 Okay everybody, we're here at AT&T Park. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and this is SiliconAngle.com's continuous coverage of VMworld 2012. We're here with Tim Russell, who's the Vice President of Data Lifecycle Solutions at NetApp. Tim, thanks for spending some time with us. Great to be here. Yeah, this is awesome. I mean, the first time I ever saw this place, it was Pac-Bell. And I'm a baseball junkie, you know, go to Fenway a lot. And I really, it's one of my favorite ballparks, really in the country. It's just fabulous here. Good choice. And we're enjoying a great day as well. Yeah, it's beautiful here. And of course, we're here with a lot of customers, you're expecting, you know, I think over a thousand people are going to be here tonight, which you put this together in record time. It's amazing. It's really a lot of fun actually, honoring customers, partners, getting some conversations going about what's really hot in the data center today. Yeah, so VMworld has become this premier event now in the industry. I mean, it's like a lightning rod. People are so passionate about it. You go to these Vmugs and people, the practitioners just really are excited about what's going on. I mean, quite a change that we've seen in this industry, hasn't it? Absolutely. And I think, you know, you see what virtualization is driving from consolidation, you know, from data centers to workloads to infrastructures, and VMware is being a catalyst to help make that happen. So a whole new conversation. Well, you guys bet the farm on VMware, and it's paying off. Very much paying off. Delivery of efficiency, delivering of value in terms of operating a common infrastructure, and now we've been in our recent announcement with Flash, really driving a lot of value for customers who are virtualizing their entire infrastructure. So let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, you guys, you know, we're participating in the Flash business, you know, previously, but now you're like going all in. Talk about what you've announced, and we'll, you know, really sort of help people understand where you're going, what the direction is. So recently, we just announced an extension of our Flash strategy into the server. So we've been a leader with delivering over 17 petabytes of Flash at the array level to accelerate traditional spinning media. And that's been highly successful at accelerating workloads. Now extending that into the server level with our own technology, with partner technologies closely integrated with data management, delivering great value at very little operational cost to the customer. So this is a software play, really, isn't it? It really is a software play because we're partnering with a number of Flash device manufacturers. So whether it's an SSD, PCIe card, number of different kind of form factors, our software will integrate with all of them. So you know, one of the things that I've been observing now, since probably around, you know, 2009, is that we saw for 15 years function move out of the host right to the array. And that was good for guys like you. I mean, you capitalized on that. We're seeing function move back now. And so one of the things that I posited and we've written about it, what you're about is, will there be an emergence of a software led initiative and a company that can become, you know, the analogy I use was the veritas of, you know, the Flash stack? You know, is that a viable metaphor? So if you look at what customers are doing with consolidating infrastructures, the data management value that's delivered at an array, especially what we're delivering with ONTAP. So disaster recovery efficiently, doing backups efficiently, doing storage efficiency, doing all the archive pieces in a clustered configuration, you just can't do that at the server level. So we still believe that whether it's a Flash media or a spinning device media, the data management is centric. It is a software play, but it's software play that's running inside of a storage device. Yeah, okay. So that's the value that you add. And there's a lot of heterogeneity. So you've got NetApp gear, NetApp arrays, NetApp software, but you're saying you're basically working with a number of Flash vendors to provide that value. Absolutely. So when you have applications that either have struggled going to virtualization environments because of performance, or you have extreme performance requirements even on physical machines, deploying Flash at that server level and the data management you get from traditional ONTAP gives you the best of all worlds. So we're talking about that. There's almost like a tug of war between the server guys and the storage guys. What's your point of view on that? How does that all shake out and there's some confusion there amongst customers? What are your thoughts there? I really don't think it's a fair tug of war. I think the server guys or the storage guys, us, we're winning. The center is from a data management perspective, the server guys still are developing and delivering sort of stateless environments. You can move your servers. You can move your VMs, but the state is retained in storage. And you have to manage that efficiently. And so the state is maintained in storage, but Flash becomes a persistent medium. How does that change the notion that spinning disk is the state? So if you look at it the way Flash is deployed most efficiently, how do you lower the cost of storage overall? Moving everything to Flash not likely in our lifetime is to be the lowest cost of storage. So deploying just the right amount of Flash as a cache and yet maintaining all of your bulk media on spinning media and having them operate together in one cohesive integrated architecture is still the best value for a customer. So you see the majority of data still sitting on spinning disk and the really high activity stuff in Flash. Is that right? Just the right amount of blocks, the right blocks, the right storage blocks that need to have high performance in Flash media. It sounds like a balancing challenge from a software perspective. Is that fair? That's exactly where the intellectual property is. How do you balance the right blocks and the right media closest to the application when it needs it? So talk about why NetApp is in a position to do that. What experience do you have and what historical intellectual property do you have and what inventions are you building? So the inventions we've actually innovation in Flash Excel, which is our software layer running in the server, actually delivers innovations in caching algorithms. So what blocks have been changed in the back end array so that we can only populate and change those blocks rather than rewarm the whole cache? They get more persistent or more consistent performance or durability. So you talk about changes, changed blocks. It reminds me of changed block tracking. So we're taking some of the concepts in back up and bringing them into high activity. In fact, that's somewhere where the technology comes from. We're doing change block tracking for our data protection strategies as well. So you don't have to replicate all the blocks. You just do the ones that are changed. So I know data protection is another area that you're responsible for. And I've said publicly, I tweeted this week, I love what you guys are doing in that area. I really love your vision using snapshots. And it seems to be going really well. It's really gaining momentum amongst our partners and even our internal developments. Being able to leverage all the richness of backup management that you get from backup vendors, but yet underlying storage efficiency that you get from snapshots, replicated snapshots, snap vault, and all those things together, a perfect marriage. Yeah. So I mean, you mentioned some partners. I know in particular you guys work with SyncStore. You work with Commvault. You're very partner friendly in that sense because you don't own a backup software product. Correct. Correct. Symantec, Commvault, SyncStore, all of them are building on our infrastructure that we've provided to them and the systems to make that all work together. Cool. Well, Tim, thanks very much for spending some time with us on theCUBE. Dave, very nice to be here. Yeah, it's good. Really looking forward to this and great to see you. All right. All right. Keep it right there. We're right back from SiliconANGLE's coverage of VMworld 2012 NetApps customer event. Keep it right there.