 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your host, Dave Vellante. To HP Discover, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Check out hpdiscover.social for all the social streams, the video, the content, the special access. Patrick Osborn is here from HP, CUBE alum. And he's joined by Bill Walker of 20th Century Fox. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us. So Discover, another Discover, a little different this year, Patrick. We got Meg talking about business outcomes. Absolutely. Uber and Airbnb and all kinds of cool stuff. The consumption models are very different. I mean, obviously you come out here every year for the past number of years and it's all about the technology. I'm always wowed by the broad portfolio that we have, but really at the end of the day, I think some of the messaging to the customers is, we're here to help you solve your problems. And part of that is technology, part of its services. So this sort of new high-level messaging around transformation and helping people achieve these business outcomes. I think it's a good fresh start. Yeah, so Bill, your business, going through some interesting transformations. Yes it is. Maybe talk about the high level, the drivers in your business. You know, you got new competitors, you got huge opportunities to go into this digital transformation. You have sort of early on in that. So maybe talk about some of the drivers in your business. Sure, absolutely. I think for us, you really hit the nail on the head in the sense that it's really been about the physical to digital transformation that the industry's kind of going through and also Fox is. And on the infrastructure side and the IT side, we're trying to support that as best we can. And the name of the game lately has been speed to market, right? So we've partnered very tightly with HP on not only the hardware but the software side building out kind of a brand new digital supply chain environment in Las Vegas actually, right here. And one of our major data centers where we deliver all of our digital content to all of our providers. So ESTV, VOD providers like Amazon and iTunes as well as major broadcasters. So you've got a facility out here that is essentially your cloud? Is that right? Yes, we do. That's our primary place where we deliver everything out of. It's great. We're using all HP hardware and software there. So we're customers across the board in the sense that we have blades. We've got three par. We're using store once as well as the HP software stack like cloud system on top of that. Is that part of Supernap? Yes, yes. So yeah, we're in Supernap. We love it. It's a great facility. We moved there a little over two years ago and it's been an awesome experience. Has that made it into any of the movies? No. It must, right? I know. It's impressive on the outside and the inside, right? Yeah, remember the old, remember the Robocop? Oh yeah, absolutely. They had that storage tech tape library way back then. They were like, oh, what's that? They were great at properties. Today it's these impressive data centers, amazing. So talk a little bit more about, you call it the digital supply chain. That's a powerful concept. What's behind that? Yeah, so we've obviously been in the physical supply chain business for a while on the home entertainment side. So think DVDs, Blue Rays, that kind of thing. But as we transition from people buying physical media to digital media, a lot of the workflows and the supply chain aspect of it is still there, but now we're talking digital and not physical. So one of the things we've done at Fox is we've created what we call our digital supply chain. So you've got, not only things like content delivery in there, but you've got watermarking, all the hallmarks of what you would need in a digital environment to deliver that customer quality product from end to end. And protect your IP. Yeah, exactly, yeah, security's a big one. So we'll talk more about security, data protection, maybe there's a general topic and then let's dig deeper. For sure, I mean security is obviously one of our big drivers. I mean, obviously with everything that's been in the news lately, we're no different in the sense that we take it very, very seriously. You know, on the data protection front, like I said, we're big store once customers. We love the product. We're using it heavily in our data center to protect our content as well as our data. So yeah. How much, let's unpack that a little bit. What's it look like? So you said a bunch of different HP products. Can you help us to understand how much storage, you kind of servers, what kind of apps? Paint a picture of your infrastructure for us. Sure, so we've got a lot actually, several racks of gear. Three par, like I said, we're big three par customers. So we have several racks of three par that we're using kind of across the board. A lot on the database side and high IO scenarios. Store once is kind of that underpinning piece that everything funnels back to that provides data deduplication, backup, archival, that kind of thing. Okay, so can we talk more about sort of your objectives of protecting data? I mean, obviously I don't want to lose it, but there's time to recover, there's data loss. How are you approaching that? Yep, so we've got our primary facility at Switch as well as a DR facility offsite. We're using Store once, we've got them in both places. We're doing replication both ways to ensure, if we were to have an event at one facility or we didn't have data available, we can quickly recover from the other. RTO-wise it's been a great success for us because we've moved from tape-based backup and I really didn't mention that, but where we came from two, two and a half years ago, from our LA and Chandler data centers, we had very, very heavy investment in tape infrastructure and one of the things we decided when we went to this new environment in Las Vegas is we wanted it to be completely tapeless, to be flexible in that environment and we picked Store once, we went all disk-based and RTO-wise it's fantastic because as opposed to tape if you have an event, if you happen to not have the tape on site, your RTO is dictated kind of by when you can get the tape back with the- Fan exit. Yeah, exactly, as fast as it can get here. With the Store once though, it's just there, we can bring it back in minutes and in fact we actually had a kind of, not funny, but interesting incident that happened early on where we kind of had an whoops incident where somebody deleted a VM and with Store once, we already had it there and we were able to recover it in minutes and have it working again which was not something we were able to do in previous iterations. So it's really RTO is your primary driver as opposed to RPO. Yeah. And Patrick, I'm sure you see it all over the board with customers, right? Yeah, absolutely. His whole environment is based on this digital content that's the lifeblood of what they're doing as a business and what they're delivering to your customers. So what we're seeing in the data protection standpoint is that more apps are mission critical, right? They're moving from business critical to mission critical, but RTOs and RPOs are definitely more aggressive month by month, quarter by quarter. People are moving from days to hours to minutes and they want to have access to more data that's near line and online so you can basically restore that right away. So we're seeing people architecting solutions for Store once where they'd want a couple weeks, maybe a couple months of data stored on that from a backup perspective. Now we're talking, having conversations about three to five years, seven years, 10 years, right? So definitely a paradigm shift in terms of data protection. I think the clouds changed that a lot too. Let's talk about that a little bit. I think, you know, because the cloud there's not really a concept of tape per se. I mean, I know, you know, some providers have a delayed, you know, kind of recovery type mechanism, but I think in general people are assuming you've got the data on disk or, you know, available somewhere and you're able to recall it, right? And, you know, almost any cloud provider, I think today is structured that way and has some kind of object storage where you can back up to, but it's an online situation, right? And I think that's kind of become the new standard for the expectation of, you know, being able to recover. It's dumping it into an object store and being able to recover from that. Yeah, well, I like to say backup is one thing, recover is everything. So there's a software component that has to go along with that. And what about tape? You're using, I mean, you must be using tape in your business, right? We do still have tape, but I think where it makes sense, we're trying to get rid of it. You know, we obviously there's a lot of physical nature with tape, you know, for us, it's also manpower you have to have, you know, there's a lot of manpower involved in just managing tape and whatnot. So where we can, you know, especially strategically in our data centers, we're trying to get out of using tape and using, you know, disk-based. But for long-term archiving, long-term retention with your digital assets, obviously you would tape for that. We definitely have scenarios at the studio where it's still used for sure. But obviously not for backup, right? No, yeah, yeah. I think, you know, with my team, we're starting to think of the notion of backup, maybe in the traditional sense, it's kind of going away. Cause I think when people think of backup, they think tape, they think these scenarios. And I think it's, you know, it's changing to more of a, you know, having various generations on disk. So you have the concept of, you know, being able to go back in time. Near real-time recovery. You know, time machine for the enterprise. Yeah, we talk, when we talk to customers, it's usually around the areas of application, data protection or a service data protection, and then long-term preservation of assets as opposed to backup and archive, right? So they're, because they have a very different business processes around them, and then you can apply different technologies to the two of them. So in some, some technologies are appropriate for one, some are appropriate for the others. So we're, you know, we're seeing a lot of customers really focus on day one of how I'm going to protect that data, how I'm going to make data protection an automatic part of the infrastructure. So I don't have to have separate backup teams, separate, you know, specific processes. So this whole area of things being sort of automatically protected as part of the infrastructure is, it's definitely where a lot of people are going. I think that's a really important point. I mean, data protection has historically been a bolt-on, right? Oh, yeah, we got to protect the data. Yep. And so you're saying that you're finally seeing customers integrate data protection as part of the fundamental solution. Absolutely. The two things, so the two things that now I'm seeing from a fundamental part of the initial solution build out is data protection's built in, right? So you're seeing the techniques of snapshot and replication being melded with, you know, backup techniques like policy management, indexing and all that kind of stuff, right? And then the other sort of conversation we're having with people who put infrastructure in place is how am I going to get office in five years, five to seven years, right? So, because the amount, the size of the data sets are becoming so big that replicating data, data migrations, migrating your backup data are, yeah, they're difficult, they're difficult tasks. So people are doing a lot more planning ahead to understand how am I going to protect this data now, right, from a different set of scenarios and how am I going to sort of do some hardware, life cycle management from an infrastructure standpoint underneath that data as I go into the future? Are you a data protector customer? What do you use? Not currently, although we are, you know, we are looking at it for sure, yeah. Today, we're actually net backup, yeah. Yeah, okay, I mean, it's a lot of ways to skin that cap. Yeah. That's still not in your group, is it? Nope, not. Meg, just make it, I've been saying this for a decade. Data protectors should be part of the storage solution. I mean, it's, anyway. We work with them every day. It's fantastic. You guys got a tight relationship. Yeah. You know, we still get paid for it. So. Do get paid for it. That's good, okay, well, that's a start. Yeah, awesome. All right, let's see, what else? What's going on at the show this year with you? Oh, lots of stuff at the show. So obviously you heard about Flash, right? Yeah, we've heard a lot about Flash. Flash is fast. Yeah, it's great. Smoking fast. Yeah, so there's, it's fine. There's a lot of implications to Flash, even on data protection, right? So this is a big area for us. Obviously it's huge in the market. The media and the speed and what Flash brings to the table allows you to do some different things from data protection standpoint as well, right? So this concept of copy data management, you've heard this in terms of, now I can take copies of databases, copies of data sets, serve them up to UAT test development environment. So you know, your speed of development by having access to copies of that, you know, of that original production data set is being enabled by media like Flash. So Flash, you can do lots of random IO. You can, with modern architectures like 3-par for example, it's multi-tenant, right? You have quality of service on there. So now where in the past, you'd have to clone a number of data sets, copy them off, restore them from backups for the purposes of having a test data set. Now you can run all that on the same infrastructure. So Flash is great from a performance standpoint for speeding up your transactions, speeding up your database, your workflow. But there's a lot of other things that allows us to do to help the overall speed of development, which is kind of cool. So the copy data management thing's interesting. I mean, yeah, so Actifio is obviously popularizing it, Delphix is another one. The problem is they want me to rip out or not use my 3-par snapshots. And I love my 3-par snapshots. I don't want to put in a whole new infrastructure around it, so is there, I mean, the opportunity, I mean, you got a catalog in store once. I mean, maybe I could use that somehow, that technology. So that's what we're doing, right? So we're taking these techniques that you've had in traditional backup for years and then things that you have on primary storage, right? Snapshots and replication, but with the advantages of Flash, now you're able to do a lot more with it and bring in those two techniques together. We're doing it with software, we're doing it with sort of extensible protocols and SDKs on the infrastructure itself. So we're not introducing any sort of sand virtualization techniques or inline fiber channel type of virtualization technology. We're allowing you to do that as a part of the infrastructure itself. So we're combining things like 3-par with Recovery Manager Central and Store Once to provide those type of experience. I think the killer app there too is potentially is Test Dev, right? I mean, if you can take copies that are more current, give it to the, especially with Flash, give it to the developers, they're not working on N-minus three copies. Absolutely. And they're way more productive. What kind of discussions are you having internally? I mean, how do you service the developer community? Are they, what kind of pressures are they putting on you, Bill? It's probably the same things you've heard. I mean, agility, speed, I know for us, because we're big on the cloud journey right now in terms of delivering private cloud services for our customers inside Fox. One of the areas we're actively really striving for is to do some deeper integration with some of the dev teams where they've got kind of closed loop dev ops type cycles that they're developing with familiar tooling which is in the market out there, the Jenkins, et cetera. My team, we're definitely working on trying to integrate a lot of the automation we're doing around cloud with what they're doing on the Test Dev side to kind of create a nice, cohesive whole. So rather than delivering just a server to them, we can deliver an entire build environment and tear it down, build it up and tear it down dynamically. So you mentioned to store once customer, talked about RTO being really the primary metric that you're trying to optimize. So Patrick comes out to California, hits the beach, makes a quick sales call, writes it off. What do you want to know from him? What? Okay. I'm with you that half the time. So what kind of discussions do you have with Patrick around? Where do you want to go? What do you want out of the product? What do you want the road map to look like? Yeah, I think one of the things, as I said before, we're three-par and store once customers and I think where we see things headed in the future, we'd love to see even deeper integration with three-par and store once and we're actually having a discussion with my team before this and one of the things they threw out there like, hey, why can't we just combine them into one product? And I know right now they're separate, but maybe in the near future the notion of having this external device that's separate from three-par that you're moving to, maybe some of that gets melded together. And what does that do for you? It minimizes the need to manage another appliance. Absolutely. So it simplifies your infrastructure, tighter integration. So better reliability. Yeah, I mean, we're like a lot of technology shops in the sense that we're trying to squeeze as much as we can with the team that we have in terms of technology and still deliver a lot of services. So we're always looking to if we can take two and make it one or that kind of scenario for simplification, that's what we want to do. Two and more with less. But let me ask you a question. When you do more with less and you've dropped money to the CFOs, bottom line, do they carve off, do you get a lick off that cone? Do they say, hey, good, nice job. Here's a little, we'll take 20% of that savings and give it back to you. For us, it's just the slap on the back, the handshake that we did it. What do you see with that? I mean, from our product portfolio standpoint, we're simplifying, right? We want to have, I think we're in a unique position in terms of we want to be the best storage division inside of HP Enterprise, right? We don't want to be the best storage division standalone. So that affords us a lot of experiences that we can bring to the customer when you bring in the blades and compute and networking and storage. I mean, what you see up on stage with OneView and all of our element managers, it doesn't sound sexy at the end of the day, but basically having a same look and feel, the same taxonomy that you use for all of our products is like a huge simplification for customers, not having to learn new UIs and whatnot. So we have other competitors who, they're bringing seven, 10, 12 different architectures for primary storage to the table. We're consolidating that and providing customers the ability to, they can go in a cost optimized software defined deployment model. You can have appliances that are tuned in high performance. Same look and feel, same CLI, same utility, same data services, so we want choice, but it has to be simple because it's too much. Bill, what do you think about that whole software defined meme? Is that the future? Is it, as Patrick sort of implying, sort of the lower cost sort of software only model? What are you guys saying? Well, we're big believers in software defined. Like I said, we're kind of in it on the whole stack in the sense that we not only have hardware, we have software with HP, we're also doing a lot with the team around Helion OpenStack right now. And one of the big bets we're making is we think OpenStack's going to be big. I know internally when we've talked with a lot of the development teams, the idea of API defined infrastructure that's more malleable is tremendously exciting. So what are you doing with OpenStack? So right now we're actually, we're kind of in that early stages. Tick and Tire. Yeah, depth test, trying to get a feel for it. Because one of the things I always say right now with OpenStack is it's kind of a two-way street. There's the infrastructure part of it that my team has to deliver, but the other side of it is really the developers, getting their hands around it, getting a feel for it, maybe even doing some platform as a service with Cloud Foundry, that kind of thing. And they're really developing for that platform and getting the most out of it. Because in a lot of cases, you're coming from a traditional environment where you had physical servers, you've put virtualization on top of it, everybody's kind of used to that, maybe a single VM kind of scenario, but when you move to something like OpenStack, you kind of got to rethink how you approach application building. Just think. All right, Gents, we're out of time. I'm going to leave it there, but Patrick, last word for you. Why HP? Why HP? I think we've got some exciting times ahead of us this year, right? So unlocking some velocity and value for everyone with HP Enterprise. Kind of like just to echo what I said before about, you know, we're a portfolio company that brings a lot of technology services to our customers. And at the end of the day, my bet is that standalone companies that focus on one thing like storage or one thing like network or specifically compute, I don't see a path forward for that over time, right? Customers are buying solutions and systems and converged, you know, infrastructure, how you see this, you know, hyper-converged theme, right? HP's one of the few companies that can bring all those elements to our customers as part of the equation. So that, for me, that's why I stay here and why we've got such a great technology path forward. Yeah, the 80s and 90s are about disintegration of IT and creating those silos and now we're seeing the reintegration. So, Patrick and Bill, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Good to have you guys. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.