(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. As you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications and data workloads resilient on the cloud?" Meaning  how is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep. >> Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - There's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

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

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

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

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

>> Presenter: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are cloud native insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. When we launched this program, we talked about, how do we take advantage of the innovation and agility that's in the cloud? And of course, one of the big components that we've talked about for many years on theCUBE is, how do we empower developers? and developers are helping change things, and I'm really happy to welcome to the program first time guests that helped build many of the tools that developers are very well familiar. So Tom Preston Werner, he is the co-founder of Chatterbug, he is the creator of redwoodjs, we had an early episode, the JAMstack Netlify team, he's also on the board for that, and we'll talk about those pieces. People might know him, if you check him out on Wikipedia, you know, GitHub, he was one of the co-founders as well as held both CTO and CEO roles there. I could go on but Tom, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so let's start there, Tom, you know, when I live in the enterprise space, how do you take advantage of new things? One of the biggest challenges out there is, let's go to something new, but let's do it the old way. And we know that that really doesn't take advantage of it you know, I think back to the oldest, some of the older technologies, it's like, well, you know, if I talk to people that are riding horses, what do they want? You know, well, I want faster horses, not the, you know, let's completely change things. I was hearing a stat that, you know, back in the early days of cars, we had like, 30% of them were electric cars, and now it's one. So what's old is new again, but I digress. One, as I mentioned, you know, GitHub, of course, is, you know, such a fundamental piece when we look at in the technology space over the last decade, you know, get in general, GitHub, specifically, of course, has created so much value engaged, you know, just millions and millions of developers and transform businesses. Take us back a little bit and you know, like to get your philosophy on, you know, building tools, how do you do it? How do you think about it? And what's inspired you? >> Yeah, I think it goes a long way back to just wanting to build things for the community. One of the first big projects I worked on was called Gravatar, and I remember laying in bed staring at the ceiling, just trying to think up some idea that that would contribute to what we then called The Blogosphere, and I came up with an idea for avatars that would follow you around and I coded it up and I got it out to a few bloggers and they started using it, and it caught on and it was really, it really introduced me to this idea that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your background is, you know, I grew up in Iowa, things are very different there. And with with the Internet, and the ability to code, you can impact the world in really significant ways. And so it follows on from there, and I think GitHub is an extension of that desire to really put things into the world that will be useful for people, and knowing that, if you have the ability to code and especially with the advent of web applications as a common tool, there's such power in that you have global reach, you just need a computer and the ability to code and you can create these things, and GitHub kind of became that. It was just, it started out really as a side project, and I hoped that someday it would be able to support me to work on it full time. But I, we started building it just because we wanted it to exist. And that's most of what I work on is, is just ideas that I want to exist in the world. >> Yeah, it's been one of those great trends to watch at, you know, there were certain technologies that used to have to be a nation state, or, you know, one of the one of the global 50 companies to take advantage of it. Now, tools like GitHub, making it so that, you know, the smallest company or even the individuals can participate in communities, can create and build you know, the building is such an important theme. So Maybe, let's fast forward a little bit if we would, I mentioned Netlify and JAMstack, you talked about the blogosphere, that team is helping to really reinvent how we think about the web, you know, it's real time, It's high performance, and you know, we need to be able to get that to where everybody is. So, you know, back in the early days, web pages, you know, relatively static and, you know, had certain criteria, and now, of course, you know, edge devices and the global population change things. So, you know, you, you've been engaged in a, you know, huge supporter of that project, and that'll lead us towards the redwoods discussion, but maybe bring us as to how you got involved there, and what got you excited? >> Well, like you said, Everything old is new again and I think that's true in fashion. It's also true in technology, in a lot of ways, and the JAMstack really is taking these old ideas where the web started, taking files and just serving them as static files and it's super fast, and it's extremely secure. This is how the internet started, and now we've sort of come full circle. But we've added a lot of really nice things and workflows on top of that. And so my journey into the JAMstack, I suppose, started more than a decade ago, when I started working on a project called Jekyll, that's a, I called it at the time, A Blog Aware Static Site Generator. So you would write your blog articles, and you would run it through Jekyll, and that would take your markdown, you'd write your articles in markdown, and it would combine them with a, some kind of a theme that you would have, and that would output static pages that represented your blog, and then you could serve those from any kind of static blog serving system. GitHub had has one built in called GitHub Pages, and so we ended up adopting Jekyll for GitHub Pages. So everything that you put up on GitHub Pages. would be run through Jekyll, and so it was a really natural place to put your blog. And so I had a blog post, one of my blog posts using Jekyll was called Blogging Like A Hacker. And it was this idea that you don't need WordPress, you don't need to have a database somewhere that's, that's hackable, that's going to cause you security problems, all the WordPress admin stuff that constantly is being attacked. You don't need all that, like you can just write articles in flat files, and then turn them into a blog statically and then put those up to serve them somewhere, right? And so when I say it like that, it sounds a little bit like the JAMstack, right? That's not how we thought about it at the time, because it was really hard to do dynamic things. So if you wanted to have comments on your blog for instance, then you needed to have some third party service that you would embed a component onto your blog, so you could receive comments. And so you had to start gluing things together, but even then, again, that sounds a little bit like the JAMstack. So it's all of these ideas that have been, evolving over the last decade to 15 years, that now we finally have an entire tool chain and adding Git on top of that and Git based workflows, and being able to push to GitHub and someone like Netlify can pick those up and publish them, and you have all these third party services that you can glue together without having to build them yourself. All of the billing things, like there's just the ecosystem is so much more advanced now, so many more bits are available for you to piece together that in a very short amount of time, you can have an extremely performant site capable of taking payments, and doing all of the dynamic things that we want to do. Well, many, I should say many of the dynamic things that we want to do, and it's fast and secure. So it's like the web used to be when the web started, but, now you can do all the modern things that you want to do. >> You're giving me flashbacks remembering how I glued discus into my Tumblr instance when that was rolling out. (laughing) >> That's what I was referring to, discuss. >> Yeah, so absolutely, you talk about there's just such a robust ecosystem out there, and one of the real challenges we have out there is, people will come in and they say, "Oh my gosh, where do I start?" And it's like, well, where do you want to go? There's the Paradox of Choice, and that I believe is one of the things that led you to create Redwoods. So help explain to our audience you know, you created this project Redwood, it related to JAMstack, but, but I'll let you explain you know, what it is in life needed? >> Yeah, Redwood is a response to a couple of things. One of those things, is the JavaScript world has, as everything has evolved in tremendous way, in all kinds of ways and almost entirely positive I think. The language itself has been improved so much from when I was a teenager using view source and copy pasting stuff into you know, some random X Files fan site. To now it's a first class language I can compete with with everything, from a ergonomics perspective. I really enjoy programming in it and I come from a Ruby, Ruby on Rails background and now I'm very happy in JavaScript that was not true even five, seven years ago, right? So JavaScript itself has changed a lot. Along with that comes NPM in the whole packaging universe, of availability of modules, right? So most of the things that you want to do, you can go and you can search and find code that's going to do those things for you, and so being able to, to just pull those into your projects so easily. That is amazing, right? The power that that gives you is tremendous. The problem comes in when, like you said, you have the Paradox of Choice. Now you have, not just one way to do something, but you have 100 ways to do something, right? And now as a as a developer, and especially as a new developer, someone who's just learning how to build web applications, you come into this and you say, all you see is the complexity, just overwhelming complexity, and every language goes through this. They go through a phase of sort of this Cambrian explosion of possibilities as people get excited, and you see that the web is embracing these technologies, and you see what's possible. Everyone gets excited and involved and starts creating solution after solution after solution, often times to the same problems. And that's a good thing, right, like exploring the territory is a good and necessary part of the evolution of programming languages and programming ecosystems. But there's comes a time where that becomes overwhelming and starts to trend towards being a negative. And so at Chatterbug, which is a foreign language learning service, if you want to learn how to speak French or Spanish or German, we'll help you do that, as part of that work, we started using react on the front end, because I really love what react brings you from a JavaScript and interactivity perspective. But along with react, you have to make about 50 other choices of technologies to use to actually create a fully capable website, something for state management, you got to choose a way to do JavaScript or sorry, CSS. There's 100 things that you have to choose, and it's, it seems very arbitrary and you go through a lot of churn, you choose one, and then the next day an article comes out and then people raving about another one, and then you choose, you're like, Oh, that one looks really nice. You know, grass is always greener, and so Redwood is a bit of a, an answer to that, or a response to that, which is to say, we've learned a lot of things now about what works in building with react, especially on the front end. And what I really want to do is have a tool that's more like Ruby on Rails, where I come from, having done years and years of Ruby on Rails, what GitHub was built with. And Ruby on Rails presents to you a fully capable web application framework that has made all the choices or most of the choices, many of the important choices. And the same is kind of missing in the JavaScript TypeScript world and so, when I saw Netlify come out with their feature where you could commit the code for a lambda function to your repository, and if you push that up to GitHub, Netlify will grab it, and they will orchestrate deploying that code to an AWS lambda so that you can run business logic in a lambda but without having to touch AWS, because touching AWS is another gigantic piece of complexity, and their user interfaces are sometimes challenging, I'll say. That, that then made me think that, here finally is the ability to combine everything that's awesome about the JAMstack and static files, and security, and this workflow, with the ability to do business logic, and that sounded to me like the makings of a full stack web application framework, and I kept waiting for someone to come out and be like, hey, tada, like we glued this all together, and here's your thing, that's rails, but for the JAMstack, JavaScript, TypeScript world and nobody was doing it. And so I started working on it myself, and that has become Redwoodjs. >> It's one of the things that excited me the early days when I looked into Serverless was that, that low bar to entry, you know, I didn't have to have, you know, a CS degree or five years of understanding a certain code base to be able to take advantage of it. Feels like you're hoping to extend that, it believe it's one of your passions, you know, helping with with Chatterbug and like, you know, helping people with that learning. What do you feel is the state out there? What's your thoughts about kind of the future of jobs, when it when it comes to this space? >> I think the future of jobs in technology and especially software development is, I mean, there is no, there is no better outlook for any profession than that. I mean, this is the, this is where the world is going, more and more of what we want to accomplish, we do in software and it happens across every industry. I mean, just look at Tesla's for instance, right? You think about automobiles and the car that you owned, you know, 10 years ago, and you're like, I don't know, I know there's a computer in here somewhere, but like, I don't really, you know, either the software for it is terrible, and you're like, who, when was the last time you actually use the navigation system in your car, right? You just like get like just turn that off because it's, it's so horrible. And then Tesla comes along and says, hey, what if we actually made all this stuff useful, and had a thoughtful interface and essentially built a car that where everything was controlled with software, and so now cars are are basically software wrapped in hardware, and the experience is amazing. And the same is true of everything, look at your, look at how many things that your phone has replaced that used to be physical devices. Look at manufacturing processes, look at any any element of bureaucracy, all of this stuff is mediated by computers, and oftentimes it's done badly. But this just shows how much opportunity there is speaking of like governmental websites, right, you go to the DMV, and you try to schedule an appointment, and you just have no confidence that that's going to work out because the interfaces feel like they were written 15 years ago, and sometimes I think they were, written that long ago. But there's so much, there's still so much improvement to be had and all of that is going to take developers to do it. Unless, you know, we figure out how to get AI to do it for us, and there's been some very interesting things lately around that angle, but to me, it's, humans will always be involved. And so, at some level, humans are telling machines what to do, whether you're doing it more or less directly, and having the ability to tell machines what to do gives you tremendous leverage. >> Yeah, we're big fans, if you know Erik Bryjolfsson and Andy McAfee from MIT, they've, you know, are very adamant that it's the combination of people plus machines that always will win against either people alone or machines alone. Tom, what, you know, right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic, there're financially, there's a lot of bad news around the globe right now. I've talked to many entrepreneurs that said, well, a downturn market is actually a great time to start something new. You're an investor, you've helped build lots of things. We talked a lot about lowering the bar for people to create and build new things. What do you see are some of the opportunities out there, if you know, you had to recommend for the entrepreneurs out there? Where should they be looking? >> I'd say look at all of the things in your life that have become challenging, because where there's challenge, where there's pain, there's opportunity for solutions. And especially when there's a big environmental change, which we see right now, with COVID-19, obviously has changed a lot of our behaviors and made some of the things that used to be easy. It's made those a lot harder, and so you see, certain segments of the economy are doing extremely well, namely technology and things that allow us to do interviews like this instead of in person, and so those industries are doing extremely well. So you look at the you look at the stock market in the United States, and it's it's very interesting, because while much of the country is suffering, the people that are already wealthy are doing very well, and technology companies are doing very well. And so the question for me is, what are the opportunities that we have, leveraging technology in the internet, to where we can create more opportunities for more people, to get people back to work, right? I think there's so much opportunity there. Just look at education, like the entire concept of educating kids right now and I have three. So we feel this very much, it has been turned on its head. And so we so you see many people looking for solutions in that space, and that's, I think that's as it should be. When things get, when things get challenged when our, our normal daily experience is so radically changed, there's opportunity there, because people are willing to change more quickly in a crisis, right? Because you need, you need something like any solution. And so some choice is going to be made, and where that's happening, then you can find early adopters more easily, than you can under other circumstances, and so in economic downturns, you often see that kind of behavior where these are crisis moments for people, you have an opportunity to come in and if you have something that could solve a problem for them, then you can get a user where that may have not been a problem for a person before. So where there is, where there is a crisis, there is always opportunity to help people solve their problems in different and better ways to address that crisis. So again, it goes back to pain, you know, and it doesn't have to be the pain from a crisis. It could be a pain from from anything. Just like with GitHub, it was, it was hard to share code as developers like it was, there was too much pain, and this was, we started it in 2008, right after the housing crisis. It was unrelated to that, but it turns out that when you start a company, when the economy is depressed in a certain way, then at least you can look forward to the economy getting better as you are building your company. >> Oh, Tom, Preston Werner, thank you so much for joining pleasure talking with you. I appreciate all of your input. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for joining this Episode of cloud native insights. Thank you for watching the theCUBE. (light music)

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

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Day three coverage of ADAS reinvent in Las Vegas. It's the cubes coverage. Want to thank Intel for being the headline sponsor for the cube two sets. Without Intel, we wouldn't make it happen. We're here extracting the signal from the noise as usual. Wall-to-wall SiliconANGLE the cube coverage. I'm John Feria with student men and men doing a keynote analysis from Verner Vogel. Stu, you know Vernor's, they always, they always got the disc, the format jazzy kicks it off. You get the partner thing on day two and then they say Verner flask could nerd out on all the good stuff. Uh, containers. Coobernetti's all under the hood stuff. So let's jump in a keynote analysis. What's your take? What's Verner's posture this year? What's the vibe? What's the overall theme of the keynote? >>Well, well, first of all, John, to answer the question that everybody asks when Werner takes the stage, this year's t-shirt was posse. So Verner usually either has a Seattle band or it's usually a Dutch DJ, something like that. So he always delivers it. The geek crowd there. And really after seeing it of sitting through Werner's keynote, I think everybody walks out with AWS certification because architecturally we dig into all these environments. So right. You mentioned they started out with the master class on how Amazon built their hypervisor. Super important. Nitro underneath is the secret sauce. When they bought Annapurna labs, we knew that those chips would be super important going forward. But this is what is going to be the driver for outposts. It is the outpost is the building block for many of the other services announced this week. And absolutely the number one thing I'm hearing in the ecosystems around outpost but far gate and firecracker micro databases and managing containers. >>Um, they had some enterprises up on stage talking about transformation, picking up on the themes that Andy started with his three hour keynote just yesterday. But um, it's a lighter on the news. One of the bigger things out there is we will poke Amazon about how open and transparent they are. About what they're doing. And one of the things they announced was the Amazon builders library. So it's not just getting up on stage and saying, Hey, we've got really smart people and we architected these things and you need to use all of our tools, but Hey, this is how we do things. Reminded me a little bit of a, you know, just echoes of what I heard from get lab, who of course is fully open source, fully transparent, but you know, Amazon making progress. It's Adrian Cockcroft and that team has moved on open source, the container group. >>I had a great interview yesterday with Deepak saying, and Abby fuller, the container group actually has a roadmap up on containers. They're so sharing a lot of deep knowledge and good customers talk about how they're taking advantage, transforming their business. In serverless, I mean, John, coming out of Andy's keynote, I was like, there wasn't a lot of security and there wasn't a lot of serverless. And while serverless has been something that we know is transforming Amazon underneath the covers, we finally got to hear a little bit more about not just Lambda but yes, Lambda, but the rest of it as to how serverless is transforming underneath. >>You know ain't Jessie's got along three hour keynote, 30 announcements, so he has to cut save some minutes there. So for Verner we were expecting to go in a little bit more deeper dive on this transformational architecture. What did you learn about what they're proposing, what they're saying or continuing to say around how enterprises should be reborn in the cloud? Because that's the conversation here and again, we are, the memes that are developing are take the T out of cloud native. It's cloud naive. If you're not doing it right, you're going to be pretty naive. And then reborn in the cloud is the theme. So cloud native, born in the cloud, that's proven. Reborn in the cloud is kind of the theme we're hearing. Did he show anything? Did he talk about what that architecture is for transformation? Right. >>Did actually, it was funny. I'm in a watching the social stream. While things are going on. There was actually a cube alumni that I follow that we've interviewed at this show and he's like, if we've heard one of these journeys to you know, transformation, haven't we heard them all and I said, you know, while the high level message may be similar is I'm going to transfer math transform, I'm going to use data. When you looked at what they were doing, and this is a significant, you know, Vanguard, you know the financial institutions, Dave Volante commenting that you know the big banks, John, we know Goldman Sachs, we know JP Morgan, these banks that they have huge it budgets and very smart staffs there. They years ago would have said, Oh we don't need to use those services. We'll do what ourselves. Well Vanguard talking about how they're transforming rearchitecting my trip services. >>I love your term being reborn cloud native because that is the architecture. Are you cloud native or I used to call it you've kind of cloud native or kinda you know a little bit fo a cloud. Naive is a great term too. So been digging in and it is resonating is to look, transformation is art. This is not trying to move the organizational faster than it will naturally happen is painful. There's skillsets, there's those organizational pieces. There are politics inside the company that can slow you down in the enterprise is not known for speed. The enterprises that will continue to exist going forward better have taken this methodology. They need to be more agile and move. >>Well the thing about the cloud net naive thing that I like and first of all I agree with reborn in the cloud. We coined the term in the queue but um, that's kinda got this born again kind of vibe to it, which I think is what they're trying to say. But the cloud naive is, is some of the conversations we're hearing in the community and the customer base of these clouds, which is there are, and Jesse said it is Kino. There are now two types of developers and customers, the ones that want the low level building blocks and ones who want a more custom or solution oriented packages. So if you look at Microsoft Azure and Oracle of the clouds, they're trying to appeal to the folks that are classic it. Some are saying that that's a naive approach because it's a false sense of cloud, false sense of security. >>They got a little cloud. Is it really true? Cloud is, it's really true. Cloud native. So it's an interesting confluence between what true cloud is from a cloud native standpoint and yet all the big success stories are transformations not transitions. And so to me, I'm watching this it market, which is going to have trillions of dollars in, are they just transitioning? I old it with a new coat of paint or is it truly a skill, a truly an architectural transformation and does it impact the business model? That to me is the question. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, so John, I think actually the best example of that cloud native architecture is the thing we're actually all talking about this week, but is misunderstood. AWS outpost was announced last year. It is GA with the AWS native services this year. First, the VMware version is going to come out early in 2020 but here's why I think it is super exciting but misunderstood. When Microsoft did Azure stack, they said, we're going to give you an availability zone basically in your data center. It wasn't giving you, it was trying to extend the operational model, but it was a different stack. It was different hardware. They had to put these things together and really it's been a failure. The architectural design point of outpost is different. It is the same stack. It is an extension of your availability zone, so don't think of it of I've got the cloud in my data center. >>It's no, no, no. What I need for low latency and locality, it's here, but starting off there is no S3 in it because we were like, wait, what do you mean there's no S3 in it? I want to do all these services and everything. Oh yeah. Your S three bucket is in your local AC, so why would you say it's sharing? If you are creating data and doing data, of course I want it in my S three bucket. You know that, that that makes that no, they're going to add us three next year, but they are going to be very careful about what surfaces do and don't go on. This is not, Oh Amazon announces lots of things. Of course it's on outpost. It has the security, it has the operational model. It fits into the whole framework. It can be disconnected song, but it is very different. >>I actually think it's a little bit of a disservice. You can actually go see the rack. I took a selfie with it and put it out on Twitter and it's cool gear. We all love to, you know, see the rack and see the cables and things like that. But you know, my recommendation to Amazon would be just put a black curtain around it because pay no attention to what's here. Amazon manages it for you and yes, it's Amazon gear with the nitro chip underneath there. So customers should not have to think about it. It's just when they're doing that architecture, which from an application standpoint, it's a hybrid architecture. John, some services stay more local because of latency, but others it's that transformation. And it's moving the cloud, the edge, my data center things are much more mobile. Can you to change and move over? >>Well this spring you mentioned hybrid. I think to me the outpost announcement in terms of unpacking that is all about validation of hybrid. You know, VMware's got a smile on their face. Sanjay Poonen came in because you know Gelson you're kind of was pitching hybrid, you know, we were challenging him and then, but truly this means cloud operations has come. This is now very clear. There's no debate and this is what multi-cloud ultimately will look like. But hybrid cloud and public cloud is now the architecture of the of it. There's no debate because outpost is absolute verification that the cloud operating model with the cloud as a center of gravity for all the reasons scale, lower costs management, but moving the cloud operations on premises or the edge proves hybrid is here to stay. And that's where the money is. >>So John, there's a small nuance I'll say there because hybrid, we often think of public and private as equal. The Amazon positioning is it's outpost. It's an extension of what we're doing. The public cloud is the main piece, the edge and the outposts are just extensions where we're reaching out as opposed to if I look at, you know what VMware's doing, I've got my data center footprint. You look at the HCI solution out there. Outpost is not an HCI competitor and people looking at this misunderstand the fundamental architecture in there. Absolutely. Hybrid is real. Edge is important. Amazon is extending their reach, but all I'm saying is that nuance is still, Amazon has matured their thinking on hybrid or even multi-cloud. When you talk to Andy, he actually would talk about multi-cloud, but still at the center of gravity is the public cloud and the Amazon services. It's not saying that, Oh yeah, like you know, let's wrap arounds around all of your existing, >>well, the reason why I liked the cloud naive, take the T out of cloud native and cloud naive is because there is a lot of negativity around what cloud actually is about. I forget outpost cloud itself, and if you look at like Microsoft for instance, love Microsoft, I think they do an amazing work. They're catching up as fast as they can, but, and they play the car. Well we are large scale too, but the difference between Amazon and Microsoft Azure is very clear. Microsoft's had these data centers for MSN, I. E. browsers, global infrastructure around the world for themselves and literally overnight they have to serve other people. And if you look at Gardner's results, their downtime has been pretty much at an all time high. So what you're seeing is the inefficiencies and the district is a scale for Microsoft trying to copy Amazon because they now have to serve millions of customers anywhere. This is what Jessie was telling me in my one-on-one, which is there's no compression algorithm for experience. What he's basically saying is when you try to take shortcuts, there's diseconomies of scale. Amazon's got years of economies of scale, they're launching new services. So Jesse's bet is to make the capabilities. The problem is Microsoft Salesforce do is out there and Amos can't compete with, they're not present and they're going into their customers think we got you covered. And frankly that's working like real well. >>Yeah. So, so, so John, we had the cube at Microsoft ignite. I've done that show for the last few years. And my takeaway at Microsoft this year was they build bridges. If you are, you know, mostly legacy, you know, everything in my data center versus cloud native, I'm going to build your bridge. They have five different developer groups to work with you where you are and they'll go there. Amazon is a little bit more aggressive with cloud native transformation, you know, you need to change your mindset. So Microsoft's a little bit more moderate and it is safer for companies to just say, well, I trust Microsoft and I've worked with Microsoft and I've got an enterprise license agreement, so I'll slowly make change. But here's the challenge, Don. We know if you really want to change your business, you can't get there incrementally. Transformation's important for innovation. So the battle is amazing. You can't be wrong for betting on either Microsoft or Amazon these days. Architecturally, I think Amazon has clear the broadest and deepest out there. They keep proving some of their environments and it has, >>well the economies of scale versus diseconomies scale discussion is huge because ultimately if Microsoft stays on that path of just, you know, we got a two and they continue down that path, they could be on the wrong side of the history. And I'll tell you why I see that and why I'm evaluating Microsoft one, they have the data center. So can they reach tool fast enough? Can they, can they eliminate that technical debt because ultimately they're, they're making a bet. And the true bet is if they become just an it transition, they in my opinion, will, will lose in the long run. Microsoft's going all in on, Nope, we're not the old guard. We're the new guard. So there's an interesting line being formed too. And if Microsoft doesn't get cloud native and doesn't bring true scale, true reliability at the capabilities of Amazon, then they're just going to be just another it solution. And they could, that could fall right on there, right on their face on that. >>And John, when we first came to this show in 2013 it was very developer centric and could Amazon be successful in wooing the enterprise? You look around this show, the answer was a resounding yes. Amazon is there. They have not lost the developers. They're doing the enterprise. When you talk to Andy, you talked about the bottoms up and the top down leadership and working there and across the board as opposed to Google. Google has been trying and not making great progress moving to the enterprise and that has been challenging. >>Oh, I've got to tell you this too. Last night I was out and I got some really good information on jet eye and I was networking around and kind of going in Cognito mode and doing the normal and I found someone who was sharing some really critical information around Jedi. Here's what I learned around this is around Microsoft, Microsoft, one that Jed ideal without the capabilities to deliver on the contract. This was a direct quote from someone inside the DOD and inside the intelligence community who I got some clear information and I said to him, I go, how's that possible? He says, Microsoft one on the fact that they say they could do it. They have not yet proven any capabilities for Jedi. And he even said quote, they don't even have the data centers to support the deal. So here you have the dynamic we save, we can do it. Amazon is doing it. This is ultimately the true test of cloud naive versus cloud native. Ask the clouds, show me the proof, John, you could do it and I'll go with, >>you've done great reporting on the jet. I, it has been a bit of a train wreck to watch what's going on in the industry with that because we know, uh, Microsoft needs to get a certain certification. They've got less than a year. The clock is ticking to be able to support some of those environments. Amazon could support that today. So we knew when this started, this was Amazon's business and that there was the executive office going in and basically making sure that Amazon did not win it. So we said there's a lot of business out there. We know Amazon doing well, and the government deals Gelsinger was on record from VMware talking about lots of, >>well here's, here's, here's the thing. I also talked to someone inside the CIA community who will tell me that the spending in the CIA is flat. Okay. And the, the flatness of the, of the spending is flat, but the demand for mission support is going exponential. So the cloud fits that bill. On the Jedi side, what we're hearing is the DOD folks love this architecture. It was not jury rig for Amazon's jury rig for the workload, so that they're all worried that it's going to get scuttled and they don't want that project to fail. There's huge support and I think the Jedi supports the workload transformational thinking because it's completely different. And that's why everyone was running scared because the old guard was getting, getting crushed by it. But no one wants that deal to fail. They want it to go forward. So it's gonna be very interesting dynamics do if Microsoft can't deliver the goods, Amazon's back in the driver's seat >>deal. And John, I guess you know my final takeaway, we talked a bunch about outpost but that is a building block, 80 West local zones starting first in LA for the telco media group, AWS wavelength working with the five G providers. We had Verizon on the program here. Amazon is becoming the everywhere cloud and they really, as Dave said in your opening keynote there, shock and awe, Amazon delivers mere after a year >>maybe this logo should be everything everywhere cause they've got a lot of capabilities that you said the everything cloud, they've got everything in the store do great stuff. Great on the keynote from Verner Vogel's again, more technology. I'm super excited around the momentum around Coobernetti's you know we love that they think cloud native is going to be absolutely legit and continue to be on a tear in 2020 and beyond. I think the five G wavelength is going to change the network constructs because that's going to introduce new levels of kinds of policy. Managing data and compute at the edge will create new opportunities at the networking layer, which for us, you know, we love that. So I think the IOT edge is going to be a super, super valuable. We even had Blackberry on their, their car group talking about the software inside the car. I mean that's a moving mobile device of, of of industrial strength is industrial IOT. So industrial IOT, IOT, edge outpost, hybrid dude, we called this what year? Yeah, we call that 2013. >>And John, it's great to help our audience get a little bit more cloud native on their education and uh, you know, make sure that we're not as naive anymore. >>Still you're not naive. You're certainly cloud native, born in the clouds do, it's us born here. Our seventh year here at Amazon web services. Want to thank Intel for being our headline sponsor. Without Intel support, we would not have the two stages and bringing all the wall to wall coverage. Thanks for supporting our mission. Intel. We really appreciate it. Give them a shout out. We've got Andy Jassy coming on for exclusive at three o'clock day three stay with us for more coverage. Live in Vegas for reinvent 2019 be right back.

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

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

(upbeat orchestral music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful Palo Alto Studios. Great conversation today with Jeremy Werner who is the vice president of SSD Marketing at Toshiba Memory, Jeremy welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, great to be here. >> You know Jeremy, one of the reasons why I find you being here so intriguing interesting is there's a lot going on in the industry. We talk about new types of workloads: AI, cloud, deep learning, all these other things, all these technologies are-- all these applications and workloads are absolutely dependent on the idea that the infrastructure has to start focusing less on just persisting memory and focusing more on delivering memory-- delivering data to these very advanced applications. That's where flash comes in. Tell us a little bit about the role that flash has had in the industry. >> It's amazing, thank you for recognizing that. So, flash has a long history. 30 years ago actually Toshiba invented flash memory, and it's had a transformation on people's lives everywhere, on all kinds of products starting with the very first application for flash being-- for NAND flash being kind of removable memory cards. You had the digital camera revolution, then it found its way into cell phones, that enabled smart phones and people carrying around all their media etc. And now we're in kind of this large third phase adoption which is, like you mentioned, the transition from persistent storage with a hard drive where, your data was available but not really available to do a lot with. To now storage on an SSD, which allows artificial intelligence, business analytics, and all the new workloads that are changing business paradigms. >> So clearly flash adoption is increasing in the data center. Wikibon has been talking about this for quite some time. My colleague David Foyer was one of the first people out there to project the role that flash was going to play within the data center. How are you seeing as you talk to customers, as you talk to some of the big systems manufacturers and some of the hyperscalers. How are you hearing or what are they saying about how they are applying and will intend to apply flash in the market today? >> It's amazing when we talk to customers they really can't get enough flash. As an industry we just came out of a major shortage of flash memory, and now a lot of new technologies are coming online. So, we at Toshiba, just announced our 96 layer 3D flash, our QLC flash. This is all in an attempt to get more flash storage into the hands of these customers so that they can bring these new applications to market. And this transformation, it's happening quickly although maybe not as quickly as people think because there's a very long road ahead of us. Still you look out 10 years into the future, you're talking about 40 or 50% growth per year, at least for the next decade. >> So I want to get to that in a second, but I want to touch upon something that you said that many of the naysayers about flash predicted that there would be shortfalls and they were very Chicken Little like. Oh my gosh, the sky is going to fall, the prices are going to go out of control. We did have a shortage, and it was a pretty significant one, but we were able to moderate some of the price increases so it didn't lead to a whole bunch of design losses or a disruption in how we thought about new workloads, did it? >> True, no it didn't, and I think that's the value of flash memory. Basically what we saw was the traditional significant decline in pricing took a pause, and you look back 20 years ago, I mean flash was 1000 times more expensive. And as we move down that cost curve, it enables more and more applications to adopt it. Even in today's pricing, flash is an amazingly valuable tool to data centers and enterprise as they roll out new workloads and particularly around analytics, and artificial intelligence, machine learning, kind of all the interesting new technologies that you hear about. >> Yeah, and I think that's probably going to be the way that these kinds of blips in supply are going to be-- it'll perhaps lead to a temporary moderation in how fast the prices drop. >> That's right. >> It's not going to lead to massive disruption and craziness. And I will also say this, you mentioned 20 years ago stuff was really expensive and I cut my teeth on mainframe stuff. And I remember when disk drives on the mainframe were $3500 a megabyte, so it could be a lot worse. So, let's now-- flash is a great technology, SSD is a great technology, but it's made valuable by an overall ecosystem. >> That's right. >> There's a lot of other supporting technologies that are really crucial here. Disk has been dominated by interfaces like SATA for a long time. Done very well by us. Allowed for a fair amount of parallelism, a lot of pathing to mainly disk, but that's starting to change as we start thinking about flash coming on and being able to provide much much faster access times. What's going on with SATA and what's on the horizon? >> Yeah, so great question. Really what we saw with SATA in about 2010 was the introduction of a six gigabit SATA interface, and that was a doubling of the prior speed that was available, and then zero progress since then, and actually the SATA roadmap has nothing forward. So people have been stuck effectively with that SATA interface for the last eight years. Now they've had some choices. You look at the existing ecosystem, the existing infrastructure, SATA and SAS drives were both choices, and SAS is a faster interface today up to 12 gigabit. It's full duplex where SATA is half duplex, so you can read and write in parallel, so actually you can get four times the speed on a SAS drive that you would get on a SATA drive today. The challenge with SAS, why everyone went to SATA-- I won't say everyone went to SATA, but maybe three or four times the adoption rate of SATA versus SAS was the SAS products that were available on the market really didn't deliver the most economical deployment of-- >> They were more expensive. >> They were more expensive. >> Alright, but that's changing. >> That is changing, so what we've been trying to do is prepare and work with our customers for a life after SATA. And it's been a long time coming, like I said eight years on this current interface. Recently we introduced what we call a value SAS product line. The value SAS product line brings a lot of the benefits of SAS, so the faster performance, the better reliability, and the better manageability, into the existing infrastructure, but at SATA-like economics. And that I think is going to be critical as customers look at the long-term life after SATA, which is the transition to NVMe and a flash-only world without having to be fully dependent on changing everything that they've ever done to move from SATA to NVMe. So, the life after SATA preparation on customers is how do I make the most out of my existing knowledge, my existing infrastructure capabilities. What's readily available from a support perspective as I prepare for that eventual transition to NVMe. >> Yeah I want to pick up on that notion of higher performance at improving cost of SAS and just make sure that we're clear here that SATA is an electrical interface. It has certain performance characteristics, but these new systems are putting an enormous amount of stress on that interface. And that means you can't put more work on top of that, not only from an application standpoint, but as you said crucially also from a management standpoint. When you put more reporting or you put more automation or your put more AI on some of these devices, that creates new load on those drives. Going to SAS releases that headroom, so now we can bring more management workloads. That's important, and this is what I want to test. That's important because as we do these more complex applications, we're pushing more work down closer to the data, and we're using a lot more data, it's going to require more automation. Is SAS going to provide the headroom that we need to actually bring new levels of reliability to more complex work? >> I believe it will, absolutely. SAS is the world's most trusted interface. So, when it comes to reliability, our SAS drives in the field are the most reliable product that our customers purchase today. And we take that same core technology and package in a way to make it truly an economical replacement for SATA. >> So we at Wikibon now have observed NVMe, so I want to turn a little bit of attention to that. We have observed that NVMe is in fact going to have a significant impact. But when Toshiba Memory is looking at what kinds of things customers are looking for, you're saying not so much SATA, let's focus on SAS, and let's bring NVMe online as the system designs are there. Is that kind of what it's about? >> You know I think it's a complicated situation. Not everyone is ready for everything at the same time. Even today, there's some major cloud providers that have just about fully transitioned to NVMe SSDs. And that transition has been challenging. So what we see is customers over the course of the next four or five years, their readiness for that transition from today to five years from now, that's happening based on the complexity of what they need to manage from a physical infrastructure, a software ecosystem perspective. So some customers have already migrated, and other customers are years away. And that is really what we're trying to help customers with. We have a very broad NVMe offering. Actually we have more NVMe SSDs than any other product line, but for a lot of those customers who want to continue with the digital transformation in to data analytics, in to realizing the value of all the data that they have available and transforming that into improved business processes, improved business results. Those customers don't want to have to wait for their infrastructure to catch up for NVMe. Value SAS gives them a means to make that transition, while continuing on to take advantage of all the capabilities of flash. One of the things that we always talk about, one of my responsibilities is product planning product definition, and one of the things that we always talk about is our ideal SSD, the bottleneck is the flash. In other words if you look at a drive there's so many things that could bottleneck performance. It could be the interface, it could be the power that you can consume and dissipate, it could be the megahertz in your controller >> You sound like an electrical engineer. >> I am an electrical engineer, but I'm a marketing guy, right? So, there's all kinds of bottlenecks, and when we design an SSD we want the flash to be the bottleneck cause at the end of the day, that's fundamentally what people need and want. And so, you look at SATA, and it's like, not only is it a bottleneck, but it's clamping the performance at 50% or less than 50% of what's achievable in the same power footprint, in the same cost footprint, so it's just not practical I mean the thing's eight years old so-- >> Yeah. Yeah. >> In technology eight years is a lot of time. >> Especially these days, and so to simplify that perhaps, or say that a little bit differently, bottom line is SAS is a smaller step for existing customers who don't have the expertise necessary to re-engineer an entire system and infrastructure. >> That's right, it gives them that stepping stone. >> So you also mentioned that there' a difference between the flash and the SSD, and that difference is an enormous amount of value-wide engineering that leads to automation, reliability, types of things you can do down at the drive. Talk to us a little bit about Toshiba, Toshiba Memory, as a supplier of that differentiating engineering that's going to lead to even superior performance at better cost and greater manageability and time to value on some of these new flash-based workloads. >> So I'm amazed at the quality of our engineering team and the challenges that they face to constantly be bringing out new technologies that keep up with the flash memory curve. And I actually joke sometimes, I say it's like being on a hamster wheel. It never stops, the second that you release a product you're developing the next product. I mean it's one of the fastest product life cycles in the entire industry, and you're talking about extremely complicated, complex systems with tight firmware development. So what we do at Toshiba Memory, we actually engineer our own SOCs and controllers, develop the RTL, manage that from basically architecture to production. We write all our own firmware, we assemble our own drives, we put it all together. The process for actually defining a product to when we release it is about five years. So we have meetings now, we're talking about what are we going to release in 2023? And that is one of the big challenges, because these design cycles are very long so anticipating where innovation is going, and today's innovation is at the speed of software, right? Not the speed of hardware. So how do you build that kind of flexibility and capability into your product so that you can keep up with new innovations no one might have seen five years ago? That's where Toshiba Memory's engineering team really shows its mettle. >> So let's get your back in theCUBE in the not-to-distant future to talk about what 2023 is going to look like, but for right now Jeremy Werner, Vice President of SSD Marketing at Toshiba Memory, thank you very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, thanks for watching this CUBE Conversation. (upbeat orchestral music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in San Francisco at Moscone West, theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services Summit 2018. It's the first of their kickoff of their little satellite events, really about developers and training and educating people on Amazon Web Services products and services. Again theCUBE covers re:Invent, that's their big show, This is more of a, less of a sales and marketing but more of a really get down and dirty with the developers and practitioners. I'm John Furrier, with my cohost this week Stu Miniman all day today, wall to wall coverage. Stu, the keynotes just kicked off, Andy Jassy is not here, notable. Werner Vogels does all the summits so he's always been the headline. Last year Andy Jassy kind of did the keynote, fireside chat, we had that up on our YouTube channel, SiliconANGLE theCUBE, but here the story is all about SageMaker and the continued dominance of Amazon Web Services, and then again as we were speculating at re:Invent, and we've been saying on theCUBE, the maturization of Amazon Web Services is clear. Everyone knows the numbers, they're breaking out the reporting, they clearly got competitive forces for the first time in AWS's history, they have some serious competition upping their game. Microsoft nipping at their heels, Google putting out some open source tech, Oracle trying to throw FUD into the fire and say, change the rules and kind of keep the rules on their terms, so the competitive pressure. But at the end of the day there's a whole new era of modern software development, modern business applications and we're seeing it with things like cloud expansion, on-premise consolidation, hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, decentralized infrastructure, blockchain AI, these are the themes, this is what developers want, this is what businesses are doing, let's analyze and discuss the keynotes. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so John, I mean, first of all, we watched the rolling thunder that is AWS just rolling through the entire industry, and now rolling all over the globe. So the AWS Summit, I think they actually had an idea about Summit in Singapore like, last night, and we're going to be covering a few of them. I was last year at the AWS New York City Summit, and I tell you, that New York City show alone was one of the best shows I went to all year. The amount of people, the excitement, what really differentiates as you said, the big re:Invent versus the summit, first of all, the summit, they tend to be a local audience, it's free for basically everybody to come in. So numbers are great, you know, we're in San Francisco, they going to 10, 15 thousand people here probably. Google Cloud Next was here last year in February and it feels almost the same amount of people here for a regional Amazon show. So the numbers are wow, the announcements, every day Amazon's running an announcement, so Doctor Werner Vogels, Doctor Matt Wood, get up stage, go through some of the usual we're dominating every industry and every service and everything there, but when you piece apart there's like, ooh, there's real announcements that are coming, things that jumped out, we talked about machine learning, Matt Wood talked about SageMaker is really growing super fast, people that I talked to that have been using it are loving it. They came out with SageMaker local, which means that I can develop it on my laptop and do it with that cool, you take ML with that cool, what was it, that deep lens, that they've got. It's how do I get these environments? Amazon isn't just about infrastructure cloud anymore, They've gone to paths, they're pushing to edge, they're doing all of these things. They had a whole ton of announcements, when they were already past the time that the keynotes were going to be done, Oh, you thought we're done, well security, security, security and secrets manager, firewall manager, there's so many services. The theme I've been looking at the past couple years, how do we keep up with all of this, even internally? You talk to Amazon people, they don't know everything that everyone's doing, because it's all those two pizza teams and how they're growing. >> And they always have to get all their sound bites in because they don't have a lot of time to get all that packed into one powerful punch. Just on a quick side note for the folks that watching knows theCUBE, we've been covering Amazon really since the beginning, since the re:Invent started, you know we've been covering data center infrastructure and big data, Hadoop and now beyond. You're starting to see coverage around blockchain and cryptocurrency. So again, we are expanding our coverage of the AWS ecosystem and cloud to include most of the major regional shows of AWS Summit, continuing to go deep into the AWS re:Invent and the community, we are also initiating coverage heavily on Google, Google Cloud Next, we'll be at their show and soon to be at Microsoft show, that's still to be determined with Microsoft that they will let us in, we're working on that, we think that's going to be good, but we'll be nailing and doubling down on the cloud coverage. So Stu, with that as a backdrop, people know we've been deep with Amazon, I've been called an Amazon fanboy many times, but the numbers are clear. I'm a Google fanboy, by the way, too, I love Google stuff. Microsoft I got to learn more about, obviously they have bundling and Office so they're a legacy player, Oracle a legacy player, so you got two legacy players, you got Amazon and Google, I would put them in two different categories, but then Alibaba in China trying to dip in as you got those, the real kind of cloud native companies, Google and Amazon on one end, you get the legacy players with Microsoft and Oracle and IBM on the other. So you have this really highly competitive environment. We're seeing for the first, or second time, Andy Jassy did it at re:Invent, but Werner Vogels put up the competitive slide. He said "This is what we're doing." And he showed the number of services that Amazon offers, vis a vis the competition, and he didn't actually call out the vendors but we kind of know, I put on my Twitter feed, you can see his number one, the second one's Microsoft. Google they put in the Google colors, that's obviously Google, and red is Oracle. Amazon is clearly dominating on the number of services available across the cloud. So when we've been squinting through the numbers on who's leading who, you've really got look at two perspectives. The broad range of available services and the number of customers using those services versus point solutions that might be one instance of the cloud. This is a new architecture, it's not the old waterfall model it's not the old six months to provision into it, mentioned that. This is like a highly competitive environment. So Stu I've got to ask you, how do you squint through that and look at the competition that Amazon has, obviously the numbers aren't great. But how should customers look at the competition, how are you looking at it, how is our team evaluating the competition? >> Well first of all John, it is not a zero sum game and it is very nuanced and complicated. And for most customers it's not a solution, it's many solutions and it's something that Amazon doesn't love, is that you talk about things like multi-cloud and they would say "Well, we have the "best service everywhere and we're the cheapest everywhere "and everyone's all in on us," well, when you get down to it, You know, I hate I have to defend a little bit, you say Microsoft and Oracle, legacy. Microsoft has business productivity applications. They are the leader in the space when you talk about... >> Yeah they're the leader in legacy applications. >> But you know, you start with the Microsoft Office Suite, and say what you will, it's still dominant out there, it's there. Microsoft gave enterprises the green light to go to SaaS, and they really helped drive that. >> John: Whoah, whoah, that's a direction. >> Yeah. >> John: But they're a legacy vendor, what you just said is that they're legacy. >> But Azure is doing quite well... >> John: Oracle's going to the cloud, are they legacy? >> Oracle's got a phenomenal team, have been building some really interesting things in cloud, but obviously no doubt about it, Amazon's leading, but when you talk to users and you say, okay, there's lots of reasons they might be using Azure for various pieces. Everybody is using AWS, except for those people, John, and you used the example, the ones that compete against Amazon and obviously that's a concern. Because today Amazon is competing against more and more companies, so that's a little bit... >> I'm not, I'm not down on the legacy, what I'm trying to point out is that IBM was clear about this, they were up front about it at IBM Think we were just at, which is, they're saying the legacy has to evolve. Doesn't mean legacy's going to die, I mean Microsoft clearly is going to the cloud, their stock's at like 90 plus, it was at 26 a few years ago so, Satya Nadella taking over from Ballmer. Clearly that's the direction Microsoft has to go, and they're doing it. Now, they're a legacy company doing cloud. Oracle, legacy company, doing cloud. IBM, legacy company, doing cloud. So that's necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying vis a vis the competition I would put Google and I would put Amazon in a new, modern, non-legacy kind of world. >> Yeah, well okay, and you find one of the lines I love that Werner Vogels was talking about is we talked about AWS customers are builders, and he said builders have a bias for action. And I love that, because if you talk to companies, and you know, we've talked a lot on theCUBE, digital transformation, much more than a buzzword, John, I've not talked to anybody, that they're like, "Oh, kind of hogwash, you know, I'm just going to "keep doing the same thing I've been doing "for the last 10 years and I'll keep being successful." We understand that change needs to happen and it's not easy. So if you've got data scientists, if you've got, you know, understanding data, if you're embracing developers, Amazon has affinity with these groups, and that's why they build and they listen to their customers and there's new services and another thing, Amazon gets up on stage and it's not so much "Oh, here's the vision of where we're going," it's here's the stuff that we GAed that we already had you in the beta. Here's the new things, and they might give you a couple things in preview, but they iterate and move so fast. >> Yeah, checking the boxes on the product side, but... >> But much more than checking the boxes, they listen to their customers. >> Well, well of course, that's what they say, but we know they're doing that, but the thing, I mean checking the boxes, they're on the cadence of the Amazon releases, which we've talked about that. But fundamentally, Stu, I think the two big things and this is what I want to get your reaction to is, what's going on with Amazon, the consistent thing is that they lay out the preferred architecture of the modern stack and it's not the same architecture as the old way. Two, the SageMaker and machine learning and where AI is going, if you look at what Matt Wood discussed, SageMaker, my prediction, will surpass Aurora as the number one shipping service for Amazon in the history of their product. That thing is on a torrent pace, and the way they lay it out architecturally, they're not head figment, they're saying this is what we're doing, they lay out the architecture, and they're putting in the machine learning. So, to me, I love that. Now, all the other stuff that they're doing it's just the cadence of Amazon. More announcements, more services, general availability, they're moving the ball down the field, as Jeff Frick would say, matriculating the ball down the field. So your reaction to the modern architecture, and the SageMaker, machine learning for all developers. >> Yeah, absolutely, Amazon is setting the bar for how we think about architecture today. They're leaders in serverless, an area I've been hot on the last year or so. You know, Werner was up on stage talking about Ai Roba who I got the chance to interview last year. So absolutely they are the bar that everything is measured on in this industry. And if they're not, have the leading product in everything, they are close second and they have so many services that there is just this flywheel of not only services and customers and the new flywheel we talked about on theCUBE two years ago with Andy Jassy is data. John, I want to throw back at you a question. Amazon released something called AWS Secrets Manager. Do we trust Amazon with our secrets? Is the government coming after Amazon now? There's some of these macroeconomic things happening, you're hearing everything in Silicon Valley, what are you hearing lately? >> Well what I'm hearing is one, people are really kind of not happy with Amazon's success because it, you know, market share at the expense of other old guard or legacy vendors, and so that's taking it's toll. Oracle to me is the biggest company that's impacted most by Amazon. It's clear that a war of words is happening between Ellison and Jassy. Two, there's a big policy battle going on in D.C. I think Bloomberg broke a story that Oracle is trying to incite Trump to tackle Amazon proper, but and then Amazon is affected, Amazon Web Services is affected, because they have all that Department of Defense and the CIA deal, so you're seeing Amazon, Amazon Web Services for the first time dealing with competitive pressures that's old school tactics, which is policy formulation, and as they say in the policy game in D.C., Stu, the battle is won before it's even fought. This is new territory for Amazon, they really got to get their act together, and if I had to tell Andy Jassy any advice would be like look it, you got to start thinking chess game at this point, and understand that the competition is not going to roll over. We've said this on theCUBE many times. Oracle's not going to roll over, IBM's not going to roll over. Now, other companies, like Cloud Air who's down thirty percent on earnings, they're going to have to do a deal with Amazon, just like VMware did. So I think you have these big cloud players sucking the oxygen out of the room, and there are impacts. The growing startups who are pre-public companies or are public companies have to either join the ecosystem or find another partner. The major cloud players are going to fight tooth and nail for market share as stakes on the table is the future internet, it's basically everything in cloud that's going to extend to democratization around decentralization, the future of money, sovereignty, government, digital nations, internet of things, these are, it's a high stakes chess game and Amazon is now on new territory, and I think that to me is the big walkaway is that no one is going to let them take this uncontested. >> Yeah, John, look at this crowd. The expo hall is filling up, customers are still excited. The buzz that I hear is that Amazon, they listen, they still move really fast when they need to make changes, I remember a year ago when we were here for the Google event I was talking, it's like, ah, Google's got such better pricing for the small business and everything like that. A week later Amazon changed all of their pricing, billing by the microsecond, I talked back to some of my sources and they're like, "Yeah Amazon listened and totally flipped the game." >> Yeah, well Jassy, he... >> There are sustainable advantages, so difficult in the fast pace of change but Amazon is doing better than what Oracle used to do in the past, they were kind of like, we'd get the lead and kind of want the competition intact, with them with the old sailing analogy, Amazon doesn't worry about the competition, they listen to their customers, they're moving forward. >> Well, I think that they do, they don't admit it but they have to watch, they've got to look in their rear view mirror a little bit, but Stu, to end out the analysis I would say the following, my observation is this: Andy Jassy and his team are very customer-centric. He sat on theCUBE many times, so as an organization they're very process oriented, they'll listen to customers. But if you look at what's happening in the world today, is that in the old way, the way that Intuit laid it out that took months to provision the software, the old technology business model or venture architecture for a business was make a sound technology decision, and all the chits will fall in the right places. This is completely opposite now, if you look at what's going on with cloud and blockchain and cryptocurrency and decentralized applications, it's the business model that matters, the technology switching costs are now fungible with Lambda you're starting to see these sets of services that can be spun up in parallel. So the scale and flexibility of the platform, and Werner Vogels pointed this out on the keynote, this is fundamental. The decisions that are fatal to a company is the business model and the business logic, this is where the action is. That means it's not just a developer game any more, it's the CTO, it's the data scientists, and Werner Vogels laid that out and I think that to me was my big walkaway from today's keynote is that Amazon recognizes that it's not just about developers, make developers more productive, but bring all those people together to do the right for the business model, the business logic and applications. >> Yeah, John, we're always looking for what are those things that are slow down the company and the roadblocks, one thing Amazon I think did a great job they're out in front of GDPR, that are super hot topic out there, and they just say categorically, "We're ready for GDPR on all of our services," so full steam ahead, don't stop your spending, keep growing. >> Couldn't be a better time to be a theCUBE host to analyze and talk about the competition. Let's see how Amazon handles the competition, do they just keep pedal to the metal, or do they address it and play those 3D chess games? TheCUBE here in San Francisco for live coverage of AWS Summit 2018 in San Francisco, more coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. (techno music)

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hello and welcome to day three of exclusive CUBE coverage here at Las Vegas for live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017. This is theCUBE's fifth year covering AWS re:Invent, and what a transformation it's been. Rocket ship growth. They got the tiger by the tail Full speed ahead. They're not looking in the rearview mirror. This is the mojo of Amazon Web Services. They're kicking ass and taking names, as we say here in theCUBE. But really, they're changing the game. A lot of game changing announcements, architectural rehab for engineering. Reimagining the future is really what they want, and they're trying to be everything to everyone. And, of course, that's always hard to do. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman on our kick off of day three. Breaking down Werner Vogel's keynote as well as kind of a review of what's been going on for the past few days. There is a lot of signal here. There's almost a noise around the signal meaning there is so much good content that it's really hard to get a hold of Stu. Great to kick it off day three. Rested. Didn't go out late last night. Went to bed by 10. I know you stayed out to three in the morning, but... >> Hoping my voice can hold out for another day in Vegas. John, good to see you, and I'm really excited. 3,951 announcements since the first re:Invent. We're going to go through every one of them. No, no, no. Werner Vogel. It was interesting because he's like, Oh, we've been told ahead of time, it's not going to be announcement heavy. Of course, there's some really awesome announcements. I hate we sound like fanboys sometimes, but you know, Alexa for business, the serverless marketplace. Some really good segments from Netflix, they were just talking about iRobot. Somebody who I had on theCUBE earlier this year. But Werner really kind of stepping back. Some people are like, what is this, a kinda computer science 101? But no, here's how you architect the future. Here's how Amazon's going to fit everything from how voice is going to be a major interface to a theme that I've really liked we've been covering for a number of years. The digital future is not robots taking over the world, but how do I take people and technology, put them together to really create that explosive future? 'Cause even the things like machine learning, the things that I've been talking to the people who are really in this environment is how are we going to train the people that are gonna put these things together? It's not just something that runs off by itself. >> And we had Sanjay Poonen who is the CEO, COO of VM Ware. Not CEO, that's Pat Gelsinger. But he kind of pointed out something that I wanna bring up here, which is Andy Jassy and the team at Amazon are highly competent, and they're executing. But, Stu, they're not just executing on the technical prowess, they're kicking ass on the technology. Certainly, I want to have a longer conversation with you about that. But they're really hitting some real high notes on societal change. So, if you look at what Amazon enables both at the startup level and the business transformation, even in the public sector with Teresa Carlson, who we'll have on later, they're enabling a new way to reimagine how to solve problems that never could be solved before. Two, they're kind of on the right vectors, and it's causing some competitive ripples. Just today in the news, you can see stories out there in the Wall Street Journal and other places where Apple is part of Stamford University to solve heart disease with the iWatch. Google's folding nest back into the hardware division as pressure because their playbook's not working because Amazon's kicking their ass on Alexa and you got Siri. So, Google's fumbling on that point. They're trying to figure it out. So, you're seeing the forces start to line up in this new era of competing on value, competing on software, competing on community and open source. Amazon has the right formula. If they keep this up, Microsoft and Google will not be able to catch them. And that is so obvious. So, until Amazon makes a misfire, which they have not yet, they experiment, but their solid track record, we're gonna call it as we see it. But calling balls and strikes right now on the cloud game, there is not even a close second place. >> Yes, so John, I've been searching for a word. We used to talk about a platform that you built or the marketplace or the ecosystem that we have around here. Amazon is enabling new things. The new AWS marketplace enabling anyone really to go in there, really could do for cloud and technology what Amazon.com helped do for retail and business. You know, I say, look, not every single one of the features that Amazon had is leaps and bounds ahead of what a Google or Microsoft has. I know you've done lots of reporting on the machine learning and everything happening, even Facebook and the like, going in there. But Amazon absolutely is in a class by itself and it's still, in our fifth year coming here, they impress and they continue to keep us-- >> Stu, let's dissect the competition. Let's lay it all out. To me, the top three are no doubt Amazon and then, way distance second place, Microsoft, and then, third on technology and then kind of, clustered like a bunch of Nascar clusters all trying to figure out what to do, is Oracle, IBM, and everybody else. >> Hold on, you didn't mention Google. You didn't mention Alibaba. >> I mean, sorry, Google would be third, Alibaba would be fourth. But their US presence, they're number four by sheer China volume, but Amazon's business in China's growing. They just cut a deal with China so we're gonna see that play out, we'll see. But Alibaba is a force to be reckoned with, as well as Tencent and Baidu and all those other platforms. But here's the deal, you can't be a pure play anymore. Look at Google, the search engine business, they're milking that cow dry, but the thing is that the business is shifting. So, I think Google, of all the competitors, probably has the best chance to accelerate because I think innovation has to be at the heart of that accelerated leadership position. Two, culture. The culture of solving not just tech problems, Stu. And this is where Amazon, no one's really unpacked this, is that if you look at Intel, for instance, they always have great tech, and they always do good things. Amazon is kind of doing the same thing. They're solving societal problems, but they're kicking ass on the business front. Google has that DNA. It's just not organized into the machinery. >> Yeah, I mean, John, we know Google has amazing technology, really good talent. We think Google spanner, oh my God, that's amazing. The thing we say is there's things that Google comes out with, and it's like, Wow, this is really cool. I really need to think about a while how can I do it. As opposed to most of the announcements you hear. In the sessions, people are like, Oh my God, I can't believe Amazon did this. I can immediately take this. I can change the way I'm doing something. I can increase my Codility. I can make my, how I just do my entire business different, better. >> Yeah, and so, Stu, I bring up the Alibaba comment. I wanna bring that back in because one of the things that Amazon's doing that Alibaba is kinda copying, I won't say copying, but emulating, is this notion of craftsmanship. If you look at the past 10 years the programmer culture, the Y Combinator, the Agile, lean, start-up kind of mindset, you look at a loss in craft in software development. Software development used to be a craft. You build software. We had to keep alumni benched from Apple, I talked about, you build a shrink-wrapped product, you ship it, you QA it, you ship it, but you don't know it's going to run. But in the Agile, you're shipping, you're shipping, and shipping, it kind of takes the craft and the artisan out of it. Yeah, US could be cool. But I think now you're going to start to see a swing-back, and whoever, whichever cloud can bring that artisan kind of craft, and blend the open source kind of community model, to me, will be the winning formula. Because that will change the game on these new use cases, the new user expectations, the new user experiences. >> And John, that's exactly what Werner was talking about in his keynote, is this is how we're architecting into the future, you know, everybody needs to be thinking about security. One of the critiques I saw is like, oh, well, you need to think about, you know, everything up and down the stack. It's like, you know, everybody needs to be the unicorn full-stack developer, you know, understand security, be on top of serverless, do all this, well, look, that's asking a lot as to, you know, not everybody's going to be able to do everything. Amazon might be everything is everything, but, you know, we need to be able to understand, you know, how do we take the vast majority of enterprises out there and move them along? I love, Keith Townsend and I did an interview with Chris Wolf from VMware, here at the show, and Keith said, you know, VMware used to move, you know, the speed of the CIO. Amazon's moving way faster than the CIO, you know, how do we help the enterprises move faster, and it's tough. I've talked, every customer I talk to is -- >> Well, we heard, we heard, we heard Intel saying they're moving faster than Intel. So, I mean, Intel has to get in these reference architectures, so, with FPGNAs and these new technologies, they have to accelerate and keep pace. But I think the Werner Vogels keynote here is kind of historic, and you brought this up before we came on, was that he was not going to do a lot of announcements. Although he did launch Alexa for business, and the Lambda Service is all in on that area, he kind of did a throwback to five years ago, or six years ago when he did his first keynote here, when he talked about the new architecture and reimagining it. But he took a modern version of what he was talking about then, and I think that highlights the Amazon greatness, but also their challenge. The one thing I'd be critical of Amazon is, well, two things, one is, I mentioned yesterday, Andy Jassy shouldn't be putting Gardener slides in a new guard presentation, because they're old guard. But that's one thing. What they're doing with the sales motion, it's hard. They have to convince customers and show them the new way. So what Werner painted the picture of is this is how we're thinking. This is how you should be thinking with customers. You have to reimagine what was traditional architecture, and think about it in a completely different way, which will change ultimately software methodologies, the life cycle of Agile, and hopefully bring in some, you know, value-oriented craftsmanship and artisan. >> Yeah, John, you know, this reminds me of many of the waves that we've seen throughout our careers. The customers, when they get in this ecosystem and they really start using it, they get religion. And, you know, number one advice I hear from a lot of the companies I talk to say, talking to your peers, what would you say? Say, get on it faster, and really just dive in. It's like, yeah, yeah, you start with one application. But get off the old stuff as fast as you can. Get on this, because there's, when you have access to all of these services, it just transforms your business. You can get, you know, these changes in these services, into more pieces of the organization, you know, John, we haven't brought up, you know, does IT matter? What's the role of IT in this versus the business lines and the developers? IT radically changing. Amazon looking to change that model. >> They are. I mean, there's no doubt. This show is kind of the final exclamation point on the fact that not only was it a collision course, it has absolutely happened. IT and Amazon have come together in a massive collision, and there's going to be carnage, too. There's going to be people, Lying on the side of the road. >> So, question for you. I've heard there's some people that like, this is the industry's biggest infrastructure show. And I'm an infrastructure guy by background, but I take, I don't think, this is not an infrastructure show. This is, you know, really about business. You know, absolutely, there's technology. Somebody I love, they said, you know, CES, this is now EES. This is the enterprise version of what's happening in technology. >> Well, I mean, we're going to have Teresa Carlson on. It's, you know, it's all digital, right, I mean, it's a digital culture, because their public sector business is booming. It's not just the enterprise. They nailed the start-up. They nailed the ElastiCLOUD, check. Tom Siebel pointed it out yesterday. And what they're nailing now with IT is they're becoming the lever, the catalyst for IT transformation at price points and functionality never seen before, and it's mind-boggling. Google's gotta re-organize, because they can't compete with Alexa. Alright, so things of that nature. So then you have the public sector, your government, and then global, regional, China, Europe, huge issues. So they're winning. And to me, this is a huge new thing. And why rant on the Gardener slide that Jessy puts up is, Amazon is the new guard, and they're putting up old guard metrics. So Stu, this is not an infrastructure as a service magic quadrant, so, the question we share, is what are the new guard metrics? My opinion, no one's developed it yet. So how would you define a modern metric for who's winning and who's losing? Because if you say number of customers, Oracle has a lot of customers, IBM's got a lot of customers. >> So John, Amazon's leading the vanguard in helping customers through digital transformation. I don't know how to measure that yet, but absolutely they're the ones that are doing this. It's not a product-centric. It's about the mindset and how we build things. I've really loved this week talking about, you know, how real is serverless? And like, well, really, Lambda's getting embedded everywhere. It's not about, you know, a product, and oh, hey, you're only going to pay for it by the microsecond, and it's 90% cheaper, no, no, no. It's about the triggers and the APIs and just integrating into the way I can build things faster, you know, yes, I can really get benefit out of microservices. That serverless application repository that Werner talked about, I mean, it's, we got really excited when we got for containers, like the Docker Hub, we had in virtualization, we had the same way, we could get kind of standard images out there. Serverless application repository's going to do the same thing for serverless. You know, is there a lock-in from AWS Lambda, how much is there going to be standards that come in? The CNCF next week is going to be digging into those. >> Is there a cost reduction? Or is it a cost increase? These are questions. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so final question for you. I know we've gotta move on to our full day here, but Stu, you, you know, you study it, you do the hallway conversations, you're at all the influencer events, how do you connect the dots between Andy Jassy's keynote and Werner's, where is the dots connecting? What is jumping out at you? Obviously Lambda, but what are the highlights, from your perspective, that you see just jumping out that Amazon's connecting and trying to present? >> Yeah, so, we always used to say it was like, you know, okay, is day one developer and day two enterprise? We're starting to see those lines blur. As the enterprise, we are still early in kind of the massive adoption there, but that's where it's coming together. There's, you know, lots of excitement, but, you know, as we talked about the continuum, now we had bare metal, we have instances, we have containers, we have serverless. And the enterprise is starting throughout that. I know there's a Sumo Logic report you've been quoting, and we've been-- >> And it came on yesterday. >> Absolutely. So good data there. New Relic had some good reports digging into this. So the wave, change is happening faster than ever. And, you know, Amazon is the lead horse driving this change throughout the industry. >> And don't forget Intel. Intel's just minding their business just watching all these compute requests come in. I mean, as more compute comes out, Intel just is a rising tide, and you know, they're a big boat in the harbor there. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman breaking down day three of theCUBE, day three here we've actually started on Sunday night at midnight. A lot of great action, a lot of great analysis, of course, check out our new Twitch channel, so, twitch.tv/siliconangle, twitch.tv/thecube, two new channels, or one rebooted channel, one new channel. And of course thecube.net. We're on Ustream, we're on YouTube. But check out our Twitch and join our community if you're a gamer. Back with more live coverage here, live in Las Vegas, for AWS re:Invent after the short break.

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

foreign welcome back to re invent 2022 we're wrapping up four days well one evening and three solid days wall-to-wall of cube coverage I'm Dave vellante John furrier's birthday is today he's on a plane to London to go see his nephew get married his his great Sister Janet awesome family the furriers uh spanning the globe and uh and John I know you wanted to be here you're watching in Newark or you were waiting to uh to get in the plane so all the best to you happy birthday one year the Amazon PR people brought a cake out to celebrate John's birthday because he's always here at AWS re invented his birthday so I'm really pleased to have two really special guests uh former Cube host Cube Alum great wikibon contributor Stu miniman now with red hat still good to see you again great to be here Dave yeah I was here for that cake uh the twitterverse uh was uh really helping to celebrate John's birthday today and uh you know always great to be here with you and then with this you know Awesome event this week and friend of the cube of many time Cube often Cube contributor as here's a cube analyst this week as his own consultancy sarbj johal great to see you thanks for coming on good to see you Dave uh great to see you stu I'm always happy to participate in these discussions and um I enjoy the discussion every time so this is kind of cool because you know usually the last day is a getaway day and this is a getaway day but this place is still packed I mean it's I mean yeah it's definitely lighter you can at least walk and not get slammed but I subjit I'm going to start with you I I wanted to have you as the the tail end here because cause you participated in the analyst sessions you've been watching this event from from the first moment and now you've got four days of the Kool-Aid injection but you're also talking to customers developers Partners the ecosystem where do you want to go what's your big takeaways I think big takeaways that Amazon sort of innovation machine is chugging along they are I was listening to some of the accessions and when I was back to my room at nine so they're filling the holes in some areas but in some areas they're moving forward there's a lot to fix still it doesn't seem like that it seems like we are done with the cloud or The Innovation is done now we are building at the millisecond level so where do you go next there's a lot of room to grow on the storage side on the network side uh the improvements we need and and also making sure that the software which is you know which fits the hardware like there's a specialized software um sorry specialized hardware for certain software you know so there was a lot of talk around that and I attended some of those sessions where I asked the questions around like we have a specialized database for each kind of workload specialized processes processors for each kind of workload yeah the graviton section and actually the the one interesting before I forget that the arbitration was I asked that like why there are so many so many databases and IRS for the egress costs and all that stuff can you are you guys thinking about reducing that you know um the answer was no egress cost is not a big big sort of uh um show stopper for many of the customers but but the from all that sort of little discussion with with the folks sitting who build these products over there was that the plethora of choice is given to the customers to to make them feel that there's no vendor lock-in so if you are using some open source you know um soft software it can be on the you know platform side or can be database side you have database site you have that option at AWS so this is a lot there because I always thought that that AWS is the mother of all lock-ins but it's got an ecosystem and we're going to talk about exactly we'll talk about Stu what's working within AWS when you talk to customers and where are the challenges yeah I I got a comment on open source Dave of course there because I mean look we criticized to Amazon for years about their lack of contribution they've gotten better they're doing more in open source but is Amazon the mother of all lock-ins many times absolutely there's certain people inside Amazon I'm saying you know many of us talk Cloud native they're like well let's do Amazon native which means you're like full stack is things from Amazon and do things the way that we want to do things and you know I talk to a lot of customers they use more than one Cloud Dave and therefore certain things absolutely I want to Leverage The Innovation that Amazon has brought I do think we're past building all the main building blocks in many ways we are like in day two yes Amazon is fanatically customer focused and will always stay that way but you know there wasn't anything that jumped out at me last year or this year that was like Wow new category whole new way of thinking about something we're in a vocals last year Dave said you know we have over 200 services and if we listen to you the customer we'd have over two thousand his session this week actually got some great buzz from my friends in the serverless ecosystem they love some of the things tying together we're using data the next flywheel that we're going to see for the next 10 years Amazon's at the center of the cloud ecosystem in the IT world so you know there's a lot of good things here and to your point Dave the ecosystem one of the things I always look at is you know was there a booth that they're all going to be crying in their beer after Amazon made an announcement there was not a tech vendor that I saw this week that was like oh gosh there was an announcement and all of a sudden our business is gone where I did hear some rumbling is Amazon might be the next GSI to really move forward and we've seen all the gsis pushing really deep into supporting Cloud bringing workloads to the cloud and there's a little bit of rumbling as to that balance between what Amazon will do and their uh their go to market so a couple things so I think I think we all agree that a lot of the the announcements here today were taping seams right I call it and as it relates to the mother of all lock-in the reason why I say that it's it's obviously very much a pejorative compare Oracle company you know really well with Amazon's lock-in for Amazon's lock-in is about bringing this ecosystem together so that you actually have Choice Within the the house so you don't have to leave you know there's a there's a lot to eat at the table yeah you look at oracle's ecosystem it's like yeah you know oracle is oracle's ecosystem so so that is how I think they do lock in customers by incenting them not to leave because there's so much Choice Dave I agree with you a thousand I mean I'm here I'm a I'm a good partner of AWS and all of the partners here want to be successful with Amazon and Amazon is open to that it's not our way or get out which Oracle tries how much do you extract from the overall I.T budget you know are you a YouTube where you give the people that help you create a large sum of the money YouTube hasn't been all that profitable Amazon I think is doing a good balance of the ecosystem makes money you know we used to talk Dave about you know how much dollars does VMware make versus there um I think you know Amazon is a much bigger you know VMware 2.0 we used to think talk about all the time that VMware for every dollar spent on VMware licenses 15 or or 12 or 20 were spent in the ecosystem I would think the ratio is even higher here sarbji and an Oracle I would say it's I don't know yeah actually 1 to 0.5 maybe I don't know but I want to pick on your discussion about the the ecosystem the the partner ecosystem is so it's it's robust strong because it's wider I was I was not saying that there's no lock-in with with Amazon right AWS there's lock-in there's lock-in with everything there's lock-in with open source as well but but the point is that they're they're the the circle is so big you don't feel like locked in but they're playing smart as well they're bringing in the software the the platforms from the open source they're picking up those packages and saying we'll bring it in and cater that to you through AWS make it better perform better and also throw in their custom chips on top of that hey this MySQL runs better here so like what do you do I said oh Oracle because it's oracle's product if you will right so they are I think think they're filing or not slenders from their go to market strategy from their engineering and they listen to they're listening to customers like very closely and that has sort of side effects as well listening to customers creates a sprawl of services they have so many services and I criticized them last year for calling everything a new service I said don't call it a new service it's a feature of a existing service sure a lot of features a lot of features this is egress our egress costs a real problem or is it just the the on-prem guys picking at the the scab I mean what do you hear from customers so I mean Dave you know I I look at what Corey Quinn talks about all the time and Amazon charges on that are more expensive than any other Cloud the cloud providers and partly because Amazon is you know probably not a word they'd use they are dominant when it comes to the infrastructure space and therefore they do want to make it a little bit harder to do that they can get away with it um because um yeah you know we've seen some of the cloud providers have special Partnerships where you can actually you know leave and you're not going to be charged and Amazon they've been a little bit more flexible but absolutely I've heard customers say that they wish some good tunning and tongue-in-cheek stuff what else you got we lay it on us so do our players okay this year I think the focus was on the upside it's shifting gradually this was more focused on offside there were less talk of of developers from the main stage from from all sort of quadrants if you will from all Keynotes right so even Werner this morning he had a little bit for he was talking about he he was talking he he's job is to Rally up the builders right yeah so he talks about the go build right AWS pipes I thought was kind of cool then I said like I'm making glue easier I thought that was good you know I know some folks don't use that I I couldn't attend the whole session but but I heard in between right so it is really adopt or die you know I am Cloud Pro for last you know 10 years and I think it's the best model for a technology consumption right um because of economies of scale but more importantly because of division of labor because of specialization because you can't afford to hire the best security people the best you know the arm chip designers uh you can't you know there's one actually I came up with a bumper sticker you guys talked about bumper sticker I came up with that like last couple of weeks The Innovation favorite scale they have scale they have Innovation so that's where the Innovation is and it's it's not there again they actually say the market sets the price Market you as a customer don't set the price the vendor doesn't set the price Market sets the price so if somebody's complaining about their margins or egress and all that I think that's BS um yeah I I have a few more notes on the the partner if you you concur yeah Dave you know with just coming back to some of this commentary about like can Amazon actually enable something we used to call like Community clouds uh your companies like you know Goldman and NASDAQ and the like where Industries will actually be able to share data uh and you know expand the usage and you know Amazon's going to help drive that API economy forward some so it's good to see those things because you know we all know you know all of us are smarter than just any uh single company together so again some of that's open source but some of that is you know I think Amazon is is you know allowing Innovation to thrive I think the word you're looking for is super cloud there well yeah I mean it it's uh Dave if you want to go there with the super cloud because you know there's a metaphor for exactly what you described NASDAQ Goldman Sachs we you know and and you know a number of other companies that are few weeks at the Berkeley Sky Computing paper yeah you know that's a former supercloud Dave Linthicum calls it metacloud I'm not really careful I mean you know I go back to the the challenge we've been you know working at for a decade is the distributed architecture you know if you talk about AI architectures you know what lives in the cloud what lives at the edge where do we train things where do we do inferences um locations should matter a lot less Amazon you know I I didn't hear a lot about it this show but when they came out with like local zones and oh my gosh out you know all the things that Amazon is building to push out to the edge and also enabling that technology and software and the partner ecosystem helps expand that and Pull It in it's no longer you know Dave it was Hotel California all of the data eventually is going to end up in the public cloud and lock it in it's like I don't think that's going to be the case we know that there will be so much data out at the edge Amazon absolutely is super important um there some of those examples we're giving it's not necessarily multi-cloud but there's collaboration happening like in the healthcare world you know universities and hospitals can all share what they're doing uh regardless of you know where they live well Stephen Armstrong in the analyst session did say that you know we're going to talk about multi-cloud we're not going to lead with it necessarily but we are going to actually talk about it and that's different to your points too than in the fullness of time all the data will be in the cloud that's a new narrative but go ahead yeah actually Amazon is a leader in the cloud so if they push the cloud even if they don't say AWS or Amazon with it they benefit from it right and and the narrative is that way there's the proof is there right so again Innovation favorite scale there are chips which are being made for high scale their software being tweaked for high scale you as a Bank of America or for the Chrysler as a typical Enterprise you cannot afford to do those things in-house what cloud providers can I'm not saying just AWS Google cloud is there Azure guys are there and few others who are behind them and and you guys are there as well so IBM has IBM by the way congratulations to your red hat I know but IBM won the award um right you know very good partner and yeah but yeah people are dragging their feet people usually do on the change and they are in denial denial they they drag their feet and they came in IBM director feed the cave Den Dell drag their feed the cave in yeah you mean by Dragon vs cloud deniers cloud deniers right so server Huggers I call them but they they actually are sitting in Amazon Cloud Marketplace everybody is buying stuff from there the marketplace is the new model OKAY Amazon created the marketplace for b2c they are leading the marketplace of B2B as well on the technology side and other people are copying it so there are multiple marketplaces now so now actually it's like if you're in in a mobile app development there are two main platforms Android and Apple you first write the application for Apple right then for Android hex same here as a technology provider as and I I and and I actually you put your stuff to AWS first then you go anywhere else yeah they are later yeah the Enterprise app store is what we've wanted for a long time the question is is Amazon alone the Enterprise app store or are they partner of a of a larger portfolio because there's a lot of SAS companies out there uh that that play into yeah what we need well and this is what you're talking about the future but I just want to make a point about the past you talking about dragging their feet because the Cube's been following this and Stu you remember this in 2013 IBM actually you know got in a big fight with with Amazon over the CIA deal you know and it all became public judge wheeler eviscerated you know IBM and it ended up IBM ended up buying you know soft layer and then we know what happened there and it Joe Tucci thought the cloud was Mosey right so it's just amazing to see we have booksellers you know VMware called them books I wasn't not all of them are like talking about how great Partnerships they are it's amazing like you said sub GC and IBM uh with the the GSI you know Partnership of the year but what you guys were just talking about was the future and that's what I wanted to get to is because you know Amazon's been leading the way I I was listening to Werner this morning and that just reminded me of back in the days when we used to listen to IBM educate us give us a master class on system design and decoupled systems and and IO and everything else now Amazon is you know the master educator and it got me thinking how long will that last you know will they go the way of you know the other you know incumbents will they be disrupted or will they you know keep innovating maybe it's going to take 10 or 20 years I don't know yeah I mean Dave you actually you did some research I believe it was a year or so ago yeah but what will stop Amazon and the one thing that worries me a little bit um is the two Pizza teams when you have over 202 Pizza teams the amount of things that each one of those groups needs to take care of was more than any human could take care of people burn out they run out of people how many amazonians only last two or three years and then leave because it is tough I bumped into plenty of friends of mine that have been you know six ten years at Amazon and love it but it is a tough culture and they are driving werner's keynote I thought did look to from a product standpoint you could say tape over some of the seams some of those solutions to bring Beyond just a single product and bring them together and leverage data so there are some signs that they might be able to get past some of those limitations but I still worry structurally culturally there could be some challenges for Amazon to keep the momentum going especially with the global economic impact that we are likely to see in the next year bring us home I think the future side like we could talk about the vendors all day right to serve the community out there I think we should talk about how what's the future of technology consumption from the consumer side so from the supplier side just a quick note I think the only danger AWS has has that that you know Fred's going after them you know too big you know like we will break you up and that can cause some disruption there other than that I think they they have some more steam to go for a few more years at least before we start thinking about like oh this thing is falling apart or anything like that so they have a lot more they have momentum and it's continuing so okay from the I think game is on retail by the way is going to get disrupted before AWS yeah go ahead from the buyer's side I think um the the future of the sort of Technology consumption is based on the paper uh use and they actually are turning all their services to uh they are sort of becoming serverless behind the scenes right all analytics service they had one service left they they did that this year so every service is serverless so that means you pay exactly for the amount you use the compute the iops the the storage so all these three layers of course Network we talked about the egress stuff and that's a problem there because of the network design mainly because Google has a flatter design and they have lower cost so so they are actually squeezing the their their designing this their services in a way that you don't waste any resources as a buyer so for example very simple example when early earlier In This Cloud you will get a VM right in Cloud that's how we started so and you can get 20 use 20 percent of the VM 80 is getting wasted that's not happening now that that has been reduced to the most extent so now your VM grows as you grow the usage and if you go higher than the tier you picked they will charge you otherwise they will not charge you extra so that's why there's still a lot of instances like many different types you have to pick one I think the future is that those instances will go away the the instance will be formed for you on the fly so that is the future serverless all right give us bumper sticker Stu and then Serb G I'll give you my quick one and then we'll wrap yeah so just Dave to play off of sharp G and to wrap it up you actually wrote about it on your preview post for here uh serverless we're talking about how developers think about things um and you know Amazon in many ways you know is the new default server uh you know for the cloud um and containerization fits into the whole serverless Paradigm uh it's the space that I live in uh you know every day here and you know I was happy to see the last few years serverless and containers there's a blurring a line and you know subject we're still going to see VMS for a long time yeah yeah we will see that so give us give us your book Instagram my number six is innovation favorite scale that's my bumper sticker and and Amazon has that but also I I want everybody else to like the viewers to take a look at the the Google Cloud as well as well as IBM with others like maybe you have a better price to Performance there for certain workloads and by the way one vendor cannot do it alone we know that for sure the market is so big there's a lot of room for uh Red Hats of the world and and and Microsoft's the world to innovate so keep an eye on them they we need the competition actually and that's why competition Will Keep Us to a place where Market sets the price one vendor doesn't so the only only danger is if if AWS is a monopoly then I will be worried I think ecosystems are the Hallmark of a great Cloud company and Amazon's got the the biggest and baddest ecosystem and I think the other thing to watch for is Industries building on top of the cloud you mentioned the Goldman Sachs NASDAQ Capital One and Warner media these all these industries are building their own clouds and that's where the real money is going to be made in the latter half of the 2020s all right we're a wrap this is Dave Valente I want to first of all thank thanks to our great sponsors AWS for for having us here this is our 10th year at the cube AMD you know sponsoring as well the the the cube here Accenture sponsor to third set upstairs upstairs on the fifth floor all the ecosystem partners that came on the cube this week and supported our mission for free content our content is always free we try to give more to the community and we we take back so go to thecube.net and you'll see all these videos go to siliconangle com for all the news wikibon.com I publish weekly a breaking analysis series I want to thank our amazing crew here you guys we have probably 30 35 people unbelievable our awesome last session John Walls uh Paul Gillen Lisa Martin Savannah Peterson John Furrier who's on a plane we appreciate Andrew and Leonard in our ear and all of our our crew Palo Alto Boston and across the country thank you so much really appreciate it all right we are a wrap AWS re invent 2022 we'll see you in two weeks we'll see you two weeks at Palo Alto ignite back here in Vegas thanks for watching thecube the leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]