(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, wonderful cloud community, and welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson, and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant gentlemen today. Please welcome Keith from Cockroach Labs and Jeff from AMD. Thank you both for tuning in, coming in from the East coast. How you doing? >> Not too bad. A little cold, but we're going >> Doing great. >> Love that and I love the enthusiasm Keith, you're definitely bringing the heat in the green room before we got on, so I'm going to open this up with you. Cockroach Labs puts out a pretty infamous and useful cloud report each year. Can you tell us a little bit about that, the approach and the data that you report on? >> Yeah, so Cockroach Labs builds a distributed SQL database that we are able to run across multiple cloud regions, multiple sites, multiple data centers. Frequently is running a hybrid kind of a use case and it's important for our customers to be able to compare the performance of configurations when they don't have exact the same hardware available to them in every single location. So since we were already doing this internally for ourselves and for our customers, we decided to turn it into something we shared with the greater community. And it's been a great experience for us. A lot of people come and ask us every year, "Hey, when's the new cloud report coming out?" Because they want to read it. It's been a great win for us. >> How many different things are you looking at? I mean, when you're comparing configurations I imagine there's a lot of different complex variables there. Just how much are you taking into consideration when you publish this report? >> Yeah, so we look at micro benchmarks around CPU network and storage. And then our flagship benchmark is we use the database itself where we have the most expertise to create a real world benchmark on across all of these instances. This year I think we tested over 150 different discrete configurations and it's a bit of a labor of love for us because we then not only do we consume it for best practices for our own as a service offering, but we share it with our customers. We use it internally to make all kinds of different decisions. >> Yeah, 150 different comparisons is not a small number. And Jeff, I know that AMD's position in this cloud report is really important. Where do you fit into all of this and what does it mean for you? >> Right, so what it means for us and for our customers is, there's a good breath and depth of testing that has gone of from the lab. And you look at this cloud report and it helps them traverse this landscape of, why to go on instance A, B, or C on certain workloads. And it really is very meaningful because they now have the real data across all those dimensional kinds of tests. So this definitely helps not only the customers but also for ourselves. So we can now look at ourselves more independently for feedback loops and say, "Hey, here's where we're doing well, here's where we're doing okay, here's where we need to improve on." All those things are important for us. So love seeing the lab present out such a great report as I've seen, very comprehensive, so I very much appreciate it. >> And specifically I love that you're both fans of each other, obviously, specifically digging in there, what does it mean that AMD had the best performance ratio tested on AWS instances? >> Yeah, so when we're looking at instances, we're not just looking at how fast something is, we're also looking at how much it costs to get that level of performance because CockroachDB as a distributed system has the opportunity to scale up and out. And so rather than necessarily wanting the fastest single instance performance, which is an important metric for certain use cases for sure, the comparison of price for performance when you can add notes to get more performance can be a much more economical thing for a lot of our customers. And so AMD has had a great showing on the price performance ratio for I think two years now. And it makes it hard to justify other instance types in a lot of circumstances simply because it's cheaper to get, for each transaction per second that you need, it's cheaper to use an AMD instance than it would be a competitive instance from another vendor. >> I mean, everyone I think no matter their sector wants to do things faster and cheaper and you're able to achieve both, it's easy to see why it's a choice that many folks would like to make. So what do these results mean for CIOs and CTOs? I can imagine there's a lot of value here in the FinOps world. >> Yep. Oh, I'll start a few of 'em. So from the C-suite when they're really looking at the problem statement, think of it as less granular, but higher level. So they're really looking at CapEx, OpEx, sustainability, security, sort of ecosystem on there. And then as Keith pointed out, hey, there's this TCO conversation that has to happen. In other words, as they're moving from sort of this lift and shift from their on-prem into the cloud, what does that mean to them for spend? So now if you're looking at the consistency around sort of the performance and the total cost of running this to their insights, to the conclusions, less time, more money in their pocket and maybe a reduction for their own customers so they can provide better for the customer side. What you're actually seeing is that's the challenge that they're facing in that landscape that they're driving towards that they need guidance and help with towards that. And we find AMD lends itself well to that scale out architecture that connects so well with how cloud microservices are run today. >> It's not surprising to hear that. Keith, what other tips and tricks do you have for CIOs and CTOs trying to reduce FinOps and continue to excel as they're building out? >> Yeah, so there were a couple of other insights that we learned this year. One of those two insights that I'd like to mention is that it's not always obvious what size and shape infrastructure you need to acquire to maximize your cost productions, right? So we found that smaller instance types were by and large had a better TCO than larger instances even across the exact same configurations, we kept everything else the same. Smaller instances had a better price performance ratio than the larger instances. The other thing that we discovered this year that was really interesting, we did a bit of a cost analysis on networking. And largely because we're distributed system, we can scan span across availability zones, we can span across regions, right? And one of the things we discovered this year is the amount of cost for transferring data between availability zones and the amount of cost for transferring data across regions at least in the United States was the same. So you could potentially get more resiliency by spanning your infrastructure across regions, then you would necessarily just spanning across availability zones. So you could be across multiple regions at the same cost as you were across availability zones, which for something like CockroachDB, we were designed to support those workloads is a really big and important thing for us. Now you have to be very particular about where you're purchasing your infrastructure and where those regions are. Because those data transfer rates change depending on what the source and the target is. But at least within the United States, we found that there was a strong correlation to being more survivable if you were in a multi-region deployment and the cost stayed pretty flat. >> That's interesting. So it's interesting to see what the correlation is between things and when you think there may be relationship between variables and when there maybe isn't. So on that note, since it seems like you're both always learning, I can imagine, what are you excited to test or learn about looking forward? Jeff, let's start with you actually. >> For sort of future testing. One of those things is certainly those more scale out sort of workloads with respect to showing scale. Meaning as I'm increasing the working set, as I'm increasing the number of connections, variability is another big thing of showing that minimization from run to run because performance is interesting but consistency is better. And as the lower side is from the instant sizes as I was talking about earlier, a (indistinct) architecture lends itself so well to it because they have the local caching and the CCDs that you can now put a number of vCPUs that will benefit from that delivery of the local caching and drive better performance at the lower side for that scale out sort of architecture, which is so consistent with the microservices. So I would be looking for more of those dimensional testings variability across a variety of workloads that you can go from memory intense workloads to database persistence store as well as a blend of the two, Kafka, et cetera. So there's a great breath and depth of testing that I am looking for and to more connect with sort of the CTOs and CIOs, the higher level that really show them that that CapEx, OpEx, sustainability and provide a bit more around that side of it because those are are the big things that they're focused on as well as security, the fact that based on working sets et cetera, AMD has the ability with confidential compute around those kind of offerings that can start to drive to those outcomes and help from what the CTOs and CIOs are looking for from compliance as well. So set them out (indistinct). >> So you're excited about a lot. No, that's great. That means you're very excited about the future. >> It's a journey that continues as Keith knows, there's always something new. >> Yeah, absolutely. What about you Keith? What is the most excited on the journey? >> Yeah, there are a couple of things I'd like to see us test next year. One of those is to test a multi-region CockroachDB config. We have a lot of customers running in that configuration and production but we haven't scaled that testing up to the same breadth that we we do with our single region testing which is what we've based the cloud report on for the past four years. The other thing that I'd really love to see us do,, I'm a Kubernetes SME, at least that's kind of my technical background. I would love to see us get to a spot where we're comparing the performance of raw EC2 instances to using that same infrastructure running CockroachDB via EKS and kind of see what the differences are there. The vast majority of CockroachDB customers are running at least a portion of their infrastructure in Kubernetes. So I feel like that would be a real great value add to the report for the next time that we go around but go about publishing it. >> If I don't mind adding to that just to volley it back for a moment. And also as I was saying about the ScaleOut and how it leverages our AMD architecture so well with EKS specifically around the spin up, spin down. So you think of a whole development life cycle. As they grow and shrink the resources over time, time of those spin ups to spin downs are expensive. So that has to be as reduced as much as possible. And I think they'll see a lot of benefits in AMD's architecture with EKS running on it as well. >> The future is bright. There's a lot of hype about many of the technologies that you both just mentioned, so I'm very curious to see what the next cloud report looks like. Thank you Keith, and the team for the labor of love that you put into that every year. And Jeff, I hope that you continue to be as well positioned as everyone's innovation journey continues. Keith and Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. As you know, this is a continuation of our coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll see you for our next fascinating segment. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's the Cube covering VeeamON 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stu Miniman. Frank Palumbo is here. He's the senior vice president at Cisco Systems. And Andy Vandeveld is the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam Software. Gents, welcome to The Cube. >> How we doing? >> Thank you. >> It's great to be here. >> Good, Frank, hot off the keynote. It was great, Yankees fan, love it. The rivalry continues. Of course you guys know the Cube, Red Sox fans, some of us. Stu's not. >> Not all of us. >> So we love it. We love the action, and it's always fun. But Frank we had to cut out a little bit before your keynote because we had to get ready to do the Cube. But you put up a slide that was awesome. We could do an hour on The Cube on that, and it's all about the apps, I mean really. But you had this great slide with apps and microservices and virtualization and bare metal and OnPrim and really laying out the complexity today. And you guys are at the heart of that. Maybe give us a quick summary of how you guys see the world. >> When you're talking about the applications, the application profile, it's important, the network kind of brings this together because we do touch everything. Where people are in this kind of application history is some of them are on legacy, mainframe. Some of them are on RISC processors. But as a network provider, we have to bring those in too even with the more modern applications. So you look at what the platforms or workloads are on so move those in. And then you're looking at workload placement, on Prim or in the Cloud. Do we put data in a colo? Do we put the application in the Cloud? There's different hybrid mentalities to do that. Then you get into the systems management where there's just too much stuff out there. Humans can't manage it anymore so the machines and the software have to manage the machines and the software. We'd like to think we're right in the middle of that because of the way we bring things together with the network. >> So Andy, I look at the... Stu and I walked the floor before we come in here, the ecosystem is really quite impressive-- >> Andy: Thank you. >> for a relatively small company. I mean not that small anymore. It didn't just happen overnight. Maybe you could talk a little bit about themes and philosophy with partnerships and some of the things that you're doing with Alliances generally and specifically get into the Cisco partnership. >> Well I think partnerships have been in our DNA since the beginning of the company. We're a 100% channel-lead company. We don't have a direct sales force. That's an important piece of the company's philosophy. These alliances are really key for us because as we start to move into markets that are maybe a little bit higher than where we've been into the large enterprise and mid-enterprise and large enterprise, we really look at partnerships like the one with Cisco that are going to benefit Veeam and the customers by us being together doing joint developments. Some of the things that Frank talked about in his keynote speech, those are the sorts of things that create solutions for that level of customer where Cisco's been resident for many, many years. So we look at these partnerships as really central to where Veeam wants to go as a company and where we think customers want Veeam to participate with the partners. >> What's the specific nature of the partnership? Can you unpack that a little bit for us? >> From my side, certainly we have a robust go-to-market relationship in terms of when we're positioning UCS or Hyperflex, our server and hyper converged platforms, now we can bring to bear the Veeam value problem as we go forward with customers. And customers look to Cisco really to complete the story and offer an end-to-end solution. We weren't able to complete it without the Veeam technology. Then on the development side, some of the things that we're doing, we've integrated so now the Veeam software can work with our Snap technology and hyper converge. So you're starting to see it come together at the screen level with the bits and bytes in terms of the integration. >> Dave: So there's a greater degree of technical integration as well. >> Frank: Yes. >> It's not just go-to, I mean that's important because a lot of times back-up data protection is kind of an afterthought. It's a bolt-on. But if you're going to be a complete solution provider, that's fundamental and it's becoming more important. >> I think you know I was just mentioning to Frank back in the green room before we came out here I look at the start of this partnership as really being about 18 months ago. Although we'd had a partnership for a while, we really kind of started about 18 months ago in this meeting that we had at their partner conference in Maui. And Radmeer and I sat down with Frank and kind of explained why we thought data protection was a solution that Cisco could get behind particularly now that they were coming out with their S-Series devices. But that's just the start of it. It has to come with integration as well. Then we started with Hyperflex. It was a new product for them, 1.0 version. With the 2.0 version, we got integrated with snapshot technology like Frank mentioned. I look at this short runway of time in this relationship that kicked off with our meeting with Frank and he got it right away. We didn't have to explain it. >> Dave: It resignated. >> Frank: Oh, no question. We're very proud of our S-Series storage server. The hardware is nice. The infrastructure piece is nice, but it really doesn't come together unless you got the application on a run with it. That's where Veeam just jumps in and fills that gap perfectly for us. >> Frank, I think back to when virtualization really took off. Networking was one of the things that we had to fix. It put a lot of stress on the network. It's one of the reasons Cisco created UCS and backup also creates a lot of strain on the network. So it seems a natural fit. Can you talk about all the complexities that are coming and how you're going to be, what can we expect to see from jointly going forward? >> I think we've learned a lot from Veeam in terms of they've been able to really attack complex issues in a very simple fashion. Simplicity is the game with customers right now. Things are moving so fast. If you can't be simple, you're going to have a tough time out there. So I think that's where it's really come together for us in that vein. But when you look at the value of data and whether it's a second old or two years old or a year old, there's so many different more paradigms coming out about what you can do with this data. And customers and even customers of customers have now found ways to use this data either to make better decisions, monetize it, to stay away from things. So that's why this whole lifecycle for us is so important. This is where Veeam and us can really do some nice things for customers. >> Andy, can you build on that about the multi-Cloud position that Veeam has? How many of those, do you know, touch what Cisco's doing here and how does the partnership help drive that value of data type offering? >> For Veeam, our message is all about availability, availability of the data which makes the applications available and which basically makes the business stay up and running. One analogy we use is a cell phone. When you're cell phone dies, you can't get access to your email. You can't get access to your instant messages. >> Dave: You freak bascially. >> You feel like you're lost, right? >> Frank: It's getting kind of pathetic. >> Yeah. >> Dave: It is pretty bad. >> So think about not being able to get access to your data or access to your applications because of some outage, not being able to backup and recover. Your business could go out of business. Working with Cisco on solutions that are on premise, that are in the Cloud, that are multi-Cloud is really the value of the partnership that we have that we bring together. It's just at the beginning. We've got solutions that we're building now. We got solutions that are on the horizon. We've got a very strong go-to-market partnership in a very short period of time that are targeting enterprise customers, service providers, the whole gamut. It's really that sort of relationship that you find in an industry every so often. When it comes together like it has with us and Cisco, it's really a very strong, strong value prop. >> Well Veeam capitalized on the original virtualization trend with VMware that was a big transformation, the server infrastructure. You're seeing a huge network transformation now. There are so many forces affecting the network that I wonder, Frank, if you could comment on. You got ScaleOut. There's Flash. There's Cloud. There's Microservice. There's DevOps makes everything go faster. The flattening of the network. Describe what's happening and then maybe you can talk about how your ecosystem is going to take advantage of that. From what were the challenges the network has is exactly like you said. You have certainly the virtualized workloads now. The Microservices containerize workloads. I think the one people forget about is there's still a ton of bare metal out there, right? You look at the Hadoop workloads and such. A lot of these are bare metal oriented, right? Quite frankly, moving a VM around a fabric is actually pretty easy to do. But when you got to move a bare metal workload around a fabric, and that's something we can do with UCS the way we do it statelessly, that's much harder. That's why we have the extraction layer with what we call the fabric interconnection with UCS to do that kind of stuff. I think that's sometimes lost in the translation in terms of how you're going to handle all these different workloads. >> If I understand it, the link then to the opportunity for you guys, Andy, is that the stakes are just much higher now, right? You could do so much more around the networks. Stakes are so much higher. That increases the need for your products and services. Carry that through if you would. >> Well, it is. As we make our way up-market into the enterprise, the amount of data that businesses are spinning off of, their infrastructure and their data center or from robo offices or wherever, is growing immensely. Being able to have a partnership with an infrastructure provider like Cisco, where we can put solutions together that really give the customers the rock solid base for backing up their data and making sure that it's available is really critical for us as we move into those larger enterprise and larger environments. So this is an essential relationship I would say. >> I think, too, if I could mention, this is something our channel wanted to see, too. We're the same. We're at about 98% of our business goes through the channel. So they're selling our full line of infrastructure products. This completes the story for them. So we got a lot of guides to them say, "Hey, yes, Cisco. "We'd like to see you come together with Veeam "so we can start bundling offers out there in the market "and be that kind of end-end-to supplier, too." That was a big impetus especially from mid-market up to enterprise customers. >> Excellent, well, we got to wrap there. The partnerships give you huge leverage as a small, again not so small company anymore. The fact that you can get somebody like Frank to come down, talk about the partnership, is a testament to what you guys have built. So congratulations. Really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube. >> No, my pleasure, our pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube. We're live from New Orleans, VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (tinkling music)

>> Announcer: Live From Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Paul Gillin. And our next guest Manuvir Das, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Dell EMC, former Microsoft Asure, historic role at Microsoft, been at the EMC for a few years. Welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, it's nice to be here. >> So the last year we had a conversation. We were talking about some of the technology and the kind of direction it was going, so first question is from last year to this year, what's changed and what's the news? >> We've brought together two pretty well-known platforms that we did, Isilon for Scalar file and ECS for Scalar object. It one team that are now around called the Unstructured Data Storage Team. And we've done this really big because from the point of view of the customer, what we see is this confluence between file and object really in the space of unstructured storage, and we think we have some ideas of how to put that together in just the right solution for the customer. So that's why we brought these teams together and we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about this year. >> How are you positioning file versus object right now? It seems like object is the rage, but file is still going to be around for a long time. How do you position that? >> Yes, I think it will be. I think basically, if I may, it's not just two, but we see three pillars of unstructured storage. The first is file, which is really more towards compatibility with traditional workloads. A lot of the application ecosystem is comfortable programming against NFS or SMB, and that ecosystem is going to remain for a long time. For instance, in the space-like video surveillance. So that's where we see file. It's optimized more for performance rather than Scale, although you do get Scale. The next level was really object, which is more for your modern workloads, for your web and mobile sort of workloads. Optimized more for Scale rather than performance. And then, the third pillar that we see that we'd be working on now is really realtime data, or what you call streaming data, from things like IOT, where you're getting a firehose of information coming out and you got to store it very, very quickly. So we see these are three different pillars of unstructured storage. And really, what we've been working on in our Unstructured Data Storage Team is how to bring all of these three together in the right solution for the customer. >> So tell us about the group that you're in because this is kind of a new, not new industry, we're talking about unstructured data for many years, going on eight years, but it's becoming super important now as you have this horizontal data fabric development. We talked a little bit about it last year, but you can see a clear line of sight now with apps using data very dynamically. So you need under-the-hood storage, but now you need addressability of data. And so, there's a challenge of getting the right data from the right database to the right place on the app in less than a hundred milliseconds. I mean, that's like the nirvana. >> So I think there's a couple of things happening. Firstly, the advances in hardware have changed the game a fair bit, because you can take a software stack that was not optimized for latency to begin with, you can put it on all Flash hardware and you can reduce the roundtrip a lot, that's one thing. The other thing I see is that especially with the advancement of object >> For the stage of life in IT, you have research background, PhD in Computer Science, I mean, it's a pretty awesome time to be in computer science right now. There's a ton of opportunity that applies from that. Machine learning, all this goodness there. What's your vision of how the next 30 years are going to play out? Because Michael Dell said, "Hey, it's been 33 years," since he's started the company, the next 33 are going to be amazing, and I believe that to be true as well given the science opportunities. How do you look at this, from a personal level and also from a Dell EMC? >> I think what's really going to change is, up 'til now, a lot of things that have been done with computing have started with the thought of, "How much data can I really have?" And then, once I've decided how much data I can really have, what am I going to do with it? And I think sort of the innovation that's happened in storage that I'm a part of, what has really changed is it said, "You don't have to stop and think "about how much data you're going to have." You can just keep all of it. And so, what that means is I don't have to figure out upfront what I'm going to do with this data. I'm just going to bring it all in, it's going to be really cheap, the systems are really scalable that can hold it, and everything is sort of tagged in such a way that after the fact, five years from now, I can go do something with this data that I hadn't envisioned when I brought it in. And I think that just opens up a range of things that were hard to imagine. The other thing I think is, >> Programmatically meaning, from a software standpoint. Discoverability, >> That's right, I think as you said, machine learning is a big part of it. Because I think machine learning unlocks opportunities to mind the data that people hadn't really thought of before. And it comes back to the same thing that when I bring data in, whether it's from sensors or aircraft engines or what have you, I have no idea what I'm going to do with the data, so I have no idea which part of the data is important and which part of the data is less important. But when I can apply things like machine learning after the fact, I don't actually have to worry about that. I just bring it all in, and the algorithms themselves will figure out which part of the data is the useful part of the data. >> Your ScaleUp product line and ScaleOut product line, how are you positioning those two application-wise to your customers? >> So I think there is distinction between tier one storage and tier two storage. I think when you think about tier one storage, it's not just about the numbers, like latency and IOPS, but it's about the whole experience of tier one storage. Do I have, for my disaster recovery, do I have RPO-0, which means I can recover to the exact point in time I was at when I failed over data center. How does my replication work, what data services that I have? So I think our ScaleUp technologies are very well oriented towards the tier one kind of capabilities. And then our ScaleOut technologies are very well oriented towards sort of the ubiquitous tier two storage, which is much more deployable at Scale. It's pretty good performance in two, actually, but not with that complete set of capabilities you think about with tier one in terms of RPO-0s, synchronist replication, those kinds of things. So I think there's a very natural sort of mace between the two. And really, I think from a storage vision, what we see is the tier two storage is so scalable and so cheap, that all of your bools of tier one storage on the top tier down automatically into the tier two storage. And what that means is for our customers, if you think about how much tier one storage they have to provision today, they should be able to provision less of that, because they should be able to tier more of that down to the tier two storage, which is now capable enough to hold the rest of the data. >> And be available. >> And be available, >> Okay so, customers want to do this, a no brainer. So when we hear Amazon talk about this all the time, Jeff Bezos was just talking about just the other day a new chassis, they've got the recognition software so you see facial recognition, a lot of great stuff happening all over the Cloud world with this kind of modeling, with the power of computes that's available. What are the customers do now? Because now they get it, it's a no brainer obviously. Now they've got to change how they did IT 30 years to be agile for tomorrow. What's the playbook? >> So what we're seeing is, the step one that we're seeing more and more today, and have seen really for the last couple of years with Isilon and with DCS, is what I would call Consolidation of the Tier Two. So where we had 12 different clustered silos of storage for the different use cases, let's buy into this model that I can just build one large storage cluster, and it can handle the 12 different use cases at the same time. And that's what we've been proving out for the last few years. I think customers have really, enterprise customers are really getting there. And now, what we're beginning to see this year is the next phase, whether it's the industrial internet with the automotives, et cetera, the more IOT style use cases. In fact, on Wednesday, we'll be talking about a new thing we've got called Project Nautilus, which is the third leg of our stool with the streaming storage that is built on top of Isilon and ECS. And we're now at the point where are first customers are beginning to work with that, where they're saying, "From my sensors, "in the automobiles, on the cameras, "I'm going to bring in this firehouse of data, "I'm going to store it all with you, "but later on, I'm going to do analytics on it. "As it's coming in, I'm going to do "some real-time analytics on it, "and then after the fact, I'm going to do "the more batch style." >> I know Paul Scott wants to jump in, but I want you to just back up because I missed the three pillars. >> The three pillars were file, for which we have Isilon, object for your modern applications and web workloads, for which we have ECS, and then streaming storage for IOT. >> Which is Nautilus? >> Which is Project Nautilus, >> Okay, got it. >> The way I put it to people is traditional storage systems, ScaleUp or ScaleOut, file or object, they need resilience. So when you write the data, you have to write and think at the same time, because you have to record all kinds of information about it, you have to take locks, et cetera. For IOT, you need a storage system that writes now, and thinks later, so that you can just suck it all in. >> It sounds like an operating system. You've got a storage that's turning into like LUNs, provisioning, hardware. It's essentially intelligence software that has to compile, runtime, assembly, all this stuff's going on. >> And there's all these fancy names like LAN Architecture and all that kind of stuff. And what that's all saying is, "I bring the data in "and as it's coming in, "there's some things I already want to do with it, "I do that analytics in real-time. "There's other things when I go tag it, "who was in the photo, where was it, "and then the rest of it, I'm going to do later." And who knows what and when, and that's a beautiful thing. >> You're way along the thinking curve on this obviously, but where are your customers? I mean, you're talking about a pretty radically, different approach to processing and storing data even in realtime. Machine learning, meta tagging, there's a lot for them to absorb. >> And I think that part, it's a vertical driven, use-case driven thing. So there's some industries where we see a lot of uptake on that. Automotive is a great example. >> Financial services, >> Financial services, fraud detection, those kinds of things. And there's other verticals where it's not time for that yet. Like I said, healthcare is a great example. So in those verticals, we see more of just the storage consolidation, let me build one pool of tier two storage, if you will, and consolidate my 12 use cases sort of what we refer to as the Data Lake in our words, but I think it's specific verticals. And that's fine, if you look at even the traditional unstructured storage, I think it really started with certain verticals like media and entertainment, life sciences, and that's sort of where it kicked up from. And I think for the streaming storage, it's these verticals that are more oriented towards IOT, your automotive, your fraud detection, those kinds of things where it's really kicking off, and then it'll sort of broaden from there. >> How is this playing into the Dell server strategy? >> It's really a fantastic thing, I don't want to say so much for us as for our customer, because I've talked to a number of people in these verticals where the customer wants a complete solution for IOT. And what that means is number one: on the edge, do I have the right equipment with the right horsepower and the right software on the edge to bring in all the data from the edge and do the part of the processing that needs to be done right there on the edge of realtime, and then it has to be backed by stuff in the backing environment that can process massive amounts of data. And with Dell, we have the opportunity for the first time that we didn't have with the EMC alone to do the complete solution on both ends of it, both the equipment on the edge as well as the backing IT, so I think it's a great opportunity. >> You bring up so many awesome conversations because it's boring storage, now storage is not boring anymore because it's fundamental to the heartbeat of a company. >> Exactly. >> So here's a question for you, kind of like thinking out loud and riffing with you. So some debate, like, "Listen, I want to find "the needle in the haystacks, "but the haystacks are getting bigger," so there's a problem with that. I got to do more design and more gig digging, if you will. And the second point is customers are saying, to at least to us on The Cube and privately is, "I got a data lake that's turning "into a data swamp, "so help me not have swamps of data, "and I want more needles, "but the stack's getting bigger." What's your advice to those CXOs? Could be a CDO, chief data officer, a CS CISCO, these are the fundamental questions. >> I would say this, whatever technology you're evaluating, whether it's an on-premise technology or a hosted technology from a vendor like us, or it's a service out there in the Public Cloud, if you will, ask yourself two questions. One is, "If I size out what I need right now, "and I multiply it by 10 or 100, "what is it going to cost? "And is it really going to work the same way, "is it going to scale the same way?" Look at the algorithmics inside the product, not the Power Point and say, "The way "they've designed this thing, "when I put 100 times the data "on 100 times the number of servers "on this storage system, "are things actually going to work the same way or not?" >> So it's a scale question, kind of what are the magnitude thinking you need to kind of go out and size it up a bit. >> Because I see right now, the landscape is full of new technologies for storage, and a lot of them sound great and look great on the PowerPoint, and you go do a POC with four nodes or eight nodes, and you put Flash in there and it works really well. But the thing is, when you have 200 nodes of that, when you've got a 30 petabyte cluster and you've got to fail it over because your data center went down, how does that go? >> Well, it's also who's going to run it, too. You want less obstacles, not more, and you don't them to be huge, expensive developers. >> TierPoint, that's the other thing. We really don't talk to our customers in terms of storage acquisition costs anymore, we talk in terms TCO, total cost of ownership. You look at power, you look at cooling. >> That killed the Duke, basically, it was so hard to run and total cost of of ownership. Michael Dell was just on, I was interviewing Michael and I asked him like, "Where's the Cloud strategy?" I was just busting his chops a little bit, 'cause I know he's messaging, trying to get him off his messaging. But he made an interesting comment and metaphor. He goes, "Well John, I remember the days "during the internet days, where's you internet strategy?" Look where that happened, the bubble popped. But ultimately, everything played out as according to plan. There's pet food online, now we've got food delivery, DoorDash, all this stuff's happening. So he kind of was using it to compare to the Cloud today. There's a lot of hope and promise, where's your Cloud strategy? But yet, his point was it's going to be everywhere. >> Yeah, and I would say this, I think people sometimes confuse Cloud with Public Cloud. And I think what happened is, having that issue myself, I would say that Public Cloud exposed a certain model that had some benefits for the customer base that were new. That is, I can use as a service, I don't worry about operationalizing things, I can pay as I go, so I get that, it's elastic. But it also came with a lot of drawbacks. I don't have the kind of control that I would like to have. A normal thing that any person who takes a dependency on infrastructure has is, "Today's my Superbowl Sunday. "Don't touch my environment today." Now you go to a Public Cloud and you use a service that is used by thousands of other customers, so which day is Superbowl Sunday? Every day is Superbowl Sunday for somebody. >> It was a metaphor, Public cloud was a metaphor for virtualization that would effect the entire environment. >> And so, I think the journey we're all in, all the vendors, the Public Cloud suppliers, everybody is, "What are the right set of models "that are going to cover the space for all our customers?" There's not going to be one. There's several. I think the dedicated private Cloud models are certainly very appealing in a number of ways if you do the economics right. And I think that's the journey we're all on sort of together. >> I tweeted a little bit of the jewels out there this morning. True, Private cloud is going to be a $265 billion dollar market, but they were the first ones to actually size that, let's say true private public means essentially hybrid, but on-prem with a data center. That's huge numbers, it's not like rounding errors. >> We believe that, too. And that's why one of the neatest things we've announced this year with ECS object storage is something called ECS Dedicated Cloud, which is basically saying, "You can take the object storage "from us, but it's going to run in our data centers." We operate it, it's actually the developers who wrote the code from my team who are actually operating it, and you can do a variety of hybrid things. You can keep some of it on-prem, some of it off-prem, you can keep all of it off-prem. But regardless, it's your stuff. You can hug it, it's dedicated to you. You're not sharing the cluster with anybody else. You get to decided when you update your version, when you take a maintenance window or what have you. So, we're all searching for that sweet spot, if you will. >> I want to ask you about something, some of the different containers. The hottest thing right now in infrastructure, lack of persistent storage has been a real problem for containers. Is that a problem that's yours to solve or is it Docker's to solve? >> No, I think it is ours to solve with them. So, I'll say a couple of things. Firstly, our modern products, ECS and object storage as well as ScaleIO, our block ScaleOut storage, these are built with containers. So for instance, if you take ECS today, every ECS appliance that we ship, if you look inside very server, it's running Linux with Docker. And all the ECS code is running on Docker containers. That's just how it works. So A: we believe in containers, and two: I think we have been doing the work to provide that persistence ecosystem for containers using our storage. So we have a great team at Dell EMC called EMC Code. And these are people, they do a lot of this integration stuff, they work very closely with Docker and a number of the other frameworks to really plug our storage in. And I think it's a very open ecosystem. There are APIs there now, so you can plug anybody's storage in. And I think that's really if you compare VM-based infrastructures with container-based infrastructures. That's really the gap, because when you operationalize the stuff, you need things like that. You need persistent storage, you need snapshots, you need a VR-storage, you need those kinds of things, but I think that'll all come. >> Well, we're looking to continuing the conversation, I know time's tight. We'd like to follow up with you after the show, maybe bring you into our studio via Skype. You're in a hot area, you got the storage, you got the software, you got some Cloud action going on. Thank you very much for coming on The Cube, appreciate it. >> My pleasure for being here, thank you for having me. >> This is TheCube, live coverage here at Dell EMC World 2017. And I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin, we'll be right back. Stay with us. (bright tech tones)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, this is The Cube's coverage of IBM's Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, Cube alumni, Vice President of Product Market at IBM storage. Welcome back to The Cube. Good to see you with the shirt on. You got the IBM tag there, look at that. >> I do. Well, you know, I've worn a Hawaiian shirt now, I think, ten Cubes in a row, so I got to keep the streak going. >> So, pretty sunny here in Vegas, great weather. Storage is looking up as well. Give us the update. Obviously, this is never going away, we talk about it all the time, but now cloud, more than ever, a lot of action happening with storage, and data is a big part of it. >> Yeah, the big thing with us has been around hybrid cloud. So our software portfolio, the spectrum family, Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Protect, our backup package, Spectrum Scale, our scale out NAS, IBM Cloud Object Storage, all will move data transparently from on-premises configurations out to multiple cloud vendors, including IBM Bluemix. But also other vendors, as well. That software's embedded on our array products, including our VersaStack. And just two weeks ago, at Cisco Live in Melbourne, Australia, we did a announcement with Cisco around our VersaStack for the hybrid cloud. >> So what's the hybrid cloud equation look like for you guys right now, because it is the hottest topic. It's almost like brute force, everywhere you see, it's hybrid cloud, that's what people want. How does it change the storage configurations? What's the solutions look like? What's different now than it was a year ago? >> I think the key thing you've got to be able to do is to make sure the data can move transparently from an on-premise location, or a private cloud, you could have started as a private cloud config and then decid it's OK to use a public cloud with the right security protocols. So, whether you've got a private cloud moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, or an on-premises configuration moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, the idea is they can move that data back and forth. Now, with our Cisco announcement, Cisco, with their cloud center, is also providing the capability and moving applications back and forth. We move the data layer back and forth with Spectrum Virtualize or IBM's copy data management product, Spectrum Copy Data Management, and with Cloud Center, or the ECS, Enterprise Cloud Sweep, from Cisco, you can move the application layer back and forth with that configuration on our VersaStacks. >> So this whole software-defined thing starts, it started when people realized, hey, we can run our data centers kind of the way the big hyper-scalers do. IBM pivoted hard toward software-defined. What's been the impact that you've seen with customers? Are they actually, I mean, there was a big branding announcement with Spectrum and everything a while back. What's been the business impact of that shift? >> Well, for us, it's been very strong. So if you look at the last couple quarters, according to the analysts that track the numbers, from a total storage perspective, we've moved into the number two position, and have been, now for the last two years. And for software-defined storage, we're the number one provider of software-defined storage in the world, and have been for the last three years in a row. So we've been continuing to grow that business on the software-defined side. We've got scale-up block configurations, scale-out block configurations, object storage with IBM Cloud Object Storage, and scale-out NAS and file with our IBM Spectrum Scale. So if you're file, block, or object, we've got you covered. And you can use either A, our competitor's storage, we work with all our competitor's gear, or you could go with your reseller, and have them, or your distributor provide the raw infrastructure, the servers, the storage, flash or hard drives, and then use our software on top to create essentially your own arrays. >> So when you say competitor's gear, you're talking about what used to be known as the SAN Volume Controller, and now is Spectrum Virtualize, right? Did I get that right? >> Yes, well, we still sell the SAN Volume Controller. When you buy the Spectrum Virtualize, it comes as just a piece of software. When you buy the SAN Volume Controller as well as our FlashSystem V9000, and our Storwize V7 and V5000, they come with Spectrum Virtualize pre-loaded on the array. So we have three ways where the array is pre-loaded: SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystems V9000, and then the Storwiz products, so it's pre-loaded. Or, you can buy the stand-alone software Spectrum Virtualize and put it on any hardware you want, either way. >> So, I know we're at an IBM conference, and IBM hates, they don't talk about the competition directly, but I have to ask the competitive questions. You've had a lot of changes in the business. Obviously, cloud's coming in in a big way. The Dell EMC merger has dislocated things, and you still see a zillion starups in storage, which is amazing to me, alright? Everybody says, oh, storage is dead, but then all this VC money still funneling in and all this innovation. What's happening in the storage landscape from your perspective? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. So, first of all, software-defined has got its legs, now. When you look at it from a market perspective, last quarter ended up at almost 400 million, which put it on a, let's say, a 1.6 to 2 billion dollar trajectory for calendar 2017, out of a total software market of around 16 billion. So it's gone from nothing to roughly 2 billion out of 16 billion for all storage software of all various types, so that's hot. All flash arrays are still hot. You're looking at, right now, last year, all flash arrays end up at roughly 25% of all arrays shipped. They're now in price parity, so an all-flash array is not more expensive. So you see a lot of innovation around that. You're still seeing innovation around backup, right? You've got guys trying to challenge us with our SpectrumProtect with some of these other vendors trying to challenge us, even though backup is the most mature of the storage software spaces, there's people trying to challenge that. So, I'd say storage is still a white-hot space. As you know, the overall market is flat, so it is totally a drag out, knock-down fight. You know, the MMA and the UFC guys got nothing on what goes on in the storage business. So, make sure you wear your flak jacket if you're a storage guy. >> Meaning, you got to gain share to grow, right? >> Yes, and it's all about fighting it out. This Hawaiian shirt looks Hawaiian, but just so you know, this is Kevlar. Just in case there's another storage company here at the show. >> So what are the top conversations now with storage buyers? Because we saw Candy's announcement about the object store, Flex, for the cold storage. It changes the price points. It's always going to be a price sensitive market, but they're still buying storage. What are those conversations that you're having? You mentioned moving data around, do they want to move the data around? Do they want to keep it at the edge? Is it moving the application around? What are some of those key conversations that you're involved in? >> So we've done a couple innovative things. One of the things we've done is worked with our sales team to create what we call, the conversations. You know, I've been doing this storage gig now for 31 years. Seven start-ups, IBM twice, EMC, Maxtor and Seagate- >> John: You're a hardened veteran. >> I'm a storage veteran, that's why this is a Kevlar Hawaiian shirt. But no CIO's a storage guy, I've never met one, in 31 years, ever, ever, ever met a storage guy. So what we have to do is elevate the conversation when you're talking to the customer, about why it's important for their cloud, why it's important for machine learning, for cognitive, for artificial intelligence. You know, this about it, I'm a Star Trek guy. I like Star Wars, too, but in Star Trek, Bones, of course, wands the body. So guess what that is? That's the edge device going through the cloud to a big, giant server farm. If that storage is not super resilient, the guy on the table might not make it. And if the storage isn't super fast, the guys on the table might not make it. And while Watson isn't there, yet, Watson Health, they're getting there. So, in ten years from now, I expect when I go to the doctor, he's just like in Star Trek, waving the wand, and boy, you better make sure the storage that that wand is talking to better be highly resilient and high performing. >> Define resilient, in your terms. >> So, resilient means you really can't have more than 30 seconds, 50 seconds a year of down time. Because whoever's on the table when that thing goes down has got a real problem. So you've got to be up all the time, and if you take it out of the healthcare space and look at other applications, whether you look at trading applications, data is the new gold. Data is the new diamonds. It's about data. Yes, I'd love to have a mound of gold, but you know what, if you have the right amount of data, it worth way more than a mound of gold is. >> You're right about the CIO and storage. They don't want to worry about storage. They don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. A CIO once said to me, "I care about storage like this, "I want it to be dirt cheap, lightning fast, and rock solid." Now, the industry has done a decent job with rock solid, I would say, but up until Flash, not really that great with lightning fast, and really not that great with dirt cheap. Price has come down for the hardware, but the management has been so expensive. So, is the industry attacking that problem? And what's IBM doing? >> Yeah, so the big thing is all about automation. So when I talk about moving to the hybrid cloud, I'm talking about transparent migration, transparent movement. That's an automation play. So you want to automate as much as you can, and we've got some things that we're not willing to disclose yet that'll make our storage even more automated whether it be from a predictive analytics perspective, self-healing storage that actually will heal itself, you know, go out and grab a code load and put the new code on because it knows there's a bug in the old code, and do that transparently so the user doesn't have to do anything. It's all about automating data movement and data activity. So we've already been doing that with the Spectrum family, and that Spectrum family ships on our storage systems and on our VersaStack, but automation is the critical key in storage. >> So I wonder, does that bring up new KPIs? Like, I presume you guys dog food your own storage internally, and your own IT. >> Eric: Yes >> Are you seeing, because it used to be, OK, the light's green on the disc drive, and you know, this is our uptime or downtime, planned downtime, you know, sort of standard metrics that we've known for 30-40 years. With automation, are we seeing a new set of metrics in KPIs emerge? You know, self-healing, percentage of problems that corrected themselves, or- >> Well, and you're also seeing things like time spent. So if you go back to the downturn of seven, eight, and nine, IT was devastated, right? And, as you know, you've seen a lot of surveys that IT spend is basically back up to '08, OK, the pre-08 crash. When you open up that envelope, they're not hiring storage guys anymore, and usually not infrastructure guys. They're hiring guys to do devops and testdev, and do cloud-based applications, which means there's not a lot of guys to run the storage. So one of the metrics we're seeing is, how much guys do I have managing my storage, or, my infrastructure? I used to have 50, now I'm a big bank, can I do it with 25? Can I do it with 20? Can I do it with 15? And then, how much time do they spend between the networking, the storage, the facilities themselves. These data center guys have to manage all of that. So there are new metrics about, what is the workload that my actual human beings are doing? How much of that is storage versus something else? And there's way less guys doing storage as a full-time job, anyway, because what happened in the downturn? And, so automation is critical to a guy running a datacenter, whether he's a cloud guy, whether he's a small shop. And clearly in the Fortune, global 2500, those guys, where they've got in-house IT, they've cut back on the infrastructure team and the storage team, so it's all about automation. So, part of the KPIs are not just about the storage itself, such as uptime, cost per Gig, cost per transaction, the bandwidth, you know, those sorts of KPIs. But it's also about how much time do I really spend managing the storage? So if I've only got five guys, now, and I used to have 15 guys, those five guys are managing, usually, three, to four, to five times more storage than they did in 2008 and 2009. So now you've got to do it with five guys instead of 15, so there's a KPI, right there. >> So, what about cloud? We heard David Kinney talk today about the object store with that funny name, and then he talked about this cloud-tiering thing, and I couldn't stay. I had to get ready for theCube. How do you work with those guys? How do you sell a hybrid story, together, because cloud is eating away at the traditional infrastructure business, but it's all sort of one big, happy family, I'm sure. But how do you work with a cloud group to really drive, to make the water level higher for IBM? >> So, all of our products from the Spectrum family, not all, but almost all our products from the Spectrum family, will automatically move data to the cloud, including IBM Bluemix/SoftLayer. So our on-premises can do it. If you buy our software only, and don't buy our storage arrays, or don't buy a Storwize, or don't buy a flash system, you still can automatically move that data to the cloud, including the IBM cloud object store. Our Spectrum Scale product, for example, ScaleOut NAS, and file system, which is very highly used in big data analytics and cognitive workloads, automatically, by policy, will tier-data to IBM cloud object storage. Spectrum Protect can be set up to automatically take data and back it up from on-premises to IBM cloud object storage. So we've automated those processes between our software and our array family, and IBM cloud object storage, and Bluemix and SoftLayer. And, by the way, in all honesty, we also work with other cloud vendors, just like they work with other storage vendors. All storage vendors can put data in Bluemix. Well, guess what, we can put data in clouds that are not Bluemix, as well. Of course, we prefer Bluemix. We all have IBM employee stock purchase, so of course we want Bluemix first, but if the customer, for whatever reason, doesn't see the light and doesn't go to Bluemix and goes with something else, then we want to make sure that customer's happy. We want to get at least some of the PO, and our Spectrum family, and our VersaStack family, and all of our array family can get that part of the PO. >> You need versatility to be on any cloud. >> Eric: We can be on any cloud. >> So my question for you is, the thing that came out of our big data, Silicon Valley event last week was, Hadoop was a great example, and that's kind of been, now, a small feature of the overall data ecosystem, is that batch and real time are coming together. So that conversation you're having, that you mentioned earlier, is about more real time than there is anything else more than ever. >> Well, and real time gets back to my examples of Bones on Star Trek wanding you over healthcare. That is real time, he's got a phaser burn, a broken leg, a this and that, and then we know how to fix the guy. But if you don't get that from the wand, then that's not real time analytics. >> Speaking of Star Trek, just how much data do you think the Enterprise was throwing off, just from an IOT standpoint? >> I'm sure that they had about a hundred petabytes. All stored on IBM Flash Systems arrays, by the way. >> Eric, thanks for coming on. Real quick, in the next 30 seconds, just give the folks a quick update on why IBM storage is compelling now more than ever. >> I think the key thing is, most people don't realize, IBM is the number two storage company in the world, and it has been for the last several years. But I think the big thing is our embracing of the hybrid cloud, our capability of automating all these processes. When they've got less guys doing storage and infrastructure in their shop, they need something that's automated, that works with the cloud. And that's what IBM storage does. >> All right, Eric Herzog, here, inside theCube, Vice President of Product Market for IBM Storage. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Velante. More live coverage from IBM InterConnect after this short break. Stay with us. (tech music)