>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage. This is Day 2, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Sheila Rohra is here. She's the Senior Vice President and GM of the Data Infrastructure Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and of course, the storage division. And Omer Asad. Welcome back to "theCUBE", Omer. Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Data Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage. Guys, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you. Always a pleasure, man. >> Thank you. >> So Sheila, I'll start with you. Explain the difference. The Data Infrastructure Business and then Omer's Cloud Data Services. You first. >> Okay. So Data Infrastructure Business. So I'm responsible for the primary secondary storage. Basically, what you physically store, the data in a box, I actually own that. So I'm going to have Omer explain his business because he can explain it better than me. (laughing) Go ahead. >> So 100% right. So first, data infrastructure platforms, primary secondary storage. And then what I do from a cloud perspective is wrap up those things into offerings, block storage offerings, data protection offerings, and then put them on top of the GreenLake platform, which is the platform that Antonio and Fidelma talked about on main Keynote stage yesterday. That includes multi-tenancy, customer subscription management, sign on management, and then on top of that we build services. Services are cloud-like services, storage services or block service, data protection service, disaster recovery services. Those services are then launched on top of the platform. Some services like data protection services are software only. Some services are software plus hardware. And the hardware on the platform comes along from the primary storage business and we run the control plane for that block service on the GreenLake platform and that's the cloud service. >> So, I just want to clarify. So what we maybe used to know as 3PAR and Nimble and StoreOnce. Those are the products that you're responsible for? >> That is the primary storage part, right? And just to kind of show that, he and I, we do indeed work together. Right. So if you think about the 3PAR, the primary... Sorry, the Primera, the Alletras, the Nimble, right? All that, right? That's the technology that, you know, my team builds. And what Omer does with his magic is that he turns it into HPE GreenLake for storage, right? And to deliver as a service, right? And basically to create a self-service agility for the customer and also to get a very Cloud operational experience for them. >> So if I'm a customer, just so I get this right, if I'm a customer and I want Hybrid, that's what you're delivering as a Cloud service? >> Yes. >> And I don't care where the data is on-premises, in storage, or on Cloud. >> 100%. >> Is that right? >> So the way that would work is, as a customer, you would come along with the partner, because we're 100% partner-led. You'll come to the GreenLake Console. On the GreenLake Console, you will pick one of our services. Could be a data protection service, could be the block storage service. All services are hybrid in nature. Public Cloud is 100% participant in the ecosystem. You'll choose a service. Once you choose a service, you like the rate card for that service. That rate card is just like a hyperscaler rate card. IOPS, Commitment, MINCOMMIT's, whatever. Once you procure that at the price that you like with a partner, you buy the subscription. Then you go to console.greenLake.com, activate your subscription. Once the subscription is activated, if it's a service like block storage, which we talked about yesterday, service will be activated, and our supply chain will send you our platform gear, and that will get activated in your site. Two things, network cable, power cable, dial into the cloud, service gets activated, and you have a cloud control plane. The key difference to remember is that it is cloud-consumption model and cloud-operation model built in together. It is not your traditional as a service, which is just like hardware leasing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> That's a thing of the past. >> But this answers a question that I had, is how do you transfer or transform from a company that is, you know, selling boxes, of course, most of you are engineers are software engineers, I get that, to one that is selling services. And it sounds like the answer is you've organized, I know it's inside baseball here, but you organize so that you still have, you can build best of breed products and then you can package them into services. >> Omer: 100%. 100%. >> It's separate but complementary organization. >> So the simplest way to look at it would be, we have a platform side at the house that builds the persistence layers, the innovation, the file systems, the speeds and feeds, and then building on top of that, really, really resilient storage services. Then how the customer consumes those storage services, we've got tremendous feedback from our customers, is that the cloud-operational model has won. It's just a very, very simple way to operate it, right? So from a customer's perspective, we have completely abstracted away out hardware, which is in the back. It could be at their own data center, it could be at an MSP, or they could be using a public cloud region. But from an operational perspective, the customer gets a single pane of glass through our service console, whether they're operating stuff on-prem, or they're operating stuff in the public cloud. >> So they get storage no matter what? They want it in the cloud, they got it that way, and if they want it as a service, it just gets shipped. >> 100%. >> They plug it in and it auto configures. >> Omer: It's ready to go. >> That's right. And the key thing is simplicity. We want to take the headache away from our customers, we want our customers to focus on their business outcomes, and their projects, and we're simplifying it through analytics and through this unified cloud platform, right? On like how their data is managed, how they're stored, how they're secured, that's all taken care of in this operational model. >> Okay, so I have a question. So just now the edge, like take me through this. Say I'm a customer, okay I got the data saved on-premise action, cloud, love that. Great, sir. That's a value proposition. Come to HPE because we provide this easily. Yeah. But now at the edge, I want to deploy it out to some edge node. Could be a tower with Telecom, 5G or whatever, I want to box this out there, I want storage. What happens there? Just ship it out there and connects up? Does it work the same way? >> 100%. So from our infrastructure team, you'll consume one or two platforms. You'll consume either the Hyperconverged form factor, SimpliVity, or you might convert, the Converged form factor, which is proliant servers powered by Alletras. Alletra 6Ks. Either of those... But it's very different the way you would procure it. What you would procure from us is an edge service. That edge service will come configured with certain amount of compute, certain amount of storage, and a certain amount of data protection. Once you buy that on a dollars per gig per month basis, whichever rate card you prefer, storage rate card or a VMware rate card, that's all you buy. From that point on, the platform team automatically configures the back-end hardware from that attribute-based ordering and that is shipped out to your edge. Dial in the network cable, dial in the power cable, GreenLake cloud discovers it, and then you start running the- >> Self-service, configure it, it just shows up, plug it in, done. >> Omer: Self-service but partner-led. >> Yeah. >> Because we have preferred pricing for our partners. Our partners would come in, they will configure the subscriptions, and then we activate those customers, and then send out the hardware. So it's like a hyperscaler on-prem at-scale kind of a model. >> Yeah, I like it a lot. >> So you guys are in the data business. You run the data portion of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I used to call it storage, even if we still call it storage but really, it's evolving into data. So what's your vision for the data business and your customer's data vision, if you will? How are you supporting that? >> Well, I want to kick it off, and then I'm going to have my friend, Omer, chime in. But the key thing is that what the first step is is that we have to create a unified platform, and in this case we're creating a unified cloud platform, right? Where there's a single pane of glass to manage all that data, right? And also leveraging lots of analytics and telemetry data that actually comes from our infosite, right? We use all that, we make it easy for the customer, and all they have to say, and they're basically given the answers to the test. "Hey, you know, you may want to increase your capacity. You may want to tweak your performance here." And all the customers are like, "Yes. No. Yes, no." Basically it, right? Accept and not accept, right? That's actually the easiest way. And again, as I said earlier, this frees up the bandwidth for the IT teams so then they actually focus more on the business side of the house, rather than figuring out how to actually manage every single step of the way of the data. >> Got it. >> So it's exactly what Sheila described, right? The way this strategy manifests itself across an operational roadmap for us is the ability to change from a storage vendor to a data services vendor, right? >> Sheila: Right. >> And then once we start monetizing these data services to our customers through the GreenLake platform, which gives us cloud consumption model and a cloud operational model, and then certain data services come with the platform layer, certain data services are software only. But all the services, all the data services that we provide are hybrid in nature, where we say, when you provision storage, you could provision it on-prem, or you can provision it in a hyperscaler environment. The challenge that most of our customers have come back and told us, is like, data center control planes are getting fragmented. On-premises, I mean there's no secrecy about it, right? VMware is the predominant hypervisor, and as a result of that, vCenter is the predominant configuration layer. Then there is the public cloud side, which is through either Ajour, or GCP, or AWS, being one of the largest ones out there. But when the customer is dealing with data assets, the persistence layer could be anywhere, it could be in AWS region, it could be your own data center, or it could be your MSP. But what this does is it creates an immense amount of fragmentation in the context in which the customers understand the data. Essentially, John, the customers are just trying to answer three questions: What is it that I store? How much of it do I store? Should I even be storing it in the first place? And surprisingly, those three questions just haven't been answered. And we've gotten more and more fragmented. So what we are trying to produce for our customers, is a context to ware data view, which allows the customer to understand structured and unstructured data, and the lineage of how it is stored in the organization. And essentially, the vision is around simplification and context to ware data management. One of the key things that makes that possible, is again, the age old infosite capability that we have continued to hone and develop over time, which is now up to the stage of like 12 trillion data points that are coming into the system that are not corroborated to give that back. >> And of course cost-optimizing it as well. We're up against the clock, but take us through the announcements, what's new from when we sort of last talked? I guess it was in September. >> Omer: Right. >> Right. What's new that's being announced here and, or, you know, GA? >> Right. So three major announcements that came out, because to keep on establishing the context when we were with you last time. So last time we announced GreenLake backup and recovery service. >> John: Right. >> That was VMware backup and recovery as a complete cloud, sort of SaaS control plane. No backup target management, no BDS server management, no catalog management, it's completely a SaaS service. Provide your vCenter address, boom, off you go. We do the backups, agentless, 100% dedup enabled. We have extended that into the public cloud domain. So now, we can back up AWS, EC2, and EBS instances within the same constructs. So a single catalog, single backup policy, single protection framework that protects you both in the cloud and on-prem, no fragmentation, no multiple solutions to deploy. And the second one is we've extended our Hyperconverged service to now be what we call the Hybrid Cloud On-Demand. So basically, you go to GreenLake Console control plane, and from there, you basically just start configuring virtual machines. It supports VMware and AWS at the same time. So you can provision a virtual machine on-prem, or you can provision a virtual machine in the public cloud. >> Got it. >> And, it's the same framework, the same catalog, the same inventory management system across the board. And then, lastly, we extended our block storage service to also become hybrid in nature. >> Got it. >> So you can manage on-prem and AWS, EBS assets as well. >> And Sheila, do you still make product announcements, or does Antonio not allow that? (Omer laughing) >> Well, we make product announcements, and you're going to see our product announcements actually done through the HPE GreenLake for block storage. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> So our announcements will be coming through that, because we do want to make it as a service. Again, we want to take all of that headache of "What configuration should I buy? How do I actually deploy it? How do I...?" We really want to take that headache away. So you're going to see more feature announcements that's going to come through this. >> So feature acceleration through GreenLake will be exposed? >> Absolutely. >> This is some cool stuff going on behind the scenes. >> Oh, there's a lot good stuff. >> Hardware still matters, you know. >> Hardware still matters. >> Does it still matter? Does hardware matter? >> Hardware still matters, but what matters more is the experience, and that's actually what we want to bring to the customer. (laughing) >> John: That's good. >> Good answer. >> Omer: 100%. (laughing) >> Guys, thanks so much- >> John: Hardware matters. >> For coming on "theCUBE". Good to see you again. >> John: We got it. >> Thanks. >> And hope the experience was good for you Sheila. >> I know, I know. Thank you. >> Omer: Pleasure as always. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back from HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE". (soft music)

(inspiring music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from the Venetian in Las Vegas, the first Discover since 2019. I really think this is my 14th Discover, when you include HP, when you include Europe. And I got to say this Discover, I think has more energy than any one that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here. Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners, Veeam CTO, Danny Allen is here, joined by David Harvey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, good to see you again. It was just earlier, let's see, last month, we were together out here. >> Yeah, just a few weeks ago. It's fantastic to be back and what it's telling us, technology industry is coming back. >> And the events business, of course, is coming back, which we love. I think the expectations were cautious. You saw it at VeeamON, a little more than you expected, a lot of great energy. A lot of people, 'cause it was last month, it was their first time out, >> Yes. >> in two years. Here, I think people have started to go out more, but still, an energy that's palpable. >> You can definitely feel it. Last night, I think I went to four consecutive events and everyone's out having those discussions and having conversations, it's good to be back. >> You guys hosted the Storage party last night, which is epic. I left at midnight, I took a picture, it was still packed. I said, okay, time to go, nothing good happens after midnight kids. David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved, and where you see it going? >> I appreciate it, and certainly this, as you said, has been a big alliance for us. Over 10 years or so, fantastic integrations across the board. And you touched on 2019 Discover. We launched with GreenLake at that event, we were one of the launch partners, and we've seen fantastic growth. Overall, what we're excited about, is that continuation of the movement of the customer's buying patterns in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam. We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage, we continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake, which we're really excited about. And we're also really excited to hear from HPE, unfortunately under NDA, some of their future stuff they're investing in, which is a really nice invigoration for what they're doing for their portfolio. And we see that being a big deal for us over the next 24 months. >> Your relationship with HPE predates the HP, HPE split. >> Mmm. >> Yes. >> But it was weird, because they had Data Protector, and that was a quasi-competitor, or really not, but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor, of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection I think is the tagline, if I got it right. Post the split, that was an S-curve moment, wasn't it, in terms of the partnership? >> It really was. If you go back 10 years, we did our first integration sending data to StoreOnce and we had some blueprints around that. But now, if you look what we have, we have integrations on the primary side, so, 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, all their top-tier storage, we can manage the snapshots. We have integration on the target side. We integrate with Catalyst in the movement of data and the management of data. And, as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake. So, customers who want to take this as a consumption model, we integrate with that. And so it's been, like you said, the strongest relationship that we have on the technology alliance side. >> So, V12, you announced at VeeamON. What does that mean for HPE customers, the relationship? Maybe you guys could both talk about that. >> Technology side, to touch on a few things that we're doing with them, ransomware has been a huge issue. Security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference, >> Dave: Yeah, you bet. and one of the things we're doing in V12 is adding immutability for both StoreOnce and StoreEver. So, we take the features that our partners have, immutability being big in the security space, and we integrate that fully into the product. So a customer checks a box and says, hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure. >> Yeah, and also, it's another signification about the relationship. Every single release we've done has had HPE at the heart of it, and the same thing is being said with V12. And it shows to our customers, the continual commitment. Relationships come and go. They're hard, and the great news is, 10 years has proven that we get through good times and tricky situations, and we both continue to invest, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of peace of mind and the revenue figures prove that, which is what we're really excited about. >> Yeah I want to come back to that, but just to follow up, Danny, on that immutability, that's a feature that you check? It's service within GreenLake, or within Veeam? How does that all work? >> We have immutability now depending on the target. We introduced the ability to send data, for example, into S3 two years ago, and make it immutable when you send it to an S3 or S3 compatible environment. We added, in Version 11, the ability to take a Linux repository and make it, and harden it, essentially make it immutable. But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems like StoreOnce, like StoreEver, and when we send data there, we take advantage of an API flag or whatever it happens to be, that it makes the data, when it's written to that system, can't be deleted, can't be encrypted. Now, what does that mean for a customer? Well, we do all the hard work in the back end, it's just a check box. They say, I want to make it immutable, and we manage how long it's immutable. Because if you made everything immutable forever, that's hugely expensive, right? So, it's all about, how long is that immutable before you age it out and make sure the new data coming in is immutable. >> Dave: It's like an insurance policy, you have that overlap. >> Yes. >> Right, okay. And then David, you mentioned the revenue, Lou bears that out. I got the IDC guys comin' on later on today. I'll ask 'em about that, if that's their swim lane. But you guys are basically a statistical tie, with Dell for number one? Am I getting that right? And you're growing at a faster rate, I believe, it's hard to tell 'cause I don't think Dell reports on the pace of its growth within data protection. You guys obviously do, but is that right? It's a statistical tie, is it? >> Yeah, hundred percent. >> Yeah, statistical tie for first place, which we're super excited about. When I joined Veeam, I think we were in fifth place, but we've been in the leader's quadrant of the Gartner Magic- >> Cause and effect there or? (panelists laughing) >> No, I don't think so. >> Dave: Ha, I think maybe. >> We've been on a great trajectory. But statistical tie for first place, greatest growth sequentially, and year-over-year, of all of the data protection vendors. And that's a testament not just to the technology that we're doing, but partnerships with HPE, because you never do this, the value of a technology is not that technology alone, it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem. And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover. It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering. >> What are your thoughts or what are you seeing in the field on As-a-service? Because of course, the messaging is all about As-a-service, you'd think, oh, a hundred percent of everything is going to be As-a-service. A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx, they got good, balance sheet, and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this, and, we're going to build our own little internal cloud. But, what are you seeing in the market in terms of As-a-service, versus, just traditional licensing models? >> Certainly, there's a mix between the two. What I'd say, is that sources that are already As-a-service, think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP, the cloud providers. There's a natural tendency for the customer to want the data protection As-a-service, as well for those. But if you talk about what's on premises, customers who have big data centers deployed, they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted for that to be data protection As-a-service. But we were early to this game ourselves. We have 10,000, what we call, Veeam Cloud Service Providers, that are offering data protection As-a-service, whether it be on premises, so they're remotely managing it, or cloud hosted, doing data protection for that. >> So, you don't care. You're providing the technology, and then your customers are actually choosing the delivery model. Is that correct? >> A hundred percent, and if you think about what GreenLake is doing for example, that started off as being a financial model, but now they're getting into that services delivery. And what we want to do is enable them to deliver it, As-a-service, not just the financial model, but the outcome for the customer. And so our technology, it's not just do backup, it's do backup for a multi-tenant, multi-customer environment that does all of the multi-tenancy and billing and charge back as part of that service. >> Okay, so you guys don't report on this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. You're number one now, let's call you, let's declare number one, 'cause we're well past that last reporting and you're growin' faster. So go another quarter, you're now number one, so you're the largest. Do you spend more on R&D in data protection than any other company? >> Yes, I'm quite certain that we do. Now, we have an unfair advantage because we have 450,000 customers. I don't think there's any other data protection company out there, the size and scope and scale, that we have. But we've been expanding, our largest R&D operation center's in Prague, it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that. Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D, so big investment in that space. You can see this just through our product space. Five years ago, we did data protection of VMware only, and now we do all the virtual environments, all the physical environments, all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, we're launching Salesforce. We announced that at VeeamON last month and it will be coming out in Q3. All of that is coming from our R&D investments. >> A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight, a PE company, purchases a company like Veeam, that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D. That did not happen in this case. >> No, they very much treat us as a growth company. We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020, and 25% year-over-year last year. The growth has been tremendous, they continue to give us the freedom. Now, I expect they'll want returns like that continuously, but we have been delivering, they have been investing. >> One of my favorite conversations of the year was our supercloud conversation, which was awesome, thank you for doing that with me. But that's clearly an area of focus, what we call supercloud, and you don't use that term, I know, you do sometimes, but it's not your marketing, I get that. But that is an R&D intensive effort, is it not? To create that common experience. And you see HPE, attempting to do that as well, across all these different estates. >> A hundred percent. We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiators, simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. Making it simple for the customers is not an easy thing to do. Making that checkbox for immutability? We have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple. Same thing on flexibility. We don't care if they're using 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, whatever you want to choose as the primary storage, we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy. You mentioned supercloud. We don't care what the cloud infrastructure, it can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure, it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud. It is a lot of effort on our part to abstract the cloud infrastructure, but we do that on behalf of our customers to take away that complexity, it's part of our platform. >> Quick follow-up, and then I want to ask a question of David. I like talking to you guys because you don't care where it is, right? You're truly agnostic to it all. I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing, cause I hear a lot of hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation that's happened all over the place, and I see pockets of it. What are you seeing in terms of repatriation? Have customers over-rotated to the cloud and now they're pullin' back a little bit? Or is it, as I'm claiming, in pockets? What's your visibility on that? >> Three things I see happening. There's the customers who lifted up their data center, moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill. >> (chuckling) Okay. >> And they will repatriate, there's no question. If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up and moved it over because the CIO told them to, they're moving it back on premises. But a second thing that we see is people moving it over, with tweaks. So they'll take their SQL server database and they'll move it into RDS, they'll change some things. And then you have people who are building cloud-native, they're never coming back on premises, they are building it for the cloud environment. So, we see all three of those. We only really see repatriation on that first scenario, when they get that first bill. >> And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost, 'cause you see the cloud is growing so fast. So David, what are the conversations like? You had several events last night, The Veeam party, slash Storage party, from HPE. What are you hearing from your alliance partners and the customers at the event. >> I think Danny touched on that point, it's about philosophy of evolution. And I think at the end of the day, whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances we've got out there, or with the big enterprise conversations we're having with HPE, it's about understanding which workloads they want to move. In our mind, the customers are getting much smarter in making that decision, rather than experimenting. They're really taking a really solid look. And the work we're doing with the GSIs on workplace modernization, data center transformation, they're really having that investment work up front on the workloads, to be able to say, this works for me, for my personality and my company. And so, to the point about movement, it's more about decisive decision at the start, and not feeling like the remit is, I have to do one thing or another, it's about looking at that workflow position. And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well. We've seen our movement to GreenLake tremendously grow in the last 18 months to two years. And from our GSI work as well, we're seeing the types of conversations really focus on that workload, compared to, hey, I just need a backup solution, and that's really exciting. >> Are you having specific conversations about security, or is it a data protection conversation still, (David chuckles) that's an adjacency to security? >> That's a great question. And I think it's a complex one, because if you come to a company like Veeam, we are there, and you touched on it before, we provide a solution when something has happened with security. We're not doing intrusion detection, we're not doing that barrier position at the end of it, but it's part of an end-to-end assumption. And I don't think that at this particular point, I started in security with RSA and Check Point, it was about layers of protection. Now it's layers of protection, and the inevitability that at some point something will happen, so about the recovery. So the exciting conversations we're having, especially with the big enterprises, is not about the fear factor, it's about, at some point something's going to occur. Speed of recovery is the conversation. And so for us, and your question is, are they talking to us about security, or more, the continuity position? And that's where the synergy's getting a lot simpler, rather than a hard demark between security and backup. >> Yeah, when you look at the stock market, everything's been hit, but security, with the exception of Okta, 'cause it got that weird benign hack, but security, generally, is an area that CIOs have said, hey, we can't really dial that back. We can maybe, some other discretionary stuff, we'll steal and prioritize. But security seems to be, and I think data protection is now part of that discussion. You're not a security company. We've seen some of your competitors actually pivot to become security companies. You're not doing that, but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think? >> It's an adjacency, and it's a new conversation that we're having with the Chief Information Security Officer. I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer who was hit by ransomware, and they got the call at 2:00 AM in the morning, after the ransomware they recovered their entire portfolio within 36 hours, from backups. Didn't even contact Veeam, I found out during this meeting. But that is clearly something that the Chief Information Security Officer wants to know about. It's part of his purview, is the recovery of that data. >> And they didn't pay the ransom? >> And they did not pay the ransom, not a penny. >> Ahh, we love those stories. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success. Love when you guys come on, and it was such a fun event at VeeamON. Great event here, and your presence is, was seen. The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from Las Vegas. (inspiring music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're here in theCUBE Studios in Marlborough, Massachusetts. We're gonna talk about storage and some of the trends that are going on in storage, and things have changed quite dramatically. It's not just about what media you're using today, you've got a lot of other considerations. Cloud, on-prem, in comes the edge, and it really drives new considerations for customers. Sundip Arora is here. He's the director of North America Storage and Big Data Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He's gonna talk to me about some of these trends, the customer point of view, and what HPE is doing to solve some of these problems. Sundip, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Dave, thanks for having me, I'm super excited. >> So you heard my little narrative upfront about some of the big picture trends, what do you see as some of the tectonic shifts in the storage marketplace? >> Yeah, Dave. So listen, we've traveled around the continent here and I spend a lot of time with customers in North America, and what I hear from customers is their center of universe revolves around being able to map with their cloud journey and what does that mean for their data. Now, I look at our cloud operating model and I map that to HPE's own point of view. Our point of view is bringing the intelligent data platform to our customers. And when we talk about mapping the cloud operating model to our customer, what does that really mean for us? When I talk to customers, they tell me three things. It means that you have extreme cost efficiency, you've got super ease of use, and you've got resource optimization, how to utilize them in the best manner. >> So, let me ask you on that. Big Data is in your title, and one of the things that we observed early on in the big data days was it was about bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data. Well, that sounded great and it was great, but it also caused problems because you're pushing, now, storage is everywhere. I mentioned the edge. So, I'm sure you're seeing that with customers. There is no more perimeter. Storage is just everywhere, wherever you want it to be. So when you talk about the cloud operating model, are you talking about bringing that experience to your data wherever that data lives? >> That's a great question. It used to be that you had an accounting system and that had a database, and that was delivering you a ton of data that you could analyze and store and read and write. And now, you've got data that's being produced at the edge, you've got point of sales systems, you've got autonomous vehicles, you've got data that's being produced on the cloud itself, and you've got data that's being produced at the core. So, what we are talking about is not just the automation of bringing that data in, but also how that data is being utilized. And to us, the way we map that challenge is through intelligence. >> Let's break down those three things: cost efficiency, ease of use, and resource optimization. Let's start with cost-efficiency. So, obviously, there's TCO. There's also the way in which I consume. The people, I presume, are looking for a different pricing model. Are you hearing that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, as part of the cost of running their business and being able to operate like a cloud, everybody's looking at a variety of different procurement and utilization models. One of the ways HPE provides utilization model that can map to their cloud journey, a public cloud journey, is through GreenLake. The ability to use and consume data on demand, consume compute on demand, across the entire portfolio of products HPE has, essentially is what a GreenLake journey looks like. >> Let's go into ease of use. So, what do you mean by that? I mean, people, they think cloud, they think swipe the credit card and start deploying machines. What do you mean by ease of use? >> For us, ease of use translates back to how do you map to a simpler operating and support model. For us, the support model is the key for customers to be able to realize the benefits of going to the cloud. To get to a simpler support model, we use AIOps. And for us, AIOps means using a product called InfoSight. InfoSight is a product that uses deep learning and machine learning algorithms to look at a wide net of call-home data from physical resources out there and then be able to take that data and make it actionable. And the action behind that is predictiveness, the prescriptiveness of creating automated support tickets, and closing automated support tickets without anybody ever having to pick up a phone and call IT support. That InfoSight model now is being expanded across the board to all HPE products. It started with Nimble. Now InfoSight is available on 3PAR it's available on Synergy, and a recent announcement said it's also on ProLiants. And we expect that InfoSight becomes the glue, the automation AI glue, that goes across the entire portfolio of HPE products. >> So this is a great example of applying AI to data, so it's like call home taking to a whole level, isn't it? >> Yeah, it absolutely is. And in fact, what it does is it uses the call-home data that we've had for a long time with products like 3PAR, which essentially was amazing data but not being actioned on in an automated fashion. It takes that data and now, it creates an automation task around it. And many times, that automation task leads to much simpler support experience. >> Okay, the third item you mentioned was resource optimization. Let's drill down into that. I infer from that there are performance implications, there's maybe governance compliance, physical placement, can you elaborate, add some color to that? >> I think it's all of the above that you just talked about. It's definitely about applying the right performance level to the right set of applications. We call this application-aware storage. The ability to be able to understand which application is creating the data allows us to understand how that data needs to be accessed which in turn means we know where it needs to reside. One of the things that HPE is doing in the storage domain is creating a common storage fabric with the cloud. We call that the fabric for the cloud. The idea there is that we have a single layer between the on-premises and off-premises resources that allows us to move data as needed depending on the application needs and depending on the user needs. >> Okay, so that brings me to multi-cloud. It's the hot buzzword now. Some people don't like it but it's reality. And so, you've got data on-prem, you want to look like the cloud operating model, you got data in the cloud, the edge confuses things even more. And so, what is your perspective on multi-cloud, and then I have a follow-up for you. >> For us, multicloud means the ability to be able to run your business whether it's on-premises or off-premises based on the needs or the requirements of the application and the business user. We don't want to force a model down our customer's throat. We want them to have optimization across both models. The way we do that is using a couple of different products. We've got a product known as Cloud Bank, which maps to StoreOnce. StoreOnce is our purpose-built backup appliance where our customer can store a copy, a backup copy of the data on-premises, and then a backup copy of that on a public cloud like Azure, AWS, or Google. Similarly, we've got products with Nimble and 3PAR that allows to have tight integration with both public and private cloud domains. And in the future, the idea is to bring all of that together where the automation and the orchestration allows customers not to worry about what product they're using but more about what are the requirements of the application. >> Okay, because sometimes you gonna wanna bring data back, whether it's, pick and, yeah, I wanna put it in the cloud for bursting, I wanna bring it back for more control, whatever it is, when it comes back, I wanna have that cloud operating model, that's where the AIOps fits in that you were just describing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Okay, and so, let's get into, more specifically, what HPE is doing. You've referenced some of the things that you and your partners are doing, but what specifically are you doing from the standpoint of products, you mentioned what I call data plan and control plan. What do you have there that we can actually buy and employ? >> What we have, as I talked about earlier from an AIOps point of view, is our product called InfoSight, and InfoSight is available to all customers that today use 3PAR, Nimble, or ProLiant servers. As long as you have a valid support contract, it comes available to them. >> So I remember when HPE acquired Nimble, you said one of the things you're gonna do is take that technology and push it across the portfolio, so that's something that you've really done in a pretty short timeframe. >> We have, and what it does, it gives us the opportunity now not just to look at call-home data from storage, but then also look at call-home data from the compute side. And then what we can do is correlate the data coming back to have better predictability and outcomes on your data center operations as opposed to doing it at the layer of infrastructure. >> And you also said about the vision of this orchestration layer, can you talk more about that? Are we talking about across all clouds, whether it's on-prem or at the edge or the public cloud? >> Yeah, we are. We're talking about making it as simple as possible where the customers are not necessarily picking and choosing. It allows them to have a strategy that allows them to go across the data center, whether it's a public cloud, building their own private infrastructure, or running on a traditional on-premises SAN structure. So this vision for us, Cloud Fabric vision for us, allows for customers to do that. >> And what about software-defined storage? Where does that fit into this whole equation? >> I'm glad you mentioned that because that was the third tenet of what HPE truly brings to our customers. Software-defined is something that allows us to maximize the utilization of the existing resources that our customers have. So, what we've done is we've partnered with a great deal of really strong software-defined vendors, such us Commvault, Cohesity, Qumulo, Datera. We work very closely with the likes of Veeam, Zerto. And the goal there is to provide our customers with a whole range of options to drive building a software-defined infrastructure built off the Apollo Series of products. Apollo servers, our storage products for us, are extremely dense storage products that allow for both cost and resource optimization. >> What's the nature of these technology partners, partnerships? Are you doing engineering integration or is it just kind of going to market together? >> We bundle our partners into three main categories. We've got a set of complete partners. These complete partners are relationship where we do joint reference architecture. We create joint pricing list and we bring them in to the family. We've got a set of partners that's part of the Pathfinder program. The Pathfinder program are partners that we've made strategic, HPE has made strategic investments in. And then the third set is partners that we resell through HPE. So, depending on which partner it is, they fall into a different bucket, and we have all sets of resources, including engineering collaboration to make sure that the customer's buying a solution as opposed to a product. >> That's great, Sundip, thank you. Thank you for watching. But before we go, how do people learn more? >> The way you learn more is make sure you contact your partner and make sure you come to Discover. So, we'll hopefully see you at the Discover. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the saas. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the sass. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston Massachusetts it's theCUBE covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin. We're here in Boston for ZertoCON and with me is Rob Strechay. He's the Senior Vice President of Product for Zerto and Rob, I understand here you have one of the big items of news is Zerto 7 is being announced. Tell us about what's new in Zerto 7. >> Yeah, so we're announcing Zerto 7, it'll be out in Q1 of 2019. We're real excited because really it's the first time that the IT Resiliance Platform that we've put out will also include in the convergence of backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility all into one singular platform. We've been building upon this platform for years. People have come to know us for continuous data protection and our journal-based data protection. And now we're extending that over time to give people a better view and better resiliancy across near-term and the long-term. >> Alright now I think of back up as being kind of table stakes in the resiliance game, but the backup features are actually new for you in this release. Is that right? >> Absolutely. What we've done is enhance what we had. We had some backup features in there already. We already got used for recovering for things like ransom-ware used in our journal level file recovery where people can go back like a DVR, a few seconds before they got hit. Be able to pull the file, folder, or entire virtual machine back and pull that out like if you were using a backup. In fact, much quicker our customers tell us than Legacy Backup. But table stakes is having enhanced indexing and search capabilities across all of your different platforms. Having dedicated workflows that are integrated into the current recovery workflows. Things of that nature, that really are in Zerto 7 that would take us to the next level. >> Now backup is a fairly painful process for most IT Admins though, what is Zerto doing to make that simpler? >> Yeah, I think the great thing is we have over 6,000 customers already that utilize us and trust us for data protection on a daily basis. We're extending those workflows to say okay, I need a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly, or a daily even and I want to keep that for a certain amount of time. Right now they would see maybe one day to 30 days back in what we call our Journal. And now we're extending that so they see the points in time beyond that and helps to simplify those workflows for those customers. Because, really the complexity comes from I have a media server, I have single points of failure, I have to worry about did I get that backup or not. The journal technology we have actually alleviates that. Plus, we've been doing this at scale for many years with many thousands of customers and we know that that's been one of the pain points for our customers around backup too. We didn't take this lightly to go further into this market. We thought that, really, the market was ripe for convergence of these products. >> Alright, now go one layer deeper on journaling. I mean that's a technology that's been around for a long time, but really not so much in the backup space. What are you doing that's different with your approach to journaling? >> Yeah, so we actually brought this out back in 2011, so we've been doing it for about seven years now. And we took a different approach to disaster recovery. Allows for a lot more granular recovery in seconds. So you have recovery point objectives that are very near and then you get quicker recovery time objectives, as well. So, a lot of this journaling technology was how do you have the right order fidelity of all of these systems as an application? Now doing that and saying okay I want to take a point in time and I want to keep it as my gold copy for three months because I have a business or a corporate mandate that says this is the retention periods that I have. Really brings together what we've been doing in journaling for years as we went from being the first to put out a hypervisor-based replication and journaling system. Then we took it to what they call the DR as a surface market when we took customers to public cloud in 2014 and back from public cloud in 2016 and now we really have any-to-any technology across those different platforms all using that same underlying journaling technology. But it does it in different ways in clouds versus say VMware's hypervisor. >> Now how do you coordinate the complexity of that environment? You've got customers who have some backup on prims, some backup in the cloud that maybe have multiple clouds. How do you coordinate all that backup? >> Yeah, I think it's been really one of the things we've been working on for some amount of time already. So they're starting to see the fruits of our labor about how you have a distributed, scalable system that automatically does that. So, we're not just a replication engine or just a journaling system, we actually embed the orchestration in automation into the system. That way it's wrapped in. It's kind of like having an engine and having the steering wheel at the same time. Then we wrap a nav system, which is our analytics product, around that to give people guidance on how to utilize it. So, to your point, we try to make it easy. In fact one of our pillars is it better be simple, like real simple, otherwise we don't ship it. >> There are a lot of vendors in the various aspects backup, DR market, how is Zerto differentiating itself? >> Yeah, I think that we're not doing backup. We're doing a completely different way of taking this. Backup has been done typically either with agents or with snapshot technology. Maybe you go back four hours in time if you get hit with ransom-ware. Because we already have and can see that data, in the journal, seconds of granularity. So say somebody's loading a database on a Friday night and doing an ETL into the database, of a terabyte of data. We'll see that terabyte go in and all those changes happen. You could actually utilize the journal after you've actually done the load so you can take a pre and a post copy of that. So I have before I made the changes and after I made the changes which really helps customers in a unique way. >> You get into some very large file sizes, I would imagine, when you're doing that many copies of data How do you manage the volumes? >> Yeah, we have some technology inside the product that is space efficient, uses things such as compression and other types of technology. For doing the backup and in Zerto 7 for long-term retention or secondary storage we're partnering with people like HPE and their StoreOnce product set. We have other partners of ours like Exit Grid here and their NFS enabled secondary storage. Plus we'll use some of the typical S3, SMB, as well as cloud-based as targets because we think that they have some of that built-in hardware and built-in technology that really does a better job of doing the compaction. We're not trying to be a purpose built appliance for everybody, we look at being a software company and leveraging those really good secondary storage devices and clouds as the targets. >> One of the themes of the conference we heard John Morency of Gartner talking about this morning was resilience and really moving beyond backup and disaster recovery to business resilience. How well are your customers taking to that message? >> It's amazing, I think that when I go out and talk to our customer CIOs and VPs of Infrastructure or even just to Sys Admins, they're looking for resiliancy. They're looking for a single product that can bring together backup, disaster recovery and that cloud mobility. I think, you heard one of our customers up on stage with Morency, Jamie from Takata, that really has embraced that. They're actually, kind of, I would say pushing the cutting edge of seven different cloud providers and utilizing us as that platform. >> Paul: By design seven different cloud providers. >> Yeah, by design and part of that is if you look at GVPR and all the different regulations across the world they have to deal with, it's easier for them. But they know that they utilizes us as an IT Resilience platform that enables them to go those different places. >> You mentioned ransom-ware earlier, have you seen the growth of ransom-ware continue or is that now slowing down finally being displaced by crypto-mining and some other. >> I think that it's always there. I think that it flares up from time to time. And it's not a, as Ziv, our CEO and Founder, said yesterday, it's not if you're going to get hit by ransom-ware, it's when. And I think that being resilient and having a resiliency in depth type of approach really is important for that as well. >> So, in the time that we've got left talk about the future. What's the road map for Zerto going forward the next couple of years? >> Yeah, so this year we're laying out the IT Resilience platform, building it out and continuing to build upon what we've done as we see and where we see a lot of our customers going. Containers are a big thing and we see that infusion of containers in our customer base is growing rapidly. So we'll be looking at some new approaches to that. And we think we're uniquely positioned based on our underlying technology to take advantage of that. Cloud-born apps are a big one, as well. But because we're already in the cloud working with Azure as one of our key partners and Amazon, as well, we get to see how these all come together. And we have a unique seat at the table for going forward. >> Rob, I can't let you go without asking you to stand up please and show the camera the official Zerto colors. If anyone is walking the walk here it's Rob Strechay wearing pants of the official Zerto color. Where do you find pants of that color? >> You can find them, the great thing is being in Massachusetts there's a lot of different companies that make Nantucket Red, which is not really Nantucket Red, it's more like a Fire Engine Red, but these in particular I had made for me for this conference this week, so. >> I figure you can find anything in the Boston area. >> Absolutely. >> Rob Strechay, thank you very much for joining us. >> Rob: Much appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. (tech music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. And this is day one of HPE Discover Madrid. The European version of the show that we cover in Las Vegas in the spring. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Bill Philbin, as the General Manager of the storage business unit And he's joined by Eugene DePrez, who's the Director of Systems Engineering at the Fox Group. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thanks. >> Bill, it's always a pleasure. I see you more than I see my wife sometimes. (laughing) >> You know, the last time we spoke about merit badges. You remember? It just came into my mind. Which is at seven or eight years in a row I thought I'd get a badge or something to offset my element here, on my lapel. I'm still waiting for it. >> You're there in terms of one of our most popular cube alums So, thanks again for coming back on. >> My pleasure. >> Well, give us the update on the event. We did some deep dives in Boston recently so, we got a good Kool-Aid injection from you guys. So, we're here at the show. What are you guys talking about? >> Well, you know, the wonders of the storage market continues. Transformation continues right? We're here six months ago, we were talking about so at that point the nimble, nimble acquisition. Now six months into that we continue to see sort of the business transform itself. There's really three things we're talking here at the show. One is, we're talking about InfoSight. But InfoSight in a much broader sense. Not sort of solely limited to Nimble, but InfoSight on 3Par, but more broadly InfoSight as a basis for AI and the data center. So if you think about sort of the experience our customers are looking at from on-prem vs off-prem models. They're having to look at things like your cost of delivery, ROI, et cetera. And InfoSight is much broader than just sort of an improved support model. It's all about how do we sort of take the on-prem experience and make it such that it's actually self managing and self-healing and that's where we're headed with InfoSight. Not only in storage but also across the whole, the whole data. So that is number one. Number two, we're focused on cloud ready. You know as customers are having to make this sort of decisions about what's on-prem versus off-prem. You and I were talking about this over dinner last night. How do we easily facilitate that and so the whole message from Hewlett Packard around hybrid IT is compute and data where you want, what's relevant to your organization. And then number three is, customers are looking at consumption based models. They want the, you know as they move data, they also want to change the way they consume storage or consume data center assets. So, CapEx and flexible OpEx models that parallel what they're seeing in web based properties. So, it's all about choice. It's all about giving them the same experience that they'd see in a web based property, but not without some of the downsize of data sovereignty, SLAs, data integrity, and sort of other issues. My friend here, Eugene, at Fox is a big supporter of storage. Of Hewlett Packard storage. And so I thought it would be interesting to sort of get, not only what the vendors view of the world is, but let's here it from a guy who's actually got the real life problem of deciding okay what's inside, what's outside, how does he consume our stuff differently. So, that was the rationale for bringing Eugene along today. >> Well we love to talk to customers. Eugene, let's here it from you. Well first help us understand your role at Fox and maybe let's get into some of the business drivers and how those trickle into IT. >> Sure, so my position is the Director on the Architecture Engineering team. And our responsibility is delivering services if you will. The idea of delivering a technology stack of servers or network or storage is blurred and now its delivering the service. People are not reaching out for this many CPUs or this type of disc or this many spindles anymore. They know what they need to do from a business perspective and it's our job to translate those business requirements to system requirements that we can then deliver our service with. >> So, what are the big drivers in your business and how are they, I mean you just sort of described how they're affecting IT, but what are the big drivers? >> So, entertainment is morphing dramatically and of course Fox is a leader in the entertainment industry. And, you know, competition is coming from new avenues and the way people consume media is changing dramatically. And, we need to adjust to all of those types of requirements. Whether it's new ideas in production or new media platforms for distribution. >> So, obviously part of that is speed, agility, time to market, flexibility, getting new products out faster. How do you hide the complexity of your infrastructure generally, maybe storage specifically, from the business? How do you make it not an inhibitor? >> So, historically people would actually buy their own components. They would be responsible for a capital budget tied to a project to acquire X number of spindles. And that's gone, that's gone. People are now more concerned with throughput requirements, but it's not along the lines of how many gigabytes per second. It's, I need 4K. We're going to use 4K transcoding. I need to have eight people to be able to view this simultaneously. And that's what they want. So, they don't want to know about the complexities of what's behind the mask, if you will, or behind the curtain. >> So it's more of a shared services model. You're trying to sort of deploy share services capability that's capable of scaling to meet the demands of your consumers. >> Exactly. And productions don't want to own the role of hardware anymore. They want an operational model. Where they have some costs associated with what their consumption is, for the duration of their production. And, from Fox's perspective, if we do this from a shared services centralized delivery model, then there's efficiencies in cost for that delivery. And there's immediacy. As soon as they need it, it's available. >> So, in that respect we use an architectural parlance. You are creating the business capability. Architecturally. That is facilitating the process of creating the digital assets that make Fox money. Make Fox profitable. >> Eugene: Exactly. >> And doing so in a way that the customer is not exposed to the underlying transaction cost associated with different infrastructure options. Is that kind of where you're going with this? >> Exactly, exactly. So, the productions can worry more about what they do which is creation. Right? And creativity. And less about what is underneath it that's enabling the storage and distribution of that media that they're creating. >> The whole media business, as you've articulated, is going through significant amount of change, but there is still a need to capture activity or capture things where it's happening so, talk a bit about how the relationship between storage and network, file size, file security, the ability to create an asset at the moment that it's being generated as opposed to a couple days later when it's being rendered. How is that all coming together so that data is dictating the model that you use to actually make all this happen? >> So we actually have mobile setups that are associated with, say motion capture stage. Then that has to be centralized. The transcoding will happen at Fox media services. And then distribution from the Fox media cloud. So, all of these different units have to be coordinated such that the data has an even flow from the capturing on stage to the transcoding and the editing to the final transcoding for the media for distribution and then off to the distributors of the content. >> Can you talk a little bit about? Dig more into the operating model. When you go back and look at your career you know, 10 to 15 years ago you had to get down and dirty, you're doing sort of unnatural acts to make infrastructure work. Fox I'm sure doesn't want to invest in that kind of heavy lifting. It wants to transform its business. How has the role of an infrastructure professional changed over the last five or 10 years? >> Well, so, we used to have issues where we would say as hardware aged the OpEx would go up and that would become a challenge. And they say, well drive down the OpEx. So, we would buy new hardware to drive down the OpEx and then that would drive up CapEx. And now, we're coming back around to let's get away from this CapEx model and get more towards a OpEx type model. And so, leveraging things like cloud storage and that flexibility to burst outward if we, our on-premise is insufficient. And, designing an infrastructure that is not dedicated to specific project or specific need but more general to performance level. So, this is where we're headed now. >> But as you look back someone in your role, someone like your role, was responsible for making sure the hardware assets were productive and taken care of and now it sounds like you're more focused on making sure the data assets are generating return for the business. That has an impact on your relationship to your key suppliers, like HPE. >> Sure. >> First off, if I got it right that your moving from a hardware focus to a data focus as you generate a return for the business and secondly, how is that impacting some of those strategic relationships with some of your key suppliers? >> Well, so, as we talk to Bill and we're talking the previous evening, we still are buying assets. We still have hard assets that are available locally, but we need to also be able to branch out and this is one of the things that, you know everybody talks about cloud. Let's get to the cloud and move things to the cloud. And we looked at like the gateway devices that were available and they seemed cumbersome. They were proprietary in nature. They used the term optimizing my data. But what that translated to was storing in a proprietary format that only they understood. And we didn't want to get locked into this gateway or that gateway and we were really looking to our vendor partners to say how do we integrate these new storage capabilities, new compute platforms, into our infrastructure that we have our hard assets that we have on-premise and that's why we're very excited about these new capabilities that we're rolling into the store ones. So, we're looking to continue to expand that capability with our partners and making those things innate to the storage platforms that we've purchased. >> So what specifically does HPE do to support that operating model? I mean is it the way it prices? Is it services? I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. >> Eugene: Sure, sure. >> You want to talk a little bit about sort of your version of archiving versus backup and what's going to be projected as a cloud versus what's in the data center and how does cloud bank sort of support those? >> Well we're very exited about cloud, right? One of the challenges that we have with backups is you have to have on-premise and off-premise copies and if I'm doing all of this within StoreOnce I'm putting up two hard assets. I'm using dedicated circuits to connect between these assets and our consumption rate has doubled, if you will, right? >> Dave: It's expensive. >> It's expensive. So, and then we're looking to the hardware vendor, who's profiting from this expense, to say how do I drive this down? >> Dave: How do you make less money? (laughs) >> Exactly. >> It's not a good analogy. This is Phil, but he's not very happy with this this whole process. (laughter) >> So you can see, it's almost a conflict of interest for our partners, except for that, you know, I don't call them a vendor, I call them a partner. And we have a shared success model, right? I need to make sure that Fox has the capabilities, that it stays competitive in the marketplace that it competes in. And I need to work with the vendor to provide that solution in a cost effective way. And if Bill and HPE's interest is only in themselves and only in selling me hardware well then they're not my partner. Right? So, we, we meet with engineers and we talk about next generation capabilities and the things that are driving our business requirements and our business model. And HPE has been very generous to allow us early access to the different capabilities including call up data, which then allow us to develop and deliver that service that is necessary for Fox to be successful. >> So, you have to figure out, okay, how can I still invest in R&D >> Eugene: That's right. and run my operation and compete. >> So customers are going to cloud as we were talking about. Data used to have gravity. And now data and compute need to sort of come together and customers want the ability to sort of move data to where they see the need arise. >> Peter: Not uncovered by the infrastructure. >> Not uncovered by the infrastructure. And it's also not a bursting based model which occasionally I need to go to the web. No, there's assets that are perfectly acceptable to sort of be deposited in the web sort of ad nauseam or ad infinitum. Permanently right? And the way that you're looking at it is how do I sort of take an infrastructure copy that used to be in my data center, assuming power, and heating and cooling, right? And how do I sort of take a copy of that and make that available, but put it on a platform, which is cost effective? >> Exactly. >> And without though, however, the sort of huge operational running cost of knowing where that data is residing. So it's you know, how do I make it operationally efficient, cost efficient from a storage perspective, and have it be reliable and available? >> But also create new options for the business because that's how, certainly in a media company, that's how a media company is going to make more money is by putting in place infrastructure that creates new revenue options because you have a way of facilitating sharing in a secure manner that diminishes the invasiveness of the underlying infrastructure. >> Eugene: That's right, exactly. >> So I think the way you think about it is it's all about choice. If Eugene decides that he want to store asset X,Y and Z in the cloud and he wants to store asset one, two, three inside of his data center our obligation is to enable that transformation for him and recognizing that the better that we do that the better partnership we're going to have and the better way that we're going to sort of move our businesses forward or together. And between Fox and Hewlett Packard we have a rich history of partnering. When HP was in the PC and printer business and that's transformed now into the HP Enterprise. I think you said it right. There's a difference between a vendor and a partner. >> Right. >> A partner's there in the good times and in the bad times. Right? Who's there to help you with your transformation and isn't only in it for themselves and I think that's sort of, if I can sort of think about our relationship, that's what it is, right? >> That's exactly where we're at with HPE. Is a true partnership. Right? Where we share in each other's success and they understand what our business requirements are and how they're changing and they're incorporating those requirements into development of the next generation of the product. And we're very fortunate then to be able to get early access to those products and those offerings so that we can co-develop them and resolve issues that arise. And protect the product as it matures. >> So Bill I want to end on the storage business. The business that you run. You got to engineering background. You're now the leader of this business which is comprised as a component of hybrid IT. The new reporting structure that we're going to see in the future, but one of my takeaways from Andover, we had deep dive in Andover a couple months ago, was that you guys are in pretty good shape of the following. I'll summarize it, and I'd love for you to chime in. You're gaining share. You basically have to hold serve with 3Par. 3Par was, to me, was the savior you know years ago. >> Bill: That's right. >> It came in and really affected, it was the gift that kept on giving. But you could only go to that well so many times. You've now made a couple of key acquisitions in the form of Nimble, where you get >> Bill: SimpliVity. >> InfaSight, SimpliVity. >> Bill: That's right. So, you're going to basically hold serve with 3Par and you've got growth opportunities with both of those assets that we just mentioned. So, maybe, that was kind of my takeaway, was wow. That really came into focus a little bit. How do you sort of look at your opportunity going forward? >> So, the best way to think about it is when I joined Hewlett Packard now almost eight years ago, we were probably six or seven in the storage business. Today, we're sort of on the cusp of being number two. Neck and neck with NetApp. So, I think the growth has been tremendous. Second, that growth has been on organic as well as inorganic options. StoreOnce is a good example of an organic option we built. Inorganic, one can't argue about the success of 3Par. It's the number one mid-range brand in the world. Nimble brings with it a flare of sort of next generation storage capability with InfoSight across the top. InfoSight now deployed on 3Par means that we can start talking a much broader message about how we transform our customers ability to sort of run their businesses differently. So, I think that's important. And then when you look at SimpliVity. The focus around hyperconverge and how we sort of offer customers solutions there. I think if you take a look at the broad breadth of the portfolio, if you're an independent storage company with one thing to sort of shuck to the street you're going to have a problem. If you're an independent storage company without a connection to the rest of the data center with compute and networking, we think you're going to have a problem. If you don't have sort of the broad orchestration sort of story like Synergy or OneView or New Stack or other things that HP is now talking about we think you're going to have a problem. So storage sort of a Ptolemaic sort of viewpoint right which is we think everything revolves around us is uniquely positioned to actually help our customers transform but it comes down to choice without operational complexity with the breadth of the portfolio that allows a customer to make the right choices of on-prem, off-prem, hardware, software defined, hyperconverged, converged >> Peter: Today and in the future. >> Today and in the future. We think that Hewlett Packard storage is actually in a tremendous position to help our customers like Eugene and others out there to run their businesses effectively. >> Well guys, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Eugene, we always love to have the customer perspective, so Bill thanks for having him come with you. >> It was good seeing you guys. I'm looking for year number eight or nine. (laughs) If you're out there, buy some more storage so I can keep coming back and seeing Dave >> Dave: And they'll partner with you. (laughs) >> Yeah, exactly right. >> Really appreciate it. Okay, keep it right there, everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE. We're live from Madrid, HPE Discover 2017. (upbeat music)

>> Commentator: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam >> We're back, this is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2017 day two. Bill Philbin is here, Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And runs the storage business for HPE. Great to see you again my friend. >> Hey Dave, it's always good to see you. >> Really? >> Always look so fantastic. >> Thank you, where's the tie? >> There's no tie. >> I will say, you guys, those of you who didn't see it, Bill nailed the Keynote this morning. It was great, it was funny, self deprecating, and genuine. And essentially you resonated with me, 'cause I got four kids and you were talking about how you call your kids, you either get voicemail, or their voicemails full. >> Bill: That's right. >> You text them, at least your kids text you back. I got to Snapchat my kids to get a hold of them. So you got to get into Snapchat >> They have told me that texting and Facebook is so, you know, 20th century Dad. >> You email 'em, right? >> Yeah. >> You get some important email, you send it to 'em. Like, email? What are you kiddin' me? >> No you know it's not in >> Our lives are challenged, but nonetheless, you got some of your challenges of your own. You're running a big business now at HPE. You guys are making some serious moves in the marketplace. Give us the update on the HPE storage business. >> Yeah, so thanks Dave. >> Every squirrel finds a nut in the forest eventually, so I just had a pretty good day today. But, that was because we have a great story, frankly, to tell. And I think you know, as I was saying before, the storage business is changing. Rather dramatically. Now is it, is it self inflicted? Or is it you know, just a a course correction. I actually believe it's self inflicted in a sense that we've taken many of the capabilities that were previously on high end systems. And we brought 'em to the mid range. We've thinned it, we've de-uped it, we've compressed it, We've got it on SSDs. And so the whole business model, now is different than it was five years ago. Before you sold somebody an appliance, you chocked it full of spinning media. They ran out of IOPS, you sold another appliance, you chocked it full. It was a pretty good business model. That's how I kept Mrs. Philbin in the lifestyle she's grown accustomed, right? Well, now, you don't chock it full of spinning media, you chock it full of SSDs. IOPS are always on guarantee. And then you take all that compaction technology, and that has actually forced a fundamental change, I think, in the storage landscape. That we, including Hewlett Packard have inflicted upon ourselves. I think we take a look at that, and need to take a look at the storage landscape, the number of vendors that are out there. You know, I think that is changing as well, which is, you know, part of the reason why we decided to get into acquiring companies like SimpliVity and Nimble. >> Dave: And you've got a knife fight going on in All-Flash. I got to say, you know, what HPE did with 3PAR surprised me and probably a lot of people. >> Bill: Mhm. >> Most people didn't think you could quote, unquote "bolt on" flash into that architecture. Obviously it wasn't a bolt on, you guys have been very successful. When you talk to your competitors, certainly when you talk to customers they love it. When you talk to competitors they say "yeah, we can compete with company A, B, and C. It's 3PAR that we have trouble with. Because it's simple and it works. >> And some times enduring technologies actually extend beyond, you know, single generations, right? And so, we certainly have heard the story about the new versus the old, and being old maybe this is my perspective. But, you know, enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries. And that's exactly what we've done, exactly what we've done with 3PAR. >> Now, having said that, you guys have been, I mean you saw 3PAR initially with you know, spinning, and hybrid. Took off, you know, justified the acquisition, made the transition to All-Flash >> Bill: Yeah. >> I've called it many times, 3PAR's the gift that keeps on giving. So how many times can you go to that well, right? So you guys have made some moves here. Not the least of which was Nimble, want to talk about that. And SimpliVity, so. Even though SimpliVity's not under your organization, you have an affinity there. Talk about those two moves and where they fit in the portfolio. >> So let's just start with the 3PAR, just the 3PAR comment just for a quick second. The pure plays versus sort of the, what they call the stayed play. So, it's hard to imagine that 3PAR as a stayed play technology, right? I don't agree with that statement. But that, the reason I don't agree with it is, we're actually going faster than the pure plays in the All-Flash market. We have more revenue than they do, so. I think it's comfortable for people to sort of set one technology off over another but the fact of the matter is, that we're growing faster. The other thing about the market is it generally gravitates toward technologies that are unique in purpose regardless of what they cost. Because the customer demands it. And All-Flash started with guys like Fusion-io and Violin Memory, and all of those guys, right? Eventually what happens though, is customers tire of those additional assets in their data center, right? One more thing they don't want in their data centers, is one more thing in their data center. And that's when the big guys eventually sort of overtake that position. So, I think what you're going to, you're starting to see in the storage landscape is compression at a company level, right? You're seeing the Neutonics and Pures out there. You're seeing then the next tier of companies trying to sort of, you know, make the big break. And the last time a company made a big break in the storage business, that's still independent today. It's a billion dollars of revenue or more, was? >> Dave: NetApp. >> NetApp. Because storage looks like it's easy goin' in but it's not easy when you think about bare metal and databases and transactional systems, and highly available. It's not that easy, and so, that's why a company like a Nimble, who has great technology, Infosite, the CASL file system, great people. To order scale that business, profitably, and have to go to market reach, it needs to align themselves with a company like Hewlett Packard. So, we're really, really excited about Nimble joining the family for sure. That now enables us to sort of take the flash portfolio further across the across the landscape. On SimpliVity, I think the way that you should think about our strategy at Hewlett Packard is it's all about choice. So, you're a customer who wants to sort of, you know, put assets in your data center, and have assets in Microsoft as your cloud we should enable that. If you think Software Defined's the right way to go, we should enable that. You have an appliance customer, we should enable that. If you want to co-locate applications in a simple easy to use interface with storage, we have that, that's SimpliVity. But that choice shouldn't come with operational complexity. So, one of the things that we have to do, and I was talking about this at the Keynote, is we have to somewhat hide ourselves behind the application and make it easier for customers to consume. Because that is what the web offers them. We ought to be able to federate the data, so that you can actually move your data around when your requirements change, or you've got to burst. And the administration ought to be really, really simple. So, our strategy around technologies like SimpliVity, or Nimble, or 3PAR, or you know, MSA, XP, is all around giving customers choice without the operational complexity of having lots of things to manage. >> Bill, I guess I'm trying to, for our audience, try to maybe compare and contrast a little bit >> Yeah. >> Against you know, what was formerly EMC, now Dell EMC, >> Uh-huh. >> Which the knock on them for many years has been, they've got so many products, they overlap. We've covered for many years how, you know, if I have 3PAR and some of the other HP, HPE storage products, I can move between them, is that the difference issues thing So even though if you have Nimble, plus SimpliVity, plus you know, 3PAR. >> So, three is less than seven. Let's just start with that answer. And maybe it's not seven anymore, you know, I've lost track. Second, I think if you're really talking about provisioning storage and networking compute from an application layer, really what you've doing is you want to have a conversation about the service level underneath that the storage provides. Maybe for certain applications you're okay with thinly provisioned or not thinly provisioned et cetera. So, one answer is, a lot of those capabilities are actually hidden by the application layer. However, we know that the thing that doesn't move all that well is data. And data has gravity. So, being able to move data in addition to moving your compute, is one of the reasons that they differentiation for us over the other guys. >> Dave: But, you know, let me just stay on that for a second Stu. We're all storage guys or quasi-storage guys. >> Bill: He's only a quasi-storage guy? >> He's really a networking guy. >> I worked at a storage company for ten years but, yeah. >> You're a newbie then. >> But if you look at history, it is shown that you actually have to have multiple architectures to increase the size of your TM, and penetrate the marketplace. I mean, NetApp is the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they could only go so far with WAFL. I mean you were there, and you know, And so even now NetApp makes a move for solid fire. Obviously EMC has been very successful with, I think it's 17, so not 7. But it actually works, and so, that dogma of oh we have to have one architecture is never proven to really be a winning strategy. >> And frankly, it is really hard to actually stress an architecture from top to bottom, right? So I don't disagree with the comment you made, but that is effectively, however the same problem with the storage startups today is if they do a single thing, only support virtualized environments, whatever it is, right. Only support VDI. The breath is what customers are looking for. And if you don't have the breath, or you're forced to go get the breath, by adding bolt-ons to try and get the breath. It's just going to make it very, very difficult for them to survive in the new world order. Both acquisitions SimpliVity and Nimble were great for the company. >> Bill, can you tie together for us HPE and Veeam, how those fit together. One of the big themes we've been covering is the extension of Veeam started very, very much virtualized now they're physical they're talking about all the cloud solutions. Expect there's a lot of fit between your strategies. >> There is, for years we've have a very, very strong technical partnership between the Veeam engineering team and the StoreOnce engineering team. I think, you know, that is like the basis of trust, I think is the best way to think about it. We've both sort of got competing road maps on occasion, but at the end of the day it's all about, sort of, what's best for the customer. Number one is technical people, second is we have the same view of the market. And I talked about this, this morning, which is, this highly available, always on sort of environment is the same story that we tell. So the messages are aligned. The third is that it's complimentary, we have our own sort of data protection technology with data protector. We have our own sort of snapshot management capability with RMC. The question is, how do we sort of you know, protect the entire environment. And Veeam is a critical asset in that. It's a great business partnership, great technology partnership. The fact that our folks kind of resell Veeam, has just launched the business forward . >> Well, the move to sell the software business to Micro Focus has just opened up new partnership opportunities for you guys. >> Bill: In regards to that we still have a very, very strong partnership with the software guys. You know there's, the largest connect that we have on a backup product today, is get a protector. So I don't expect that to change. But there are people who prefer, you know, to use Veeam and we have to support that. >> Dave: Yeah, but still I mean, if you got the your colleagues in data protector and you're out aggressively partnering with Veeam and it's part of HPE. Maybe you get an email or, you get a "hey, come on Bill, you know, give me a break here." And now I feel like you know, the gloves are off you can do independent of all that internal stuff, plumbing. It's what's right for the customer. Maybe I'm overstating that. >> Perhaps a bit, because we'll still have equity ownership in the new company. Again with all the sort of connect I have, I think that regardless of where the paychecks come from if you will, we have to have a really strong partnership with them. And it's no different than, you know, we also have a partnership with Symantec, I mean we have other partnerships that customers just have made a preference around. That we're not going to convince them, you know, to do something different. Therefore, we've got to have a strong partnership. >> Dave: Alright, so we're going to be at Discover, theCUBE will be there for, been there many years now. I think this is our seventh Discover. >> You've been there as many years as I have, >> So what are we looking forward to there. >> So I think there's a bunch of announcements, we've highlighted one of them today around the secondary flash array for Nimble. There's some new 3PAR announcements that are certainly coming. The Synergy guys are going to certainly have a thing or two to say, I'm thinking. Based on the strength of that platform, that platform's really starting to take off. And so I think you're going to see that, I think this will probably be really the first Discover where, you know, you'll start to see, and maybe Madrid Discover will be different. But you'll start to see the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We keep focusing on things that we've spin-merged out, but the thing I think we need to focus on is the fact that we're, this is like a Phoenix of a new company, right? Solely focused on enterprise infrastructure and the customer needs. We've rebranded the TS business and PointNext, which is all around transformation and technology services, so. It's almost like we're starting the clock over again. For the HP employees, we're not changing your service levels. But, for almost everything else, we're rebuilding a brand new company. And that is what Meg and the board are doing, it's really exciting. >> Well, it's true the last couple of Discovers there was a distraction with the split, there was a distraction with two spin-merges. But you've now seen the M&A activity focus on areas like storage, areas like converge, type or converge. >> I always tell this story 'cause you guys like my analogies which is, you know, when you've got lots of kids in your family, my family, my oldest I've got lots of pictures of. The middle kid, you know, some pictures of. The third one virtually no pictures of, right? 'Cause you go from man to man defense, to zone defense. Same is true with a CEO. When you've got seven or eight different things to manage, you're focused, it needs to be spread over seven different or eight things. Now, Meg is actually, got fewer children to manage if you roll the analogy out a little bit. We got a lot of her attention, and a lot of focus. And that I think is really, really important. >> Dave: And now all the pictures are digital, they're in the cloud, they're protected. >> Bill: Yeah. >> Bill, great to see you. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, we'll see you in Vegas. >> Bill: You bet. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

live from San Francisco California it's the queue at vmworld 2014 brought to you by vmware cisco EMC HP and nutanix hi welcome back to San Francisco everybody this is dave vellante i'm with Wikibon organ this is silicon angles the cube cube is our live mobile studio we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise and we're here at vmworld 2014 this is our fifth year at vmworld we're in moscone south of the lobby in the right hand side just before you get through the escalators stop by say hello fish motion is here is with HP cube alum you know I'm going to talk to your title you do so many things at HP technical background you do strategy you do product stuff so welcome back to the cube it's good to see you great thanks thanks Dave great to be here again we were we spent a lot of time together last week actually right we were in Boston yes doing the deep dive you had a bunch of analysts in kind of doing the kool-aid injection I thought it went really well you had a good crew there it was a very interactive session a lot of good feedback you know it was good i mean what you think yeah i thought it was great you know in my mind getting the perspective from folks outside a HP just to keep grounded and what the reality is i think is very key right and so we really enjoyed the interaction the feedback you guys provided us and the depth and time that we could spend on the topic yeah i was there only for the first day i told you i was out golf in the second day shut up but i got to hear the flash session and and then you know there was a little bit of discussion on software-defined but I think you guys went into that in more detail the second day so I want to start there sure the software-defined data center you know the what used to be called the software mainframe yeah don't use that term anymore the marketing guys took over from moretz and so we're now seeing that sort of instantiation what do you make of all that what's HP's sort of position on that yeah so Dave let me talk from our from a storage perspective right because the software-defined data center is a very broad area reservas networking so we look at storage there are two elements you want to think about in fact three elements you want to think about which software-defined data centers in storage the first element has to do with cost optimizations how do you get the lowest cost storage that's defined by software-defined storage that's hypervisor agnostic that's hardware independent and that is control orchestrated by industry standard offerings that's the first piece right then there is sort of like all performance optimized storage to deliver on a service level and instead of you know collecting masses of hardware to deliver that service level a lot of the optimizations are done in software so as an example priority optimization software to guarantee how much an application gets in terms of performance how do you solve the noisy neighbor problem or here's another one Pierre motion to move data between say a flash array and a tiered array for example right just because it's a different service level you want to accomplish with that without offering so so this notion of a service levels really key and the third piece Dave I think is this notion of orchestration right and I saw view OpenStack you had OpenStack announced but be aim where as well you know it's the tcp/ip of orchestration if I can use that term right you know you don't want to be able to orchestrate in a standard fashion just like you know we used to have decnet sna appletalk and then tcp/ip one out right I think we've got the same phase here with orchestration today right okay so the reliable approach to to orchestration that everybody can trust the trust everybody understands and and ok so now so so that's kind of the high-level what's your specific product strategy around software-defined sure so we can talk about two key products from a from a software-defined costs optimize we have the HP storevirtual VSA and the HP storeonce VSA right these are both virtual storage appliances that work on any story any hardware any server hardware right we of course will talk about HP servers but if you are running on a delta x only any x86 xne x86 right we announced support for 4 kb m on the store virtual we announced support for hyper-v install ones we also announced the store virtual offering being a part of the Helion HP Helion OpenStack distribution and if you recall he lien OpenStack is has both a community edition and enterprise edition right and so whichever edition that you get from Helion you essentially have now store but you'll be sa built into it ok so we know a little bit about helium we've had sargol I on a number of times on the cube and and we've seen HP's cloud strategy evolve so and we can come back and talk about that a little bit so relative to v san I got to get your take on on v san because there's so much confusion in the marketplace so Chuck also write a blog one day and you'll read it and say oh maybe sort of dissing the the competition and the next day it's like you know a lot of love and embracing but it's clear that one positioning for v san suu you guys are not just vmware it's more than just vmware but what's your take on visa and what does it mean for your for your strategy as an ecosystem partner that sells probably more vmware licenses than anybody i mean how do you yeah when you make it up that's a great question right so vmware continues to be a very close partner with us right i think the introduction of visa and evo rail i think it just continues to point to invalidate this notion of software-defined storage right in my mind Dave it's software defined and flash are the two key disruptors we saw that this year I think going into next year we'll see that sort of go even more mainstream right so you know I think it's great to see multiple offerings here validating what we've done actually with Software Defined before it was having cold software-defined right you look at if you look at store virtual and how we offered it right okay and and so just a natural progression of the ecosystem right and it's like VMware's the software vendor doing with software vendors do grabbing pieces of the stack and the hardware guys got to move fast you know hardware guys the two software got to move fast well I think it's going to be interesting right like like any sort of emerging technology as always a flourishing of offerings right mhm and I think that's the great thing about this it's it's choice you can say probably have different approaches and let's see which one wins out in the market in the end right all right let's talk about flash so you guys came out last summer flash announcement all-flash array based on three par and made the statement okay well we're not going to go buy a flash company we don't need to a lot of people myself included said well maybe don't need to but Meg Whitman said we're not doing any acquisitions certainly any major ones so you really have a choice so the question in my mind at the time was okay is this a bolt on a term that you guys used a lot when everybody was say no we have thin provisioning to you said that's a bolt on and you were largely correct and so I was skeptical and then when you came out with flash last summer the pricing was in my view not competitive now fast forward to this summer all of a sudden you're under two dollars a gigabyte your latency is down to best in class Wow okay what happened how do we get there so where are we with flash how all of a sudden did we go from really essentially a an okay product with a great stack that was really to your advantage as you had the stack to one that is now great stack competitive from performance and a price standpoint what happened yeah so David's been a great year for the last 12-18 months on flash right if I can roll back the clock a little bit and talk about some of the elements of change right I think to answer your question first what happened right there was a very big emphasis on flash we've had R&D developments over the last two to three years focusing on flash optimizations there were a lot of skeptics at first step said hey wait a minute you guys are a disk based architecture can you really do flash I think the proofs in the pudding right now right nine or thousand I ops 200 microseconds of latency write latency thinly duplication inline switch data services data mobility now you if you roll back and look at sort of what the rides been in December of 2013 we announce something called adaptive sparing right so we took now one very key flash optimization we took an 800 gig SSD drive and looked at how our provisioning was done unless it's do you drive and said wait a minute we can be a bit more intelligent village right adaptive sparing allowed you to reduce the over provisioning capacity that the drive takes so the net effect the customer was they got extra capacity at the same price because we treated the flash differently from say a traditional media right and so a lot of times i know i will tell folks hey you know if you're really flash optimized mr. vendor where's your adapter spearing right because here's a perfect example of how i can take it and rig a drive deliver our customer 920 gigs that's twenty percent more capacity free right that was back in december where we announce it after sparing this one of several optimizations we did then in june of 2014 we announced sort of flash for the mainstream right to gospel gigabyte we had ten deduplication teen clones 1.9 terabyte see mlc drives 460 terabyte raw capacity right five-year warranty on the drives 69 s guarantee we brought together a real collection of very very compelling i think features that allow customers to take flash to the mainstream right so far we've seen great uptake on that we'll talk about customers in a second we see not only just all flash deployments but people are the point traditional high nras like a monolithic v-max for example are we looking at that and saying wow you mean to tell me I can get the same performance same resiliency half the floor space may be less than half the floor space less power it's a very compelling proposition is that the competition vimax or is a competition other flash array well I think you got both IV about you got all the flash arrays you've got also high-end arrays and then you also have people that are looking for work load acceleration right consolidation so it is truly becoming mainstream because we're seeing multiple use cases mm-hmm right then fast forward to September it's just a couple of days ago we announced all flash 7200 starter kit for 35 thousand dollars average Street rice okay and you know if that was flashed on the mainstream this is now flash for the masses and my first flash array B let me use that term and here's where we're looking at that for Dave right so there are two kinds of buyers right one buyer says hey I have a limited absolute dollar budget Sam only got fifty thousand dollars alright so now you have an offering that gives you that that ability to go into flash they're also people that are saying wait a minute you know if I were to try out flash in my data center 35k is a very low risk invest right maybe it works great if it doesn't all right we'll move on right and so I think that's another very interesting approach to the way people are buying flash I you mentioned customers before so I was going to ask you how's the uptake have you seen you know since you've made the new announcements have you seen a big boost in in demand and you know get any proof points that you can share with us yeah Dave's we'd be seeing great up take lots of interest lots of the man let me talk about three customers today okay so let me start off with lattices lattices is a cloud service provider there are managed hosting provider and they were looking for high-performance storage to maintain SLA s right and in addition to sort of guaranteed high performance they needed the ability to ensure that they could offer customers a consistent and guaranteed performance level as well as a very performance level right I may come in with a bronze service level that I need and I want to pay for a bronze service level versus say a gold service level where I actually want to be able to offer that service so lattices put the three-part 7450 and and then this piece of software called priority optimization to do exactly that they also use three part because of its unique multi-tenancy features where you can run mixed workloads you can consolidate different types of customers on those workloads that was key for lattices and then what they said to me was provisioning now took hours instead of days orchestration was quick and and it was easy right that was the big thing for them it was simple to use number two Nuance Communications I don't even know the company yeah sure nuance they make dragon well the dragon speech recognition is off later there's a lot of Apple iPhone Siri local companies on the back end hello Pocoyo for ya so nuanced does speech recognition software and they actually help in the case of Apple iPhone Siri are non-native speakers right by recording their voice patterns and then helping recognize those watchbands right be especially with non-native speaker now they use that 7452 index those voicemails very quickly to deliver iPhone Siri service to improve improve recognition I mean you remember when I found first came out it was the Serie was awful you couldn't even use it and now it's so it's better over time right yeah that's great case use case their third one is exact target and you know exact target is a marketing demand generation company they they have a huge number of databases in fact some of the stats that they share with me was four trillion rose under management they do 21 billion rules that day 100 terabytes databases are not common uncommon in ExactTarget right and so they have multiple three power raised to to to store this data and and they deployed both cheering with flash as well as all-flash arrays right and the biggest thing for them was how do they adopt flash without ripping and replacing their infrastructure I have an existing infrastructure they want to be able to add flash to it to accelerate performance lower costs and then they also now viewing all flash for vdi right so exact target is a perfect example here of a three-part customer being able to extend an embrace flash without doing a lot of change 3par the gift that keeps on giving I always say all right there's we have to leave it there thanks very much for coming to the cube I was a great dump to you I keep track everybody will be back with our next guest this is the cube we're live from vmworld 2014 and we'll be right back you