(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)

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

yeah I probably would use a sort of ever-changing I would say ever-expanding you know but you have to write because what we saw when we started off is roll around how to automate my datacenter how do I get a cloud experience in my data center what we see changing and okay Frank is driven by this whole app refactoring process that customers want to deploy apps maybe in the cloud maybe develop in the cloud and so they need an extension to the automated data center into the cloud and so really what you see from us is an expansion of that ACA concept you rangas point we actually really didn't change we just we're just extending it to container development platforms two different cloud environments what's the same area automate end-to-end network reach as well as the segmentation what is the right there right sorry security regime in this you know cloud era how is it evolving well I mean what we're doing is we're bringing tools like tetration which now runs on Prem and in the cloud things like stealthWatch which runs on from in the cloud and simply bringing them security frameworks that are very effective we're I think a very capable of well known security vendor but bringing them the capability to run the same capabilities in their on-prem environments and their data centers as well as in multiple public clouds and that just eliminates the seams that hackers could maybe get into it makes common policy Possible's they can define policy around an application once and have that apply across the vault environments which not only it's easier for them but it eliminates potential mistakes that they might make that might leave things open to a hacker so for us it's that simple bringing very effective common frameworks for security across all these cisco has embraced the idea of being a platform and not a siloed individual product line and so for a service provider like CenturyLink for us to be able to embrace that same philosophy of the platform of services what that means is that our engineering and field ops folks our Operations teams do all the hard work on the back end to make sure that we have established all of the right security the right network the reliability the global scalability of our specific platform of services and being that leader in telecommunications and then we're able to lay that cisco platform on top of it and what happens then from a product management level is once you've established that foundation it's really plug-and-play the customer calls and says I need calling I need meetings I need you know whatever it is they need and we build that solution and very quickly can put those components into play and get them to use the service right away so what we've done across the portfolio even in primary storage is made sure that we've done all sorts of things that help you against a ransomware a malware attack keep the data encrypted I think the key point and actually I think Silicon angle wrote about this is like some like 98% of all enterprises getting a broke it in two anyway so it's great that you've got security software on the edge with at the IBM or RSA or blue coat or checkpoint oh who cares who you buy the software from but when they're in there stealing and sometimes you know some accounts have told us they can track them down in a day but if you're a giant global fortune 500 datacenter look it may take you like a week so they can be stealing stuff right and left so we've done everything from we have right once technology right so it's immutable data you can't change it we've got encryption so if they steal it guess what they can't use it but the other thing we've done is real protection against ransomware now that's a great question in terms of modernization of infrastructure and there's some really interesting trends that I think are occurring and I think the one that's getting a lot of us is really edge computing and what we're finding is depending on the use case it can be an enterprise application where you're trying to get localization of your data it could be an IOT application where it's it's really critical for latency or bandwidth to keep compute and data close to the thing if you will or it could be mobile edge computing where you want to do thing like analytics and AI on a video stream before you tax the the bandwidth of the cellular infrastructure with that data stream so across the board I think edge is super exciting and you can't talk about edge with like I said talking about artificial intelligence another big trend whether it's running native running with an accelerator an FPGA I think we're seeing a myriad of use cases in that space but Security's in the end to your point right I've got software to find access I've got mobile access points I've got you know tetration I've got you know all of these products that are helping people that in the past they were just patching holes in the dike you know hey this happened let's put this software product here this happened let's put this in and we actually built the security practice like the last three or four years ago it's growing you know the number of people that are whether it's regulation compliance you know I got some real problem I think I've got a problem and I don't know what it is our ability to come back and sit down and say let's evaluate what your situation is so I was talking to the networking guys and so Wow enterprise networking it's up way up what's driving that the need to transform or is that you know what is it they're like a lot of times it's something are long security that's making them step back and reevaluate and then sometimes that transfer translates into an entire network refresh there are tools that people use and everybody's environments a little different so some might want to integrate in and use ansible terraform you know tools like that and so then you need code that will help integrate into that other people are using ServiceNow for tickets so if something happens integrate into that people are using different types of devices hopefully mostly Cisco but they may be other using others as well we can extend code that goes into that so it really helps to go in different areas and what's kind of cool is that our there's an amount of code that where people have the same problems you know and you know you start doing something everyone has to make the first few kind of same things in software let's get that into exchange and so let's share that there's places where partners are gonna want to differentiate keep that to yourselves like use that as your differentiated offer and then there's areas where people want to solve in communities of interest so we have we have someone who does networking and he wants to do automation he does it for power management in the utilities industry so he wants a community that will help write code that'll help for that area you know so people have different interests and you know we're hoping to help facilitate that because Cisco actually has a great community we have a great community that we've been building over the last 30 years there the network experts they're solving the real problems around the world they work for partners they work for customers and we're hoping that this will be a tool to get them to band together and contribute in a in a software kinda way they have the right reason to be afraid because so many automation was created a once user exactly was right and then you have the cost of traditional automation you have the complexity to create a network automation you guys realize that middle coordination you cannot have little automation only work on a portion of your needle you have to work on majority if not all of your needle right so that's became very complex just like a you wanna a self-driving car you can go buy a Tesla a new car you can drive on its own but if you wanna your 10 year order Toyota driving on its own richer feared that's a very complex well let's today Network automation how to deal with it you have to deal with multi vendor technology Marty years of technology so people spend a lot of money the return are very small they so they have a right to affair afraid of it but the challenge is there is what's alternative yeah I think that is one of the things that's very unique about the definite community is within the community we have technical stakeholders from small startups to really large partners or huge enterprises and when we're all here in the demo soon we're all engineers and we're all exchanging ideas kind of no matter what the scale so it becomes this great mixing of you know shared experiences and ideas and that is some of the most interesting conversations that I've actually heard this week is people talking about how maybe they're using one Cisco platform in these two very different environments and exchanging ideas about how they do that or maybe how they're using a Cisco platform with an open-source tool and then people finding value in thinking oh maybe I can do that in my environment so that part of the ecosystem and community is very interesting and then we're also helping partners find each other so we do a lot of work around you know here's a partner in the Cisco ecosystem who goes and installs Meraki networks right here's a software partner who builds mapping technology on top of indoor Wi-Fi networks and getting those two together because the software partner is not going to install the network and the network person may not write that application in that way and so bringing them together we've had a lot of really good information coming back from the community around kind of finding each other and being able to deliver those outcomes what are you guys doing Tom we'll start with you how are you guys working together to infuse and integrate security into the technologies and that from a customer's perspective those risks that dial down yeah so so we're in Cisco's integrating security across all of our product portfolio right and and that includes our data center portfolio all the way through our campus our when all those portfolios so we continue to look for opportunities to to integrate you know whether it's dual factor authentication or things like secure data center with a fire you know of highly scalable multi instance firewall in front of a data center things like that so we're we're definitely looking for areas and angles and opportunities for us to not only integrate it from a product standpoint but also ensure that we are talking that story with our customers so that they know they can they can leverage Cisco for the full architecture from a security standing on the storage of the data from an encryption perspective and as it gets moved or his mobile you know that that level of security and policy follows it you know wherever the data is secure of course enemy everybody always wants more performance they want lower cost security in many ways has begun to trump those other two attributes they've they've become table stakes security as well but security is really number one now ya talk about that talk about the major trends that you're seeing well of course of course security now is top of mine for everyone board level conversations executive level conversations all the time I think what ends up happening is in the past we would think about it as Network performance cost etc security as a tangent kind of side conversation now of course it's built into everything that we do [Music]

Las Vegas expensing the signal from the noise it's the kue covering you interconnect 2016 brought to you by IBM now your host John hurry and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are live here in Las Vegas this is silicon angles the cube our flagship program when we go out to the events and extract the signal annoys we are at IBM interconnect 2016 it's our fifth year now doing all the IV meds now interconnecting out the cloud show I'm John furrier with my coach Dave vellante our next guest is Eric Herzog vice president of storage and software-defined at IBM welcome back you belong great to see you great thank you very much always loved helping guys out of the cube thank you very much for including us pleasure we are very cognitive today we get cognition going on the cube we have all kinds of real-time we've got api's and notifications or and we're going to stract some insight and predictive and prescriptive analytics from you right first what's going on with storage and software obviously storage right now you're seeing huge change Dell buying EMC which you know a lot about emc IBM buys the weather company two contrasting strategies but Stewart still it's the center of the value proposition we also heard Robert de Blanc say on stage today cheap compute he didn't say cheap storage storage visited it did he didn't say so long about cheap storage okay I stand corrected but you talk about a commoditization of resource still valuable I always said what's wrong with cheap compute want more of it I want more and more compute so storage does he changing the software values their last time we spoke about that what's the update in context to cloud what's the storage equation was a storage angle well for us there's a huge value proposition when both the cognitive side and in the cloud infrastructure side obviously with the tumultuous change in storage both from just where the world is going we believe that you ride the wave a flash and software-defined and that is our mantra as you know one of the industry analyst firms who tracks the numbers we were number one in flash capacity shift and number one in flash units last year are all flash and we've been number one several years in row and software-defined storage so while the storage envelope is changing if you open up that envelope we're writing the change inside that omelet which is flash software to find converged infrastructure with our pure power product and also with our partnership with Cisco on the verses stack that's two years in a row for flash leadership right yes charge same thing with software to bunt well the good thing is well the other guy leads in revenue we believe in a fair price for an outstanding award-winning product line on the software value now the cell where that fits in we had multiple guests on today we had you know Jamie Thomas former GM and storage now thinking a more systems view its horizontally composable infrastructure now our dead loss infrastructure as code how does that change the equation certainly we want storage but now you've got software driving the change where's the wisdom value points there well when you look at the software-defined infrastructure the magic fairy dust is in the software so we can work with our own hardware we can work with our competitors hardware over 300 different raise from our competitors are completely compatible with our software to find solutions for storage and we can use with white box if one of our channel partners our end users would rather have a white box storage bear hard drives from seagate OWD and some some flash and just a wrapper of metal we are software provides the value add for integration into hybrid cloud configurations in the cognitive configurations into the oceans of data and big data and into analytic environments all powered by software-defined storage ok so you've been on less than a year now all right you came on last summer right yes mid year so what nine months roughly yes inland what are the big learnings that you've encountered and then we'll start from there and then we're going to get into result are you going to transfer yeah I think the big learning is the world is evolving and a lot of the customer base hasn't gotten there yet so we're going to take them on that journey with flash software-defined converged infrastructure so we're going to lead that charge we're going to ride the wave not fight the wave sometimes iBM has fought the wave we've changed that in the storage world so we're going to be a leader we're are a leader in flash we're leader and software-defined are converged infrastructure particularly with Cisco had an incredible year last year you know for our first year we had over 250 customers over 400 units sold and while there are others who are bigger in our first year that was one of the best first years in the converging instructor of any vendor and that's the power of our software to find portfolio our flash portfolio and the things we deliver from a storage perspective that helps customers they convert either the software-defined infrastructure or converged infrastructure so that case so that sort of answers the question as to how you're going to deal with immediate it's not unique you got old stuff that's declining you got new stuff that's growing like crazy but still not big enough to offset the decline of the old stuff you got currency headwinds but the there's light at the end of the tunnel in terms of that transformation to those newer architectures is that fair yes absolutely last year if you look whether it was in the channel with our award from computer reseller news as the best enterprise storage provider in the world and that was in the fall of 2015 so when you look at the channel and what they're looking for from their provider unlike the guys in hopkinton in Austin who are merging they didn't win that IBM one that so great solution for our Channel Partner base we've won awards for software-defined for all flash we did very well in the hybrid or a category last year with several product of the Year awards so again yes we have an older installed base one of our big goals this year is to refresh that installed base with software-defined with all flash with a comprehensive family of hybrid raise to make sure that people understand this is where the market is going this is where you need to go to drive cognitive value hybrid cloud value quite honestly it's all about applications workloads and use cases and even though I've done storage for 31 years let's face it most CEOs can't stand storage have to put it in the language that they understand which is software value-add and how it can enhance their ability to meet the business SLA s that the CIO is under pressure from the VP of Operations the VP of Marketing the finance side and of course ultimately the CEO so in this business I've been in the business maybe not 31 years but maybe 35 okay so the product portfolio is very very important one of the criticisms I've had of IBM over the years has been just not enough product innovation coming out great R&D but doesn't hit the pipeline so when you came to see us in Boston you showed us a little you know glimpse of the roadmap and it's very clear that's accelerating I wonder if you could talk about that what can you share with our audience sure we've done it we've done a couple things first of all we have the flash religion we acquired a flash company get started but so did several of our competitors in addition to spending money on that acquisition we've invested over a billion dollars in engineering resources on the flash site software-defined we're spending a billion dollars in that as you know we recently bought the award-winning and market-leading object storage technology with clever safe and we spent money on that so IBM is putting its money where its mouth is its focus is on storage and how storage enhances hybrid clouds cognitive big data analytics and you know deals with these oceans of data that our customers are facing and how do you manage that and how do you make the data more valuable and more productive to the business because that's what about it's not about storage it's about the management that data to optimize our customers business and how we can deliver that with effective cost so clever save was mentioned in the keynote in context to LeBlanc's reference to the digital transport transit of you know new stream the video stuff interesting how he plugged in clever see how it is that relate I mean honestly I know it's a recent acquisition is it's just the objects towards an unstructured data why is clever stay plugged into that kind of portfolio of those four companies you mentioned around you know is when you develop that type of technology you end up with incredible amounts of data and an object store is designed to handle exabytes of capacity and exabytes of information it doesn't necessarily have to be fast for example video surveillance data and all kinds of other data may be hot for a while and one of the values of clever say for example is on our spectrum scale product which is our scale out network attached storage actually will automatically cheer too clever safe we're in a public beta right now our spectrum protect product we've also talked about is going to support clever safe either as an source so you could back it up but more importantly as a target so you could take gobs of data and back it up into a clever safe repository when you've got oceans of data and people are generating exabytes and exabytes of data what you can get with clever safe on premises or in a cloud configuration allows you to handle this extensive data growth cost-effectively and in an easy to manage and configure way about the end where relationship with storage obviously there in an announcement today with IBM EMC recently had an announcement with VMware and VX rail rom and the big debate was I see his hybrid cloud was deposition using their software stack to be a glue and into the hybrid cloud journey but one of the comments that we made note of that we captured on the prowl chat was from Keith Townsend one of our members of our community he wrote it took Netflix seven years to move to the public cloud meaning everything all flash they had one of the first all flesh implementations that Amazon ever rolled out what does that mean for the average VMware customer in this case IBM customer from a product perspective so you got you know your relationship VMware you have this notion of hybrid cloud right it took Netflix seven years there in the cutting edge what does that mean for the average customer this whole notion of using software in storage plugging the hybrid cloud it took them seven years was it 70 years for an average company well you've got to remember that that started a while ago and the move to the hybrid cloud is just accelerated dramatically so our spectrum scale product our spectrum accelerate product our spectrum protect product all are designed for hybrid cloud configurations right this minute they're easy to employ they're easy to use they're all available in softlayer they're also filled with other cloud providers spectrum protect as close to a hundred different msps and csps who provide backup and archive services with award-winning spectrum protect so our specialist families and I've different than it was seven years ago today actually its accelerated easy-to-deploy it's easy to use you have a wide choice of msps and csps to use whether it's soft layer or other providers in the industry and our software-defined storage supports all of that vendor base regardless of whether it's IBM SoftLayer or other cloud providers as well well you could argue to Netflix did it at a time when it was early days right it was near the Pioneer they were they were final trees hack and you know right they're the ones with the arrows in motion tracking chaos monkeys everywhere so so Tommy you guys okay all right sorry John I want to talk about the state of the industry it's a lot of interesting stuff going on even in the business for four decades you understand some of the trends you've seen a lot of the ebb and the flow how would you describe where we're at right now seems like an uncertain time so storage is incredibly tumultuous right now one of the good things about storage it's constantly filled with innovation as you know from my past I've done seven startups thank God five have been acquired so I can wear a Hawaiian shirt they're expensive these days ISA why insurance so every five six years you have a wave of startups of the storage business that's not common in most other segments of the IT market space but in storage it is so you have a constant wave of startups that happens on a normal basis and we're in one of those phases right now at the same time you have massive change in the Tier one vendor base EMC and Dell emerging HP splits into two network appliance which had been an incredibly great company it's fast has now missed their numbers almost eight quarters in Rowan just last week announced they're laying off 1500 people so the world is changing dramatically also the applications workloads and use cases are changing dramatically so you've gone to a cognitive ear you don't have cereal management of data you now have parallel management of data you don't want databases that react or let's say a data warehouse it takes 30 hours to run a report you want the report to run in one so if you will real-time cognitive data availability and ability to analyze that data and that is dramatically changing what startups are out how successful they'll be how the tier 1 vendors are reacting you know for example one of the great things about IBM is we are focused on flash which is the fastest grain storage systems market and software to find which was one of the fastest growing storage software markets and we're leaders in both market spaces so when you open up the envelope of what's inside storage it's a slow growth market three to four percent per year is all it's growing but certain segments are growing rapidly and IBM focuses on those rapid growth segments now but the cloud piece right so you make you guys are talking about clever safe before I was thought that was a cloud acquisition which it was in part right but it's also something that falls into the storage portfolio right and that's because clever safe can be configured in a number of different ways on-premises only cloud only or hybrid configuration we can have an on-premises clever safe configuration talking to a cloud-based configuration so again part of IBM strategy to make sure that from a storage perspective all of our software to find infrastructure and what we acquired with clever safe are designed for hybrid cloud configurations or private cloud configurations or public again our spectrum family is used by hundreds of public cloud service writers to deliver a backup service for example a spectrum protect so the reason my question was this very clearly in effect on that you talked about three percent or whatever you know the the latest numbers are it's flat Marcus gases and flat is flat but the cloud market of course is growing like that from a smaller base but it's clearly having an impact on demand is that a fair statement yeah I think what's happening when you look at it from a storage perspective where you're really having the biggest impact on cloud is in the lower end in the entry space yes the capacity is growing exponentially but whether it's the department level of a giant at global fortune 500 whether it's Herzog's bar and grill or a midsize company when they need a small array a lot of times are going to a public cloud configuration so that low end of the market is shrinking at the same time when you do software-defined if you're one of the tier 1 vendors the storage could come from off-the-shelf hard drives so the values in the software but that also delivers a revenue hit to the vendor base and Ashley when you think about how would you get incredible performance five or six years ago you would have bought an array that was five to eight million dollars best case if not closer to 10 you'd be lucky if you could get 200,000 I ops maybe you could get five milliseconds latency today at an average sale place of 300,000 dollars we can deliver over a million I ops and sub hundred micro center and latency so you don't need to buy your big iron at five eight 10 million you can do it with something for three hundred thousand dollars huge the bottleneck John okay I mean this is back to our kena brian.krall from Apple was on stage another great company leaders in the delivering great value but he made a comment I want to get your reaction to because I know it's a phone analogy but I want to bring into storage if the values and the software and all flash is the bet you guys are making the numbers are impressive in terms of performance in terms of I ops throughput and and cost per puss per megabyte he said you got to get closer to the hardware to write your native apps and he's referring to the iphone software app using Swift and xcode to the hardware so in storage look different how does the software piece take advantage of the hardware and is that built-in is an obstacle the customer because we're seeing this notion of okay take care of it take advantage of the hardware so what was how do you reconcile the we've done some very strong things there so let's take for example our spectrum virtualized software spectrum virtualize allows enterprise class data services across heterogeneous storage environments hours our competitors and anything that's white box over 300 arrays we have taken the spectrum virtualized platform and integrate it into our v nine thousand flash systems all-flash array into our mid tier storwize v7000 and our mid tier storwize v5000 which we just launched last week three new configurations we also have the sand volume controller but what we've done is integrate that spectrum virtualized software which rides a virtual back end of all storage not just our own provides a single way to replicate a single way to snapshot transparent block migration on the fly and integrate that right into flash systems and storwize as a software comes as a hard annick Stauffer comes with it exactly it's built into the size of Jeff managed as a code or estructuras code like an apple programa billion native app to the iphone what does that develop or doing with you guys is it through that software layer or how they could be right i mean the key thing when you look from a DevOps perspective they want to quickly be able to provision storage okay and with things like all the spectrum family and with the gooeys we've implemented into our store wise our XIV and all of our storage products it's very easy to deploy storage you can do it in minutes so whether the DevOps guy does or where the deadlock flight calls the storage guy the bottom line is they can get the storage up and running in a virtual environment a containerized environment in a matter of minutes and from a DevOps perspective that's what they want so we're able to meet the needs of the DevOps guy but also the traditional storage vendor as well don't get one last question for me for the henna we've run out of time they might have one more but I want to get your take on this because it's really been an interesting industry chess game with VCE and VMware and EMC doing the hyper converged x4 star calling it this hyper conversion without Cisco right this is because no longer you mentioned you in partnership with Cisco so VCC and bx rails was talked about last week what's going on with VCE is it still going to be around you see you're taking multiple forms is the increased breadth of solution is going to be multi-vendor what's your in it what you're taking on so you were at IBM cell you have relationship with cisco has that how does that what a customer's deal and what does the customer do because they're like okay who do I so I think there's a couple things that customers to look at first of all there's going to be a transformation VCE as it was originally constructed a partnership with cisco EMC and VMware will not exist after the acquisition this is my theory what will happen this distinctive sorry Cisco is go in there's no luck involved so all happen is those Cisco servers will be transitioned now and dell servers will be tradition did it's exactly what's going to happen so cisco is aware of this and cisco has been engaging with other partners like i mentioned the vs. tak had the best first year of any converged infrastructure in the history within its first year why well in the middle of last year what happened Dell an EMC an announced a merger so a lot of the business partners a lot of the end users there's cause for concern and EMC is already taken Cisco out of a number of configurations and there's a number of things for an end-user to think about one look at the development budgets what was the EMC development budget what's the dell development budget and substantially lower EMC did an outstanding job of acquiring startups with the debt load that's been written about publicly not just in the storage fresh but really in the financial press will be able to afford to buy a bunch of cool startups like EMC used to do the old days hard to say an EMC well I thought of stata domain was a great acquisition for uniting isilon same thing will they be able to continue to do that and like IBM EMC has a pretty good reputation for support and service that's not really reputation of the guys in Austin their reputation is cost-effective rapid delivery not necessarily the best important service the enterprise side people looking for that enterprise-class important service so those the questions that a customer needs to ask at the end user level where a channel partner use a civ as this merger goes for how's it going to impact the roadmap for the future the development expense my support capability those are things that have different models in those two companies so being should see how it pans out unfortunately we're out of time because we could do a whole cube second just on that area thanks for coming by give you the last word what does the digital transformation for the customer of IBM the buyer when they talked to you in the elevator and they say hey what's the storage angle on this digital treasure where the stores fit into my digital transformation what's the what's the bumper sticker what's the value proposition well the key thing digital transformation is a different sort of data it's been data for years and years and years data has to sit on storage the better the storage is your better the digital environment is the faster it is things like flash systems or our spectrum scale for cognitive the better that date is going to be so the digital era is powered by storage underneath it's like the foundation of a home good foundation great home good foundation great digital data great foundation the cube day one here more foundational coverage tomorrow the cube conversation will continue tomorrow day two we had more interviews today but tomorrow a lot of big names the biggest names in tech most powerful people here IBM interconnect is the cube we right back with more coverage here on day ones wrap up after the short break