why from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors we are here live in las vegas at mandalay bay in the hang space at vmworld 2016 this is the cube silicon angles flagship program where we go out to the events that extract the signal from noise i'm john for my host John Tory with tech reckoning our next guest is vegetable Shan who is the senior director of product management at HP storage HPE storage EP enterprise welcome back to the cube good to see you hey John good to see you you guys obviously a big partner with VMware in the ecosystem is the update men all flash all the time it's a flash crazy world now yeah if you want to talk about flash you know so to your earlier comment about vmware partnerships we work with them vmware community across many different areas right flash storage being one of them key one just because many of these virtualized environments today depend so heavily on the storage and flash makes it a very very attractive option for four people running virtualized environments so talk about where it's all fitting in with vmware for you guys after you you know the three par success story dave vellante always raves about the best knowledge is HP's ever done is a gift that keeps on giving as he always says now with the all-flash side of it how is it impacting the data storage data protection all the integrated stuff that the customers are looking for is to change the game a bit or what's just i think you know if I if I may there's the core of an all-flash offering right and if you brought down the core you can say it's about performance it's about affordability right and clearly when all flash started performance was the key then there was the affordability wave and then there's even now what you would call data services way it's right where the ability to do snapshots or quality of service so I would mark those as the core then you could ask other table stakes sorry those are those tables say say you go thank you table stakes yeah and then some other question is if we look outside the core because the core is pretty much understood today right there's still lots of things outside of the core so for example how do you protect the flash array right how do you do data protection in a bit of a flash because the considerations are different your performance is different your application characteristics at difference so what I do a data protection that's one aspect the other aspect is your infrastructure right your host connectivity you know your bottleneck used to be storage you'll eliminate that bottleneck where is the bottleneck now is it on your host pipes and then the third thing I'd say sort of outside the core would be you know there are new environments coming up containerized environments are an interesting place where you may develop on one environment and choose to deploy in another in these cloud native apps again how does a flash array operate in those kinds of environments so outside of the main court a lot very interesting areas to look at about HP enterprises and specifically don't want the flash the data protection in the host side connectivity not so much the storage or talk about the difference of those areas and now they all work together yeah so let's look at the data protection first right and so what are the attributes of data protection that matter in a flash environment first of all how often are you taking your data protection snaps for example are you using snapshots do you go direct to a backup device what is the latency impact in taking the backup what happens to your backup windows how do you restore quickly if you are snapping every hour on the hour do you go back with the full backup apply incrementals can you do synthetic folds so lots of different elements here and I think the point of view is you could take back up from a point of view I've got to back up my entire environment I vmc array of IBM arrays of HP arrays have a whole environment here to backup right or you can say hey in my flash environment how do I ensure it's optimized just like what veem did with you know virtualize backups right they took a very specific approach not the same thing can be said with data protection and flash do you see so put the story for primary storage yeah how do you distort change then as you're backing up to another flash device RP are you saying that look in the field so so that's interesting you say that because you have different choice points now right so i could have to prime arrays replicating each other that I could be backing up the secondary array to addy duplicating device that's one option the other options I could be having my primary array backing up to a deduplication device and replicating the deduplication level or the device level here or I could be replicating at the host level so I think there are different choice points question is how do you choose one versus the other and their trade offs right there sort of pros and cons um and and you want to be able to offer the customers that choice as well as the guidance as to when you would do one versus the other I love the way you're talking about generations we've gotten to this one this core system now of this generation of solid say yes but there's all these other technologies coming down the pipe we talk a lot about nvme and connectivity and we talk a lot about 3dx point and that's going to change everything where do those fit into the this framework that you that you've been talking about so you go back down into the core and look at performance right because there's got to be a performance next that's our industry it never stays the same right things always move and so the key to looking through those technologies that you asked about John is to look at sort of the n to n path of an i/o and it starts from an application it traverses some kind of fabric it gets to what I would call a controller fabric on the storage side and then from that control of fabric weather data is processed dee doop compress for example it gets written to back-end right and so you have to look at that end-to-end path so some of the technologies that we've been talking about talks about the different points here so nvme as a back-end connectivity for back-end media to the controllers that significantly cuts the lengthy down now but if you look at the latency envelope today the lion's share of the length C is not with the SAS protocol back end its with the media right and so if you did nvme you want to pair it up with storage class memory to get the benefit of that latency and then you want to ensure as well that you are talking say nvme over fabric to your host so that the protocol delays there go away and so again here you can see how envy me impacts choice of media choice of host connectivity so you get that end to niño optimization talk about what's next for flash performance specifically across the host fabric controller fabric and the media back-end fabric yeah so I think you have to then figure out now as in all emerging technologies there's probably going to be different choice points right so we look at a host to front end storage port connectivity that traditionally has been fibre channel we are seeing a rise of I skazhi and ethernet so the question is what does that do with when 25 Giggy 25k Ethan it comes to play right do we see a shift there a tip there maybe I don't know I think again you want to be able to offer choice points and if you can reduce that whole plane see using Ethernet technologies I think that's going to be a segment of the market that's gonna be very attracted to it we've been diving down deep into the technology stack I'm curious if you're seeing the buying center shift as we get to more integrated virtualization teams cloud teams do you have to talk about these technologies down to them and to understand how to buy storage so yeah so that's a very interesting point because there is a segment of the market that says hey I am looking at a vm level or an application level right and I and I don't want to associate all the different component metrics so I think that's the growing trend and hyper convergence for example is a perfect example of that where people want to look at the vm level or even at the application level and you know as we get more and more entrenched in two lines of businesses wanting to develop key competitive capabilities we need to be able to do what exactly what you just said what's the hpe story now that now that you're HPE storage is an important component of what you what you all are doing us I mean in relation to what John was asking what's the future what's the future looking like it you guys talking about in terms of your storage platform so the opportunity for us is to bring you know the collection of different technologies to bear on our customers and I and I view it as two things so job one is for us to be the best storage vet out there in the world if i took that storage myopic view of things right but we're not a small company where a large company and so that's a job to that says how do we the storage and the server and the networking and the compute play together right so we've got to bring the one plus one plus one equals five story and that means the opportunity HP can bring right whether it's things like composable infrastructure where you can say look i have one set of infrastructure for mission-critical applications one set for my cloud native applications why should i have two infrastructures for that i should have one infrastructure that allows me to compose the elements as I see fit for those environments some of them have different attributes I shouldn't have to have different sets of infrastructure to do both nothing to me that's a great opportunity we can bring to our customers about HP Enterprise now and storage give us the update was going on in the business office of the vmware ecosystem thin strategic you guys again like you mentioned been there for a very long time been a big big big partner of vmware but how's business in general at HP enterprise storage business what's the update what's the shiny new toy what's the where's the meat and Wiz what's going on you accepting yeah so so from an HP storage perspective clearly all flashes one of the rock stars there we're doing great with all flash good traction we're seeing a lot of interests around software-defined storage and hyper convergence and you know it's interesting on the software-defined side we've taken the same approach as we as well take on the primary side because we offer now what we call a common data fabric where you can deploy software either in a running on a proliant server or blade server you can deploy that same software as an appliance if that's how you want to consume it you can deploy it as part of a hyper converge packet we even offer it's part of our Helion OpenStack cloud distribution private cloud distribution so again bringing one technology one offering that can span multiple shape and form factors help make it simple for the customer otherwise they're going to do or deploy 13 different things so final question fish as a veteran of the tech business industry hace storage is your focus here at vml what are you taking back with you home as a key walk away item from vmworld share with the folks what you're learning what's that what's the vibe what's what's what are you going to take home with you as a walk away pretty much vehicles always been a great show right it's probably the one place where you know it's got such a rich ecosystem of vendors such a rich ecosystem some offering both complimentary and competitive so you know we have the stone we called frenemy right you're a friend in some places an enemy in others which is great because it just gives you places to collaborate and give new capability to your customers the vibes great at vmworld very rich ecosystem they're doing a lot of great technology innovations in cloud and software-defined we partner in Maine spaces we compete in some yeah but hey that's just the way the cookie crumbles and customers one choice fish thanks so much for sharing your inside the cube great to see you see at HP discover coming up in London in December yes right i think it's december or is that it's quite not much of a neighbor okay and yeah right yeah so big events european version of hpe discover which we just had an amazing set of interviews the cube was there could still get an angle website web site com or youtube com still gonna go check out the HP Enterprise discover videos tons of storage videos with all the big dogs on there thanks we spending the time now here I am world thank you if we are live at the mandalay bay in the hang space at vmworld 2016 john free with john schuer with tech reckoning we write back you're watching the cube