(sprightly music) >> Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Great. Well, thanks for having us. We love to be participating in this community event, something a little bit different from what we've usually done with theCUBE. We're really excited to be here today. >> Yeah, this is a really special thing that we're trying to do 'cause we're going to introduce some thought leadership concepts, take a look at some recent moves by IBM and then at the end of it, as we've talked about, give an opportunity for the community to come together in the crowd chat. But let me start with this proposition, Eric. Our research, here at Wikibon, pretty strongly shows that we're in the midst of a pretty similar transformation in the industry. Everybody talks about digital transformation, everybody talks about the emergence of AI, big data and related type of technologies are going to have an enormous impact on how businesses operate and how they engage their customers. But we think that, none of that would be possible without some of the fundamental changes that are happening in storage. I mean, a lot of these AI algorithms for knowledge representation and learning have been around for 30, 40 years. What's new, is now we have storage technologies that are not dedicated to persisting data but actually delivering data, and increasingly delivering data over high-value storage services that look like a fabric. And that changes the way we think about applications and we could think about digital business. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's very much about the application, workloads and use cases and you go to digital transformation. And what you need, underneath that is a strong storage highway. From a performance perspective you've got to be able to move data back and forth seamlessly, transparently and automatically, to the cloud, back on prem and from cloud-to-cloud in a multi-cloud environment. All that's critical to go to digital transformation. For any company, big, medium or small. >> So, specifically it's a lot of the new things that we can do with Flash, in terms of getting data out faster but you mentioned multi-cloud. Now, it seems like it's a practical reality, it's not going to all end up in one cloud, in fact there's going to be multiple avenues for achieving that cloud experience. What do you think about that? Why is that so important? >> Well I think you've got a couple different things. From a perspective of, why multi-cloud? You've got some people that want to keep it private. So you've got companies we need to, for a storage company, we need to provide them with private cloud technology. You've got public cloud providers which are a big customer, by the way, of IBM Storage. And the third thing is hybrid cloud, part private, part public, moving around. And lastly, some people really will be using multiple public cloud providers whether it be cloud provider going public or whether they're trying to be hybrid. You're going to use IBM Cloud and you're going to use Amazon depending on the size of the company, the geography and sometimes even legal regulation. IBM's whole storage strategy is to make sure not only provide that incredible resiliency, that incredible reliability and the performance you need for all data set workloads as they move to the cloud, but also you can transparently move data to the cloud and in fact, all of our storage software is heavily cloudified, as we've talked about actually a couple of years ago, with IBM Storage software. >> So, that suggests ultimately that we and that these businesses think about digital business, they're going to use their data differently. And storage, types of storage technology, relying on it to happen, in a multi-cloud setting. But what are some of those kind of baseline storage technologies that make this, that become so critical, as we think about this transformation? >> So, the first thing is the move to NVMe. NVMe is a new protocol that's very high-speed. We've introduced a new product, couple weeks ago, called the FlashSystem 9100, that has NVMe actually in the storage subsystem itself, dramatically increasing the performance, for example, you can go up to 10 million IOPS, and have latency of only 350 mics. Well, guess what? The real enemy of all workloads and applications is your latency and at 350 mics, that's almost nothing. Then the second thing is making sure that you have a robust software interconnect. So what we've done, is make sure that all of our storage products can automatically and transparently tier data out to multiple clouds, not just one but in a multi cloud environment. So those two things are critical. The high performance of NVMe that we just launched and integrating a storage subsystem with all of this cloudified software, and getting it for one price. >> Now you mentioned the FlashSystem 9100. I presume also that there is new thoughts about how to imagine packaging, how to imbue some of that engineering discipline into some of these new products. Tell, talk to us a little bit about some of the things that IBM is doing to simplify the packaging and the availability of these types of technologies in context of this journey to the multi-cloud. >> So we've done two things. In addition to having this FlashSystem 9100 being NVMe from end-to-end, supporting NVMe over fabric infrastructures, you talked about already, the cloud is all about a fabric. But, secondly what we're doing is integrating a whole family of the IBM Spectrum Storage software. Spectrum Protect Plus, we've got our Spectrum Connect for containerized environments, we've got our Spectrum Virtualize for public cloud, the base software is our regular Spectrum Virtualize which happen to work with over 440 arrays that are ours, giving them all sorts of technology such as data rest encryption, the ability to move out to the cloud, so if you've got an older array and it happens to be working with the 9100 with our Spectrum Virtualize, we can move data from an older array, that's not ours, or our older arrays too, and move it out to IBM Cloud or move it out to Amazon or Azure with our transparent cloud tiering. So imbuing all of this software functionality. And now the third thing we've done is create a bunch of solutions blueprints, think of them as recipes. Easy use for the end-user, it shows them what they need to do to work in a private cloud environment, what they need to do to really work on secondary data sets. Remember, data is your most valuable asset. It's not just about your primary data. What do you do with your secondary data? Are you mining that for AI? Are you in that to do any business intelligence? And we've got software that allows you to do that, and all of that is imbued and embedded integrated into your FlashSystem 9100, when you buy it. >> Sounds like a pretty exciting time for storage. >> It is. Storage is white hot. >> Great conversation Eric-- >> White hot. >> Great. >> Alright so that's the first one, we'll go into the segway. (sprightly music) Good? (sprightly music)