 We're back here at VMworld in Vegas. Now the scene where we were Dave Vellante, my co-host with HP last June. So take it away. We're at HP Discover in the same building. And we're here with David Scott, Senior Vice President of HP Storage. Welcome, David. Nice to see you, Dave. Nice to see you. Former CEO of 3PAR and now going head to head with the whales. How's it feel? It's great. You know, we see a really exciting opportunity leveraging HP's converged infrastructure strategy, which I just heard Sonny from Cisco talking about. And so obviously it's getting great brand recognition if Cisco is talking about HP's strategy. Really pleased to hear that. In storage, we're going great guns. We introduced back in the summertime frame our HP Converged Storage strategy, talking about storage without boundaries. And then last week, we followed that up, actually making that a reality with the introduction of HP Peer Motion, a storage federation technology that allows you to have kind of transparent online data mobility between either lots of 3PAR systems or lots of left hand systems. So you can do, you know, transparent workload balancing, lifecycle asset management, you know, improve your utilization efficiency and thin provisioning on a data center or a metropolitan level rather than just in a single system. David, just before we get into some of the meat and potatoes of the conversation, just talk about the performance of ESSN. We talked to Mike Vanick yesterday, he said the business performance was fantastic. So take us through the momentum that you guys have right now on the business side. Well, I think what we're seeing across the whole ESSN is a strategy where having adopted converged infrastructure as a guiding focus with both servers, storage and networking a couple of years ago. It's really coming to fruition and adding value to customers and that's building our market momentum up. The HP networking team have been firing on all cylinders after the 3Com acquisition and coming forward. And now with HP storage, you're starting to see some of the same kind of, that same leverage. Last quarter, we just announced that both the HP 3PAR platform as well as the HP StoreOnce de-duplication platform had triple digit growth rates. But more importantly, in external disk storage, we grew 17% year over year. So the momentum is starting to build. And you guys, obviously 3PAR was a big part of that injection and looking at in our research, you guys and tracking you guys. HP had an offering kind of in there. And also boom, 3PAR comes in and you guys just expands the sales capacity. How's that going now? It's going really well because, our strategy has been to optimize people's existing traditional IT environments which have been based on established platforms like our P2000 MSA, the mid-range EVA platform and the high-end P9500 or XP platform. And we've been focused on kind of tech refreshes and new software that allows conservative storage customers to continue on their path. Then at the same time, we're building out these new generations of storage solutions for virtualization, cloud, what we call big everything data environments with 3PAR, left hand, our iBricks, 16 petabytes scalable file system, and with our store once de-duplication technology. So that our customers can have both best solutions in the old world as well as great solutions for the new cloud world. And we tie it all together with a set of converged systems solutions that we announced recently. And in fact, it was our app systems for vertically integrated solutions for business intelligence, data warehousing, exchange, OLTP, our virtual systems, which were all about providing integrated solutions bit like Vblocks, but better, best of breed components at every level for virtualization VDI environments. And then our unique cloud system offering that basically allows people to get new private clouds up and running in less than 30 days. So just to clarify, that was triple digit growth of, you said, store once and- And 3PAR. 3PAR, yeah, you published that in your earnings. There wasn't a lot of talk on the earnings call. The analysts wanted to talk about something else, we won't go there, but that's a pretty impressive growth rate. When you guys were bought out by HP, you were roughly a $200 million company, is that right? We were just over a $200 million run rate company. Yeah, yeah. And so we're talking about that, plus the store once is pretty small, so you're talking about at least a doubling, at least based on the interpretation of that. So obviously you'll get to a billion dollars a lot faster with HP than you would have independently. And that's really where the leverage is paying off. I mean, we're getting the benefit of HP's worldwide sales force, our tremendous channel kind of partners the channel is becoming very excited about HP storage, our converged storage strategy, the opportunity to make money. And so we're starting to see a lot of interest from people who may be hesitant about buying 20-year-old storage architectures from EMC. Well, but the obvious question there, I got to ask it, is that growth, could the obvious questions, is it coming from EVA customers buying 3PAR or is it coming from legacy EMC? There are some EVA customers, obviously, who are very happy to see a new platform with all of the functionality of 3PAR, and so we're seeing some of those customers choose 3PAR, but there's a lot of that growth that is really associated with competitive market share takeaways. And that's what, you know, we were growing our external disk storage 17% year over year. So what about the competition? So Dell has, he has a compelling, you know that involved in that war, but they're bulking up and they're pushing hard, aggressive. How do you guys look at Dell right now in terms of their approach? Well, you know, equal logic and compelling, are pretty much the same thing differentiated by a front end protocol. You know, the positioning of it is difficult. One's got iSCSI, the other one's got fiber channel, it really doesn't do a lot of different things. So I think they have a lot of positioning challenges, whereas, you know, with our HP left hand solutions, the P4000, we have solutions targeted in virtualization from a virtual SAN appliance that runs in a virtual machine to our P4800 bladed solution that supports, you know, small to medium-sized enterprises. And then at the other end of the spectrum from the mid-range to the very high end, we have HP three-part. We think we have some of the best intellectual property in the storage industry right now. You mentioned your new announcements, you had a new V-class, I guess, right? Which essentially is going to replace the high end of the T-class. The federated storage product that you guys announced, the peer-to-peer piece. I want to talk about that a little bit. So by federated storage, we're talking about an autonomous set of resources that talk to each other. They're independent physical devices, but they create this pool within a data center, right? Or within a synchronous distance. That's right. Rather than having to kind of view storage as a single set of assets, you can now take, let's say, all of your HP three-part storage arrays and treat them as a single management entity from the perspective of data mobility. So you can transparently move workloads from one system, let's say a low-end F-class system to a new V-class system. And that happens online transparently without having to add the overhead of virtualization appliances. If you look at all of the competitors out there, they have to add appliances like EMC's Invista. Oh, that was the one that went away. The Vplex, sorry, Vplex or IBM's SVC, et cetera. And you have to buy that extra layer of cost and complexity, which also you have to administer. So it's more operating cost. And then you're adding a level in your architecture that really is a point of failure. So it's impeding the resilience of your overall architecture. And peer-to-peer federation, storage federation, with HP Peer Motion works exactly the same way as V-Motion does in Compute Federation. V-Motion is peer-to-peer between VMware virtual machines going to another server. And that's exactly how the HP three-part Peer Motion works. So, Dave, now one of the benefits of some of those other approaches, though, is they bring in heterogeneity, you do not. That's not something that you're attacking, is that right? At this point in time, the actual core federation capability is clearly three-part systems or left-hand systems. Separating. Three-part to three-part, or left-hand to left-hand. Three-part to three-part. But obviously there's the opportunity for developing an on-ramp into that environment. And that on-ramp may start to include competitors' kind of solutions, whether it be EMC, network appliance, IBM. And of course, most of the customers are looking for the tremendous improvements in agility and efficiency that platforms like left-hand and three-part can offer. And so we see a very strong kind of opportunity for allowing customers to really incrementally get tremendous improvements in return on investment by thinning their legacy storage environments moving to kind of a three-part platform. And if we can extend our storage federation Peer Motion capability to enable that migration, it's going to make things much easier for customers to kind of go through that process. So last time we talked, you were at Carl at Chebacca, at HP Discover, you had your little meeting with Carl from VMware. What's happened since June? And what's going on in your world that people haven't heard yet? Well, you know, we just were talking about today how the world has changed with virtualization and cloud in the way that 10 years ago, you'd have a five-year planning horizon. You know, five years ago, you know, it was a two-year planning horizon. Today, with so much use of virtualization and cloud and self-service, your planning horizon has virtually vanished. And so this issue is about how do you handle unpredictability that is associated with massive amounts of virtualization? And so what we've been introducing are platforms, new platforms that solve that problem, the new P10,000 three-power platform that we've just introduced is really the world's best platform for handling mixed, unpredictable workloads that may be heavily transactional or sequential. In real time too. In real time, being able to have the agility to non-disruptively change quality of service levels to deliver autonomic storage tiering. And then now with peer motion, the expansion of the capability to treat all of your assets in a metropolitan or data center level, so that's really been the major area of focus. But we've also introduced new software for left-hand. The same peer motion software is now out on the left-hand platform. And we've just introduced integration, application integration for snapshots into virtual machine environments like VMware and Hyper-V. So it's been a busy time. It's going to be busy next six months, I can imagine for you as you guys roll out all this good stuff. And it is hyper, we heard, you know, Hurricane Irene, we were talking about that earlier. It's like, it's kind of screwed everyone's plans up coming out here on the East Coast. And that's unpredictable in the cloud. There's a lot like that. So, Dave, you have anything else? Yeah, so, well, I just wanted to thank you again for coming on theCUBE. You've been a great friend of ours. And I love your perspectives, the vision, and congratulations on the integration. Looks like it's going well. A lot of work to do, I'm sure. It's going really well. Yeah. Very pleased. Well, we, you know, the SSN, we've said Donatelli's business looks good. You guys are executing. I think convergent infrastructure is really, is really working out for HP as a strategy. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, well, we had said there's a two horse race there, VCE and HP, now others have entered. I think NetApp is doing a good job there and has impressed us. You know, Oracle's doing its own thing. You know, and, you know, we're waiting for IBMs to shoot a drop. That's probably got to happen here shortly. I mean, they've got to play in that. I think the fundamental difference is we've really committed to best of breed products at every level of the stack. Servers, storage, networking, management, in an open environment. And if you look at our competitors, you either compromise on best of breed, you may have a few market leading long in the tooth products, or you compromise on openness. I don't know. And that's where HP is at. I just told Tom Georgians when he was on, I said, Tom, you know, to me, it's like Democrats and Republicans, the similarities are greater than the differences, but okay, we can argue about nuance. Okay, we're good. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.