 Okay, we're here live at VMworld 2013 for a special CUBE presentation. We are on the ground in San Francisco Live at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. Now this is an anchor desk. We are sitting here live on the field behind second phase. You can see behind me. This is a major, major activity for NetApp, special customer event. Guys, welcome to the CUBE special presentation. Anchor desk and all, Jake Hidt, CTO. Vaughn Stewart, director of technical marketing. This is going to be an exciting night. Stay with us for great interviews, talking about flash, software-defined storage here on the field. So guys, what do you think? Pretty exciting for NetApp. Second year in a row. This is where I'm in the short, short stop field backing up for a fly ball. Wind is blowing. The hair's going to be out of control. But let's get right into it. On the technical side, Jake, talk about the software-defined revolution that's going on. Really, two years ago, within the past 24 months, massive shift on software-defined, we started with networking, now moving into storage. This is the data center of the future. What's your take on software-defined storage? A lot of discussion this year is around software-defined data center, software-defined networking, software-defined storage, and I listen to what people talk about the software-defined storage. I sometimes think that the industry is thinking too small about this. We think about software-defined storage. It's these three key attributes. It's got to be a set of virtualized storage services that really drive the power of what applications are doing in storage. It's got to be able to run on a range of platforms to give buyers choice of how they want to deploy it. Most critically, it's got to be able to be controlled by the applications. As we're headed to a world where the applications get to decide what resources and what infrastructure they use, not IT professionals who statically provision it to a much more dynamic world. So one of the things we talked about in theCUBE, actually, at Moscone, at VMworld, was the trend that's now validated by cloud, and that is applications are driving infrastructure configurations on the fly, on demand, automated, that is happening. So let's break that down. What is really happening in the tech and at the customer base? So can you share with some of the things that you've learned from customers and what are you talking to them about? The biggest thing we hear from customers is, they buy into a whole virtualization premise. They're ready to go on automation. They're trying to make it real. How do I do this at scale? How do I get this to be operationally efficient, fast, and deliver the level of responsiveness that my users are expecting of me? You know, in Candle, there's a lot of innovation to go. It is still an unsolved problem, but a lot of pretty cool things coming out to help solve it. Vaughn, Stuart, your director of technical marketing, you're in the trenches. You're talking to the developers within NetApp. You're also talking to the product management guys, also to the customers. So you're seeing the full spectrum. What is the big disruptive enable that you're seeing with software-defined storage? It's driving this massive inflection point. I know some companies are some position well for it. Some are doing extremely challenge, if you will. But this is a big trend. What is the key disruptive enabler? I think the key disruptive enabler is actually this VMware ecosystem and the administrators in that space. They are accustomed to being able to provision on demand, respond with a great amount of agility to the desires of their infrastructure teams and deploy new systems. But now they're being tasked to go higher up in the stack. They're being tasked to drive greater integrations into the application teams and be even more responsive to the needs of an application, whether it's bringing a new application on board or having to have the wear-with-all with the let an app owner be able to make the appropriate choices within the infrastructure stack and consume resources to respond to either change in loads or the needs to apply a patch, move forward or move a workload. At the end of the day, no one purchases storage for storage sakes. Storage is a requirement to run an application and this software-defined ecosystem is ready and primed to bring storage under their fold. So we were talking earlier today about software-defined data center. A lot of software, but let's not forget the data center. So you guys have a lot of experience in the data center. There still is a footprint. You still have those kinds of operating challenges within the data center. So what is the bridge to the new world knowing that there has to be a pre-existing condition called legacy stuff. You guys have a good install base. You have power and cooling issues. You have new software. Some of the internet operating system model goes to the data centers. The data center is an operating environment. Jay, share with us the vision around what that's going to look like because at the end of the day, you still need physical premise. The assets got to be configured. Is it flash? Is it new software? And you still have to manage the capacity, the power and cooling, those kinds of things. At the end of the day, you still got compute, you've got hardware, you need power, you need storage to run all these great applications. If you look out, say a decade, the data center a decade from now is going to be very large. So probably a number of them spread out probably as close as possible to hydroelectric power sources where they can get decent cooling, decent power. Very few people will be in there because the applications they'll be doing, most of the control, most of the provisioning, most of the operations. And you'll have a handful of people walking around dusting the equipment to make sure it stays running. Guys, we got to take a pause here and just kind of reflect on the situation. We are, the Cube is on the outfield grass at AT&T Park celebrating a customer event that you guys have and really you guys done it right. Just for the folks out there that are watching, share with you, share with them what's happening here. Who's here? Why are they here? What's all the excitement and what are you guys excited about? So we are joined by a number of our key technology partners, including Cisco and Intel. We've got some celebrities here highlighted by Ronnie Lott, Pro Ball Hall of Fame, NFL legend, personal man crush of mine, if I must say so. And you know what, some of our top customers, sales teams, technology teams, all coming to Intermingle and talk about their cloud needs today and where they're looking to go over the next three, four, five years. I think they're the greatest things though is the customers that are here tonight. This is a unique experience to be able to come to be on the field of the World Series champions and be able to just get an experience you just don't normally get. Yeah, you get to walk the field, you get to go in the dughouse, you get to see the World Series trophy. Well, I'll tell you, I'm personally excited. One, you guys are great. The NetApps are a great company and we're huge sports fans. And Dave Vellante and I always talk about the ESPN of Tech being the Cube. So this is kind of a dream come true for us. Thanks for inviting us, we appreciate it. But guys, I want to get a little technical here because NetApp has a great loyal following and if you look at the NetApp customer base, these guys are smart. You got technical customers, they know what they're talking about. What are they saying right now about the key challenges? Because you guys are kind of ahead of the pack in the marketplace. You've got flash, you've got a good strategy, but your customers in the middle of Iowa aren't on the bleeding edge like Silicon Valley. You got to go out there and you got to continue to deliver function and functionality to them. What are they saying to you, Jake? Yeah, I think the thing I hear most from customers is almost a little bit of trepidation because the magnitude of change that's going on now in the IT industry between what's going on with virtualization, with cloud, with hybrid clouds, with flash, with software defined, everything. They're worried about what do I tackle and what order do I tackle it in. Most customers realistically, they've figured out virtualization, they've got a level of efficiency in their data center and they're trying to figure out what to do next. And we can give them a lot of help. How to sequence these things. What's your take on the application trend right now? Obviously, in the old days, you provisioned some infrastructure and you can only take what was given to you relatively. Yeah, you throw some apps, handful of apps. Now it's radical change from that. Yeah, it is a radical change and the app owners, as well as the infrastructure teams, they're getting spoiled by their ability to self-provision at home with their own devices, their mobile phones, et cetera. And so that's putting a lot of pressure in on us as storage vendors to deliver it. And while software defined storage may be the new marketing term, it actually encapsulates and summarizes the direction that we've been driving towards for the last 10 years. If you look at what we're doing around clustered on tap in terms of providing virtualized storage services so we can provision a policy enabled through RBAC policies within that device and enforced with QoS. And then mixing flash technologies both on the controller as well as in the host to eliminate the unexpected bumps in the night when a workload spike takes off in the cloud. This is just the foundational elements where it really gets interesting as in the programmable set of APIs and our integrations into our top partner technologies whether it's VMware VCAC and VCloud Director or vSphere all the way into, say, OpenStack or application suite such as Oracle SAP and the Microsoft suite. We're letting those infrastructure administrators consume on demand based on how they need to run their business as well as extend it out to the app teams. It's an exciting time to be in IT because we're making things move fast. Jay, we always talk about tech athletes but IT athletes that are trying to transform and hit the home run, so to speak, since we're here at AT&T Park, we'll talk about that home run. Sometimes it might be a dream but also a longer term plan. You got to hit those singles, hit a double here and there. What is the roadmap for your, the customer base right now that is in transition from architecturally moving to the app-centric environment that Vaughn was talking about. What are the top three, five things that they're doing right now that you can point to as examples that are, this is what is the playbook that's known to you? So I think there's three key things that everybody has to start with. They've got to figure out how to build IT as a utility. The virtualized compute environment, the virtualized network environment and to build a scale out storage environment that let them deploy applications as they come without knowing in advance what they are. That's one. The second is they've got to figure out how to change the people in the organization. This is a whole different operating model to run a virtualized data center much less a software defined data center. So there's a lot of retraining, rethinking about fiefdoms and control points and you don't worry about the network guy, the storage guy, the server guy. You want the build guy, the run guy that runs end to end through the infrastructure. And that's a huge change in mentality and people. I think the third one is they've got to change their expectations on the pace of change because so much is changing right now that things that used to take five years are now going to take two. Things that used to take two are going to be done in six months. The pace is just picking up in this industry. Brian, getting more deeper into the weeds on that. Go down, drill down off that top line and what are specifically things that they're looking at? Is it management? Is it the automation? And where is the first order of business? What room needs to get reset first for the IT guys to go to the new model? Before I go there, I actually wanted to highlight something that Jay said. You could take a key thing that Jay said which is administrative teams need to start changing their mindset. They are service providers. You are the in-house IT service provider and you're going to be measured against the external service providers, the Amazon web services of the world, et cetera. This is the goal. So you need to start looking at the technologies that are going to enable you to change into that model, whether it's the storage platforms, whether it's the integration points and the management. If you work in IT today, you are a service provider. Thank you. You have to think like one and act like one. Thank you. The second piece is, scale out. This is not to be underestimated. This construct of being able to scale out so that we can address the data that's... The data workload and growth that is coming, that it's here today and it's growing exponentially year over year. It's conservative estimates at 300% growth in the next three years. You've got to be able to plan, how am I going to support this in a scale out architecture, but not a web scale out architecture. Enterprises don't have the data center floor space to do triple copies for all their production environments. It has to be enterprise scale it. It has to have storage efficiencies built in it. That means cloning, storage reduction, all these capabilities, backup, an archive that really respects the construct of data gravity. You're not going to be able to move this data with efficiency, but how can I leverage the use cases of it when it's smarter means. Guys, let's spend the next couple of minutes we have left in this segment to go and talk about the hybrid cloud, because that's ultimately the hot area right now. Yeah, public cloud is great for some non-mission critical stuff, but the data centers are standing into the cloud. It's hybrid cloud. All the customers are pretty much voting with their fee if you look at the numbers, attendance of sessions at VM world and other conferences, and the role of flash. So Jay, what's going on in the hybrid world and how are you guys addressing that and what is the role of flash play under the hood? So the hybrid data center, it is the data center of the cloud. This is also where the software defined work that the industry is rallying around is building. Software defined storage is a foundation of building a hybrid data center by creating a data fabric that allows you to easily move data between premise, enterprise cloud, hyperscaler cloud, different service providers. That's what NetApp is building with clustered on tap. That's the soul of what we're going after. Flash is a piece of it. It'll speed it up. There'll be flash in the cloud. There'll be flash on the premise. Flash is to make everything faster. So clustered on tap is a hybrid cloud offering in your mind. Hybrid, it is the foundation of hybrid cloud and hybrid cloud is a foundation. It's an enabler. Absolutely. And if you look at what we're doing with clustered data on tap, and Jay brought up the point about a data fabric. We are actually a universal data fabric. We are the only storage platform that allows the customer to run VMware in their core, another form of hybridizing, maybe Microsoft and the Azure in their development team and also pushes that up into web service provider like Amazon web services with NetApp Private Storage. We can do all of this without ever transforming, mutating, importing, exporting the data. It's a universal platform that is cloud agnostic. You know, I asked, I was on the Cube earlier. We're talking about VMware. I always ask the executives, what's the core enabler? Disruptive enabler, every inflection point, every wealth creation boom has one. TCPIP created networking, et cetera, et cetera. And I go, what's going on now? What is the disruptive enabler? He goes, you know what? I still say virtualization. And he said, and you look at all the customers, that's still the common denominator in all the equation. Would you agree? So I think it's not virtualization by itself, it's what it enables. Virtualization untethered applications from a physical piece of compute hardware, the server. That's what we're doing with clustered on tap on the data side. We're untethering the data. So virtualization, data mobility and application mobility enables the virtualized data center enable software to find storage, enables the hybrid cloud. That's the disruption. All right, we are here live at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. I'm John Ferri, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is the Cube, special presentation, live on site, music, people hanging out, customers celebrating, NetApp's clustered on tap, their hybrid cloud flash. You guys have a great customer base, Jay. And well, thanks for spending your time. I know you got to get to some schmoozing. Appreciate taking the time to come in on the Cube and great stuff. Okay, we'll be right back here. This is a special presentation of the Cube. Dave Vellante's here. The Cube team is here. We are on the outfield grass behind you. You can see the Coke bottle and you've got the whole glove there. Awesome day. Guys, thanks for coming on the Cube. We'll be right back with our next guest for this short break here live at 18D Park in San Francisco, California for VMworld 2013. I'm John Ferri, we'll be right back.