastructure to support these new container worlds? >> Got it, so Eric, you guys made an announcement to directly address these issues. Like it's kind of a fire hose of innovation. Maybe you could take us through and then we can unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, so what we did is on April 27th, we announced IBM Spectrum Fusion. This is a fully container native software defined storage technology that integrates a number of proven battle-hardened technologies that IBM has been deploying in the enterprise for many years. That includes a global scalable file system that can span edge core and cloud seamlessly with a single copy of the data. So no more data silos and no more 12 copies of the data which of course drive up CapEx and OpEx. Spectrum Fusion reduces that and makes it easier to manage. Cuts the cost from a CapEx perspective and cuts a cost for an OpEx perspective. By being fully container native, it's ready to go for the container centric world and could span all types of areas. So what we've done is create a storage foundation which is what you need at the bottom. So things like the single global namespace, single accessibility, we have local caching. So with your edge core cloud, regardless of where the data is, you think the data's right with you, even if it physically is not. So that allows people to work on it. We have file locking and other technologies to ensure that the data is always good. And then of course we'd imbued it with the HA Disaster Recovery, the backup and restore technology, which we've had for years and have now made of fully container native. So spectrum fusion basically takes several elements of IBM's existing portfolio has made them container native and brought them together into a single piece of software. And we'll provide that both as a software defined storage technology early in 2022. And our first pass will be as a hyperconverged appliance which will be available next quarter in Q3 of 2021. That of course means it'll come with compute, it'll come with storage, come with a rack even, come with networking. And because we can preload everything for the end users or for our business partners, it would also include Kubernetes, Red Gat OpenShift and Red Hat's virtualization technology all in one simple package, all ease of use and a single management gooey to manage everything, both the software side and the physical infrastructure that's part of the hyperconverged system level technologies. >> So, maybe it can help us understand the architecture and maybe the prevailing ways in which people approach container storage, what's the stack look like? And how have you guys approached it? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Really, there's three layers that we look at when we talk about container native storage. It starts with the storage foundation which is the layer that actually lays the data out onto media and does it in an efficient way and makes that data available where it's needed. So that's the core of it. And the quality of your storage services above that depend on the quality of the foundation that you start with. Then you go up to the storage services layer. This is where you bring in capabilities like HA and DR. People take this for granted, I think as they move to containers. We're talking about moving mission critical applications now into a container and hybrid cloud world. How do you actually achieve the same levels of high availability you did in the past? If you look at what large enterprises do, they run three site, for site replication of their data with hyper swap and they can ensure high availability. How do you bring that into a Kubernetes environment? Are you ready to do that? We talk about how only 20% of applications have really moved into a hybrid cloud world. The thing that's inhibiting the other 80% these types of challenges, okay? So the storage services include HA DR, data protection, data governance, data discovery. You talked about making multiple copies of data creates complexity, it also creates risk and security exposures. If you have multiple copies of data, if you needed data to be available in the cloud you're making a copy there. How do you keep track of that? How do you destroy the copy when you're done with it? How do you keep track of governance and GDPR, right? So if I have to delete data about a person how do I delete it everywhere? So there's a lot of these different challenges. These are the storage services. So we talk about a storage services layer. So layer one data foundation, layer two storage services, and then there needs to be connection into the application runtime. There has to be application awareness to do things like high availability and application consistent backup and recovery. So then you have to create the connection. And so in our case, we're focused on open shift, right? When we talk about Kubernetes how do you create the knowledge between layer two, the storage services and layer three of the application services? >> And so this is your three layer cake. And then as far as like the policies that I want to inject, you got an API out and entries in, can use whatever policy engine I want. How does that work? >> So we're creating consistent sets of APIs to bring those storage services up into the application, run time. We in IBM have things like IBM cloud satellite which bring the IBM public cloud experience to your data center and give you a hybrid cloud or into other public cloud environments giving you one hybrid cloud management experience. We'll integrate there, giving you that consistent set of storage services within an IBM cloud satellite. We're also working with Red Hat on their Advanced Cluster Manager, also known as RACM to create a multi-cluster management of your Kubernetes environment and giving that consistent experience. Again, one common set of APIs. >> So the appliance comes first? Is that a no? Okay, so is that just time to market or is there a sort of enduring demand for appliances? Some customers, you know, they want that, maybe you could explain that strategy. >> Yeah, so first let me take it back a second. Look at our existing portfolio. Our award-winning products are both software defined and system-based. So for example Spectrum Virtualize comes on our flash system. Spectrum Scale comes on our elastic storage system. And we've had this model where we provide the exact same software, both on an array or as standalone piece of software. This is unique in the storage industry. When you look at our competitors, when they've got something that's embedded in their array, their array manager, if you will, that's not what they'll try to sell you. It's software defined storage. And of course, many of them don't offer software defined storage in any way, shape or form. So we've done both. So with spectrum fusion, we'll have a hyper-converged configuration which will be available in Q3. We'll have a software defined configuration which were available at the very beginning of 2022. So you wanted to get out of this market feedback from our clients, feedback from our business partners by doing a container native HCI technology, we're way ahead. We're going to where the park is. We're throwing the ball ahead of the wide receiver. If you're a soccer fan, we're making sure that the mid guy got it to the forward ahead of time so you could kick the goal right in. That's what we're doing. Other technologies lead with virtualization, which is great but virtualization is kind of old hat, right? VMware and other virtualization layers have been around for 20 now. Container is where the world is going. And by the way, we'll support everything. We still have customers in certain worlds that are using bare metal, guess what? We work fine with that. We worked fine with virtual as we have a tight integration with both hyper V and VMware. So some customers will still do that. And containers is a new wave. So with spectrum fusion, we are riding the wave not fighting the wave and that way we could meet all the needs, right? Bare metal, virtual environments, and container environments in a way that is all based on the end users applications, workloads, and use cases. What goes, where and IBM Storage can provide all of it. So we'll give them two methods of consumption, by early next year. And we started with a hyper-converged first because, A, we felt we had a lead, truly a lead. Other people are leading with virtualization. We're leading with OpenShift and containers where the first full container-native OpenShift ground up based hyper-converged of anyone in the industry versus somebody who's done VMware or some other virtualization layer and then sort of glommed on containers and as an afterthought. We're going to where the market is moving, not to where the market has been. >> So just follow up on that. You kind of, you got the sort of Switzerland DNA. And it's not just OpenShift and Red Hat and the open source ethos. I mean, it just goes all the way back to San Volume Controller back in the day where you could virtualize anybody's storage. How is that carrying through to this announcement? >> So Spectrum Fusion is doing the same thing. Spectrum Fusion, which has many key elements brought in from our history with Spectrum Scale supports not IBM storage, for example, EMC Isilon NFS. It will support, Fusion will support Spectrum Scale, Fusion will support our elastic storage system. Fusion will support NetApp filers as well. Fusion will support IBM cloud object storage both software defined storage, or as an array technology and Amazon S3 object stores and any other object storage vendor who's compliant with S3. All of those can be part of the global namespace, scalable file system. We can bring in, for example, object data without making a duplicate copy. The normal way to do that as you make a duplicate copy. So you had a copy in the object store. You make a copy and to bring that into the file. Well, guess what, we don't have to do that. So again, cutting CapEx and OpEx and ease of management. But just as we do with our flash systems product and our Spectrum Virtualize and the SAN Volume Controller, we support over 550 storage arrays that are not ours that are our competitors. With Spectrum Fusion, we've done the same thing, fusion, scale the IBM ESS, IBM cloud object storage, Amazon S3 object store, as well as other compliance, EMC Isilon NFS, and NFS from NetApp. And by the way, we can do the discovery model as well not just integration in the system. So we've made sure that we really do protect existing investments. And we try to eliminate, particularly with discovery capability, you've got AI or analytics software connecting with the API, into the discovery technology. You don't have to traverse and try to find things because the discovery will create real time, metadata cataloging, and indexing, not just of our storage but the other storage I'd mentioned, which is the competition. So talk about making it easier to use, particularly for people who are heterogeneous in their storage environment, which is pretty much the bulk of the global fortune 1500, for sure. And so we're allowing them to use multiple vendors but derive real value with Spectrum Fusion and get all the capabilities of Spectrum Fusion and all the advantages of the enterprise data services but not just for our own product but for the other products as well that aren't ours. >> So Sam, we understand the downside of copies, but then, so you're not doing multiple copies. How do you deal with latency? What's the secret sauce here? Is it the file system? Is there other magic in here? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll build a little bit off of what Eric said, but look one of the really great and unique things about Spectrum Scale is its ability to consume any storage. And we can actually allow you to bring in data sets from where they are. It could have originated in object storage we'll cash it into the file system. It can be on any block storage. It can literally be on any storage you can imagine as long as you can integrate a file system with it. And as you know most applications run on top of the file system. So it naturally fits into your application stack. Spectrum Scale uniquely is a globally parallel file system. So there's not very many of them in the world and there's none that can achieve what Spectrum Scale can do. We have customers running in the exabytes of data and the performance improves with scales. So you can actually deploy Spectrum Scale on-prem, build out an environment of it, consuming whatever storage you have. Then you can go into AWS or IBM cloud or Azure, deploy an instance of it and it will now extend your file system into that cloud. Or you can deploy it at the edge and it'll extend your file system to that edge. This gives you the exact same set of files and visibility and we'll cash in only what's needed. Normally you would have to make a copy of data into the other environment. Then you'd have to deal with that copy later, let's say you were doing a cloud bursting use case. Let's look at that as an example, to make this real. You're running an application on-prem. You want to spin up more compute in the cloud for your AI. The data normally you'd have to make a copy of the data. You'd run your AI. They have to figure out what to do with that data. Do you copy some of the fact? Do we sync them? Do you delete it? What do you do? With Spectrum Scale just automatically cash in whatever you need. It'll run there and you get assigned to spin it down. Your copy is still on-prem. You know, no data is lost. We can actually deal with all of those scenarios for you. And then if you look at what's happening at the edge, a lot of say video surveillance, data pouring in. Looking at the manufacturing {for} looking for defects. You can run a AI right at the edge, make it available in the cloud, make that data available in your data center. Again, one file system going across all. And that's something unique in our data foundation built on Spectrum Scale. >> So there's some metadata magic in there as well, and that intelligence based on location. And okay, so you're smart enough to know where the data lives. What's the sweet spot for this Eric? Are there any particular use cases or industries that we should be focused on or is it through? >> Sure, so first let's talk about the industries. We see certain industries going more container quicker than other industries. So first is financial services. We see it happening there. Manufacturing, Sam already talked about AI based manufacturing platforms. We actually have a couple clients right now. We're doing autonomous driving software with us on containers right now, even before Spectrum Fusion with Spectrum Scale. We see public of course, healthcare and in healthcare don't just think delivery at IBM. That includes the research guys. So the genomic companies, the biotech companies, the drug companies are all included in that. And then of course, retail, both on-prem and off-prem. So those are sort of the industries. Then we see from an application workload, basically AI analytics and big data applications or workloads are the key things that Spectrum Fusion helps you because of its file system. It's high performance. And those applications are tending to spread across core ,edge and cloud. So those applications are spreading out. They're becoming broader than just running in the data center. And by the way they want to run it just into the data center, that's fine. Or perfect example, we had giant global auto manufacturer. They've got factories all over. And if you think there isn't compute resources in every factory, there is because those factories I just saw an article, actually, those factories cost about a billion dollars to build them, a billion. So they've got their own IT, now it's connected to their core data center as well. So that's a perfect example that enterprise edge where spectrum fusion would be an ideal solution whether they did it as software defined only, or of course when you got a billion dollar factory, just to make it let alone produce the autos or whatever you're producing. Silicon, for example, those fabs, all cost a billion. That's where the enterprise edge fits in very well with Spectrum Fusion. >> So are those industries, what's driving the adoption of containers? Is it just, they just want to modernize? Is it because they're doing some of those workloads that you mentioned or is there's edge? Like you mentioned manufacturing, I could see that potentially being an edge is the driver. >> Well, it's a little bit of all of those Dave. For example, virtualization came out and virtualization offered advantages over bare metal, okay? Now containerization has come out and containerization is offering advantage over virtualization. The good thing at IBM is we know we can support all three. And we know again, in the global fortune 2000, 1500 they're probably going to run all three based on the application workload or use case. And our storage is really good at bare metal. Very good at virtualization environments. And now with Spectrum Fusion are container native outstanding for container based environments. So we see these big companies will probably have all three and IBM storage is one of the few vendors if not the only vendor that could adroitly support all three of those various workload types. So that's why we see this as a huge advantage. And again, the market is going to containers. We are, I'm a native California. You don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. and the wave is containers and we're riding that wave. >> If you don't ride the wave you become driftwood as Pat Gelsinger would say. >> And that is true, another native California. I'm a whole boss. >> So okay, so, I wonder Sam I sort of hinted upfront in my little narrative there but the way we see this, as you've got on-prem hybrid, you got public clouds across cloud moving to the edge. Open shift is I said is the linchpin to enabling some of those. And what we see is this layer that abstracts the complexity, hides the underlying complexity of the infrastructure that becomes kind of an implementation detail. Eric talked about skating to the park or whatever sports analogy you want to use. Is that where the park is headed? >> Yeah, I mean, look, the bottom line is you have to remove the complexity for the developers. Again, the name of the game here is all about agility. You asked why these industries are implementing containers? It's about accelerating their innovation and their services for their customers. It's about leveraging AI to gain better insights about their customers and delivering what they want and proving their experience. So if it's all about agility developers don't want to wait around for infrastructure. You need to automate it as much as possible. So it's about building infrastructure that's automated, which requires consistent API APIs. And it requires abstracting out the complexity of things like HA and DR. You don't want every application owner to have to figure out how to implement that. You want to make those storage services available and easy for a developer to implement and integrate into what they're doing. You want to ensure security across everything you do as you bring more and more of your data of your information about your customers into these container worlds. You've got to have security rock solid. You can't leave any exposures there and you can't afford downtime. There's increasing threats from things like ransomware. You don't see it in the news every day but it happens every single day. So how do you make sure you can recover when an event happens to you? So yes, you need to build a abstracted layer of storage services and you need to make it simply available to the developers in these dev ops environments. And that's what we're doing with spectrum fusion. We're taking, I think, extremely unique and one of a kind storage foundation with Spectrum Scale that gives you single namespace globally. And we're building onto it an incredible set of storage services, making extremely simple to deploy enterprise class container applications. >> So what's the bottom line business impact. I mean, how does this change? I mean, Sam, you I think articulated very well through all about serving the developers versus you know, storage, admin provisioning, a LUN. So how does this change my organization, my business? What's the impact there? >> I've mentioned one other point that we talk about an IBM a lot, which is the AI ladder. And it's about how do you take all of this information you have and be able to take it to build new insights, to give your company and advantage. An incumbent in an industry shouldn't be able to be disrupted if they're able to leverage all the data they have about the industry and their customers. But in order to do that, you have to be able to get to a single source of data and be able to build it into the fabric of your business operations. So that all decisions you're making in your company, all services you deliver to your customers, are built on that data foundation and information and the only way to do that and infuse it into your culture is to make this stuff real time. And the only way to do that is to build out a containerized application environment that has access to real-time data. The ultimate outcome, sorry, I know you asked for business results is that you will, in real time understand your clients, understand your industry and deliver the best possible services. And the absolute, business outcome is you will continue to gain market share and your environment and grow revenue. I mean, that's the outcome every business wants. >> Yeah, it's all about speed. Everybody's kind of, everybody's last year was forced into digital transformation. It was sort of rushed into and compressed and now they get some time to do it right. And so modernizing apps, containers, dev ops developer led sort of initiatives are really key to modernization. All right, Eric, we've got, we're out of time but give us the bottom summary. We didn't talk, actually, we had to talk about the 3,200. Maybe you could give us a little insight on that before we close. >> Sure, so in addition to what we're doing with Fusion we also introduced a new elastic storage system, 3,200 and it's all flash. It gets 80 gigs, a second sustained at the node level and we can cluster them infinitely. So for example, I've got 10 of them. I'm delivering 800 gigabytes, a second sustained. And of course, AI, big data analytic workloads are extremely, extremely susceptible to bandwidth and or data transfer rate. That's what they need to deliver their application base properly. It comes with Spectrum Scale built in so that comes with it. So you get the advantage of Spectrum Scale. We talked a lot about Spectrum Scale because it is if you will, one of the three fathers of spectrum fusion. So it's ideal with it's highly parallel file system. It's used all over in high performance computing and super computing, in drug research, in health care in finance, probably about 80% of the world's largest banks in the world use Spectrum Scale already for AI, big data analytics. So the new 3,200 is an all flash version twice as fast as the older version and all the benefit of Spectrum Scale including the ability of seamlessly integrating into existing Spectrum Scale or ESS deployments. And when Fusion comes out, you'll be able to have Fusion. And you could also add 3,200 to it if you want to do that because of the capability of our global namespace and our single file system across edge, core and cloud. So that's the 3,200 in a nutshell, Dave. >> All right, give us a bottom line, Eric. And we got to go, what's the bumper sticker. >> Yeah, bumper sticker is, you got to ride the wave of containers and IBM storage is company that can take you there so that you win the big surfing context and get the big prize. >> Eric and Sam, thanks so much, guys. It's great to see you and miss you guys. Hopefully we'll get together soon. So get your jabs and we'll have a beer. >> All right. >> All right, thanks, Dave. >> Nice talking to you. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America. 2020. Virtual Brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our ongoing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con 2020 North America. Of course, it's virtual like everything else is in 2020 but we're excited to be back. It's a terrific show, and we're excited our next guest. So let's introduce him. And we've got Sam Warner, the VP of offering manager and business line executive for storage for IBM. Sam. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. >>And also joining us is Brent Compton. He's a senior director of data services for Redhead. Great. See you, Brent. >>Thank you. >>So let's let's jump into it. Cloud Native. Everything's about cloud native. Everything's about containers. Everything is about kind of container ization and flexibility. But then there's this thing in the back and called storage. We actually have toe keep this stuff and record this stuff and have data protection for this stuff in business resiliency love to jump into it, so lets you know where does storage fit within a container world? And how is the growth of containers and the adoption containers really had you rethink the way that you think about storage and how clients you think about stories saying, Let's start with you >>e mean, it's a great question. And first off, I'm really excited about another cube con. Uh, we did Europe now, uh, doing North America so very excited to be, you know, seeing all the you know, all the news and all the people talking about the advancements around kubernetes. And we're very excited about it now. You asked a very good question. Important question. We're seeing an acceleration of digital transformation, and the people that are going through this digital transformation are using containers to now modernize the rest of their infrastructure. The interesting thing about it, though, is those initiatives are being driven out of the application teams. The business lines in an organization, and a lot of them don't understand that there's a lot of complexity to this storage piece here. So the storage teams I talked to are all of a sudden getting these initiatives thrown on them or a kind of halfway their strategy. And they're scratching their heads, trying to figure out now how they can support these applications with persistent storage. Because that's not where containers started. They started with micro services, and now now they're in a quandary. They have to deliver a certain S L. A to their customers, and they're trying to figure out how they do it in this new environment, which in a lot of cases, has been designed outside of their scope. So they're seeing issues with data protection. Some of the kind of core things that they've been dealing with for years are now. They're now having to solve all over again. So that's what we're working on helping them with reinventing how storage is deployed to help them deliver the same level of security, availability and everything they have in the past. Uh, in these new environments, >>right? So, yeah, e say you've been involved in this for a long time. You know, you've worked in hyper converge. You've worked in big data. You know, the evolution of big data continues to change, as ultimately we want to get people the information to make good decisions, but we've gone through a lot of integrations over the years. So how is it different? You know? Now how is it different with containers? What can we finally do you as a as an architect that we couldn't do before? >>Infrastructure is code. That's, I think, one of the fundamental differences of the storage admin of yesteryear versus storage admin of today today, Azaz Sam mentioned As people are developing and deploying applications, those applications need to dynamically provisioned the infrastructure dynamically provisioned what they need from compute dynamically provisioned what they need from storage dynamically provisioned network paths and so that that that element of infrastructure is code. A dynamically provisioned infrastructure is very different from well from yesterday, when applications or teams needed to. Well, when they needed storage, they would you know, they would file a ticket and typically wait. Now they make an a p A. Now they make an A p. I call and storage is dynamically provisioned and provided to their application. >>But what what I think hard to understand for the layman. And maybe it's just me, right? I It's very easy to understand dynamic infrastructure around, um compute right, I'm Pepsi. I'm running it out for the Super Bowl. I need I know how much people are gonna hit by hit my site and it's kind of easy to understand. Dynamic provisioning around networking again for the same example. What's less easy to understand its dynamic provisioning for storage? It's one thing to say, you know, there's a there's a pool of storage resource is that I'm going to dynamically provisioned for this particular after this particular moment. But one of the whole things about the dynamic is not only is it available when you need it, but I could make it big, and conversely, I could make it smaller go away. I get that for servers, and I kind of get that for networking, supporting an application and that example I just talked about. But we can't It doesn't go away a lot of the time for storage, right? That's important data that's maybe feeding another process. There's all kinds of rules and regulations, So when you talk about dynamic infrastructure for storage, it makes a lot of sense for grabbing some to provision for some new application. But it's >>hard to >>understand in terms of true dynamics in terms of either scaling down or scaling up or turning off when I don't particularly need that much capacity or even that application right now, how does it work within storage versus No, just servers or I'm grabbing them and then I'm putting it back in the pool. >>Let me start on this one, and then I'm gonna hand it off to Brent. Um, you know, let's not forget, by the way, that enterprises have very significant investments in infrastructure and they're able to deliver six nines of availability on their storage. And they have d are worked out in all of their security, encryption, everything. It's already in place, and they're sure that they can deliver on their SLS. So they want to start with that. You have to leverage that investment. So first of all, you have to figure out how to automate that into the environment, that existing sand, and that's where things like uh, a P I s the container storage interface CS I drivers come in. IBM provides that across your entire portfolio, allowing you to integrate your storage into a kubernetes environment into an open shipped environment so that it can be automated, but you have to go beyond that and be able to extend that environment, then into other infrastructure, for example, into a public cloud. So with the IBM flash system, family with our spectrum virtualized software were actually able to deploy that storage layer not only on Prem on our award winning a race, but we can also do it in the cloud. So we allow you to take your existing infrastructure investments and integrate that into your communities environment and using things like danceable, fully automated environment. I'll get into data protection before we're done talking. But I do want Brent to talk a bit about how container native storage comes into that next as well. On how you can start building out new environments for, uh, for your applications. >>Yeah, What the two of you are alluding to is effectively kubernetes services layer, which is not storage. It consumes storage from the infrastructure, Assam said. Just because people deploy Kubernetes cluster doesn't mean that they go out and get an entirely new infrastructure for that. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on premises, they have servers. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on AWS or an azure on G C P. They have infrastructure there. Uh, what the two of you are alluding to is that services layer, which is independent of storage that can dynamically provisioned, provide data protection services. As I mentioned, we have good stuff to talk about their relative to data protection services for kubernetes clusters. But that's it's the abstraction layer or data services layer that sits on top of storage, which is different. So the basics of storage underneath in the infrastructure, you know, remain the same, Jeff. But the how that storage is provisioned and this abstraction layer of services which sits on top of the storage storage might be IBM flash system array storage, maybe E m c sand storage, maybe a W S E B s. That's the storage infrastructure. But this abstraction layer that sits on top this data services layer is what allows for the dynamic interaction of applications with the underlying storage infrastructure. >>And then again, just for people that aren't completely tuned in, Then what's the benefit to the application developer provider distributor with that type of an infrastructure behind And what can they do that they just couldn't do before? >>Well, I mean Look, we're, uh, e I mean, we're trying to solve the same problem over and over again, right? It's always about helping application developers build applications more quickly helps them be more agile. I t is always trying to keep up with the application developer and always struggles to. In fact, that's where the emergency cloud really came from. Just trying to keep up with the developer eso by giving them that automation. It gives them the ability to provision storage in real time, of course, without having open a ticket like friends said. But really, the Holy Grail here is getting to a developed once and deploy anywhere model. That's what they're trying to get to. So having an automated storage layer allows them to do that and ensure that they have access to storage and data, no matter where their application gets it >>right, Right, that pesky little detail. When I have to develop that up, it does have to sit somewhere and and I don't think storage really has gotten enough of of the bright light, really in kind of this app centric, developer centric world, we talk all the time about having compute available and and software defined networking. But you know, having this software defined storage that lives comfortably in this container world is pretty is pretty interesting. In a great development, I want to shift gears a >>little bit. Just one thing. Go >>ahead, >>plus one to Sam's comments. There all the application developer wants, they want an A P I and they want the same a p I to provision the storage regardless of where their app is running. The rest of the details they usually don't care about. Sure. They wanted to perform what not give him an A p I and make it the same regardless of where they're running the app. >>Because not only do they want to perform, they probably just presume performance, right? I mean, that's the other thing is that the best in class quickly becomes presumed baseline in a very short short period of time. So you've got to just you just got to just deliver the goods, right? They're gonna get frustrated and not be productive. But I wanted to shift gears up a little bit and talk about some of the macro trends. Right? We're here towards the end of 2020. Obviously, Cove It had a huge impact on business and a lot of different ways. And it's really evolved from March, this light switch moment. Everybody work from home, too. Now, this kind of extended time, that's probably gonna go on for a while. I'm just curious some of the things that you've seen with your customers not so much at the beginning, because that was that was a special and short period of time. But mawr, as we've extended and and are looking to, um, probably extended this for a while, you know, What is the impact of this increased work from home increase attack surface? You know, some of these macro things that we're seeing that cove it has caused and any other kind of macro trends beyond just this container ization that you guys were seeing impacting your world. Start with you, Sam. >>You know, I don't think it's actually changed what people were going to do or the strategy. What I've seen it do is accelerate things and maybe changed the way they're getting their, uh and so they're actually a lot of enterprises were running into challenges more quickly than they thought they would. And so they're coming to us and asking us to help them. Saw them, for example, backing up their data and these container environments as you move mission critical applications that maybe we're gonna move more slowly. They're realizing that as they've moved them, they can't get the level of data protection they need. And that's why actually we just announced it at the end of October. Updates to our modern data protection portfolio. It now is containerized. It could be deployed very easily in an automated fashion, but on top of that, it integrates down into the A P. I layer down into CSE drivers and allows you to do container where snapshots of your applications so you could do operational recovery. If there's some sort of an event you can recover from that you can do D R. And you can even use it for data migration. So we're helping them accelerate. So the biggest I think requests I'm getting from our customers, and how can you help us accelerate? And how can you help us fix these problems that we went running into as we tried to accelerate our digital transformation? >>Brent, Anyone that you wanna highlight? >>Mm. Okay. Ironically, one of my team was just speaking with one of the cruise lines, um, two days ago. We all know what's happened them. So if we just use them as an example, I'm clearly our customers need to do things differently now. So plus one to Sam's statement about acceleration on I would add another word to that which is agility, you know, frankly, they're having to do things in ways they never envisioned 10 months ago. So there need to cut cycle times to deploy effectively new ways of how they transact business has resulted in accelerated poll for these types of infrastructure is code technologies. >>That's great. The one that jumped in my mind. Sam, is you were talking. We've we've had a lot of conversations. Obvious security always comes up on baking security and is is a theme. But ransomware as a specific type of security threat and the fact that these guys not only wanna lock up your data, but they want to go in and find the backup copies and and you know and really mess you up so it sounds like that's even more important to have the safe. And we're hearing, you know, all these conversations about air gaps and dynamic air gaps and, you know, can we get air gaps and some of these infrastructure set up so that we can, you know, put put those backups? Um, and recovery data sets in a safe place so that if we have a ransomware issue, getting back online is a really, really important thing, and it seems to just be increasing every day. We're seeing things, you know, if you can actually break the law sometimes if you if you pay the ransom because where these people operate, there's all kind of weird stuff that's coming out of. Ransomware is a very specific, you know, kind of type of security threat that even elevates, you know, kind of business continuity and resiliency on a whole nother level for this one particular risk factor. When if you're seeing some of that as well, >>it's a great point. In fact, it's clearly an industry that was resilient to a pandemic because we've seen it increase things. Is organized crime at this point, right? This isn't the old days of hackers, you know, playing around this is organized crime and it is accelerating. And that's one thing. I'm really glad you brought up. It's an area we've been really focused on across our whole portfolio. Of course, IBM tape offers the best most of the actual riel air gapping, physical air gapping We could take a cartridge offline. But beyond that we offer you the ability to dio you know, different types of logical air gaps, whether it's to a cloud we support. In fact, we just announced Now the spectrum protect. We have support for Google Cloud. We already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud. So we give you the ability to do logical air gapping off to those different cloud environments. We give you the ability to use worm capability so you can put your backups in a vault that can't be changed. So we give you lots of different ways to do it. In our high end enterprise storage, we offer something called Safeguarded copy where we'll actually take data off line that could be recovered almost instantly. Something very unique to our storage that gives you, for the most mission critical applications. The fastest path recovery. One of things we've seen is some of our customers have done a great job creating a copy. But when the event actually happens, they find is gonna take too long to recover the data and they end up having to pay the ransom anyway. So you really have to think through an Indian strategy on we're able to help customers do a kind of health checks of their environment and figure out the right strategy. We have some offerings to help come in and do that for our customers. >>Shift gears a little bit, uh, were unanswerable fest earlier this year and a lot of talk about automation. Obviously, answer was part of the Red Hat family, which is part of the IBM family. But, you know, we're seeing Mawr and Mawr conversations about automation about, you know, moving the mundane and the air prone and all the things that we shouldn't be doing as people and letting people doom or high value stuff. When if you could talk a little bit about the role of automation, that the kind of development of automation and how you're seeing that, you know, impact your deployments, >>right? You want to take that one first? >>Yeah, sure. Um, s o the first is, um when you think about individual kubernetes clusters. There's a level of automation that's required there. I mean, that's the fundamental. I mean, back to the infrastructure is code that's inherently. That's automation. To effectively declare the state of what you want your application, your cluster to be, and that's the essence of kubernetes. You declare what the state is, and then you pass that declaration to kubernetes, and it makes it so. So there's the kubernetes level automation. But then there's, You know what happens for larger enterprises when you have, you know, tens or hundreds of kubernetes clusters. Eso That's an area of Jeff you mentioned answerable. Now that's an area of with, you know, the work, the red hats doing the community for multi cluster management, actually in the community and together with IBM for automating the management of multiple clusters. And last thing I'll touch on here is that's particularly important as you go to the edge. I mean, this is all well and good when you're talking about, you know, safe raised floor data center environments. But what happens when you're tens or hundreds or even thousands of kubernetes clusters are running in an oil field somewhere? Automation becomes not only nice to have, but it's fundamental to the operation. >>Yeah, but let me just add onto that real quick. You know, it's funny, because actually, in this cove it era, you're starting to see that same requirement in the data center in the core data center. In fact, I would say that because there's less bodies now in the data center, more people working remotely. The automation in need for automation is actually actually accelerating as well. So I think what you said is actually true for the core data center now as well, >>right? So I wanna give you guys the last word before before we close the segment. Um, I'm gonna start with you, Brent. Really, From a perspective of big data and you've been involved again in big data for a long time. As you look back, it kind of the data warehouse era. And then we had kind of this whole rage with the Hadoop era, and, you know, we just continue to get more and more sophisticated with big data processes and applications. But at the end of the day, still about getting the right data to the right person at the right time to do something about it. I wonder if if you can, you know, kind of reflect over that journey and where we are now in terms of this mission of getting, you know, the right data to the right person at the right time so they could make the right decision. >>I think I'll close with accessibility. Um, that Z these days, we you know, the data scientists and data engineers that we work with. The key problem that they have is is accessibility and sharing of data. I mean, this has been wonderfully manifest. In fact, we did some work with the province of Ontario. You could look that stop hashtag house my flattening eso the work with them to get a pool of data. Scientists in the community in the province of Ontario, Canada, toe work together toe understand how to track co vid cases s such so that government could make intelligent responses and policy based on based on the fax so that that need highlights the accessibility that's required from today's, you know, yesteryear. It was maybe, uh, smaller groups of individual data scientists working in silos. Now it's people across industry as manifest by that That need accessibility as well as agility. They need to be able to spin up an environment that will allow them to in this case, um, to develop and deploy inference models using shared data sets without going through years of design. So accessibility on back to the back to the the acceleration and agility that Sam talked about. So I'll close with those words >>That's great. And the consistent with the democratization of two is another word that we're here, you know, over and over again in terms of, you know, getting it out of the hands of the data scientists and getting it into the hands of the people who are making frontline business decisions every day. And Sam for you, for your clothes. I love for you Thio reflect on kind of the changing environment in terms of your requirements for the types of workloads that you now are, you know, looking to support. So it's not just taking care of the data center and relatively straightforward stuff. But you've got hybrid. You've got multi cloud, not to mention all the media, the developments in the media between tape and obviously flash, um, spinning, spinning drives. But you know, really, We've seen this huge thing with flash. But now, with cloud and the increased kind of autumn autonomy ization of of units to be able to apply big batches in small batches to particular workloads across all these different requirements. When if you could just share a little bit about how you guys are thinking about, you know, modernizing storage and moving storage forward. What are some of your what are some of your your priorities? What are you looking forward to, uh, to be able to deliver, You know, basically the stuff underneath all these other applications. I mean, applications basically is data whether you I and some in some computer on top. You guys something underneath the whole package? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, first of all, you know, back toe what Brent was saying, Uh, data could be the most valuable asset of an enterprise. You could give an enterprising, incredible, uh, competitive advantage as an incumbent if you could take advantage of that data using modern analytics and a I. So it could be your greatest asset. And it can also be the biggest inhibitor to digital transformation. If you don't figure out how to build a new type of modern infrastructure to support access to that data and support these new deployment models of your application. So you have to think that through. And that's not just for your big data, which the big data, of course, is extremely important and growing at incredible pace. All this unstructured data, You also have to think about your mission critical applications. We see a lot of people going through their transformation and modernization of S a p with move toe s four Hana. They have to think about how that fits into a multi cloud environment. They need to think about the life cycle of their data is they go into these new modern environments. And, yes, tape is still a very vibrant part of that deployment. So what we're working on an IBM has always been a leader in software defined storage. We have an incredible portfolio of capabilities. We're working on modernizing that software to help you automate your infrastructure. And sure, you can deliver enterprise class sls. There's no nobody's going to alleviate the requirements of having, you know, near perfect availability. You don't because you're moving into a kubernetes environment. Get a break on your downtime. So we're able to give that riel enterprise class support for doing that. One of the things we just announced that the end of October was we've containerized our spectrum scale client, allowing you now toe automate the deployment of your cluster file system through communities. So you'll see more and more of that. We're offering you leading modern native protection for kubernetes will be the first to integrate with OCP and open ship container storage for data protection. And our flashes from family will continue to be on the leading edge of the curve around answerable automation and C s I integration with who are already so we'll continue to focus on that and ensure that you could take advantage of our world class storage products in your new modern environment. And, of course, giving you that portability between on from in any cloud that you choose to run in >>exciting times. No, no shortage of job security for you, gentlemen, that's for sure. All right, Well, Brent, Sam, thanks for taking a few minutes and, uh, is great to catch up. And again. Congratulations on the success. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alrighty, Sammy's Brent. I'm Jeff, You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con North America 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. we've got a couple of a CUBE alumni veterans who've been on a lot of times. They've got some exciting announcements to tell us today, so we're excited to jump into it, So let's go. First we're joined by Eric Herzog. He's the CMO and VP worldwide storage channels for IBM Storage, made his time on theCUBE Eric, great to see you. >> Great, thanks very much for having us today. >> Jeff: Absolutely. And joining him, I think all the way from North Carolina, Sam Werner, the VP of, and offering manager business line executive storage for IBM. Sam, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Sam you're in North Carolina, I think that's where the Red Hat people are. You guys have Red Hat, a lot of conversations about containers, containers are going nuts. We know containers are going nuts and it was Docker and then Kubernetes. And really a lot of traction. Wonder if you can reflect on, on what you see from your point of view and how that impacts what you guys are working on. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We talk, everybody hears about containers constantly. Obviously it's a hot part of digital transformation. What's interesting about it though is most of those initiatives are being driven out of business lines. I spend a lot of time with the people who do infrastructure management, particularly the storage teams, the teams that have to support all of that data in the data center. And they're struggling to be honest with you. These initiatives are coming at them, from application developers and they're being asked to figure out how to deliver the same level of SLAs the same level of performance, governance, security recovery times, availability. And it's a scramble for them to be quite honest they're trying to figure out how to automate their storage. They're trying to figure out how to leverage the investments they've made as they go through a digital transformation and keep in mind, a lot of these initiatives are accelerating right now because of this global pandemic we're living through. I don't know that the strategy's necessarily changed, but there's been an acceleration. So all of a sudden these storage people kind of trying to get up to speed or being thrown right into the mix. So we're working directly with them. You'll see, in some of our announcements, we're helping them, you know, get on that journey and provide the infrastructure their teams need. >> And a lot of this is driven by multicloud and hybrid cloud, which we're seeing, you know, a really aggressive move to before it was kind of this rush to public cloud. And that everybody figured out, "Well maybe public cloud isn't necessarily right for everything." And it's kind of this horses for courses, if you will, with multicloud and hybrid cloud, another kind of complexity thrown into the storage mix that you guys have to deal with. >> Yeah, and that's another big challenge. Now in the early days of cloud, people were lifting and shifting applications trying to get lower capex. And they were also starting to deploy DevOps, in the public cloud in order to improve agility. And what they found is there were a lot of challenges with that, where they thought lifting and shifting an application will lower their capital costs the TCO actually went up significantly. Where they started building new applications in the cloud. They found they were becoming trapped there and they couldn't get the connectivity they needed back into their core applications. So now we're at this point where they're trying to really, transform the rest of it and they're using containers, to modernize the rest of the infrastructure and complete the digital transformation. They want to get into a hybrid cloud environment. What we found is, enterprises get two and a half X more value out of the IT when they use a hybrid multicloud infrastructure model versus an all public cloud model. So what they're trying to figure out is how to piece those different components together. So you need a software-driven storage infrastructure that gives you the flexibility, to deploy in a common way and automate in a common way, both in a public cloud but on premises and give you that flexibility. And that's what we're working on at IBM and with our colleagues at Red Hat. >> So Eric, you've been in the business a long time and you know, it's amazing as it just continues to evolve, continues to evolve this kind of unsexy thing under the covers called storage, which is so foundational. And now as data has become, you know, maybe a liability 'cause I have to buy a bunch of storage. Now it is the core asset of the company. And in fact a lot of valuations on a lot of companies is based on its value, that's data and what they can do. So clearly you've got a couple of aces in the hole you always do. So tell us what you guys are up to at IBM to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Well, what we're doing is we are launching, a number of solutions for various workloads and applications built with a strong container element. For example, a number of solutions about modern data protection cyber resiliency. In fact, we announced last year almost a year ago actually it's only a year ago last week, Sam and I were on stage, and one of our developers did a demo of us protecting data in a container environment. So now we're extending that beyond what we showed a year ago. We have other solutions that involve what we do with AI big data and analytic applications, that are in a container environment. What if I told you, instead of having to replicate and duplicate and have another set of storage right with the OpenShift Container configuration, that you could connect to an existing external exabyte class data lake. So that not only could your container apps get to it, but the existing apps, whether they'll be bare-metal or virtualized, all of them could get to the same data lake. Wow, that's a concept saving time, saving money. One pool of storage that'll work for all those environments. And now that containers are being deployed in production, that's something we're announcing as well. So we've got a lot of announcements today across the board. Most of which are container and some of which are not, for example, LTO-9, the latest high performance and high capacity tape. We're announcing some solutions around there. But the bulk of what we're announcing today, is really on what IBM is doing to continue to be the leader in container storage support. >> And it's great, 'cause you talked about a couple of very specific applications that we hear about all the time. One obviously on the big data and analytics side, you know, as that continues to do, to kind of chase history of honor of ultimately getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision. And the other piece you talked about was business continuity and data replication, and to bring people back. And one of the hot topics we've talked to a lot of people about now is kind of this shift in a security threat around ransomware. And the fact that these guys are a little bit more sophisticated and will actually go after your backup before they let you know that they're into your primary storage. So these are two, really important market areas that we could see continue activity, as all the people that we talk to every day. You must be seeing the same thing. >> Absolutely we are indeed. You know, containers are the wave. I'm a native California and I'm coming to you from Silicon Valley and you don't fight the wave, you ride it. So at IBM we're doing that. We've been the leader in container storage. We, as you know, way back when we invented the hard drive, which is the foundation of almost this entire storage industry and we were responsible for that. So we're making sure that as container is the coming wave that we are riding that in and doing the right things for our customers, for our channel partners that support those customers, whether they be existing customers, and obviously, with this move to containers, is going to be some people searching for probably a new vendor. And that's something that's going to go right into our wheelhouse because of the things we're doing. And some of our capabilities, for example, with our FlashSystems, with our Spectrum Virtualize, we're actually going to be able to support CSI snapshots not only for IBM Storage, but our Spectrum Virtualize products supports over 500 different arrays, most of which aren't ours. So if you got that old EMC VNX2 or that HPE, 3PAR or aNimble or all kinds of other storage, if you need CSI snapshot support, you can get it from IBM, with our Spectrum Virtualize software that runs on our FlashSystems, which of course cuts capex and opex, in a heterogeneous environment, but gives them that advanced container support that they don't get, because they're on older product from, you know, another vendor. We're making sure that we can pull our storage and even our competitor storage into the world of containers and do it in the right way for the end user. >> That's great. Sam, I want to go back to you and talk about the relationship with the Red Hat. I think it was about a year ago, I don't have my notes in front of me, when IBM purchased Red Hat. Clearly you guys have been working very closely together. What does that mean for you? You've been in the business for a long time. You've been at IBM for a long time, to have a partner you know, kind of embed with you, with Red Hat and bringing some of their capabilities into your portfolio. >> It's been an incredible experience, and I always say my friends at Red Hat because we spend so much time together. We're looking at now, leveraging a community that's really on the front edge of this movement to containers. They bring that, along with their experience around storage and containers, along with the years and years of enterprise class storage delivery that we have in the IBM Storage portfolio. And we're bringing those pieces together. And this is a case of truly one plus one equals three. And you know, an example you'll see in this announcement is the integration of our data protection portfolio with their container native storage. We allow you to in any environment, take a snapshot of that data. You know, this move towards modern data protection is all about a movement to doing data protection in a different way which is about leveraging snapshots, taking instant copies of data that are application aware, allowing you to reuse and mount that data for different purposes, be able to protect yourself from ransomware. Our data protection portfolio has industry leading ransomware protection and detection in it. So we'll actually detect it before it becomes a problem. We're taking that, industry leading data protection software and we are integrating it into Red Hat, Container Native Storage, giving you the ability to solve one of the biggest challenges in this digital transformation which is backing up your data. Now that you're moving towards, stateful containers and persistent storage. So that's one area we're collaborating. We're working on ensuring that our storage arrays, that Eric was talking about, that they integrate tightly with OpenShift and that they also work again with, OpenShift Container Storage, the Cloud Native Storage portfolio from, Red Hat. So we're bringing these pieces together. And on top of that, we're doing some really, interesting things with licensing. We allow you to consume the Red Hat Storage portfolio along with the IBM software-defined Storage portfolio under a single license. And you can deploy the different pieces you need, under one single license. So you get this ultimate investment protection and ability to deploy anywhere. So we're, I think we're adding a lot of value for our customers and helping them on this journey. >> Yeah Eric, I wonder if you could share your perspective on multicloud management. I know that's a big piece of what you guys are behind and it's a big piece of kind of the real world as we've kind of gotten through the hype and now we're into production, and it is a multicloud world and it is, you got to manage this stuff it's all over the place. I wonder if you could speak to kind of how that challenge you know, factors into your design decisions and how you guys are about, you know, kind of the future. >> Well we've done this in a couple of ways in things that are coming out in this launch. First of all, IBM has produced with a container-centric model, what they call the Multicloud Manager. It's the IBM Cloud Pak for multicloud management. That product is designed to manage multiple clouds not just the IBM Cloud, but Amazon, Azure, et cetera. What we've done is taken our Spectrum Protect Plus and we've integrated it into the multicloud manager. So what that means, to save time, to save money and make it easier to use, when the customer is in the multicloud manager, they can actually select Spectrum Protect Plus, launch it and then start to protect data. So that's one thing we've done in this launch. The other thing we've done is integrate the capability of IBM Spectrum Virtualize, running in a FlashSystem to also take the capability of supporting OCP, the OpenShift Container Platform in a Clustered environment. So what we can do there, is on-premise, if there really was an earthquake in Silicon Valley right now, that OpenShift is sitting on a server. The servers just got crushed by the roof when it caved in. So you want to make sure you've got disaster recovery. So what we can do is take that OpenShift Container Platform Cluster, we can support it with our Spectrum Virtualize software running on our FlashSystem, just like we can do heterogeneous storage that's not ours, in this case, we're doing it with Red Hat. And then what we can do is to provide disaster recovery and business continuity to different cloud vendors not just to IBM Cloud, but to several cloud vendors. We can give them the capability of replicating and protecting that Cluster to a cloud configuration. So if there really was an earthquake, they could then go to the cloud, they could recover that Red Hat Cluster, to a different data center and run it on-prem. So we're not only doing the integration with a multicloud manager, which is multicloud-centric allowing ease of use with our Spectrum Protect Plus, but incase of a really tough situation of fire in a data center, earthquake, hurricane, whatever, the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster can be replicated out to a cloud, with our Spectrum Virtualize Software. So in most, in both cases, multicloud examples because in the first one of course the multicloud manager is designed and does support multiple clouds. In the second example, we support multiple clouds where our Spectrum Virtualize for public clouds software so you can take that OpenShift Cluster replicate it and not just deal with one cloud vendor but with several. So showing that multicloud management is important and then leverage that in this launch with a very strong element of container centricity. >> Right >> Yeah, I just want to add, you know, and I'm glad you brought that up Eric, this whole multicloud capability with, the Spectrum Virtualize. And I could see the same for our Spectrum Scale Family, which is our storage infrastructure for AI and big data. We actually, in this announcement have containerized the client making it very simple to deploy in Kubernetes Cluster. But one of the really special things about Spectrum Scale is it's active file management. This allows you to build out a file system not only on-premises for your, Kubernetes Cluster but you can actually extend that to a public cloud and it automatically will extend the file system. If you were to go into a public cloud marketplace which it's available in more than one, you can go in there click deploy, for example, in AWS Marketplace, click deploy it will deploy your Spectrum Scale Cluster. You've now extended your file system from on-prem into the cloud. If you need to access any of that data, you can access it and it will automatically cash you on locally and we'll manage all the file access for you. >> Yeah, it's an interesting kind of paradox between, you know, kind of the complexity of what's going on in the back end, but really trying to deliver simplicity on the front end. Again, this ultimate goal of getting the right data to the right person at the right time. You just had a blog post Eric recently, that you talked about every piece of data isn't equal. And I think it's really highlighted in this conversation we just had about recovery and how you prioritize and how you, you know, think about, your data because you know, the relative value of any particular piece might be highly variable, which should drive the way that you treated in your system. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit, you know, to helping people think about data in the right way. As you know, they both have all their operational data which they've always had, but now they've got all this unstructured data that's coming in like crazy and all data isn't created equal, as you said. And if there is an earthquake or there is a ransomware attack, you need to be smart about what you have available to bring back quickly. And maybe what's not quite so important. >> Well, I think the key thing, let me go to, you know a modern data protection term. These are two very technical terms was, one is the recovery time. How long does it take you to get that data back? And the second one is the recovery point, at what point in time, are you recovering the data from? And the reason those are critical, is when you look at your datasets, whether you replicate, you snap, you do a backup. The key thing you've got to figure out is what is my recovery time? How long is it going to take me? What's my recovery point. Obviously in certain industries you want to recover as rapidly as possible. And you also want to have the absolute most recent data. So then once you know what it takes you to do that, okay from an RPO and an RTO perspective, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Once you know that, then you need to look at your datasets and look at what does it take to run the company if there really was a fire and your data center was destroyed. So you take a look at those datasets, you see what are the ones that I need to recover first, to keep the company up and rolling. So let's take an example, the sales database or the support database. I would say those are pretty critical to almost any company, whether you'd be a high-tech company, whether you'd be a furniture company, whether you'd be a delivery company. However, there also is probably a database of assets. For example, IBM is a big company. We have buildings all over, well, guess what? We don't lease a chair or a table or a whiteboard. We buy them. Those are physical assets that the company has to pay, you know, do write downs on and all this other stuff, they need to track it. If we close a building, we need to move the desk to another building. Like even if we leasing a building now, the furniture is ours, right? So does an asset database need to be recovered instantaneously? Probably not. So we should focus on another thing. So let's say on a bank. Banks are both online and brick and mortar. I happened to be a Wells Fargo person. So guess what? There's Wells Fargo banks, two of them in the city I'm in, okay? So, the assets of the money, in this case now, I don't think the brick and mortar of the building of Wells Fargo or their desks in there but now you're talking financial assets or their high velocity trading apps. Those things need to be recovered almost instantaneously. And that's what you need to do when you're looking at datasets, is figure out what's critical to the business to keep it up and rolling, what's the next most critical. And you do it in basically the way you would tear anything. What's the most important thing, what's the next most important thing. It doesn't matter how you approach your job, how you used to approach school, what are the classes I have to get an A and what classes can I not get an A and depending on what your major was, all that sort of stuff, you're setting priorities, right? And the dataset, since data is the most critical asset of any company, whether it's a Global Fortune 500 or whether it's Herzog Cigar Store, all of those assets, that data is the most valuable. So you've got to make sure, recover what you need as rapidly as you need it. But you can't recover all of it. You just, there's just no way to do that. So that's why you really ranked the importance of the data to use sameware, with malware and ransomware. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, certain data you need to recover as soon as you can. So if there, for example, as a, in fact there was one Jeff, here in Silicon Valley as well. You've probably read about the University of California San Francisco, ended up having to pay over a million dollars of ransom because some of the data related to COVID research University of California, San Francisco, it was the health care center for the University of California in Northern California. They are working on COVID and guess what? The stuff was held for ransom. They had no choice, but to pay them. And they really did pay, this is around end of June, of this year. So, okay, you don't really want to do that. >> Jeff: Right >> So you need to look at everything from malware and ransomware, the importance of the data. And that's how you figure this stuff out, whether be in a container environment, a traditional environment or virtualized environment. And that's why data protection is so important. And with this launch, not only are we doing the data protection we've been doing for years, but now taking it to the heart of the new wave, which is the wave of containers. >> Yeah, let me add just quickly on that Eric. So think about those different cases you talked about. You're probably going to want for your mission critically. You're going to want snapshots of that data that can be recovered near instantaneously. And then, for some of your data, you might decide you want to store it out in cloud. And with Spectrum Protect, we just announced our ability to now store data out in Google cloud. In addition to, we already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud, in various on-prem object stores. So we already provided that capability. And then we're in this announcement talking about LTL-9. And you got to also be smart about which data do you need to keep, according to regulation for long periods of time, or is it just important to archive? You're not going to beat the economics nor the safety of storing data out on tape. But like Eric said, if all of your data is out on tape and you have an event, you're not going to be able to restore it quickly enough at least the mission critical things. And so those are the things that need to be in snapshot. And that's one of the main things we're announcing here for Kubernetes environments is the ability to quickly snapshot application aware backups, of your mission critical data in your Kubernetes environments. It can very quickly to be recovered. >> That's good. So I'll give you the last word then we're going to sign off, we are out of time, but I do want to get this in it's 2020, if I didn't ask the COVID question, I would be in big trouble. So, you know, you've all seen the memes and the jokes about really COVID being an accelerant to digital transformation, not necessarily change, but certainly a huge accelerant. I mean, you guys have a, I'm sure a product roadmap that's baked pretty far and advanced, but I wonder if you can speak to, you know, from your perspective, as COVID has accelerated digital transformation you guys are so foundational to executing that, you know, kind of what is it done in terms of what you're seeing with your customers, you know, kind of the demand and how you're seeing this kind of validation as to an accelerant to move to these better types of architectures? Let's start with you Sam. >> Yeah, you know I, and I think i said this, but I mean the strategy really hasn't changed for the enterprises, but of course it is accelerating it. And I see storage teams more quickly getting into trouble, trying to solve some of these challenges. So we're working closely with them. They're looking for more automation. They have less people in the data center on-premises. They're looking to do more automation simplify the management of the environment. We're doing a lot around Ansible to help them with that. We're accelerating our roadmaps around that sort of integration and automation. They're looking for better visibility into their environments. So we've made a lot of investments around our storage insights SaaS platform, that allows them to get complete visibility into their data center and not just in their data center. We also give them visibility to the stores they're deploying in the cloud. So we're making it easier for them to monitor and manage and automate their storage infrastructure. And then of course, if you look at everything we're doing in this announcement, it's about enabling our software and our storage infrastructure to integrate directly into these new Kubernetes, initiatives. That way as this digital transformation accelerates and application developers are demanding more and more Kubernetes capabilities. They're able to deliver the same SLAs and the same level of security and the same level of governance, that their customers expect from them, but in this new world. So that's what we're doing. If you look at our announcement, you'll see that across, across the sets of capabilities that we're delivering here. >> Eric, we'll give you the last word, and then we're going to go to Eric Cigar Shop, as soon as this is over. (laughs) >> So it's clearly all about storage made simple, in a Kubernetes environment, in a container environment, whether it's block storage, file storage, whether it be object storage and IBM's goal is to offer ever increasing sophisticated services for the enterprise at the same time, make it easier and easier to use and to consume. If you go back to the old days, the storage admins manage X amount of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. Now the same admin is managing 10 petabytes of data. So the data explosion is real across all environments, container environments, even old bare-metal. And of course the not quite so new anymore virtualized environments. The admins need to manage that more and more easily and automated point and click. Use AI based automated tiering. For example, we have with our Easy Tier technology, that automatically moves data when it's hot to the fastest tier. And when it's not as hot, it's cool, it pushes down to a slower tier, but it's all automated. You point and you click. Let's take our migration capabilities. We built it into our software. I buy a new array, I need to migrate the data. You point, you click, and we automatic transparent migration in the background on the fly without taking the servers or the storage down. And we always favor the application workload. So if the application workload is heavy at certain times a day, we slow the migration. At night for sake of argument, If it's a company that is not truly 24 by seven, you know, heavily 24 by seven, and at night, it slows down, we accelerate the migration. All about automation. We've done it with Ansible, here in this launch, we've done it with additional integration with other platforms. So our Spectrum Scale for example, can use the OpenShift management framework to configure and to grow our Spectrum Scale or elastic storage system clusters. We've done it, in this case with our Spectrum Protect Plus, as you saw integration into the multicloud manager. So for us, it's storage made simple, incredibly new features all the time, but at the same time we do that, make sure that it's easier and easier to use. And in some cases like with Ansible, not even the real storage people, but God forbid, that DevOps guy messes with a storage and loses that data, wow. So by, if you're using something like Ansible and that Ansible framework, we make sure that essentially the DevOps guy, the test guy, the analytics guy, basically doesn't lose the data and screw up the storage. And that's a big, big issue. So all about storage made simple, in the right way with incredible enterprise features that essentially we make easy and easy to use. We're trying to make everything essentially like your iPhone, that easy to use. That's the goal. And with a lot less storage admins in the world then there has been an incredible storage growth every single year. You'd better make it easy for the same person to manage all that storage. 'Cause it's not shrinking. It is, someone who's sitting at 50 petabytes today, is 150 petabytes the next year and five years from now, they'll be sitting on an exabyte of production data, and they're not going to hire tons of admins. It's going to be the same two or four people that were doing the work. Now they got to manage an exabyte, which is why this storage made simplest is such a strong effort for us with integration, with the Open, with the Kubernetes frameworks or done with OpenShift, heck, even what we used to do in the old days with vCenter Ops from VMware, VASA, VAAI, all those old VMware tools, we made sure tight integration, easy to use, easy to manage, but sophisticated features to go with that. Simplicity is really about how you manage storage. It's not about making your storage dumb. People want smarter and smarter storage. Do you make it smarter, but you make it just easy to use at the same time. >> Right. >> Well, great summary. And I don't think I could do a better job. So I think we'll just leave it right there. So congratulations to both of you and the teams for these announcement after a whole lot of hard work and sweat went in, over the last little while and continued success. And thanks for the, check in, always great to see you. >> Thank you. We love being on theCUBE as always. >> All right, thanks again. All right, he's Eric, he was Sam, I'm I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020. Hard to believe our 11th year at the show, obviously the first time we're doing these virtually. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, so regular on the program, Sam Werner. He is the Vice President of Product at IBM. Sam, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, Stu, thanks for having me. It's great to be with you again and great to be at VMworld virtually. Different experience this year but still just as exciting as always. >> Yeah, well, obviously a long history between IBM and VMware. I go back in my memory to like 2002. Most people hadn't even heard of virtualization. I was working for a certain storage company, and IBM and HP and Dell were all banging on our door saying, "You really need to support this stuff, this is really important." Obviously, a lot has changed in the subsequent years. VMware's high level message talks a lot about cloud, they've got a lot of big partnerships, including IBM, of course on the cloud side as well as the system side. So why don't you bring us in your team, the relationship with VMware these days. >> Yeah. Thanks. And that's a great intro. We do have a very long relationship and history with VMware. And the thing I love about the VMware community is I'm a storage person. People in the VMworld really understand the importance of storage and having a strategy around storage for how it's deployed. Simplifying the management, automating things and probably most importantly, bringing some of the security aspects especially in today's world. So, we've got really, really strong integration with our flash system family, making it very easy to deploy and ensure you've got end-to-end data protection, encryption and everything you need to secure your mission critical applications in your VMware environment. And we spent... IBM is a leader in data protection software. And we've made large investments in our integration with VMware to ensure our customers are able to secure their data and ensure that they have backups that they can easily restore. And we've tried to make it simple enough that the VM administrator can actually do it on their own. >> Yeah. Sam, I mentioned one of the big messages we hear from VMware, of course, is that you can take that VMware stack and put it lots of places. Of course, they have heavy data center environments, but can live in Amazon with VMware and AWS. I mentioned the IBM Cloud partnership, all the other clouds and from a data protection standpoint, really, they've made it so that their partners can kind of come along with that story. So, what are you seeing from your standpoint obviously, I expect the IBM Cloud is a piece of it. But are you also... Your data protection, does that play across the full spectrum of what VMware is doing? >> Absolutely. So I mean, if you want to backup your VMware environment on AWS, you can use Spectrum Protect Plus, you can do it for on-prem, you can do it in IBM Cloud. It's interesting, because the data protection software is now being used in a much broader use cases. We've moved to a world where you take snapshots of your data, which allows you to do instantaneous recovery. It allows you to offload for longer term backups and archives or disaster recovery. But it also allows you to do things like data migration, open up new analytics, make data available for analytics and other environments. So we're seeing our customers who are using spectrum protect suite on-premises, actually then leverage it in different cloud environments, both for DR in the cloud and for things like dev test or analytics. So I think that connection, both leveraging the underlying VMware capabilities, but having a very strong application running on top that can help you with the orchestration gives you the ability to really take advantage of a hybrid multi-cloud environment. >> Yeah. And Sam, something that really goes side by side, if we're talking about data protection, big conversations we've been having with customers last few years has been things like governance, dealing with GDPR and CCCP from California, as well as the cyber resiliency, ransomware and everything like that. So how does that fit into? Give us the update on your end when it comes to those pieces? >> It's a great question because, as storage administrators, I think they struggle quite a bit with a lot of different priorities that are at odds with each other. There's this big push for AI, and big push for driving great insights from the institutional knowledge of an enterprise and driving new value to customers. And enterprises are obviously hiring data scientists and building out these neural networks. The problem is, at odds with that strategy of making data available, you have GDPR requirements, and you also have growing cyber threats out there. We've even seen an increase within this COVID world. If you think that criminals back off when there's a global pandemic, the answer is no, they do not. So there's this increased threat and increased regulation. So you really need a strategy for how you're going to manage that data. And actually, that's where something like a Spectrum Protect Plus can come in and allows you to take snapshots, build a catalog of your data, and do some analysis on the different types of data you want to make available for these different use cases. And actually bring that data into an environment where it's safe and secure. And you can also bring the copy back later. Early on, people would make copies and move it everywhere, you lose track of that data. You don't really have a single source of truth anymore. So it's really important to have an intelligent, catalogued approach to doing this. >> Wonderful. Well, Sam, one of the other big themes we see at the show, obviously, is VMware's has a big push into that cloud native discussion, Kubernetes, containerization. I've spoken with your team plenty of times at theCUBE con shows, so help connect us. There's still a little bit of two different worlds. VMs and containers, yes, they're coming together. But it's infrastructure versus app developers and oftentimes there's the technology pieces and then of course, as we always know, those organizational challenges can really slow things down if we don't plan properly. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a really good point. And in fact, VMware took years and years to get to where it is today. But now, it gives you a lot of the core capabilities you need to do to do data protection. VADP wasn't built overnight. When you look at Kubernetes, and where it is today, it's still in pretty early stages of that. We have CSI drivers, the container storage interface, they allow you to do snapshots. If you go to various storage vendors, they're in kind of different phases in their work on it. It's a little bit of the Wild West, I would say right now. Early on in Kubernetes environments or container environments, they were used for stateless applications, as we all know, now that we're moving more mission critical workloads and moving towards stateful applications, data protection becomes critical. And in fact, from our customers, it's one of the biggest challenges they say they're encountering in their digital transformation, as they move to a hybrid multi-cloud container world. So what we're doing with Spectrum Protect Plus is we're integrating directly into the CSI drivers, and providing customers the capability to do application and container where snapshots of their data again, building this catalog and information about the data and being able to make it not only available for other use cases, but also in the event you have to recover. If there's a ransomware attack, if you lose a file, if you know, something, anything malicious happens or a disaster, you can actually get back to the data you need quickly, which is obviously just as important in a Kubernetes environment as in a VMware environment. >> Yeah, Sam, it's so good to hear some of the progress here. You and I, we lived through that, fixing a storage for virtual environment, and really took about a decade to go from just, "Okay, well, I can backup everything," to, "Wait, I can really have that VM granularity." But we're about five years into containerization and storage. You talked about the CSI plugins, you talked about what we can do there. So it looks like we've learned from the past, we can accelerate a bit what we're doing so that we can have that full stack solution in these modern environments. >> Yeah, I mean, obviously, we're taking the learnings that we got from those environments. And we have a lot of customers who are leveraging their VMware environment and building on top of that, and we also have others that are looking at moving towards bare metal, in some cases. So we need to provide a lot of the same level of automation and integration that we have in VMware environments. So we're able to leverage all the learnings we have from all those years and all the challenges we had to make storage much easier to manage and deploy in these environments. So I think it'll be a much shorter learning curve this time around. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's been great to see the communities rally, so much maturation. All right, Sam, what else should people know about these solutions? We're not going to be all jammed together in either San Francisco or Las Vegas, but there's always great conversations at the show. Lots of customers, lots of learning. So what do you want people to take away from VMworld when it comes to IBM? >> Well, I think obviously, the announcements the VMware is making this week are very exciting. And I think you'll see that our storage platforms continue to come along with VMware and provide, I would say the most secure and performance storage options for VMware environments with end-to-end encryption, our ability to do snapshots and cataloguing of the snapshot for quick recovery, our ability to move into hybrid multi-cloud environments, I think gives a very flexible storage infrastructure for your VMware world. And also, as you move beyond, as you adopt containers, we have very good integration with OpenShift and any type of Kubernetes framework. So we're able to support you today with VMware and whether you're continuing to move forward with VMware and Kubernetes is on top of it, or moving forward to a hybrid multi-cloud version on bare metal, we can support all those environments with very secure storage infrastructure. The one other thing that I think people need to keep in mind is the concept of air gapping. And having copies outside of their storage infrastructure. We're actually able to bring you tape storage, as an extension to your environment. Tape is the true air gap, we actually can pull a cartridge out and put it on a shelf, and I can assure you, nobody is going to be able to change that data. So in the event, something really happens, we can recover from tape. We can give you the ability to copy the data to the cloud in a logical air gap. You can consider that a separate network. So to some extent, it is an air gap and you can retrieve the data back. And we can give you the ability to do snapshots in place, which would be your quickest recovery path. So we can give you the ability to do all three of those things within our storage products. Giving the ultimate secure environment and many options for recovery in this (mumbles) vicious world of IT, I guess. >> Yeah. Well, Sam, what's old is new again, we know that everything in IT is always additive. I remember a couple of years ago, we were joking with we had that "flip turn" of taking flash and tape. And a few years back, if you looked underneath a lot of the cloud solutions like some of those deep archives, there often was (mumbles) there. So, Sam, thank you so much. Great to catch up with you, so many pieces. Hope you and the team have lots of good conversations at VMworld. >> Thank you, Stu. It's great to be here with you again. >> Stay tuned, lots more coverage from VMworld 2020, the global digital online experience. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Coop Con and Cloud, Native Con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its Ecosystem Partners. >>And welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Cube Con Cloud, Native Con Europe 20 twenties Virtual event. I'm Stew Minimum and and happy to Welcome back to the program, two of our Cube alumni. We're gonna be talking about storage in this kubernetes and container world. First of all, we have Sam Warner. He is the vice president of storage, offering management at IBM, and joining him is Brent Compton, senior director of storage and data architecture at Red Hat and Brent. Thank you for joining us, and we get to really dig in. It's the combined IBM and red hat activity in this space, of course, both companies very active in the space of the acquisition, and so we're excited to hear about what's going going. Ford. Sam. Maybe if we could start with you as the tee up, you know, Both Red Hat and IBM have had their conferences this year. We've heard quite a bit about how you know, Red Hat the solutions they've offered. The open source activity is really a foundational layer for much of what IBM is doing when it comes to storage, you know, What does that mean today? >>First of all, I'm really excited to be virtually at Cube Con this year, and I'm also really excited to be with my colleague Brent from Red Hat. This is, I think, the first time that IBM storage and Red Hat Storage have been able to get together and really articulate what we're doing to help our customers in the context of kubernetes and and also with open shift, the things we're doing there. So I think you'll find, ah, you know, as we talked today, that there's a lot of work we're doing to bring together the core capabilities of IBM storage that been helping enterprises with there core applications for years alongside, Ah, the incredible open source capabilities being developed, you know, by red Hat and how we can bring those together to help customers, uh, continue moving forward with their initiatives around kubernetes and rebuilding their applications to be develop once, deploy anywhere, which runs into quite a few challenges for storage. So, Brennan, I'm excited to talk about all the great things we're doing. Excited about getting to share it with everybody else. A cube con? >>Yes. So of course, containers When they first came out well, for stateless environments and we knew that, you know, we've seen this before. You know, those of us that live through that wave of virtualization, you kind of have a first generation solution. You know what application, What environment and be used. But if you know, as we've seen the huge explosion of containers and kubernetes, there's gonna be a maturation of the stack. Storage is a critical component of that. So maybe upfront if you could bring us up to speed you're steeped in, you know, a long history in this space. You know, the challenges that you're hearing from customers. Uhm And where are we today in 2020 for this? >>Thanks to do the most basic caps out there, I think are just traditional. I'm databases. APS that have databases like a post press, a longstanding APS out there that have databases like DB two so traditional APs that are moving towards a more agile environment. That's where we've seen in fact, our collaboration with IBM and particularly the DB two team. And that's where we've seen is they've gone to a micro services container based architecture we've seen pull from the market place. Say, you know, in addition to inventing new Cloud native APS, we want our tried true and tested perhaps I mean such as DB two, such as MQ. We want those to have the benefits of a red hat, open shift, agile environment. And that's where the collaboration between our group and Sam's group comes in together is providing the storage and data services for those state labs. >>Great, Sam, you know I IBM. You've been working with the storage administrator for a long time. What challenges are they facing when we go to the new architectures is it's still the same people it might There be a different part of the organization where you need to start in delivering these solutions. >>It's a really, really good question, and it's interesting cause I do spend a lot of time with storage administrators and the people who are operating the I T infrastructure. And what you'll find is that the decision maker isn't the i t operations or storage operations. People These decisions about implementing kubernetes and moving applications to these new environments are actually being driven by the business lines, which is, I guess, not so different from any other major technology shift. And the storage administrators now are struggling to keep up. So the business lines would like to accelerate development. They want to move to a developed, once deploy anywhere model, and so they start moving down the path of kubernetes. In order to do that, they start, you know, leveraging middleware components that are containerized and easy to deploy. And then they're turning to the I T infrastructure teams and asking them to be able to support it. And when you talk to the storage administrators, they're trying to figure out how to do some of the basic things that are absolutely core to what they do, which is protecting the data in the event of a disaster or some kind of a cyber attack, being able to recover the data, being able to keep the data safe, ensuring governance and privacy of the data. These things are difficult in any environment, but now you're moving to a completely new world and the storage administrators have ah tough challenge out of them. And I think that's where IBM and Red Hat can really come together with all of our experience and are very broad portfolio with incredibly enterprise hardened storage capabilities to help them move from their more traditional infrastructure to a kubernetes environment. >>Maybe if you could bring us up to date when we look back, it, like open stack of red hat, had a few projects from an open source standpoint to help bolster the open source or storage world in the container world. We saw some of those get boarded over. There's new projects. There's been a little bit of argument as to the various different ways to do storage. And of course, we know storage has never been a single solution. There's lots of different ways to do things, but, you know, where are we with the options out there? What's that? What's what's the recommendation from Red Hat and IBM as to how we should look at that? >>I wanna Bridget question to Sam's earlier comments about the challenges facing the storage admin. So if we start with the word agility, I mean, what is agility mean for it in the data world. We're conscious for agility from an application development standpoint. But if you use the term, of course, we've been used to the term Dev ops. But if we use the term data ops, what does that mean? What does that mean to you in the past? For decades, when a developer or someone deploying production wanted to create new storage or data, resource is typically typically filed a ticket and waited. So in the agile world of open shift in kubernetes, it's everything is self service and on demand or what? What kind of constraints and demands that place on the storage and data infrastructure. So now I'll come back to your questions. Do so yes. At the time, that red hat was, um, very heavily into open stack, Red Hat acquired SEF well acquired think tank and and a majority of the SEF developers who are most active in the community. And now so and that became the de facto software defying storage for open stack. But actually for the last time that we spoke at Coop Con and the Rook project has become very popular there in the CN CF as away effectively to make software defined storage systems like SEF. Simple so effectively. The power of SEF, made simple by rook inside of the open shift operator frame where people want that power that SEF brings. But they want the simplicity of self service on demand. And that's kind of the diffusion. The coming together of traditional software defined storage with agility in a kubernetes world. So rook SEF, open shift container storage. >>Wonderful. And I wonder if we could take that a little bit further. A lot of the discussion these days and I hear it every time I talk to IBM and Red Hat is customers air using hybrid clouds. So obviously that has to have an impact on storage. You know, moving data is not easy. There's a little bit of nuance there. So, you know, how do we go from what you were just talking about into a hybrid environ? >>I guess I'll take that one to start and Brent, please feel free to chime in on it. So, um, first of all, from an IBM perspective, you really have to start at a little bit higher level and at the middleware layer. So IBM is bringing together all of our capabilities everything from analytics and AI. So application, development and, uh, in all of our middleware on and packaging them up in something that we call cloud packs, which are pre built. Catalogs have containerized capabilities that can be easily deployed. Ah, in any open shift environment, which allows customers to build applications that could be deployed both on premises and then within public cloud. So in a hybrid multi cloud environment, of course, when you build that sort of environment, you need a storage and data layer, which allows you to move those applications around freely. And that's where the IBM storage suite for cloud packs was. And we've actually taken the core capabilities of the IBM storage software to find storage portfolio. Um, which give you everything you need for high performance block storage, scale out, um, file storage and object storage. And then we've combined that with the capabilities, uh, that we were just discussing from Red Hat, which including a CS on SEF, which allow you, ah, customer to create a common, agile and automated storage environment both on premises and the cloud giving consistent deployment and the ability to orchestrate the data to where it's needed >>I'll just add on to that. I mean that, as Sam noted and is probably most of you are aware. Hybrid Cloud is at the heart of the IBM acquisition of Red Hat with red hat open shift. The stated intent of red hat open shift is to be to become the default operating environment for the hybrid cloud, so effectively bring your own cloud wherever you run. So that that is at the very heart of the synergy between our companies and made manifest by the very large portfolios of software, which would be at which have been, um, moved to many of which to run in containers and embodied inside of IBM cloud packs. So IBM cloud packs backed by red hat open shift on wherever you're running on premises and in a public cloud. And no, with this storage suite for cloud packs that Sam referred to also having a deterministic experience. That's one of the things as we work, for instance, deeply with the IBM DB two team. One of the things that was critical for them, as they couldn't have they couldn't have their customers when they run on AWS have a completely different experience than when they ran on premises, say, on VM, where our on premises on bare metal critical to the DB two team t give their customers deterministic behavior wherever they can. >>Right? So, Sam, I I think any of our audience that it followed this space have heard Red House story about open shift in how it lives across multiple cloud environments. I'm not sure that everybody is familiar with how much of IBM storage solutions today are really this software driven. So ah, And therefore, you know, if I think about IBM, it's like, okay, and by storage or yes, it can live in the IBM Cloud. But from what I'm hearing from Brent in you and from what I know from previous discussion, this is independent and can live in multiple clouds, leveraging this underlying technology and can leverage the capabilities from those public cloud offers. That right, Sam? >>Yeah, that's right. And you know, we have the most comprehensive portfolio of software defined storage in the industry. Maybe to some, it's ah, it's a well kept secret, but those that use it No, the breadth of the portfolio. We have everything from the highest performing scale out file System Teoh Object store that can scale into the exabytes. We have our block storage as well, which runs within the public clouds and can extend back to your private cloud environment. When we talk to customers about deploying storage for hybrid multi cloud in a container environment, we give them a lot of houses to get there. We give them the ability to leverage their existing san infrastructure through the CS I drivers container storage interface. So our whole, uh, you know, physical on Prem infrastructure supports CS I today and then all the software that runs on our arrays also supports running on top of the public clouds, giving customers then the ability to extend that existing san infrastructure into a cloud environment. And now, with storage suite for cloud packs a sprint described earlier, we give you the ability to build a really agile infrastructure, leveraging the capabilities from Red Hat to give you a fully extensible environment and a common way of managing and deploying both on Prem and in the cloud. So we give you a journey with our portfolio to get from your existing infrastructure. Today, you don't have to throw it out it started with that and build out an environment that goes both on Prem and in the cloud. >>Yeah, Brent, I'm glad that you started with database, cause it's not something that I think most people would think about. You know, in a kubernetes environment, you Do you have any customer examples you might be able to give? Maybe Anonymous? Of course. Just talking about how those mission critical applications can fit into the new modern architect. The >>big banks. I mean, just full stop the big banks. But what I'd add to that So that's kind of frequently they start because applications based on structured data remain at the heart of a lot of enterprises. But I would say workload, category number two, our is all things machine Learning Analytics ai and we're seeing an explosion of adoption within the open shift. And, of course, cloud pack. IBM Cloud private for data, is a key market participant in that machine learning analytic space. So an explosion of the usage of of open shift for those types of workloads I was gonna touch just briefly on an example, going back to our kind of data data pipeline and how it started with databases, but it just it explodes. For instance, data pipeline automation, where you have data coming into your APS that are kubernetes based that our open shift based well, maybe we'll end up inside of Watson Studio inside of IBM ah, cloud pack for data. But along the way, there are a variety of transformations that need to occur. Let's say that you're a big bank. You need Teoh effectively as it comes in. You need to be able to run a CRC to ensure to a test that when when you modify the data, for instance, in a real time processing pipeline that when you pass it on to the next stage that you can guarantee well that you can attest that there's been no tampering of the data. So that's an illustration where it began, very with the basics of basic applications running with structured data with databases. Where we're seeing the state of the industry today is tremendous use of these kubernetes and open shift based architectures for machine learning. Analytics made more simple by data pay data pipeline automation through things like open shift container storage through things like open shift server lis or you have scale double functions and what not? So yeah, it began there. But boy, I tell you what. It's exploded since then. >>Yeah, great to hear not only traditional applications, but as you said so, so much interest. And the need for those new analytics use cases s so it's absolutely that's where it's going. Someone. One other piece of the storage story, of course, is not just that we have state full usage, but talk about data protection, if you could, on how you know things that I think of traditionally my backup restore and like, how does that fit into the whole discussion we've been having? >>You know, when you talk to customers, it's one of the biggest challenges they have honestly. And moving to containers is how do I get the same level of data protection that I use today? Ah, the environments are in many cases, more complex from a data and storage perspective. You want Teoh be able to take application consistent copies of your data that could be recovered quickly, Uh, and in some cases even reused. You can reuse the copies, for they have task for application migration. There's there's lots of or for actually AI or analytics. There's lots of use cases for the data, but a lot of the tools and AP eyes are still still very new in this space. IBM has made, uh, prior, uh, doing data protection for containers. Ah, top priority for our spectrum protect suite. And we provide the capabilities to do application aware snapshots of your storage environment so that a kubernetes developer can actually build in the resiliency they need. As they build applications in a storage administrator can get a pane of glass Ah, and visibility into all of the data and ensure that it's all being protected appropriately and provide things like S L A. So I think it's about, you know, the fact that the early days of communities tended to be stateless. Now that people are moving some of the more mission critical workloads, the data protection becomes just just critical as anything else you do in the environment. So the tools have to catch up. So that's a top priority of ours. And we provide a lot of those capabilities today and you'll see if you watch what we do with our spectrum. Protect suite will continue to provide the capabilities that our customers need to move their mission. Critical applications to a kubernetes environment. >>Alright And Brent? One other question. Looking forward a little bit. We've been talking for the last couple of years about how server lists can plug into this. Ah, higher kubernetes ecosystem. The K Native project is one that I, IBM and Red Hat has been involved with. So for open shift and server lis with I'm sure you're leveraging k native. What is the update? That >>the update is effectively adoption inside of a lot of cases like the big banks, but also other in the talk, uh, the largest companies in other industries as well. So if you take the words event driven architecture, many of them are coming to us with that's kind of top of mind of them is the need to say, you know, I need to ensure that when data first hits my environment, I can't wait. I can't wait for a scheduled batch job to come along and process that data and maybe run an inference. I mean, the classic cases you're ingesting a chest X ray, and you need to immediately run that against an inference model to determine if the patient has pneumonia or code 19 and then kick off another serverless function to anonymous data. Just send back in to retrain your model. So the need. And so you mentioned serverless. And of course, people say, Well, I could I could handle that just by really smart batch jobs, but kind of one of the other parts of server less that sometimes people forget but smart companies are aware of is that server lists is inherently scalable, so zero to end scalability. So as data is coming in, hitting your Kafka bus, hitting your object store, hitting your database and that if you picked up the the community project to be easy, Um, where something hits your relational database and I can automatically trigger an event onto the Kafka bus so that your entire our architecture becomes event >>driven. All right. Well, Sam, let me give you the funding. Let me let you have the final word. Excuse me on the IBM in this space and what you want them to have his takeaways from Cube con 2020 Europe. >>I'm actually gonna talk to I think, the storage administrators, if that's OK, because if you're not involved right now in the kubernetes projects that are happening within your enterprise, uh, they are happening and there will be new challenges. You've got a lot of investments you've made in your existing storage infrastructure. We had IBM and Red Hat can help you take advantage of the value of your existing infrastructure. Uh, the capabilities, the resiliency, the security of built into it with the years. And we can help you move forward into a hybrid, multi cloud environment built on containers. We've got the experience and the capabilities between Red Hat and IBM to help you be successful because it's still a lot of challenges there. But But our experience can help you implement that with the greatest success. Appreciate it. >>Alright, Sam and Brent, Thank you so much for joining. It's been excellent to be able to watch the maturation in this space of the last couple of years. >>Thank you. >>Alright, we'll be back with lots more coverage from Cube Con Cloud, native con Europe 2020 the virtual event. I'm stew Minimum And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by the M wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here to San Francisco. Where? Mosconi Center right now. And for Veum. World 2019. Gorgeous Day outside, by the way. Great. To be here on the West Coast with Sam Warner right now is the vice president of offering management of storage at IBM. And I'm joined by Stew Minimum as well. Good to see you still haven't singing along. >> Great to see you, John. And yeah, you know, beautiful day outside. If we're in Vegas, I'm sure will be sunny, but we sure wouldn't be >> outside. No, no, I love it Here. Thanks for joining us. Glad to have you here on the Cube way. We're kind of joking. Before we came out about how you said, you know, I'm in the storage, but you have to be very careful about how you described at the some people because they want to get a riddle in unit from you. That's right away. So? So we know. What storage? What side of that? L'm what we're talking about here. Let's just talk about the big picture right now that just in terms of of what's going on in terms of stories that some of the I guess larger concerns that you have these days is people go multi cloud in hybrid cloud. Um, it presents a whole different array of challenges for you and your team. I would assume >> that's right. You know, you often hear people talking about modernizing their applications for the cloud world, and they're focused on how do they rebuild and re factor their applications for future? The other thing they really need to think about is how do they modernize their data protection? You have to think about how you're gonna manage that data in a multi cloud world. Is your data protected on premises and in the cloud, you have to think about new threats that are emerging. Organized crime is behind a lot of these data breaches, you see, and the malware attacks. You have to think about that and then you always hear about A. I am trying to unlock all of the data to get valuable insights for an organization. How can you leverage that data that in the past has just been a back up there to protect you. Now how can you use it for valuable sites for your business? So modernizing data protection that's spent a lot of time talking about these days. >> Sam VM World has always been a great ecosystem show, and over the years, certain things that have been front and center. I remember when the launch NSX networking was there many years, people called the storage world. I walked through the expo floor and you could almost say, You know, this is data protection world. I saw big booths. I see lots of pomp and circumstance. You know, big companies like IBM. Of course, I have a strong presence there, and a whole lot of startups maybe give >> us a >> little context. Is toe kind of why there's so much on data protection? Because it's not like this is a new thing, but, you know, definitely is, You know, more hot in buzzy er than that has been in a long time. >> It's a really interesting observation. Actually, we used to call this the biggest storage show there was. And now when I walked in today to the Expo floor, it was every data protection company just big and bright. And And I'll tell you, it's all the things that I mentioned, right? The whole everybody has to back up their data. If something happens, you need to be able to recover, so it's really important. And and the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, always talks about data as the next gold. The best resource, right? If you can unlock that data, you get a competitive advantage, so obviously have to protect it. I think that there's this big revolution going on in data protection because of all the additional value could get out of that data. The one thing I always have to remind clients. You'll see a lot of startups you walk out on the expo floor. But it's not just your new applications that need to be backed up. It's your entire enterprise. That data. When you think about a I, it's about harvesting value from all those legacy applications as well. So I think you gotta have a full suite of data protection. >> You hit on something that I'm sure your colleagues seem throughout the industry. All they also deal with you talk about cyber resiliency and making sure that you have the best protections against what are becoming increasingly Mork complex, sophisticated intrusions. Eso How has that evolved, say, over the last 345 years to where we are now in terms of putting up that safeguard against you know, the level on actors and knowing that the stakes are that much higher now than they might have been in the past. >> You know, an IBM has always been a leader in this space. When you think about the strongest protection against cyberattacks, it's tape you can actually air gap your data, you move it off line completely. You put it on tape in the native safe. By the way, our tape business is growing like crazy because as data grows, you need somewhere to put it in. The best economics in the most safe place to store it is actually on tape. But what you see happening, the change is coming is really about adding Maur intelligence in the software because you need a certain amount of your data online. So how do you keep that data online and keep it safe? You have to be able to detect attacks, and you have to have software in your system that can actually protect the data in real time. So I think you're seeing a lot more intelligence. We'd call it a I driven data protection, And that's some of stuff we're working on our data protection portfolio. >> Sam. Wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit because, you know, when we look at, you know, machine learning or a eye out there. You know, we've talked about intelligence and automation in the storage world for decades, but data is very much dispersed, and and I think part of it is people alone could not manage this environment that, you know, it's no longer something. I could just turn a key, unlock it and keep it in there. It's now, as you said, it's multi cloud. I've got sass applications and everywhere. So you know, where is that a I going to help in? What is IBM, you know, got available today to help >> write great great questions. So, first of all, the great thing about focusing on the data protection part of it is it is part of your whole data strategy. It needs to be, at least if it's not you have a problem, you're exposed with spectrum. Protect will actually show you which of your data is exposed and not being protected. Giving a whole list view of your environment. For example, in a V M where environment will show you all of your v EMS and show you which ones aren't protected. So, you know, and then what we do give me a real world. Examples. Since we understand what's happening at the data in real time, if we see something like the D duplication rate change, so you typically get a certain amount of data de duplicated and all this on that rate changes, something might be going on. So we'll notify the administrator. Let's say that all the sudden lots of data starts changing outside, the normal pattern will alerted Administrator and let them know that there might be some bad actors. So there's the types of things we can see in real time. And since we're part of all of the data because you have to back up your data, we have holistic view of the environment. >> Sam IBM has a long, long partnership with VM, where one of the things that really struck me leading up to the show and even in the keynote is the VM isn't necessarily what we're talking about anymore. I joked Veum, where's actually done some advertising at some shows where they put, like, container where and you look at all the acquisitions they've done put things together. You talked about cloud native pieces. So you know, where's the relationship that IBM has with the, um where where is that going? And how are you ready for that containerized micro service, multi cloud world that we're all heading towards? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And by the way, if you talk to customers, I would guess 80% plus of them will tell you that their biggest concern for their container environment is how to do data protection. And it's certainly immature compared to, ah, the ecosystems that have built up around VM where AH, however, there's a lot of focus on it were focusing on an IBM research is focusing on it, and we're building drivers that go underneath that actually do that data protection, and we'll be coming out with application aware data protection for containers over the next quarter in years to come. That's one of our big focus areas. Ah, and it has to be for both on premises on your private cloud. Also going into the public cloud. As you said, you need one holistic way of doing that. Pratt detection across >> both. How's the nature of of attacks changed in terms of of the intrusions that you're detecting now? How is that morphed as technology's advanced that I'm sure the the offense, if you will, has advanced a swell >> significantly? I mean, they become significantly more sophisticated, of course, on you see them everywhere and in fact, some of the more recent ones. I'm not going to name any names or even happening in the cloud, right? So you failed to properly deploy an application in the cloud. It's not the clouds fault, necessarily. It's how it's being used and you leave the back door open. And there's armies of people that are being paid a lot of money to find those, uh, those gaps and go after them. So it's near impossible to close all those gaps. So you need intelligence running underneath that can detect Aah these intrusions without proper awareness and protection. You know, some of these things can go six months to a year without being detected. So you gotta you gotta be more on top of the thing. >> And how exhausting is that? I mean, just in terms of of sheer, you know, brain power, if you will. But it's just the fact that you play defense all the time. You don't get the throat, the long ball yourself, right? You have to be on the safe guard. You have to be on the defensive. And I'm sure you'd like to be on the other side of the defense, everyone. So all right. A little offense, but you can't s o. How literally. How tiring is that to be on the defensive like that? >> When you talk to a C suite person in the company, this is what's keeping them up at night. They don't want to be the next one on the news, and it is daunting. Do I have an application out there with some kind of exposure? And they come to IBM because we have the experience dealing with it. We've got decades of experience dealing with security and, uh, and we have led the way, and a lot of the things you can do around data breaches and protecting your data. So So they come to us is ah, reliable partner that has the experience. There's a lot of startups out there that are entering the space. I don't think that they bring the same level of experience that we have to be able to detect and respond to those problems. >> Yeah. So, Sam, we talked about the show floor. There's a lot going on there. What? Your team doing a lot of the show. Maybe give us a little sneak peek. For those people that aren't here at the show is toe. You know what they're missing. If they if they didn't come to check out all that IBM is doing >> what we're doing so much exciting stuff. We've got a heavy focus on Sybers and leases we talked about in data protection. Ah, we're also doing a lot around cognitive and in a I and helping customers accelerate >> Ah ah, >> the insights that could get we helped create an end in data pipeline for your data. One of the big challenges for a I is bringing the data together a lot of copying of data and it slows it down. It also prevents. Ah, an enterprise from deploying, uh, the actual models in into production so they can gain insights in no time. We actually help streamline that data pipeline. Of course, we're doing a lot around Hybrid multi cloud is a company. Ah, the acquisition we recently made of Red out. We're bringing those pieces together and providing customers with the real way to manage there are modernizing manage their applications in a hybrid, multi cloud >> world data management. You know, that's a whole different slices it not that that people might be very focused in some respects on security and protection, but now you gotta manage all that stuff too. In a multi cloud environment and a hybrid environment, whole new levels of complexities, >> right? And in containers really start providing you with the ability to modernize your application deployed on premises or give you a consistent way to deploy it on the cloud. One of the things we do in our software defined storage portfolio is provide you one common management data plane that extends from on premises to the cloud. So you can really create data portability for your application as you modernize it, >> Sam. I mean, one of things I heard very loud and clear for the M. Where is, you know, we're gonna give you everything from where you are today to where you want to go. I think IBM got a little bit of legacy experience with doing those kind of solutions. >> That's right, Andi. We've been doing it for quite some time, and that's a big focus area for ours. I was joking that in the keynote this morning, a lot of it sounded very familiar to me. It's things that we've been talking about for a while. I'm excited about where the m where is going. I think it's very consistent with our strategy as a company, as an IBM company. >> Well, thanks for the time. Glad to have you here on the Cube. Good luck with the move to North Carolina guy. New York guy headed to Raleigh. So, uh, uh, you love it. The great city. Sam Warner joining us here on the Q back with more live from San Francisco. Right after this time out

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, we're here at Moscone North. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day four of our wall to wall coverage of IBM the Think. The second annual IBM Think, first year at Moscone. Dave Vellante here with Stu Miniman. Eric Herzog is here, he's the CMO of IBM Storage and Sam Werner is the VP of Offering Management for Storage Software at IBM. Guys welcome back to theCUBE. Always good to see ya both. >> Thanks >> Thank you. >> So we were joking yesterday and today, of course multi cloud, the clouds opened, it's been raining, it's been sunny today, so multi cloud is all the rage. Evidently you guys have done some work in multi cloud. Some research that you can share with us. >> Yeah, so couple things. First of all, the storage vision in multi cloud at IBM for years. We work with all the cloud providers including IBM cloud, but we work with Amazon and we work with Azure, we work with Google cloud and in fact our Spectrum Protect, modern data protection product, has about 350 small and medium cloud providers across the world that use it for the engine for their back up as a service. So we've been doing that for a long time, but I think what you're getting is, what we found in a survey multi cloud and I actually had had a panel yesterday and all three of my panelists, including Aetna, use a minimum of five different public cloud providers. So what we're seeing is hybrid is a subset of that, right? On and off, but even if someone is saying, I'm using cloud providers, they're using between five and 10, not counting software as a service because many of the people in the survey didn't realize software as a service is theoretically a type of cloud deployment, right? >> So that's obviously not just the big three or the big five, we're talking about a lot of small guys. Some of the guys maybe you could have used in your Spectrum Protect for back up, local cloud providers, right? And then add sas to that, you could probably double or triple it, right? >> Right, well we've have been very successful with sas providers so for example, one of people on the panel, a company called Follett, they're a privately held, in the mid close to a billion dollars, they provide services to universities and school districts and they have a software package for universities for the bookstores to manage the textbooks and another software as a service for school districts across the United States. They have 1,500 and it's all software service. No on prem licensing and that's an example. That's in my mind, that's a cloud deployment, right? >> Ginni talked Tuesday about chapter two how chapter one was kind of, I call it commodity cloud, but you know, apps that are customer facing, chapter two, a lot of chapter two anyways, is going to be about hybrid and multi cloud. I feel like to date it's largely been, not necessarily a purposeful strategy to go multi cloud, it's just we're multi vendor. Do you see customers actually starting to think about a multi cloud strategy? If so, what's behind that and then more specifically, what are you guys doing from a software stand point to support that? >> Yeah, so in the storage space where we are, we find customers are now trying to come up with a data management strategy in a multi cloud model, especially as they want to bring all their data together to come up with insights. So as they start wanting to build an AI strategy and extend what they're doing with analytics and try to figure out how to get value out of the data they're building a model that's able to consolidate the data, allow them to ingest it and then actually build out AI models that can gain insights from it. So for our software portfolio, we're working with the different types of service providers. We're working closely with all the big cloud providers and getting our software out there and giving our customers flexible ways to move and manage their data between the clouds and also have clear visibility into all the data so they can bring it together. >> You know, I wonder sort of what the catalyst is there? I wrote an article that's going up on SiliconANGLE later and I talked about how the first phase was kind of tire kicking of cloud and then when the down turn hit, people went from capex to opex. It was sort of a CFO mandate and then coming out of the down turn, the lines of business were like, whoa agility, I love this. So shadow IT and then IT sort of bought in and said, "we got to clean up this mess." and that seems to be why, at least one catalyst, for companies saying, "hey, we want a single data management strategy." Are you seeing that or is there more to it? >> Well I think first of all, we're absolutely seeing it and there's a lot of drivers behind it There's absolutely IT realizing they need to get control over this again. >> Governance, compliance, security, edix >> And think about all the new regulations. GDPR's had a huge impact. All a sudden, these IT organizations need to really track the data and be able to take action on it and now you have all these new roles in organizations, like data scientists who want to get their hands on data. How do you make sure that you have governance models around that data to ensure you're not handing them things like pi? So they realized very quickly that they need to have much better control. The other thing you've seen is, the rise of the vulnerabilities. You see much more public attacks on data. You've seen C level executives lose their jobs over this. So there's a lot more stress about how we're keeping all this data safe. >> You're right. Boards are gettin' flipped and it's a big, big risk these days >> Well the other thing you're seeing is legal issues. Canada, the data has to stay in Canada. So if you're multi national and you're a Japanese company, all your Canadian offices, the data has to be some cloud of ours got an office in Canada. So if you're a Japanese headquarter company, using NTT cloud, then you got to use IBM or Amazon or Azure, 'cause you have to have a data center inside the country just to have the cloud data. You also have shier maturity in the market. I would argue, the cloud used to be called the web and before it was the web, it was called the internet and so now that you're doing that, what happens in the bigger companies, procurement is involved, just the way they've been involved in storage servers and networking for a long time. Great you're using CISCO for the network. You did get a quote from HP or using IBM storage, but make sure you get at least one other quote so as that influences aside from definitely getting the control is when procurement get involved, everything goes out for RFP or RFQ or at ten dure, as they say in Europe and you have to have multiple vendors and you sometimes may end up for purely, we need the way to club 'em on price so we need IBM cloud and Microsoft so we can keep 'em honest. So when everyone rushed the cloud, they didn't necessarily do that, but now that it's maturing >> Yeah, it's a sign of maturity. >> It's a sign of maturity that people want to control pricing. >> Alright, so one of the other big themes we've been talking a lot about this week is AI. So Eric talks about, when we roll back the clock, I think back to the storage world, we've been talking about intelligence in storage for longer than my career. So Sam, maybe you can tell us what's different about AI in storage than the intelligence we've been talking and what's the latest about how AI fits into the portfolio? >> Yeah, that's a great question and actually a lot of times we talk about AI and how storage is really important to make the data available for AI, but we're also embedding AI in our storage products. If you think about it, if you have a problem with your storage product, you don't just take down one application. You can take down an entire company, so you've got to make sure your storage is really resilient. So we're building AI in that can actually predict failures before they happen so that our storage never takes any outages or has any down time. We can also predict by looking at behavior out in the network, we can predict or identify issues that a host might be causing on the network and proactively tell a customer before they get the call that the applications are slowing down and we can point out exactly which host is causing the problem. So we're actually proactively finding problems out on the storage network before they become an issue. >> Yeah and Eric, what is it about the storage portfolio that IBM has that makes it a good solution for customers that are deploying AI as an application in use cases? >> Yeah so we look at all, so one is AI, in the box if you will, in the array and we've done a ton of work there, but the other is as the underlying foundation for AI workloads and applications so a couple things. Clearly, AI often is performance dependent and we're focused on all flash. Second thing as Sam already put it out, resilience and availability. If you're going to use AI in an automotive factory to control the supply chain and to control the actual factory floor, you can't have it go down because they could be out tens of millions, hundreds of millions of year just for that day of building Mercedes or Toyotas or whatever they're building if you have an automated factory. The other areas we've created what we call, the data pipeline and it involves three, four members of our storage software family. Our Spectrum Scale, a highly parallel file system that allows incredible performance for AI. Our Spectrum Discover which allows you to use meta data which is information about the data to more accurately plan and the AI software from any vendor can use an API and go in and see this meta data information to make the AI software more efficient that they would use. Our IBM Cloud Object Storage and our Spectrum Archive, you have to archive the data, but easily bring it back because AI is like a human. We are, smart humans are learning non-stop, whether you're five, whether you're 25, or whether you're 75, you're always learning. You read the newspaper, you see of course theCUBE and you learn new things, but you're always comparing that to what you used to know. Are the Russians our friends or our enemies? It depends on your point in time. Do we love what's going on in Germany? It depends on your point in time. In 1944, I'd say probably not. Today you'd say, what a great Democratic country, but you have to learn and so this data pipeline, this loop, our software is on our storage arrays and allows it to be used. We'll even sell the software without our storage arrays for use on any AI server platform, so that softwares really the huge differentiator for us. >> So can you, as a follow up to that, can you address the programmability of your portfolio? Whether it's through software or maybe the infrastructure as well. Infrastructure, I'm thinking infrastructure's code. You mentioned you know API's. You mentioned the ability to go into like Spectrum Discover for example, access meta data. How programmable is your infrastructure and how are you enabling that? >> I mean across our entire portfolio, we build restful API's to make our infrastructure completely extensible. We find that more and more enterprises are looking to automate the deployment of the infrastructure and so we provide API's for programming and deploying that. We're also moving towards containerizing most of our storage products so that as enterprises move towards cubernetes type clusters, we work with both Red Hat and with our own ICP and as customers move towards those deployment models and automate the deployment of their clusters, we're making all of our storage's available to be deployed within those environments. >> So do you see an evolution of the role of a storage admin, from one that's sort of provisioning luns to one that's actually becoming a coder, maybe learning Python, learning how to interact through API's, maybe even at some point developing applications for automation? Is that happening? >> I think there's absolutely a shift in the skills. I think you've got skills going in two directions. One, in the way of somebody else to administer hardware and replace parts as they fail. So you have lower skilled jobs on that side and then I believe that yes, people who are managing the infrastructure have to move up and move towards coding and automating the infrastructure. As the amount of data grows, it becomes too difficult to manage it in the old manual ways of doing it. You need automation and intelligence in the storage infrastructure that can identify problems and readjust. For example, in our storage infrastructure, we have automated data placement that puts it on the correct tier. That use to be something a storage administrator had to do manually and figure out how to place data. Now the storage can do it themselves, so now they need to move up into the automation stack. >> Yeah, so we've been talking about automation and storage also for a lot of years. Eric, how are enterprises getting over that fear that either I'm going to lose my job or you know, this is my business we're talking about here. How do I let go and trust? I love, I saw downstairs, there was a in the automation booth for IBM, it was free the humans, so we understand that we need to go there. We can't not put automation with the scale and how things are moving, but what's the reality out in the field? >> So I think that the big difference is and this is going to sound funny, but the economic down turn of seven, eight and nine, when downturn hit and certainly was all over the IT press, layoff, layoff, layoff, layoff, layoffs, so we also know that storage is growing exponentially, so for example, if I'm Fortune 500 company x and I had 100 people doing storage across the planet. If I laid off 50 of them and now I'm recovered. I'm making tons of money, my IT budget is back up. I didn't go to the CIO and say, you can hire the 50 storage people back. You can hire 50 people back, but no more than five or six can be storage people. Everything else has to be dev ops or something else. So what that means is, they are managing an un-Godly amounts of more storage every year with essentially the same people they had in 2008 or maybe a tiny bit more. So what matters is, you don't manage a peta bite or in the old days, half a peta bite. Now, one storage admin or back up admin or anyone in that space, they want you to manage 20 peta bites and if you don't have automation, that will never happen. >> Stu and I were interviewing Steven Hill from KPMG yesterday and he was talking about the macro numbers show we're not (stutters) as globally and even in the US, we're not seeing productivity gains. I'm saying yeah, you're not looking at the storage business you know, right? Because if you look at anybody who's running storage, they're doing way more with much less, to your point. >> Which is why, so for example when Sam talked about our easy tier, we can tier, not only as AI base. So in the old days, when you guys weren't even born yet, when I was doing it. >> Well I don't know about that >> What was it? It was move the data after 90, so first it was manual movement, then it was set up something, a policy. Remember policy automation was the big deal 10 years ago? Automatically move the data when its 90, 60, or 30 days old. AI based, what we have an easy tier, automatically will determine what tier it should go on, whether when the data's hot or when the data's cold and on top of that, because we can tier over 440 arrays that are not IBM logo'd, multi vendor tiering, we can tier from our box to an EMC box. So if you have a flash array, you've got an old or all hard drive that you've moved into your back up in archive tier, we can automatically tier to that. We can tier from the EMC array out to the Cloud, but it's all done automatically. The admin doesn't do anything, it just says source and target and the AI does all the work. That's how you get the productivity that you're talking about, that you need in storage and back ups even worse because you got to keep everything now, which Sam mentioned GDPR, all these new regulations and the Federal Government its like keep the data forever. >> But in that case, the machine can determine whether or not it's okay to put it in the Cloud, if it's in Canada or Germany or wherever, the machine can adjudicate and make those decisions. >> And that's what the AI, so in that case you're using AI inside of the storage system versus what we talked about with our other software that makes our storage systems a great platform for other AI workloads that are not, if you will, AI for storage. AI for everything else, cars or hospitals or resume analysis. That's what the platform can, but we put all this AI inside of the system 'cause there aren't that big, giant, global, Fortune 500 has 55 storage admins and in 2007 or eight, they had 100, but they've quintupled the amount of storage easily if not 10x'd it, so who's going to manage that? Automation. >> Guys, good discussion. Not everyday, boring, old storage. It's talking about intelligence, real intelligence this time. Eric, Sam, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you guys again. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest shortly, right after this break. John Furrier is also here. IBM Think, Day four, you're watching theCUBE. Be right back. (tech music)

>> Narrator: From Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think, everybody. My name's Dave Vallante, I'm here with Peter Burris. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our day three. We're wrapping up wall to wall coverage of IBM's inaugural Think Conference. Thirty or forty thousand people, too many people to count, I've been joking all week. Sam Werner is here, he's the VP of Offering Management for Software Defined Storage, Sam, good to see you again. And Steve Kenniston is joining him otherwise known as the storage alchemist. Steven, great to see you again. >> Steven: Thanks, Dave. >> Dave: Alright, Sam. Let's get right into it. >> Sam: Alright. >> Dave: What is the state of data protection today and what's IBM's point of view? >> Sam: Well, I think anybody who's been following the conference and saw Jenny's key note, which was fantastic, I think you walked away knowing how important data is in the future, right? The way you get a competitive edge is to unlock insights from data. So if data's so important you got to be able to protect that data, but you're forced to protect all this data. It's very expensive to back up all this data. You have to do it. You got to keep it safe. How can you actually use that back-up data to, you know, perform analytics and gain some insights of that data that's sitting still behind the scenes. So that's what it's really all about. It's about making sure your data's safe, you're not going to lose it, that big big competitive advantage you have and that data, this is the year of the incumbent because the incumbent can start unlocking valuable data, so - >> Dave: So, Steve, we've talked about this many times. We've talked about the state of data protection, the challenges of sort of bolting on data protection as an afterthought. The sort of one size fits all problem, where you're either under protected or spending too much and being over protected, so have we solved that problem? You know, what is next generation data protection? What does it look like? >> [Steve} Yeah, I think that's a great Question, Dave. I think what you end up seeing a lot of... (audio cuts out) We talk at IBM about the modernize and transform, a lot. Right? And what I've started to try to do is boil it down almost at a product level. WhY - or at least an industry level - why modernize your data protection environment, right? Well if you look at a lot of the new technologies that are out there, costs have come way down, right? Performance is way up. And by performance around data protection we talk RPO's and RTO's. Management has become a lot simpler, a lot of design thinking put in the interfaces, making the Op Ec's job a lot easier around protecting information. A lot of the newer technologies are connected to the cloud, right? A lot simpler. And then you also have the ability to do what Sam just mentioned, which is unlock, now unlock that business value, right? How do I take the data that I'm protecting, and we talk a lot about data reuse and how do I use that data for multiple business purposes. And kind of unhinge the IT organization from being the people that stumble in trying to provide that data out there to the line of business but actually automate that a little bit more with some of the new solutions. So, that's what it means to me for a next generation protection environment. >> Dave: So it used to be this sort of, okay, I got an application, I got to install it on a server - we were talking about this earlier - get a database, put some middleware on - uh! Oh, yeah! I got to back it up. And then you had sort of these silos emerge. Virtualization came in, that obviously change the whole back up paradigm. Now you've got the cloud. What do you guys, what's your point of view on Cloud, everybody's going after this multi-cloud thing, protecting SAS data on prem, hybrid, off-prem, what are you guys doing there? >> Sam: So, uh, and I believe you spoke to Ed Walsh earlier this we very much believe in the multi-cloud strategy. We are very excited on Monday to go live with a Spectrum Protect Plus on IBM's cloud, so it's now available to back up workloads on IBM Cloud. And what's even more exciting about it is if you're running Spectrum Protect Plus on premises, you can actually replicate that data to the version running in the IBM cloud. So now you have the ability not only to back up your data to IBM cloud, back up your data IN IBM cloud where you're running applications there, but also be able to migrate work loads back and forth using this capability. And our plan is to continue to expand that to other clouds following our multi-cloud strategy. >> Dave: What's the plus? >> Sam: Laughs >> Dave: Why the plus? >> Kevin: That's the magic thing, they can't tell you. >> Group: (laughing) >> Dave: It's like AI, it's a black box. >> Sam: Well, I will answer that question seriously, though. IBM's been a leader in data protection for many years. We've been in the Gardeners Leaders Quadrant for 11 years straight with Spectrum Protect, and Spectrum Protect Plus is and extension of that, bringing this new modern approach to back up so it extends the value of our core capability, which you know, enterprises all over the world are using today to keep their data safe. So it's what we do so well, plus more! (laughing) >> Dave: Plus more! - [Sam] Plus more. >> Dave: So, Steve, I wonder if you could talk about the heat in the data protection space, we were at VM World last year, I mean, it was, that was all the buzz. I mean, it was probably the most trafficked booth area, you see tons of VC money that have poured in several years ago that's starting to take shape. It seems like some of these upstarts are taking share, growing, you know, a lot of money in, big valuations, um, what are your thoughts on What's that trend? What's happening there? How do you guys compete with these upstarts? >> Steve: Yeah, so I think that is another really good question. So I think even Ed talks a little bit about a third of the technology money in 2017 went to data protection, so there's a lot of money being poured in. There's a lot of interest, a lot of renewed interest in it. I think what you're seeing, because it cut - it's now from that next generation topic we just talked about, it's now evolving. And that evolution is it's not, it's no longer just about back up. It's about data reuse, data access, and the ability to extract value from that data. Now all of a sudden, if you're doing data protection right, you're backing up a hundred percent of your data. So somewhere in the repository, all my data is sitting. Now, what are the tools I can use to extract the value of that data. So there used to be a lot of different point products, and now what folks are saying is, well now, look, I'm already backing it up and putting it in this data silo, so to speak. How do I get the value out of it? And so, what we've done with Plus, and why we've kind of leap frogged ourselves here with - from going from Protect to Protect Plus, is to be able to now take that repository - what we're seeing from customers is there's a definitely a need for back up, but now we're seeing customers lead with this operational recovery. I want operational recovery and I want data access. So now, what Spectrum Protect Plus does is provides that access. We can do automation, we can provide self service, it's all rest API driven, and then what we still do is we can off load that data to Spectrum Protect, our great product, and then what ends up happening is the long term retention capabilities about corporate compliance or corporate governance, I have that, I'm protecting my business, I feel safe, but now I'm actually getting a lot more value out of that silo of data now. >> Peter: Well, one of the challenges, especially as we start moving into an AI analytics world, is that it's becoming increasingly clear that backing up the data, a hundred percent of the data, may not be capturing all of the value because we're increasingly creating new models, new relationships amongst data that aren't necessarily defined by an application. They're transient, then temporal, they're, they come up they come down, how does a protection plane handle, not only, you know, the data that's known, from sources that are known, but also identifying patterns of how data relationships are being created, staging it to the appropriate place, it seems as though this is going to become an increasingly important feature of any protection scheme? >> Steve: I think, I think a lot - you bring up a good topic here - I think a lot of the new protection solutions that are all rest API driven now have the capability to actually reach out to these other API's, and of course we have our whole Watson platform, our analytics platform that can now analyze that information, but the core part, and the reason why I think - back to your previous question about this investment in some of these newer technologies, the legacy technologies didn't have the metadata plane, for example, the catalog. Of course you had a back up catalog , but did you have an intelligent back up catalog. With the Spectrum Protect Plus catalog, we now have all of this metadata information about the data that you're backing up. Now if I create a snapshot, or reuse situation where to your point being, I want to spin something back up, that catalog keeps track of it now. We have full knowledge of what's going. You might not have chosen to again back that new snap up, but we know it's out there. Now we can understand how people are using the data, what are they using the data for, what is the longevity of how we need to keep that data? Now all of a sudden there's a lot more intelligence in the back up and again to your earlier question, I think that's why there's this renewed interest in kind of the evolution. >> Dave: Well, they say at this point you really can't do that multi-cloud without that capability. I wanted to ask you about something else, because you basically put forth this scenario or premise that it's not just about back up, it's not just about insurance, my words, there's other value that you could extract. Um, I want to bring up ransomware. Everybody talks about air gaps - David Foyer brings that up a lot and then I watch, like certain shows like, I don't know if you saw the Zero Days documentary where they said, you know, we laugh at air gaps, like, oh! Really? Yeah, we get through air gaps, no problem. You know, I'm sure they put physical humans in and they're going to infect. So, so there's - the point I'm getting to is there's other ways to protect against ransomware, and part of that is analytics around the data and all the data's - in theory anyway - in the backup store. So, what's going on with ransomware, how are you guys approaching that problem, where do analytics fit? You know, a big chewy question, but, have at it. >> Sam: Yeah, no I'm actually very glad you asked that question. We just actually released a new version of our core Spectrum Protect product and we actually introduced ransomware detection. So if you think about it, we bring in all of your data constantly, we do change block updates, so every time you change files it updates our database, and we can actually detect things that have changed in the pattern. So for example, if you're D-Dup rate starts going down, we can't D-Dup data that's encrypted. So if all of a sudden the rate of D-Duplication starts going down that would indicate the data's starting to be encrypted, and we'll actually alert the user that something's happening. Another example would be, all the sudden a significant amount of changes start happening to a data set, much higher than the normal rate of change, we will alert a user. It doesn't have to be ransomware, it could be ransomware. It could be some other kind of malicious activity, it could be an employee doing something they shouldn't be - accessing data that's not supposed to be accessed. So we'll alert the users. So this kind of intelligence, uh, you know is what we'll continue to try to build in. IBM's the leader in analytics, and we're bringing those skills and applying it to all of our different software. >> Dave: Oh, okay. You're inspecting that corpus of backup data, looking for anomalus behavior, you're say you're bringing in IBM analytics and also presumably some security capabilities from IBM, is that right? >> Sam: That's right. Absolutely. We work very closely with our security team to ensure that all the solutions we provide tie in very well with the rest of our capabilities at IBM. One other thing though, I'll mention is our cloud object storage, getting a little bit away from our backup software for a second, but object storage is used often - >> Kevin: But it's exciting! >> Sam: It is exciting! It's one of my favorite parts of the portfolio. It's a place where a lot of people are storing backup and archive data and we recently introduced worm capability, which mean Write Once Read Many. So once it's been written it can't be changed. It's usually used for compliance purposes but it's also being used as an air gap capability. If the data can't be changed, then essentially it can't be you know encrypted or attacked by ransomware. And we have certification on this as well, so we're SEC compliant, we can be used in regulated industries, so as we're able to in our data protection software off load data into a object store, which we have the capability, you can actually give it this worm protection, so that you know your backup data is always safe and can always be recovered. We can still do this live detection, and we can also ensure your backup is safe. >> Dave: That's great. I'm glad to hear that, cause I feel like in the old days, that I asked you that question about ransomware, and well, we're working on that - and two years later you've come up with a solution. What's the vibe inside of IBM in the storage group? I mean it seems like there's this renewed energy, obviously growth helps, it's like winning, you know, brings in the fans, but, what's your take Steve? And I'll close with Sam. >> Steve: I would almost want to ask you the same question. You've been interviewing a lot of the folks from the storage division that have come up here today and talked to you. I mean you must hear the enthusiasm and the excitement. Right? >> Dave: Yeah, definitely. People are pumped up. >> Steve: And I've rejoined IBM, Sam has rejoined IBM, right? And I think what we're finding inside is there used to be a lot of this, eh yeah, we'll eventually get there. In other words, it's like you said, next year, next year. Next, next quarter. Next third quarter, right? And now its, how do we get it done? People are excited, they want to, they see all the changes going on, we've done a lot to - I don't want to say sort out the portfolio, I think the portfolio's always been good - but now there's like a clean crisp clear story around the portfolio, how they fit together, why they're supposed to - and people are rallying behind that. And we're seeing customer - we're voted by IDCE, number one in the storage software business this year. I think people are really getting behind, you want to work for a winning team, and we're winning and people are getting excited about it. >> Dave: Yeah, I think there's a sense of urgency, a little startup mojo, it's back. So, love that, but Sam I'll give you the last word, before we wrap. Just on Think? Just on the Market? >> Sam: I got to tell you, Think has been crazy. It's been a lot of fun so far. I got to tell you, I have never seen so much excitement around our storage portfolio from customers. These were the easiest customer discussions I've ever had at one of these conferences, so they're really excited about what they're doing and they're excited about the direction we're moving in. So, yeah. >> Dave: Guy, awesome seeing you. Thanks for coming back on The Cube, both of you, and, uh, really a pleasure. Alright. Thank you for watching. Uh, this is a wrap from IBM Think 2018. Guys, thanks for helping us close that up. Peter, thank you for helping - >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Dave: me co-host this week. John Furie was unbelievable with the pop up cube, really phenomenal job, John and the crew. Guys, great great job. Really appreciate you guys coming in from wherever you were Puerto Rico or the Bahamas, I can't keep track of you anymore. Go to siliconangle.com, check out all the news. TheCube.net is where all these videos will be and wikibon.com for all the research, which Peter's group has been doing great work there. We're out! We'll see you next time. (lively tech music)

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. Day 2, lots of stuff going on. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed colleague Dave Vellante. >> Hey hey. >> Hey hey! I'm excited to welcome an old friend, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM, as well as Sam Warner offering management IBM software-defined storage. Welcome, guys! >> Well thanks, we always love to be on The Cube, always. >> Dave: Love the shirt. >> Thank you, I'm glad I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt again. >> Dave: Thank you for making sure you wore that, yeah. >> I think it's like my 25th time on The Cube with a Hawaiian shirt. >> Lisa: Oh you're like the Alec Baldwin of The Cube. (laughs) >> Lisa: Alright guys, so here we are- >> Dave: If we have the record, that is the same shirt you wore last year, isn't it? >> Yes, but I did clean it, Dave. (laughs) >> He wears it once a year. >> I've never had to ask anyone about dry cleaning on The Cube but there's a first time for everything. Alright guys, so here we are at VMworld. What's new with IBM and VMware? Kind of talk to us, Eric, from a marketing perspective. What's going on there? >> Sure, well the big thing is IBM and VMware have a very strong alliance across our entire portfolio. The Cloud Division has a big agreement with VMware that was announced with Pat Gelsinger and the head of the division last year, the Storage Division has all kinds of heavy duty integration with our VersaStack product, as well as in all of our all-flash arrays, and then Sam's team brought out a new backup and recovery product, Spectrum Tech Plus, which is optimized for VMware and hypervisor and cloud environments. >> Excellent. And that's one of the things actually thematically that we heard yesterday is that, you know, backup is hot. So tell us a little bit more about that hotness and how you guys are working with VMware to dial that- >> Dial that heat. >> Yeah, dial that heat up. >> Sam: Well it's actually, it's more than backup, right, it's about data availability, and ensuring your data's safe, data's the bloodline of your company now, right? Everything's moving toward cognitive and AI, you can't do that without data. Most of your data's trapped as a backup. And what we're trying to do now is make it really easy for people to get at that data and use it for other purposes. So first of all, making sure you're safe from things like ransomware, but also making sure you can get some value out of that data. Make it very easy to recover that data. >> So, lots of topics that we could cover there, I wonder, did you have one more and I want to jump in. >> I did. Just, Eric from a, as the CMO, from a messaging perspective now we've heard backup is hot, you've just kind of articulated that a little bit more, same with storage. From a conversation perspective, and you talked about the importance of data, Michael Dell talked about that this morning, that the data conversation is a CEO agenda. How is the conversation changing, and the position of IBM changing when you guys are talking to customers that, is backup, is storage a conversation around data that you're having with the C-suite of your customers? >> So, a couple things, and I've done storage for 32 years. EMC, IBM twice, seven startups, and the C-suite hates storage, including the CIO, but they do love their data. So they all know they need storage but when you talk about data, data availability, the resiliency of the data, the data always needs to be there, you don't even use things like data resiliency 'cause the CEO doesn't know what that is, so you need to say, so how'd you like it if you were in Star Trek, and Bones wanded you with a new healthcare wand, and it came back with no answer? (laughs) That's 'cause your storage is not resilient and it's not fast enough. So the data has to be available and it has to be fast. So we're moving to this world where everything is AI and everything is immediate. If your storage goes down and you're in dark trading, you just lost ten million bucks per second. So, but it's all about the data. So basically what we're doing is getting out of the storage conversation and talking about the data conversation. How data is used to optimize their business, and then you weave the storage in underneath as, well as you know if you've got a bad foundation to your building and the earthquake hits, boom. You building falls down. So data is that building, and storage is the foundation on which your data rests. >> I love this conversation, and I think you're right on. The C-suite, they hate storage because it's to them, it's just an expense, but I want to pick up on something that was one of my favorite interviews thus far this year. Believe it or not, it was the interview that you and Burris and Ed Walsh did in our studio in Palo Alto. And I wonder if you could add some color, and then Sam I want you to chime in. What I loved about that interview is you guys talked about digital business and digital business being all about data and how you leverage data. And you said something there, and I want to unpack it a little bit. Storage should not be just a dumb target that is unintelligent. it should be an active element of your data and digital strategy. >> Eric: Right. >> So what did you mean by that and how does IBM make it, storage, an active element of a data strategy? >> So the first thing you want to do is you want to make it all automated. You want to make it transparent to the user. So, whether it's in the healthcare space, I don't care what your business, Herzog's bar and grill? My storage is transparent. Okay I'm running a bar and grill, I don't have time to fool around with the storage. I need it automated, I need it fast, I need to see who's drinking what, how many cigars I can sell, I don't have time to fart around. Right? Storage can make that happen. So you've got certain CPU that's done on the server level or in the virtual machines, and then you've got to have storage that's intelligent. So, we're working on some products we're not ready to announce yet, but we've got some products that have built-in AI into the storage themselves. So things like, you can search in the storage instead of search on the server. How do like, be able to look at metadata and have the storage actually fetch the data not the server fetch the data, so the server's crunching, crunching, crunching, and the storage is smart enough to go grab the data on its own and then bring it to the server. Versus the server having to do that work. So all that's about making data more available, more resilient, and again, having smart storage not dumb storage. >> So Sam, when we were talking about backup it's how you say, it's not just backup, it's more than that. >> Sam: Right. >> Pick up on what Eric just said. How is Spectrum Protect more than just backup and playing into what Eric just talked about? >> Well a lot of things Eric was just talking about you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily going to be able to do all this analysis reporting, analytics on your production data, you don't want to get in the way of your critical workloads, so how can we make copies off to the side where you can do things like analytics, where you can do dev test, quickly build new applications, so we give the ability to have access to that data in a way that's not going to jeopardize your core applications as well. And of course, that data, you can't lose it, right? I mean, you've got to make sure it's protected. So we also offer you a very simple way to protect it, and very rapidly restore it. >> So, let's go through an example or use case. You mentioned ransomware before. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of people think okay I'll create an air gap, but air gap, in and of itself, you know, you watch these Black Hat shows, and they go, "Air gap is a joke. It's easy for me to get through an air gap." >> Sam: Right. >> So how do you deal with that problem? Presumably, you have insights and analytics that can help you identify anomalies, but I wonder if you can address what's the conversation like with your customers and how are you solving a problem like that? >> Well I think there's a lot of stages that would solve it. First of all, there's simple things you can do like have copies that are immutable, so they can't be changed, encryption can't go and encrypt a read-only volume, there is air gapping, which like you said there are ways around that, but then there's also, Eric touched on some of the metadata analysis. If you can find anomalies and changes in the metadata that are unexpected, you can take action and alert an administrator and let them know that something doesn't seem right, so there's a lot more work we're doing to introduce cognitive capabilities that can also detect that. >> One of the things actually that Pat Gelsinger said this morning, and this may have put a smile on your face when you said there's something you can't quite talk to yet is, companies have to integrate AI into their products. And machine learning. >> Eric: So, that's the plan at IBM, and we've already done some of that, we have some products that we've hinted at, that's product code name Harmony, and we've already done a public blog on that, a statement of direction, and that is our first step in implementing AI technology directly into the storage, again it's part of what I talked about a couple weeks ago when I filmed at your Palo Alto office, storage is not dumb anymore. I may be dumb, but storage is not. Storage is smart, storage is intelligent, storage is active not passive, and in the old worlds, when I started doing storage a long time ago, storage was just passive. Just a big brick. It's no longer a brick. It's a brain, and it thinks and it acts, and it relieves the CPU, and the other areas of your IT infrastructure from having to do the work, which is part of the metadata action that Sam talked about that we're working on and also this project Harmony that we talked about, is adding AI intelligence, things like Watson for example, maybe, but I can't quote me on that yet, but maybe we might put Watson inside of our storage, since we happen to own Watson, the dominant AI platform on the planet, we could probably put that into our storage. Maybe we will. >> So there's still a... okay why not? There's still a lot of dumb storage out there though. >> Yes. >> Huge install base. You actually probably sold a lot of it back in the day, so fixing the problem that you created, that's smart marketing. (laughs) But when you talk about the technical debt that exists, how do you go from point A to point B, going from that dumb storage to that active element? What's that conversation like with customers? >> So, it's actually pretty easy. First of all, storage refreshes every three to five years anyway. So now you can say, "Well you know the storage you had only did this, how about if we could do this, this, this or this, and really raise the bar?" The other thing of course is that IBM is the number one storage software company in the world, so anything we do is going to be integrated into the software side of our business, not just embedded in the storage systems we sell. And that software works with everyone's arrays. So that, if you will, artificial intelligence that we can bring to bear in an IBM Storwize or flash systems would also work on an EMC VNX2, would also work on a Dell Compellent, would also work on an HP 3PAR, would also work on this guy, that guy, and the other guy, because we are the number one storage software company in the world, for the guys that track the numbers, and all of this is being implemented into the software layer, which means it'll work with the other guys' gear. So we can take the old stuff I used to do at the evil machine company and make that stuff smart. >> What do you mean when you say you're the number one software company, because when you worked for that company you guys would always tell me, us as analysts, "Look, we don't really have any hardware engineers any more, we spend all our time on software, so we're a software company." You're talking about something different today, you guys leaned in to software to find, you've put your chips in, you did your billion dollar Steve Mills bet, what does it mean today to be a software company in storage? >> So for us, let's take all of our storage systems for example, FlashSystem V9 comes with Spectrum virtualized software, which works with over 400 arrays that aren't IBM logo. That software comes on that system. FlashSystem A9000 comes with Spectrum Accelerate, which is a scale-out block infrastructure that works both on-premise and in the cloud. Again, not just with our own gear. So we basically decided that, do we want to sell the full system solution? Sure we do. But if we sell the software only, that's fine with us, and remember, most of the big shops in IBM is exceedingly strong, enterprise to the Global Fortune 1000, and the Global Fortune 1000 down to those sort of, you know, one billion dollar company and up, most of them are heterogeneous anyway, so you're, if you're smart, and we think we are at IBM, to this effect, we made sure our software works with everybody else's gear. Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus will back up any storage from any vendor, old or new, will go to any tape drive, will go to any cloud, we can automatically back up to the cloud, will automatically go to an object store, not just to our own object store, but other object stores. Will automatically go to disk or flash, so we've made it completely heterogeneous and, if you will, media and technology independent. And we're doing that across the board with all the IBM storage software. >> So that compatibility matrix, if I can call it that, is very important, has always been important in the storage business, but I feel like it's insufficient in today's cloud world. And let me tell you, explain what I mean and get your reaction. I'll start with Sam. So we've been talking all week about the imperative to not try to reform your business and bring it to the cloud, but rather to shape the cloud and bring cloud services to your data. And that's the right model, and now part of that, a big part of that, a huge part of that is simplicity. So we're here at VMworld, we're talking about backup and data protection, simplicity is fundamental. What are you guys doing in that regard, generally and specifically with regard to Spectrum Protect? >> Yeah, I think what you want is a very simple way to do data protection, and a methodology to do data protection that's consistent between your applications that you're running in your own data center and what you're running in the cloud. So you don't want to find out that, yeah your traditional applications that you've been you know, running in your data center for years are all protected, but it turns out all the new applications being built out on the cloud don't have the same rigor, aren't following the same standards, you're breaking your governance models, and you're at risk. So what you want is a simple way to manage both sides, you want a simple dashboard that gives you visibility to the entire environment in one space, so you know I've got 2,000 VMs, 1,800 of them are backed up, two of them aren't backed up, oh those are in the cloud, somebody didn't set it up correctly. You want to be able to see it very easily on a simple dashboard, and that's what we're bringing with Spectrum Protect Plus. >> Speaking of simple, Eric, last question to you, as the CMO, how do you make this message simple for a C-suite to comprehend and understand and help take them to the next level for them? >> Well for us, we don't even talk storage anymore. We just talk data, applications, their workloads and their use cases. That's it, and then you bring storage up underneath it, again it's the foundation of your data infrastructure, your data is the primary building, but if you don't have a solid foundation and, being from Silicon Valley and being from the '89 earthquake, when the earthquake hits, if you have a solid foundation, the building stays up, if you don't the building falls down. So, we lead with data, data, data, ease of use, simplicity, but really focus on what's your application, what's the workload you're trying to accomplish, what's the use case you need. And when you do it that way, you take the discussion away from being, "You're a storage guy." It's, "You're the data guy. You're the business guy." And that's how you have to pitch it. >> I like that. Hashtag data data data you heard it here first. (laughs) Eric and Sam, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube, I wish you best of luck and we'll be keeping our eyes and ears open for what's coming with AI and machine learning. Thank you for watching The Cube, continuing coverage live from VMworld 2017 Day 2, I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante. Stick around, we've got more great conversations coming right back up. (upbeat music)