 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And welcome back here on theCUBE. We continue our coverage of VMworld from Mandalay Bay along with Peter Burris. I'm John Walls, and it's a pleasure to welcome two fellows who know all about being on theCUBE. One of them very recently, Ken Barth is back with us, CEO and co-founder of Catalyzed Software. Ken, good to see you. Oh, it's great to see you. And then Eric Herzog, I mean, the Hawaiian shirt we know is your signature moment. It was, by the way, Vice President of Product Marketing and Management at IBM. But you're an original Cubist, you said. That you were your... I think the first year that theCUBE happened, I was on with Dave, eons ago, must have been either 2010 or 2011 at the first CUBE ever. We gotta make you like an emeritus member of the Alumni Association or something. And let's be careful when we say Cubist. Let's be very clear about it. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm about to cube her. I've got to mix words here, yeah. I'm about to cube her. He'll be a cube her. All right, so if you would, let's take a look, talk about your relationship. It's catalogic at IBM. I know you have a long-standing partnership, you might call that, that's evolving and getting a little bit stronger. And Ken, if you would, maybe paint that picture a little bit for us. Oh, look, I mean, these guys are just fantastic to work with. We've been working with IBM for a couple of years now. We're excited, because we're going to continue to move the relationship forward. We've got some exciting new announcements about supporting even more of their storage coming out later this year. What we're really excited about is the way that they've jumped in and they have a complete line of Flash products. And as you know from our conversation the other day, Flash is just taking the market absolutely by storm, particularly around the primary applications. So what we've done at IBM is dramatically extend our portfolio this year. We've been a market leader for years in all Flash. And we see Flash as you bickered across all primary data sets. So whether that be the high performance databases, VMware environments or virtualized environments, cloud configurations, big data analytics, doesn't matter what the workload is. And we have all sorts of price points, all sorts of different performance. Flash does have different performance characteristics depending on how you configure it, and how you use it substantially. Now, of course, any Flash configuration substantially faster than any traditional storage array or any hybrid array, 10x to as much as 100x in real world application spaces. So we've expanded it down from our high end into very cost effective entry products as low as $19,000 street price, not right there at the point of attack end user RAID 5 configuration for 19,000. We have big data analytics, all Flash configurations. We have mainframe in the upper end of the Linux community and what's left of the Unix world that's still out there. That few Solaris and AIX business, we have a lot of products in that space, again, all going Flash, and it doesn't matter what the workload is. Virtualized workloads, database workloads, virtual server workloads, virtual desktop workloads, cloud workloads, new world databases, Splunk, Spark, Mongo, Hadoop, Cassandra, all of those types of workloads now can be all Flash, and we have the right workloads with the right solution at the right price point. And you pick the right price point, the right solution you need for the right workload and application. Yeah, and it seems to me that you've talked about performance, obviously, key factor there, speed, you know, off the charts, but cost is the one that once that's been solved, as you said, is that the big nighter? Is that what's going to light the way? Well, what you're seeing is Flash is essentially at the same price as disk was. So there's a number of storage-efficient technologies on the primary side, which is what we do. Catalotic edges, efficiency technologies on the copy side because so much copies of data are made, not only for disaster protection, but for test and dev, snapshotting that's then used for backup, so they track all that to get efficiency on the secondary side of the equation. We do things like real-time compression, we block-level D-dup, we have all kinds of technologies designed to cut the cost of Flash, and so when you factor that in, Flash is way less expensive actually than disk, and when you look at how it impacts your data center. So for example, if you were running certain workloads and we have a real-world public reference, to run their workload, which is a database workload, took 80 servers because the storage was so slow, so you over-provision your servers because of what's called storage latency. That customer just swapped out the storage for Flash and went from 80 physical servers to 10 to do the exact same workload. So the impact of Flash is not just performance-oriented, it's actually very cost-oriented, not just what does it cost per gigabyte for the storage, but if you can take out 70 servers, you just cut not only the CapEx on his server farm, all the operational expenditures around it, and then what Catalotic does, people make copies of the primary data sets and they make everything efficient on the copy side or if you will, the secondary side of storage, and so they complement each other, what we do on primary and what they do on secondary. So let's talk about that a little bit. So if you think about it, productivity is a function of the amount of work that you can do divided by the amount of cost or resources consumed to perform that work. So Flash has significant benefits, as you just said, on the cost side, but when we start talking about a lot more copies that can be made available to developers or decision makers in a lot of different forms, now we're accelerating the speed by which these digital assets get created and we're improving productivity, not just through efficiency and the cost, but accelerating the value that IT's able to deliver through the business. That's exactly right, you're hitting the nail on the head because as Eric over here said, it saves CAPEX and OPEX with just Flash, but if you add a copy data management product, particularly one like ours, that has, it's really a combination of copy data management, we have a workflow engine, and we have full access to REST APIs, that the customer can begin to tailor it to their environment and solve a lot of pain points like around test dev, database copies, snap copies, things like that. You know, they did some studies, IDC actually did some studies earlier this year where at any given time, a customer would have 50 copies of different data floating around the neighborhood, 50 snaps. And the reason this is a complex issue is because you have many different storage types taking many different snaps, you have applications taking snaps. And so if you think about it, this all starts by organizing the snaps, putting them in a searchable database, if you will, then offering a workflow engine where you can automate the process, even make it self-service, right? And then at the end of the day, what can happen is they can move, delete, so they really kind of, you have control over your environment, but what they can do is they can begin to really save huge money. So with Flash, you're gonna have good CAPEX and OPEX, but if you put our ECX product in, which is what a lot of our customers call copy data management on steroids, you can see geometric savings of that OPEX and CAPEX. But you can also accelerate development time. Absolutely, efficiency all about efficiencies. All those things are radically improved. Absolutely, right? And then if you start having, like we have a series of REST APIs, you can begin to really tailor it to that customer's environment. So if you're doing, again, I'll go back to the test dev example. In test dev, we can tie that directly into things like puppet, chef, blue mix, right? These are all development tools that make it totally efficient for the software developer, right? And that's just one use case. Go ahead. So Eric, as IBM introduces more of these products, IBM spends in the storage business for a long time. Forever, yeah. They're the best. In many respects, IBM created the whole concept of storage administration, whatever was 30 years ago now. But as IBM does this, is storage increasingly being elevated as customers see their data volumes going up and the need to track where this data is, who's using it, the number of copies in place. How is that impacting the way IBM thinks about the concept of an overall system? Well, we look at it from the application space. It's all about the application's workloads and use cases. And customers want to optimize the business value of that data. So as it's growing exponentially, you need to be able to access that data quickly. And most importantly, it needs to be always there. So everyone talks about speed, speed, speed for flash. It's not just about speed of flash. Your flash array needs to be reliable, available, and serviceable, just like a hard drive array had to be. And so you're looking at different characteristics and performance, different characteristics and price, different characteristics in the RAZ capability, the reliability available and serviceability, and you tie that to what you need for your workloads. You've got the highest end oracle database in a company. Let's say that company's all oracle. So you need something like our flash systems, A9000 or flash system 900. But if you've got the oracle database that tracks their asset management, which would mean things like chairs, tables, and whiteboards, that's not high performance. That could go on our store-wise 5030F, which is way more cost-effective. And it's incredibly fast compared to a hard drive array, but not as fast as our flash systems. So it's very important to A, that you have the performance, but B, if you don't have the reliability, doesn't matter how fast you are. If the thing fails, then your cloud goes down, your virtual environment goes down, your VMware doesn't work, you can't access that oracle or their SAP or that Hadoop. And so it's really about how to optimize those workloads, those applications, and those use cases. And storage is the rock solid foundation underneath that allows you to do that. Absolutely. And when you're going into a world that's all about cloud, which means real-time access and self-service, and the self-service aspect by the way means that you don't always have a storage admin accessing it. So if the thing fails and the guy's a VMware admin or a developer in oracle or in any other environment, he doesn't know what to do. So you can't have the storage fail. And in cognitive workloads and big data analytics workloads where you're running petabytes and petabytes and petabytes of information as fast as you possibly can, you're trying to make business decisions in real-time so you need the speed. So what if it's super fast and then it fails? So if you put it on a database for black trading, for example, or some of the financial applications, if it's really fast and then it fails, that didn't help you, it hurts you. So it's all about how to manage those workloads, applications, use cases, not just for performance, which everyone knows flash is, but all that reliability, availability and service ability. And then they manage a catalogic on the backside, all the copies that people create, which is critical to make sure that those get managed appropriately. And you don't have, you really need 50 copies? Fine, but you don't want 150 because it's completely inefficient on the storage side. And then the developer doesn't know what to use. So you just made it worse for yourself. So you just raised an interesting point relating to data governance. So I know that obviously catalogic is some ideas about how data governance is likely to evolve, partly in response to the need to manage multiple snaps and understand where they are. Talk to us a little bit about how data governance, which is fundamentally about how a business brings policy, roles, responsibilities, to assets as data becomes more of an asset. How's governance changing? Oh, I think governance is huge because data is exploding. And particularly you start moving, you have numbers of copies, like Eric was saying. How do you track that? How do you know where it is? How do you, if you're in a compliance-based business, you could be in a lot of trouble. So you've got to make sure you can audit and know where it goes. And again, one of the ways to do that is to keep it under control and not have so many copies floating around. In his example, you might make 10 to 15 copies of that database. Why do that if you only need one, right? That's one of our big advantages that we have versus some of our competitors. We do what's called in-place copy data management, which means we simply leverage Eric's great storage out there. So a lot of our competitors will actually put a copy of it, they'll make a copy on Eric's storage, move it to their storage, and then you've kind of exacerbated the problem a little bit, right? Well, it's like hoarding, right? Exactly right. But I mean, kind of to Peter's point and somewhat you're saying is that because we can, we do, right? And so we make all these copies. That's exactly right. I might not need, you know, 15 of them, but because I can and it's cheaper and storage is going down. Cleaning out that closet. We all have that closet at the house that we just keep putting stuff in. And one of these days, we think we're gonna clean it out and the thing just grows and grows and then you have to buy another house to get another closet. So again, how does all this curb that behavior and then allow me to monitor through some governance policy when somebody is going over the line and we bring them back on the line and we get a little more regular, restrictive activity? Well, again, because of our workflow engine that we have in the product, you can set thresholds, you can automate the process. So as an example, when a DBA or somebody gets a copy of the database, you can put a time limit on when it's gonna wipe it out. They're gonna stay in sync across the board. So again, you're not replicating this thing time and time again. They're getting timely data when they need it and then it can automatically be removed. But at the same time, one of the biggest problems within an IT organization is making available, making data available to the disparate groups that need it. Absolutely. The administrative costs of I need data. Well, we'll get around to giving you that second Tuesday in September. Right. Being able to do this much faster and utilize flash technologies to facilitate that process has an impact on cost, has an impact on the benefits, which increases productivity, has an impact on governance, but also has an impact on the healthy, friendly relations between IT and the business. Yes. Well, what's happening is you're undergoing a revolution in the data center. Cloud, obviously it started with virtualization. Now it's extending to the cloud. Now you have a line of business that's more involved than IT than it's ever been before. So the last thing you want is to worry about your storage and you just want it to be the foundation. Okay, I'm from Silicon Valley. We have earthquakes. Buildings really fall down on earthquakes if they have a bad foundation. If you have a rock solid foundation, your cloud, your cognitive, your database workloads will always be fine. You want to make sure that as you're doing that you're doing it cost effectively. So both high performance that you need, but high performance has a whole bunch of different price points at high performance because the entire world's got high performance. And the thing from an IT perspective and a business on a perspective, flash storage is actually the evolution. The revolution is the rest of the data center. Right. I'm old enough where when I took my first computer class at the University of California it was on a punch card. Then it all went tape. Anyone who's seen a 1985 Schwarzenegger spy movie, it's all tape. Then you see a 1995 Schwarzenegger spy movie and it's all hard drive arrays. Now it's all flash arrays. So it's just an evolution from a storage perspective and it coincides with the revolution in the data center of cloud, cognitive, big data analytics, real time evaluation of data sets. And so flash is coming at the first and perfect time as you have this revolutionary confluence in the data center, in the cloud, and in the application workload use case space. The fact that flash is only an evolution is actually great because you don't have to worry about it. It's just an evolution of storage and allows you to take advantage of the revolution in your data center and your application and workload space. That's the way that flash brings is it's not a revolution. It helps the revolution. It does, because as Eric was saying you want to modernize your data center is what you're out to do. And if you flash is a good step towards that and then if you add a copy data management tool like our product ECX on top of it it gives you the flexibility to move to the cloud, move data up to the cloud and back. It allows you to start offering self service to your people so it doesn't take weeks or days to get that copy of the data they can start doing it themselves. So it's a step in the right direction as he said from an evolution to the revolution to the data center. You know, I'll bet out there somewhere right now there are a couple of millennials watching say did you already said about punch cards? What are punch cards? I don't know. Well, it's all about data at the right place at the right time for the right people. And you guys are a great example of getting that job done. And thanks for being with us and sharing your story and we wish you continued success down the road. I'd like to say one thing if you would please finish real quick. If anybody out there has SVC or if they have any in the flash from IBM please come see us. We've got a great product that'll greatly increase the capex. It's catalogic software for Ken Barth. Thank you gentlemen for being with us here on theCUBE. We continue our coverage from VMworld after this. Thank you.