>> Announcer: 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. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020 of course, happening virtually. And there are certain people that we talk to every year at theCUBE, and this guest, I believe, has been on theCUBE at VMworld more than any others. It's actually not Pat Gelsinger, Eric Herzog. He is the chief marketing officer and vice president of global storage channels at IBM. Eric, Mr. Zoginstor, welcome back to theCUBE, nice to see you. >> Thank you very much, Stu. IBM always enjoys hanging with you, John, and Dave. And again, glad to be here, although not in person this time at VMworld 2020 virtual. Thanks again for having IBM. >> Alright, so, you know, some things are the same, others, very different. Of course, Eric, IBM, a long, long partner of VMware's. Why don't you set up for us a little bit, you know, 2020, the major engagements, what's new with IBM and VMware? >> So, a couple of things, first of all, we have made our Spectrum Virtualize software, software defined block storage work in virtual machines, both in AWS and IBM Cloud. So we started with IBM Cloud and then earlier this year with AWS. So now we have two different cloud platforms where our Spectrum Virtualize software sits in a VM at the cloud provider. The other thing we've done, of course, is V7 support. In fact, I've done several VMUGs. And in fact, my session at VMworld is going to talk about both our support for V7 but also what we're doing with containers, CSI, Kubernetes overall, and how we can support that in a virtual VMware environment, and also we're doing with traditional ESX and VMware configurations as well. And of course, out to the cloud, as I just talked about. >> Yeah, that discussion of hybrid cloud, Eric, is one that we've been hearing from IBM for a long time. And VMware has had that message, but their cloud solutions have really matured. They've got a whole group going deep on cloud native. The Amazon solutions have been something that they've been partnering, making sure that, you know, data protection, it can span between, you know, the traditional data center environment where VMware is so dominant, and the public clouds. You're giving a session on some of those hybrid cloud solutions, so share with us a little bit, you know, where do the visions completely agree? What's some of the differences between what IBM is doing and maybe what people are hearing from VMware? >> Well, first of all, our solutions don't always require VMware to be installed. So for example, if you're doing it in a container environment, for example, with Red Hat OpenShift, that works slightly different. Not that you can't run Red Hat products inside of a virtual machine, which you can, but in this case, I'm talking Red Hat native. We also of course do VMware native and support what VMware has announced with their Kubernetes based solutions that they've been talking about since VMworld last year, obviously when Pat made some big announcements onstage about what they were doing in the container space. So we've been following that along as well. So from that perspective, we have agreement on a virtual machine perspective and of course, what VMware is doing with the container space. But then also a slightly different one when we're doing Red Hat OpenShift as a native configuration, without having a virtual machine involved in that configuration. So those are both the commonalities and the differences that we're doing with VMware in a hybrid cloud configuration. >> Yeah. Eric, you and I both have some of those scars from making sure that storage works in a virtual environment. It took us about a decade to get things to really work at the VM level. Containers, it's been about five years, it feels like we've made faster progress to make sure that we can have stateful environments, we can tie up with storage, but give us a little bit of a look back as to what we've learned and how we've made sure that containerized, Kubernetes environments, you know, work well with storage for customers today. >> Well, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, I think all the storage vendors learn from VMware. And then the expansion of virtual environments beyond VMware to other virtual environments as well. So I think all the storage vendors, including IBM learned through that process, okay, when the next thing comes, which of course in this case happens to be containers, both in a VMware environment, but in an open environment with the Kubernetes management framework, that you need to be able to support it. So for example, we have done several different things. We support persistent volumes in file block and object store. And we started with that almost three years ago on the block side, then we added the file side and now the object storage side. We also can back up data that's in those containers, which is an important feature, right? I am sitting there and I've got data now and persistent volume, but I got to back it up as well. So we've announced support for container based backup either with Red Hat OpenShift or in a generic Kubernetes environment, because we're realistic at IBM. We know that you have to exist in the software infrastructure milieu, and that includes VMware and competitors of VMware. It includes Red Hat OpenShift, but also competitors to Red Hat. And we've made sure that we support whatever the end user needs. So if they're going with Red Hat, great. If they're going with a generic container environment, great. If they're going to use VMware's container solutions, great. And on the virtualization engines, the same thing. We started with VMware, but also have added other virtualization engines. So you think the storage community as a whole and IBM in particular has learned, we need to be ready day one. And like I said, three years ago, we already had persistent volume support for block store. It's still the dominant storage and we had that three years ago. So for us, that would be really, I guess, two years from what you've talked about when containers started to take off. And within two years we had something going that was working at the end user level. Our sales team could sell our business partners. As you know, many of the business partners are really rallying around containers, whether it be Red Hat or in what I'll call a more generic environment as well. They're seeing the forest through the trees. I do think when you look at it from an end user perspective, though, you're going to see all three. So, particularly in the Global Fortune 1000, you're going to see Red Hat environments, generic Kubernetes environments, VMware environments, just like you often see in some instances, heterogeneous virtualization environments, and you're still going to see bare metal. So I think it's going to vary by application workload and use case. And I think all, I'd say midsize enterprise up, let's say, $5 billion company and up, probably will have at least two, if not all three of those environments, container, virtual machine, and bare metal. So we need to make sure that at IBM we support all those environments to keep those customers happy. >> Yeah, well, Eric, I think anybody, everybody in the industry knows, IBM can span those environments, you know, support through generations. And very much knows that everything in IT tends to be additive. You mentioned customers, Eric, you talk to a lot of customers. So bring us inside, give us a couple examples if you would, how are they dealing with this transition? For years we've been talking about, you know, enabling developers, having them be tied more tightly with what the enterprise is doing. So what are you seeing from some of your customers today? >> Well, I think the key thing is they'd like to use data reuse. So, in this case, think of a backup, a snap or replica dataset, which is real world data, and being able to use that and reuse that. And now the storage guys want to make sure they know who's, if you will, checked it out. We do that with our Spectrum Copy Data Management. You also have, of course, integration with the Ansible framework, which IBM supports, in fact, we'll be announcing some additional support for more features in Ansible coming at the end of October. We'll be doing a large launch, very heavily on containers. Containers and primary storage, containers in hybrid cloud environments, containers in big data and AI environments, and containers in the modern data protection and cyber resiliency space as well. So we'll be talking about some additional support in this case about Ansible as well. So you want to make sure, one of the key things, I think, if you're a storage guy, if I'm the VP of infrastructure, or I'm the CIO, even if I'm not a storage person, in fact, if you think about it, I'm almost 70 now. I have never, ever, ever, ever met a CIO who used to be a storage guy, ever. Whether I, I've been with big companies, I was at EMC, I was at Seagate Maxtor, I've been at IBM actually twice. I've also done seven startups, as you guys know at theCUBE. I have never, ever met a CIO who used to be a storage person. Ever, in all those years. So, what appeals to them is, how do I let the dev guys and the test guys use that storage? At the same time, they're smart enough to know that the software guys and the test guys could actually screw up the storage, lose the data, or if they don't lose the data, cost them hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars because they did something wrong and they have to reconfigure all the storage solutions. So you want to make sure that the CIO is comfortable, that the dev and the test teams can use that storage properly. It's a part of what Ansible's about. You want to make sure that you've got tight integration. So for example, we announced a container native version of our Spectrum Discover software, which gives you comprehensive metadata, cataloging and indexing. Not only for IBM's scale-out file, Spectrum Scale, not only for IBM object storage, IBM cloud object storage, but also for Amazon S3 and also for NetApp filers and also for EMC Isilon. And it's a container native. So you want to make sure in that case, we have an API. So the AI software guys, or the big data software guys could interface with that API to Spectrum Discover, let them do all the work. And we're talking about a piece of software that can traverse billions of objects in two seconds, billions of them. And is ideal to use in solutions that are hundreds of petabytes, up into multiple exabytes. So it's a great way that by having that API where the CIO is confident that the software guys can use the API, not mess up the storage because you know, the storage guys and the data scientists can configure Spectrum Discover and then save it as templates and run an AI workload every Monday, and then run a big data workload every Tuesday, and then Wednesday run a different AI workload and Thursday run a different big data. And so once they've set that up, everything is automated. And CIOs love automation, and they really are sensitive. Although they're all software guys, they are sensitive to software guys messing up the storage 'cause it could cost them money, right? So that's their concern. We make it easy. >> Absolutely, Eric, you know, it'd be lovely to say that storage is just invisible, I don't need to think about it, but when something goes wrong, you need those experts to be able to dig in. You spent some time talking about automation, so critically important. How about the management layer? You know, you think back, for years it was, vCenter would be the place that everything can plug in. You could have more generalists using it. The HCI waves were people kind of getting away from being storage specialists. Today VMware has, of course vCenter's their main estate, but they have Tanzu. On the IBM and Red Hat side, you know, this year you announced the Advanced Cluster Management. What's that management landscape look like? How does the storage get away from managing some of the bits and bytes and, you know, just embrace more of that automation that you talked about? >> So in the case of IBM, we make sure we can support both. We need to appeal to the storage nerd, the storage geek if you will. The same time to a more generalist environment, whether it be an infrastructure manager, whether it be some of the software guys. So for example, we support, obviously vCenter. We're going to be supporting all of the elements that are going to happen in a container environment that VMware is doing. We have hot integration and big time integration with Red Hat's management framework, both with Ansible, but also in the container space as well. We're announcing some things that are coming again at the end of October in the container space about how we interface with the Red Hat management schema. And so you don't always have to have the storage expert manage the storage. You can have the Red Hat administrator, or in some cases, the DevOps guys do it. So we're making sure that we can cover both sides of the fence. Some companies, this just my personal belief, that as containers become commonplace while the software guys are going to want to still control it, there eventually will be a Red Hat/container admin, just like all the big companies today have VMware admins. They all do. Or virtualization admins that cover VMware and VMware's competitors such as Hyper-V. They have specialized admins to run that. And you would argue, VMware is very easy to use, why aren't the software guys playing with it? 'Cause guess what? Those VMs are sitting on servers containing both apps and data. And if the software guy comes in to do something, messes it up, so what have of the big entities done? They've created basically a virtualization admin layer. I think that over time, either the virtualization admins become virtualization/container admins, or if it's a big enough for both estates, there'll be container admins at the Global Fortune 500, and they'll also be virtualization admins. And then the software guys, the devOps guys will interface with that. There will always be a level of management framework. Which is why we integrate, for example, with vCenter, what we're doing with Red Hat, what we do with generic Kubernetes, to make sure that we can integrate there. So we'll make sure that we cover all areas because a number of our customers are very large, but some of our customers are very small. In fact, we have a company that's in the software development space for autonomous driving. They have over a hundred petabytes of IBM Spectrum Scale in a container environment. So that's a small company that's gone all containers, at the same time, we have a bunch of course, Global Fortune 1000s where IBM plays exceedingly well that have our products. And they've got some stuff sitting in VMware, some such sitting in generic Kubernetes, some stuff sitting in Red Hat OpenShift and some stuff still in bare metal. And in some cases they don't want their software people to touch it, in other cases, these big accounts, they want their software people empowered. So we're going to make sure we could support both and both management frameworks. Traditional storage management framework with each one of our products and also management frameworks for virtualization, which we've already been doing. And now management frame first with container. We'll make sure we can cover all three of those bases 'cause that's what the big entities will want. And then in the smaller names, you'll have to see who wins out. I mean, they may still use three in a small company, you really don't know, so you want to make sure you've got everything covered. And it's very easy for us to do this integration because of things we've already historically done, particularly with the virtualization environment. So yes, the interstices of the integration are different, but we know here's kind of the process to do the interconnectivity between a storage management framework and a generic management framework, in, originally of course, vCenter, and now doing it for the container world as well. So at least we've learned best practices and now we're just tweaking those best practices in the difference between a container world and a virtualization world. >> Eric, VMworld is one of the biggest times of the year, where we all get together. I know how busy you are going to the show, meeting with customers, meeting with partners, you know, walking the hallways. You're one of the people that traveled more than I did pre-COVID. You know, you're always at the partner shows and meeting with people. Give us a little insight as to how you're making sure that, partners and customers, those conversations are still happening. We understand everything over video can be a little bit challenging, but, what are you seeing here in 2020? How's everybody doing? >> Well, so, a couple of things. First of all, I already did two partner meetings today. (laughs) And I have an end user meeting, two end user meetings tomorrow. So what we've done at IBM is make sure we do a couple things. One, short and to the point, okay? We have automated tools to actually show, drawing, just like the infamous walk up to the whiteboard in a face to face meeting, we've got that. We've also now tried to make sure everybody is being overly inundated with WebEx. And by the way, there's already a lot of WebEx anyway. I can think of meeting I had with a telco, one of the Fortune 300, and this was actually right before Thanksgiving. I was in their office in San Jose, but they had guys in Texas and guys in the East Coast all on. So we're still over WebEx, but it also was a two and a half hour meeting, actually almost a three hour meeting. And both myself and our Flash CTO went up to the whiteboard, which you could then see over WebEx 'cause they had a camera showing up onto the whiteboard. So now you have to take that and use integrated tools. One, but since people are now, I would argue, over WebEx. There is a different feel to doing the WebEx than when you're doing it face to face. We have to fly somewhere, or they have to fly somewhere. We have to even drive somewhere, so in between meetings, if you're going to do four customer calls, Stu, as you know, I travel all over the world. So I was in Sweden actually right before COVID. And in one day, the day after we had a launch, we launched our new Flash System products in February on the 11th, on February 12th, I was still in Stockholm and I had two partner meetings and two end user meetings. But the sales guy was driving me around. So in between the meetings, you'd be in the car for 20 minutes or half an hour. So it connects different when you can do WebEx after WebEx after WebEx with basically no break. So you have to be sensitive to that when you're talking to your partners, sensitive of that when you're talking to the customers sensitive when you're talking to the analysts, such as you guys, sensitive when you're talking to the press and all your various constituents. So we've been doing that at IBM, really, since the COVID thing got started, is coming up with some best practices so we don't overtax the end users and overtax our channel partners. >> Yeah, Eric, the joke I had on that is we're all following the Bill Belichick model now, no days off, just meeting, meeting, meeting every day, you can stack them up, right? You used to enjoy those downtimes in between where you could catch up on a call, do some things. I had to carve out some time to make sure that stack of books that normally I would read in the airports or on flights, everything, you know. I do enjoy reading a book every now and again, so. Final thing, I guess, Eric. Here at VMworld 2020, you know, give us final takeaways that you want your customers to have when it comes to IBM and VMware. >> So a couple of things, A, we were tightly integrated and have been tightly integrated for what they've been doing in their traditional virtualization environment. As they move to containers we'll be tightly integrated with them as well, as well as other container platforms, not just from IBM with Red Hat, but again, generic Kubernetes environments with open source container configurations that don't use IBM Red Hat and don't use VMware. So we want to make sure that we span that. In traditional VMware environments, like with Version 7 that came out, we make sure we support it. In fact, VMware just announced support for NVMe over Fibre Channel. Well, we've been shipping NVMe over Fibre Channel for just under two years now. It'll be almost two years, well, it will be two years in October. So we're sitting here in September, it's almost been two years since we've been shipping that. But they haven't supported it, so now of course we actually, as part of our launch, I pre say something, as part of our launch, the last week of October at IBM's TechU it'll be on October 27th, you can join for free. You don't need to attend TechU, we'll have a free registration page. So just follow Zoginstor or look at my LinkedIns 'cause I'll be posting shortly when we have the link, but we'll be talking about things that we're doing around V7, with support for VMware's announcement of NVMe over Fibre Channel, even though we've had it for two years coming next month. But they're announcing support, so we're doing that as well. So all of those sort of checkbox items, we'll continue to do as they push forward into the container world. IBM will be there right with them as well because we know it's a very large world and we need to support everybody. We support VMware. We supported their competitors in the virtualization space 'cause some customers have, in fact, some customers have both. They've got VMware and maybe one other of the virtualization elements. Usually VMware is the dominant of course, but if they've got even a little bit of it, we need to make sure our storage works with it. We're going to do the same thing in the container world. So we will continue to push forward with VMware. It's a tight relationship, not just with IBM Storage, but with the server group, clearly with the cloud team. So we need to make sure that IBM as a company stays very close to VMware, as well as, obviously, what we're doing with Red Hat. And IBM Storage makes sure we will do both. I like to say that IBM Storage is a Switzerland of the storage industry. We work with everyone. We work with all these infrastructure players from the software world. And even with our competitors, our Spectrum Virtualized software that comes on our Flash Systems Array supports over 550 different storage arrays that are not IBM's. Delivering enterprise-class data services, such as snapshot, replication data, at rest encryption, migration, all those features, but you can buy the software and use it with our competitors' storage array. So at IBM we've made a practice of making sure that we're very inclusive with our software business across the whole company and in storage in particular with things like Spectrum Virtualize, with what we've done with our backup products, of course we backup everybody's stuff, not just ours. We're making sure we do the same thing in the virtualization environment. Particularly with VMware and where they're going into the container world and what we're doing with our own, obviously sister division, Red Hat, but even in a generic Kubernetes environment. Everyone's not going to buy Red Hat or VMware. There are people going to do Kubernetes industry standard, they're going to use that, if you will, open source container environment with Kubernetes on top and not use VMware and not use Red Hat. We're going to make sure if they do it, what I'll call generically, if they use Red Hat, if they use VMware or some combo, we will support all of it and that's very important for us at VMworld to make sure everyone is aware that while we may own Red Hat, we have a very strong, powerful connection to VMware and going to continue to do that in the future as well. >> Eric Herzog, thanks so much for joining us. Always a pleasure catching up with you. >> Thank you very much. We love being with theCUBE, you guys do great work at every show and one of these days I'll see you again and we'll have a beer. In person. >> Absolutely. So, definitely, Dave Vellante and John Furrier send their best, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (relaxed electronic music)

(fast orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another Wikibon CUBE Conversation. Today I'm joined by Eric Herzog, who's the CMO and Vice President of Channels in IBM's Storage Group. Welcome, Eric. >> Peter, thank you very much. Really appreciate spending time with theCube. >> Absolutely, it's always great to have you here, Eric. And you know, it's interesting. When you come in, it's kind of, let's focus on storage, cause that's what you do, but it's kind of interesting overall, the degree to which storage and business is now becoming more than just a thing that you have to have, but part of your overall business strategy increasingly because of the role that digital business is playing. Well, earlier today IBM made some pretty consequential announcements about how you intend to help customers draw those two together closely. Why don't you take us through 'em? >> So, first thing I think, with the digital business, it's all about data. And the digital business is driven by data. Data always ends up on storage and is always managed by storage software, so while it may be underneath the hood if you will, it is the critical engine underneath that entire car. If you don't have the right engine or transmission, which you could argue storage and storage software is, then you can't have a truly digital business. >> True, so tell us, what did IBM do? >> So what we do is we announced a number of technologies today, some of which were enhancing, some of which were brand new. So for example, a lot of it was around our Spectrum storage software family. We introduced a new software-defined storage for NAS, Spectrum NAS. We introduced enhancements to our IBM cloud object storage offering, also to our Spectrum Virtualize, several enhancements to our modern data protection suite, which is Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Tech Plus were enhanced. And lastly, from an infrastructure perspective, we announced a first real product around an NVMe storage solution over an InfiniBand fabric, and what we're going to do for rest year-round NVMe and how that impacts storage systems. Which are of course, a critical component in your digital data business. >> You also announced some new terms and conditions, or new ways of conceiving how you can get access to the storage, capacity storage plans you want. Why don't ya give us a little bit of inside on that. >> So one of the things we've done is we've already created, a couple years ago the Spectrum storage suite which has a whole raft of different products, file software, block software, back-up, archive software. So we added the Spectrum Protect Plus offering into that suite. We also had a back-up only suite which focuses just on modern data protection. We've put it in there and in both cases, it's at no additional fee. So if you buy the suite, you get Spectrum Protect Plus. If you buy the back-up only suite, so you're more focused on back-up only, again at no extra charge to the end user. The other thing we've done is we announced in Q4, a storage utility model. So think that you can buy storage, the way you buy your power bill or your water bill or your gas bill. So it can go up and it can go down. We bill you quarterly. We added our IBM cloud object storage on premises solution to that set of products. We had an earlier set of products built around flash we announced in Q4 of last year. Now we've added object storage as a way to consume in basically a utility offering model. >> So we talk a lot at Wikibon about the need for what we call the true private client approach which is basically the idea that you want the cloud experience wherever your data requires. And it sounds like IBM is actually starting to accelerate the process by which it introduces many of these features, especially in the storage unit. You've bought in more stuff underneath the spectrum family. You're starting to introduce some of those new highly innovative technologies like NVMe over Fabric and you've also introduced an honest utility model that allows people to have or to treat their storage capacity more like that cloud experience. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely. And we've done one other things too. For example, as you know, from a cloud perspective everyone is moving to containers, right? Our Spectrum Connect product offers free support for dockers and kubernetes. So if you're going to create a private cloud, and you're going to do that on your own, of even hybrid cloud where you're, you know, sluffing some of it into your public cloud provider. Bottom line is that dockers support, that container support is what you need to create the true private cloud experience that Wikibon has been talking about for the last year and half now. >> Well, let's talk about the kubernetes and dockers and the notion of containers as a dissociative storage. I want to take it in two directions. First off, tell us a little bit about how it works kind of dissolver oriented terms and then, let's talk about what that's going to mean to the ecosystem and how people are going to think about buying storage going forward. So why don't we start with how does this capability work? >> Sure. So the key thing we've done with the Spectrum Connect product is provide persistent storage capability to a container environment. As you know, containers just like VM's in the past can come up and come down very frequently especially if you're in a dev-ops environment. The whole point is they can spin them up quickly and take them down quickly. The problem is they don't allow for persistent storage. So our Spectrum container product allows for the capability of doing persistent storage connected to a containerized environment. >> So they way this would would work is you'd still have a server, you'd still have machine with some compute that would be responsible for spinning the containers up and down. But you'd have a storage feature that would make sure that that storage associated with that container would persist. >> Correct. >> Therefore you could continue to do the container up and down in the server while at the same time persisting the storage over an extended period of time. >> Right. So what that means is any of our customers who have our Spectrum Accelerate software defined storage for block, our Spectrum Virtualized software defined storage for block, and the associated family of arrays that ship with that software embedded. Remember, for us, our software defined storage can be sold stand alone as just a piece of software or embedded in our arrays, which for example, at Spectrum Virtualized means there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of our software defined storage between the software only version and the array version. So for people who have those arrays, the container support is absolutely free. So if you've already bought the product and you're on our maintenance support, you just download the Spectrum Connect, boom you're off to the races, you deploy your containers for your private cloud environment and you've got it right there. If you're a brand new customer, you're going to buy let's say for example next week, you buy it next week. You get the Spectrum Virtualized, let's say for example on our Storewize V7000 F all-flash array cause that software comes with it. And you could go download Spectrum Connect at no fee cause you just type in you're a customer, put in your serial number, boom! They can just download it. And we don't charge anything for that. >> And now your storage guys and your developer guys are working a little bit more closely together as opposed to being at each others' throats. >> And saying what happened to the storage? >> There you go. >> Oh wait. I thought that was going to be... well no, it's not persistent. And in this case, it's persistent. They can take it up. They can take it down. They can do whatever they want. And that container product is free so the IT guy doesn't go, "Oh now I got to pay more money cause he doesn't." And then the guys on the dev-ops side and on the deployment application side are saying oh okay now I don't have to worry about that as an issue anymore. The IT guys took care of that for me. So you get everybody working together. You get the persistent storage that is not, you know, comes when you get a container environment. You get the exact opposite that is not persistent. And now we've offered that. And again it's a no charge for the users so it's easy to deploy. Easy to use and there's no fee. >> And so Eric, the reason I ask questions is because it's the compounding of these little annoyances that make it difficult for companies to accelerate their entree into digital business. And how they engage their customers differently and so this is one of those examples where as you said, data is the asset that distinguishes a digital business from a regular business competitor. What types of changes is this going to mean to the way the business thinks, the way the business buys, the way the business perceives storage? >> So I think the first thing is they need to realize that in a digital business, data is the oil. It is the gold, it is the silver, it's the diamonds. It is the number one entity. >> It's the value. >> It is the value of your digital business. So, you have to realize that the underlying infrastructure if it goes down, guess what? Your digital business is no longer up and running. So from that perspective, you need to have your underlying foundation from a storage perspective. In this case, think of Storage System the highly, highly available, highly, highly reliable and it needs to be incredibly fast because now you're doing everything from a digital business. And so everything is pounding on your server and storage infrastructure. Not that it wasn't a traditional data center but if certain things need to be slow, it's okay. But now that you've gone true private cloud with a full digital business, it can't be slow. It has to be resilient and it has to be always available. And those are things we've built in to both our storage software lair, the Spectrum family and to all of our storage arrays. The Storewize family, our DS family, our Flash System family. All are highly redundant, highly available and they're all flash. >> And let me add two more things to that. Cause I think it's pertinent to the direction that IBM is taking here, because data is not exactly like oil or not exactly like diamonds, in the sense that, oil and diamonds still follow the laws of scarcity. The value of data increases, and I know you've made this point, as you use it more. >> Right. >> So on the one hand, the storage has to provide the flexibility that developers can go after the same data at different times and in different ways. But still have that data be persistent and related to that obviously is that you want to ensure that you're able to drive that through-put through the system as aggressively as possible without creating a whole bunch of administrative headaches. So if we pivot for a second to NVMe, what does that mean to introduce things like NVMe to those five things we just talked about? Especially you know, the performance and the flexibility of having multiple applications and groups being able to go at the same data, perhaps do some snapshots and copies? >> So, couple things. From a software perspective that sits on top of all of our products, we've taken the approach of modern data protection. It's not let's just do an incremental back-up like in the old days. So what we do today is we have basically incessant snapshotting which is a full boat copy. What you can do is you can check those out with our Spectrum Content data manager which we didn't announce anything new on that, but we announced it last year. And with that, you can have unending snapshots. The dev-ops guys can grab a real piece of software, a real piece of data. So when they're doing their development, they're not using a faux set. And that faux set often can introduce more bugs. It doesn't get up as quickly. >> And so now you got more data, so you take the snapshot. By the way, it's self service. They can check it out themselves. Now when you look at it from the IT guy's perspective, guess what? There's a log of who's got what. So if there was a security issue, they can say, oh Eric Herzog, you're the one that had that. It looks like that leaked out from you. Even if it was inadvertent, the point is the dev-op guys can go in and grab from this new modern data production paradigm that we have. At the same time, the IT guys can at least track what is going on, so it's interesting. Then from a NVMe perspective, the key thing that NVMe has is A, all of the existing infrastructures, InfiniBand, Fabric, Fibre Channel Fabric, and Ethernet Fabric will be supported. Okay, over time, we're announcing today an InfiniBand Fabric solution, but all of the arrays that you buy today, if you for example bought a flash system V9000 and you wanted to do NVMe over Ethernet later in the year, software upgrade only. You buy the hardware now, you're done, okay? Our A9000 flash systems, Fibre Channel Connect, you buy they Fibre Channel now, you just upgrade the software a little bit later. So the key things within a NVMe configuration is A, the box is already highly resistant, highly available. Okay, they resist failures. They're easy to fix if there is a hardware failure for example, failed power supply. You know it's going to happen, okay? The smart business has an extra power supply sitting on the shelf. He pulls it out, he swaps it then sends it back to IBM. And when it's under warranty, boom, we take care of it. Okay? So that's the resiliency and the availability aspect from a physical perspective. But with NVMe, you get a better performance, which means that the arrays can handle more workloads. So as you go to a truly digital business built around the private cloud that Wikibon has been talking about now for 18 months, as you go to that model, you want to get more and apps pounding on the same storage, if you will. And with an NVMe Fabric solution, NVMe over time in the sub system itself, all that gives you more apps can work on the same set of storage. Now, do I have enough capacity, which is a separate topic. But as far as can the array handle the workload with NVMe from a Fabric perspective and NVMe in a storage sub system? You can handle additional workloads on the same physical infrastructure which saves you time, saves you money and gives you the performance for all workloads. Not just for a few niche workloads and all the other ones have to be slow. >> So Eric, you're out spending a lot of time with customers. Tell us a little about how they see their environments changing as a consequence of these and other related announcements. Are developers going to be looking at storage more as a potential source of value? How are administrators dealing with this? And give us some examples if you would. >> Sure, sure. So I think the key thing is with things like our content data manager. As we've got customers right now and they're able to check it out to all the test step guides which they couldn't do before. They're getting work done faster with real data. So the amount of bugs that come up with internal developers just like commercial developers like IBM or any other software company, the Microsofts, the Oracles, everybody has bugs. Well, guess what? In house developers got the same bugs. But, we help reduce that bug count. We make it easier for them to fix. Cause we're working on a real data set and not a fake data set, right? The IT guys love it because the dev-op guys don't say can you spin this up, spin this down? They do it on their own, right? Which accelerates them in doing their work. And the IT guys aren't bothered for it. That one concern on security, guess what? You got that long saying who's got what. >> Right, right. >> Burris has this. Herzog has that. >> That's a big deal because the IT guys ultimately, if something leaks out or there's a security issue, they get the call from the Chief Legal Officer, not the dev-ops guy. So this way, everybody is happy. The dev-op guys are happy. The IT guys are happy. The IT guys can focus on spinning up and spinning down for the dev guys. You can build it all yourself. Our copy data management and all of our storage softwares are API driven. Rest API's, integration with all of the object storage interfaces including S3. So it's easier and easier for the IT guy to make the dev-ops guys happy and give the dev-op guys self service, which, as you know, self service is one of the key attributes of the private cloud that Wikibon keeps talking about is self service. So we can give more through the software side. >> So I have one more question Eric. As we think about kind of where this announcement is, most important to businesses that are trying to affect that type of transformation we're talking about, is there one specific feature that is your conversation with customers, your conversations with the channels, since you're also very very close with the channel, that keeps popping to the top of the list of things to focus on as companies? As I said, try to figure out how to use data and assets differently? >> Well I think what the key thing from a storage guy perspective is one, interfacing with all the API's which we've done across our whole family, okay? Second thing is automation, automation, automation. The dev-ops guys like it. In a smaller shop, there may be only one IT guy who has to take care of their entire infrastructure. So the fact that our Spectrum Protect Plus for example can do VMware hyper V back-up except it can be done by the VMware hyper V guy or a general IT guy not a storage guy or a back-up admin. In the enterprise, sure there's a back-up admin in the big enterprises, but if you're at Herzog's Bar and Grill there is no back-up admin. So that ease of use, that simplicity, that integration with common API's and automating as much as possible is critical as people go to the digital business based on private clouds. >> Excellent. Eric Herzog, CMO, Vice-President of Channels at IBM storage group, talking about a number of things that were announced today as businesses try to marry their storage capability and their digital business strategy more closely together. Thanks for being here. >> Great, thank you very much. >> Once again, I'm Peter Burris. This has been a Wikibon CUBE Conversation with Eric Herzog of IBM. (fast orchestral music)