 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm with Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles Continuous wall-to-wall coverage of VMworld 2013. We're here back at the Moscone Center. We're in Moscone South. At the street level, come on and see us. Just turn right in the lobby and you can't miss us and really appreciate VMware. They've built a beautiful set for us. Hugh Yoshida is here. He's the CTO of Vatachi Data Systems, somebody I've known for a number of years. Hugh, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Glad to be here. Yeah, good to see you. Appreciate you coming on and this is the 10th, it's not my 10th VMworld, I don't know if it's your 10th, but I've been to a lot of them. I think I lost track, but a lot of energy, a lot of action, what are your general thoughts on the show? Oh, I mean, what, over 22, 23,000 people. It's quite amazing and it just shows the penetration of virtualization and the benefits that it provides customers. Otherwise, it wouldn't be here. I mean, you've seen that, the impact that virtualization has had on your customer base. You saw it all the way through. Were you a skeptic at first? Were you super enthusiastic? Were you a little wait and see? May I take us back to the early days of virtualization? What were you thinking about at the time and did you ever envision that would be this much of an impact? No, I mean virtualization, I mean that's where we had to go and we had to separate that infrastructure from the application of data. Couldn't keep that tight connection. So virtualization enables us to do that. So we can make changes, refresh to the technology and we're still without disrupting the application. So it was a key moment in IT history. Which of course, the industry had done before. I mean, Tatchee was a mainframe supplier for many years and of course IBM had virtualized it. But then the industry kind of forgot about it and then the whole open systems trend and then, hey, VMware had this new idea, like it had never been invented. But it's really the way they applied it, the way they built an ecosystem around it. And of course, Tatchee's part of that ecosystem. So maybe talk a little bit about your relationship with VMware, what are you guys doing? Right, we've had over a 10 year relationship with VMware, one of the early implementers, especially with our virtualization technology. We're the first to be able to virtualize storage and be able to integrate with things like VAI, the integration with their APIs. So we are also now an early design partner with them so that we are now not just looking for things to integrate with, but are really involved in the design with them. Okay, so we hear a lot about cloud this week, hybrid clouds and even a little bit about public cloud. So what's your, what's Tatchee's take on cloud, private cloud or otherwise? And maybe talk a little bit about what you're doing there. Yeah, private cloud is transformational. I mean, it's taking that old IT organization where you're putting together things, do it yourself type of approach to more of an automated consolidated approach. The key to that is the virtualization. It's not just the virtualization of the servers, but all the way through the stack server network and then the management to be able to set policies and run that as a service. So you talk about VAI and VASA. You know, when I first came to VMworld, I said, oh wow, this is really going to have a negative effect on storage, right? You guys are virtualizing storage at the time, so you're sort of maybe ahead of the game in that regard, but virtualization really stressed storage a lot and a lot of the integration, you know, that the APIs that VMware announced were kind of designed to minimize the penalties associated with spinning disks. So I want to ask you a question around flash. You've got a deep technology background, you've been covering this a long time. I almost feel like, and I want to test this premise with you, a lot of those integrations that I guess say we're designed to deal with spinning disks go away when you get things like all flash arrays. The integration points relative to flash become a lot smaller. Is that a viable premise and how does integration change as flash becomes more prominent? Okay, flash is, well, first of all, you know, the hard disk technology has slowed down. You know, for the last 50 years. It's gone backwards right there. We used to have a price erosion of about 30% per year because we're doubling the bit densities and that has slowed down. You know, and if we look to the future, that price erosion is going to be something less than 20%. And everything we do to add capacity to that disk is going to make it slower and slower. So flash is going to be required or a non-volatile memory as I want to call it to be able to be that top tier so that everybody gets that high performance and yet the disk can still be there to maintain the capacity. Disk can do what they do best which is give us low cost capacity but the flash has to be there to give us the performance. And it has to be in a tiered environment and that requires automation. That requires the virtualization. That requires this software defined data center as VMware is defining it. Yes, John Furrier and I talk about these disruptions all the time, John, right? Yeah, I mean, disruption is the key. One of the things we were talking about earlier today was should IT reward disruptors or sustainers? Sustainers being the ones holding on to the old and the disruptors. And so balance between having disruption. And one of the areas that are being disrupted right now is obviously the compute side. Obviously with compute storage and networking all going software, they're actually software defined. That's a big area. I want to ask you specifically on the unified compute you guys announced here at the show, your unified compute platform for vSphere. What is that about? What is unified compute? What does that mean? Okay, it's taking server storage and network. It's taking the infrastructure pieces and then being able to integrate at them and then being able to present it through a software defined interface like a vCenter. We've taken an approach that's different from any other vendors that has helped us become more integrated with that software to define data center. Instead of trying to manage VMWare through APIs, we provide all our management objects to vCenter. So you don't have to see any of our element managers. You can manage provision everything through the vCenter interface. That's unique. I think if you go to any of the booths here at this convention, you'll see that we're the most closely integrated of all the vendors. With our own servers, our own storage and our partnership with our switch vendors. All through vCenter. So I don't have to have one single pane of glass. I'm the VMWare customer. I could provision, manage, store, all that stuff through vCenter. Right. And since we make this open through breastful APIs to vCenter, it's also going to be available to other types of hypervisors. But it also enables us to leverage future functions from VMWare like vCloud, for instance. Okay, so that they can bring in new functions and they don't have to change any of the infrastructure underneath it. So we had Jerry Chen on from Greylock. Obviously they're an investor and some will argue they don't have as much vision of the guy's building products like you guys. They make the bets on the startups. So I got to ask you the same question I asked him, which is if software defined data center continues to track on the way it's tracking, the disruption will be a different look of IT. So this vCenter is an interesting angle because then you say, okay, that is kind of the Amazon-like experience. Are customers looking forward to be more like Amazon or is Amazon looking to be more like enterprise? Is it what we call the dog and the cat? Depending on which animal you look at, it's a different view. But what, in your opinion, does the software defined data center truly disrupt for the IT guys? And how big will that be in your mind? Okay, it makes it simpler. It simplifies the environment. They don't have to do it yourself. And every new function that comes in, they don't have to go down, deep dive into the elements, okay? The way we provide it through our interfaces, using the APIs and just opening our objects up to the hypervisor, they're able to add functions without having to go deep dive. So it's going to be much simpler for our users, much easier to transition to new technologies in the future. So how does that affect the hardware business? So you've got all this hard, the software function today to bet it in an array controller. The software defined seems to be trying to pull that out. So is that correct? What does that mean for a company that makes a lot of money in hardware? And where are the white spaces now? How do they shift? Well actually, software defined data center doesn't mean that we have commodity hardware, commodity infrastructure. That infrastructure has to be much more smarter, have much more functions to be able to support that. I think from my viewpoint, the hardware, the intelligent hardware, enables the software defined data center. Okay, an example I use is, no matter how much software you have, you can't take a mini cooper and make it like an escalate or a Porsche. Okay, it has different functions. So you have to have the stored system that are be able to work to those interfaces, provide that dynamic provisioning, provide that flash optimization, the performance of optimization, or the capacity optimization. But that hardware has to have that capability to do that. And that's why hardware that's differentiated in their functionality is going to be more important moving forward. You know, when VMware first came, they said you could do thin provisioning. Okay, that's very useful for optimizing storage utilization. But when they did that, they had to use their cycles. They couldn't, so they have the same problem everybody else has. There's more and more applications, more cycles being needed by the applications. So they offload that to the storage through APIs and then we're able to do that thin provisioning. They want to do a schedule reserves, we do that for them. They want to do vMotion, we move the data for them. So this combination, this integration between VMware and the hardware is what really makes that software defined data center. And that intelligence, more intelligence or more requirements are being pushed down into the hardware. Excellent, so my last question here, so as a technologist, you look out, are you going to break out the telescope or maybe at least the binoculars? What's really exciting you now on the horizon that you see? Well, this whole approach about the information cloud, you know, as VMware moves to the cloud, as we are able to share resources, share applications across the public and private cloud, that's going to be really transformational, okay? So today there's some reluctance to put core applications into the public cloud, okay? So we can still have, there's a need for the private cloud as well. But to be able to get information from the public cloud integrated with what we have in the core, private cloud, that's where we can get more of the information that we need to be able to be more productive in our businesses. Excellent. All right, Hugh Ushida, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really pleasure seeing you as always. Good to see you, indeed. All right, keep right there, everybody. John Furrier and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from VMworld 2013, this is theCUBE.