 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with David Floyer with Wikibon.org and this is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our continuous coverage of EMC World 2013. We extract the signal from the noise, we bring you the best guests that we can find. We like to call them tech athletes. Chris Flash is here, he's vice president of global delivery with CSC. We're unpacking Viper software-defined storage. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, David, glad to be here. Now, you guys are a beta customer of this so-called project born, now we know what is Viper and we're going to go deeper into that, but let's start with CSC and what your role is at the company. We've had a number of folks on from CSC in the past, you guys are a great service organization. What do you do there and what's your role? Well, David, I own all the storage and compute assets for the company and so roughly $1.8 billion P&L, all storage and compute for CSC. Yeah, okay, so you help manage the infrastructure delivery, is that right, or is it more managed services or a combination? So, I have full P&L responsibilities, so everything from offering introduction, all the way back through what we think of as traditional product management for storage as a service offerings, compute as a service offerings, mainframe offerings, the whole infrastructure piece. Yeah, you guys are a massive global organization, you do pretty much customer services, what I need, you say, okay, figure out how to do it. So, you've got a diverse set of offerings from an infrastructure standpoint, I would imagine. Is that right? In this case, diversity was not the goal. No, it just sort of happened that way. It's exactly right, it was a long evolution to get to the kind of diversity that we have, and that's part of the challenge. And so, establishing our offering standards, having standard architectures, having standard deployment approaches and technologies, is really a big part of our go forward strategy, because that defines our to be state. In terms of all of our legacy systems, being able to take a product like Viper, for example, and virtualize big parts of our storage estate, and look at that as one resource, is absolutely critical to us, and one of the reasons Viper's so interested in it. Yeah, I mean, one of the hard parts for somebody in your role over the last 20 years has been every, you know, there's a controller for every API out there, right? That's exactly right. You have a lot of different controllers, and a big way, you know, EMC was part of the culprit along with some others, but you got to like the move that they're making. So talk about, you're a beta customer of Viper, talk about your initial experiences, and then we'll get into the sort of business benefits. Right, so we started working with EMC last year on this, and really our goal was to get it rolled out in a proof of concept environment, and we put it out in our Ottawa labs here within the last three months. We took a good portion of our technology teams and implementation teams through it. The goal of which was to become familiar with it, but also to give feedback to our EMC partner as to those things and to emphasize and prioritize those elements of it that were most critical to our use cases, multi-tenancy and those kinds of things. Yeah, so it seems that EMC is aiming this at least initially at service providers like yourself, the multi-tenancy aspects, but so we were talking before about sort of the different infrastructure components that you have, how do you envision software-defined storage infrastructure as changing that? Will it allow you to sort of standardize and consolidate, or do you still see that you're going to have to maintain that sort of separate stovepice for quite some time to come? Well, you know, the answer, as is often in these cases, is all of the above, right? Is that the most important thing for us in our go-forward strategy is to define that 2B state. What are our standards? What technologies? What products? Which partners are we going to standardize on? And EMC is obviously a big part of that. In terms of the legacy environment, we know that this is not an overnight fix. Software-defined storage is a big part of that. It's the least virtualized element in our data centers. But we also recognize that we need to add a software-defined networking and compute to that to help virtualize more of our infrastructure, which, quite frankly, is not as virtualized as it might be and certainly not to the degree that it's going to be necessary years going forward. So, let's talk about the as is. We talk about the 2B a little bit. Describe in whatever detail you want. How would you describe your existing infrastructure? We talked about a lot of different components and so forth. Let's set it up and then we'll talk about the future Nirvana. Yeah, sure, yeah, I use that term myself. Because the current state is essentially 67 data centers spread around the globe. And in that it's upwards of 100,000 X86 boxes, 75,000 or so mid-range boxes of some description. Petabytes and petabytes of storage, some of it virtualized, some of it not. And as we all know, this is all part of where we came from, our legacy, having taken many of our customers' environments in that your mess for less, if you will, business model of the last 25 years and information technology outsourcing and taking it in. It's now, the tools are mature enough, our partnerships are mature enough in the industry to finally take advantage and I think to really make great strides in that direction. So one of your big challenges is you got to move faster, right, you're seeing Amazon go like crazy and spin in the flywheel and so now granted, it's easy to say, okay, that's public cloud, we don't have to participate, but you can't put your head in the sand when you see innovations like that. So you have to move faster. How does software-defined storage, or does it allow you to move faster? Well, it does because you're no longer constrained by the traditional cloud approach, which is make things as homogeneous as possible so as to keep the variables to a minimum. The value of having this software-defined storage is that it not only accounts for, but embraces the diversity that we have in our storage estate and the fact that we can create our own APIs, for example. So even if it may not be a compelling market decision for a third party to make that API, we can make our own decisions, our own investment decisions in that integrated into the product and it becomes a differentiator for us in the market. So I want to make sure I understand that. So you're saying that you may have some IP, some other function that you've developed, and that you can leverage that platform through a set of APIs and even innovate through your own set of APIs. Exactly right, and so the architecture, the underlying architecture of Viper is quite innovative in that way and quite modern. And so, again, we're in a competitive environment just like everybody else is, and we need to be in a position to make the decisions that are best for our business based on things as proprietary and individual as the particular location and makeup and contents of a data center, for example. And so being able to implement Viper in that way and develop our own APIs for the very storage arrays we have is a really valuable aspect. So let's go through an example. So you guys do a fair amount of business within sort of SAP environments, I'm sure, right? So you've got to do some level of integration. EMC's obviously put a lot of effort into that, but it's put a lot of brute force effort, frankly. People and a lot of engineering resource. How will a software-defined storage approach generally and Viper specifically accelerate that integration? And where is CSC's value at in that? Well, the issue is one of, for all of our customers, we typically weren't there when the decisions were made for the infrastructure that they have in place. And so recognize that there's going to be no perfect system, no perfectly integrated system that's going to be, that'll answer all the questions. However, in a speed-to-market environment, this allows us to go and integrate in those environments where we had no say in what the original makeup of the disk estate was, or the storage estate was, and puts us in a much more competitive environment to where our competitors might have to go in and either trade out the estate, or spend a lot more time configuring the estate than we would by implementing a Viper solution. Because you're delivering this now, essentially as a set of services, and you can evoke those services as needed. That's correct. So there's one question I was going to ask you. You said you're writing your own APIs. How are you managing Viper yourself? How are you tying that in with your own orchestration level for things like the servers and the network, et cetera? How are you tying the whole thing in and getting some economies of scale and economies for your operations? Well, so the challenge for us is really, I think as you indicated in your question there, making, setting those priorities, and determining where to integrate number one, which APIs are most valuable for us, and then ultimately in our multi-tenancy environment, being able to come back and say, okay, which customers does this affect, right? So, and we're currently in the process of doing that, but we have to do it on a buy data center, buy customer bottoms-up analysis, right? The good news is that when we find out what the answer should be, we now have a tool to implement it in a fast fashion. Right, and that's your direction, and you think you'll be able to get to that situation where you can manage it, manage Viper with your own sets of tools. Absolutely, that's our goal, and we... That's pretty unique, isn't it? I like to think of it as a competitive advantage. Absolutely. Right, well congratulations. So, do you see going forward, do you see a majority of your storage going through this, or you've got pieces where it's very suitable for? Can you talk about where you see it makes the most value in the data center? You know, the issue is really of prioritizing, and so we've identified some of our larger and more complex, and in some cases, let's say more mature estates to take advantage of this, because each one of them presents a unique business case and value proposition both to us as the manager of that system and to our customers. So we're... We, a tool like this presents us a tremendous amount of opportunity. Opportunity's not the problem, it's prioritization and execution, exactly right, that's where we are today. So, you gave us a sense of your early impressions, pretty positive, what kinds of things do you really need EMC to execute on to make a difference in your business? What's on there to-do list in your view? Well, I had some very frank and candid discussions inside of, with our very capable support infrastructure inside of EMC, and they've very much made a commitment to this partnership to help us, frankly, do a lot of that prioritization and help us do that analysis, which is quite frankly in an environment where we have 67 data centers and 3,500 customers and the petabytes of storage out there, which that level of partnership involved this has been critical to our adoption of it, and that's actually going to be critical to its long-term success. Excellent, Chris Flash, CSC, peeling back the complexity with software-defined storage and transforming your business. Really good luck with the initiative, it sounds like you got a great business and a competitive one, but also a lucrative one and one that's in constant transition, I would imagine. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, it was great to meet you and hear your perspectives and really appreciate it. Thanks very much, David, appreciate it. Pleasure. Okay, everybody, keep it right there. We'll be right back. We've got some folks from Isilon coming on, we're going to go deep into that side of EMC's business and then we're going to come back to the software-defined piece with Amitabh Sarvastavar later on today, so keep it right there, this is Dave Vellante with my co-host, David Floyd, this is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this work.