 Hi, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's live production of the VTUG, Winter Warmer. We're here live at Gillette Stadium. Mike McDermott is here. He's the vice president with Nexan. Nexan's a company that has been around for a while and certainly known for their very high density arrays, they're getting into the hybrid flash storage business, a recent acquisition, I'm maybe not that recent by I-Mation. Mike, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, so nice to be here. So what do you think of this venue? Pretty good, you know, you're sort of an enemy territory, being from New York and all, but... Well, when you come up the escalators and elevators and it says EMC, you know you're an enemy territory. But no, it's been my third or fourth year here and it's a great venue, real good interaction at the booths, get a chance to do some breakout sessions. So it has been a real good event for Nexan. So Nexan's an interesting company. They've gone through a number of transitions and ridden some waves. I mean, for a while there, sort of prior to the downturn in 2008, 2009, Nexan's claim to fame was very high density storage. There was a big green IT push, you remember that? Correct. And Nexan fit very well because of the cost efficiencies and economics and probably through the downturn survive pretty well. Correct. So Nexan's clearly a survivor and now with all this flash coming on, you guys have become more of a hybrid array company. So let's talk a little bit more about Nexan. What's new these days? How the I-Mation acquisitions working out and what's new there? Yeah, I think one of the things that Nexan has brought to the table and we have for the last 13 years is that tier two dense storage, the big storage users, whether it be the labs, whether it be the NFL films, whether it be the entertainment. When you had a lot of data that had to be stored, Nexan was a go-to partner. We were the first ones to put 42 drives in a 4U chassis. They were ATA drives back in the day. They're now, of course, SATA drives with SAS and SSD in them. And about two years ago, we upgraded to the E-Series, which are faster controllers, more memory, and denser. They can handle four terabyte drives. They can handle SSDs directly. So in a 4U frame, we can still handle 240 terabytes or north of two petabytes in a rack with the May technology. And that is to be able to slow down the disk and save energy. But one of the things that's key today, obviously with VMware and the events that we're in, whether it be vSphere or whatever, is that the disk itself, to a certain extent, is no longer the special repository where five, 10 years ago, oh, my disk is so important. I have to keep all my assets there by the most expensive disk. Now with virtualization, what you're beginning to see is, the disk is becoming a commodity. You need good, reliable spinning disk with intelligence that lives above it. With that, we've released our hybrid. It's the NST, and we've got the 5,000 model and the 6,000 model. And with that, you get file system, snapshots, replication, SIFs, NFS, and then you can take our dense storage and layer it underneath that. And with that is the SSD technology for the IOPS and the flash. So that's one of the advantages of being around for 13 years is you actually have a stack, right? Correct. You're seeing a lot of, say, new flash startups emerge, a lot of action going on, but there's not a lot of software around it. Correct. You mentioned that. So at the same time though, they would say, oh, next thing, they're just bolting flash on. So how do you deal with the advantage of having the stack and the perceived, oh, well they're just sticking flash into a tier two device and we're better? How do you talk about that? Right, I think one of the things that we really see when it comes to the advantages of Next-An, being around for 13 years as we have, and then being acquired by a nation, is that not only do we have the customer base, I would say that we're probably north of 10 to 12,000 customers in 60 countries, so we're able to have the environments that we've been working in. As far as the engineering goes, we've got the file system, we've got the engineers to be able to develop and work on that. The system that we work with is our own proprietary system, so we're not bolting anything on. The storage itself is designed by Next-An. The drives are pre-tested by Next-An. Our reliability has always been there to just come on with a file system on top of that, whether it be an open file system where somebody just buys our desk or they do buy our NST, it is an integrated system. And the SSD, which is our fast tier layer, can give you the burst in IOPS that you need. If you think about IOPS, just from a pure IOPS standpoint, 10 years ago it was a brute force build, right? If you needed 50,000 IOPS, you bought more servers, more power, and more drives. But today's environment, especially if you have a VDI booth for an example, what do you need? You need 3,000 IOPS most of the day and 10,000 IOPS at nine in the morning and five at any afternoon. Do you go spend 200 grand to build 100,000 IOPS? No, you get a system that can have SSD fast tier and as those IOPS come in, it will read up, live in the SSD, serve out the IOPS and then it'll flush out cash. Some approaches that other companies have taken are all SSD. So, but do you really want to have your data living and written on all SSD? If you've got the money, that's a great idea. So, so, so, Mike, you know, you're in the field and you're talking to customers, you know, every day pretty much. I'm wondering if you can address for us, you know, what you're seeing specifically, you said, you know, virtualization is coming in, software is managing more of pieces. You know, what do you see changing as to how customers think about storage, the role of the storage team and the storage administrator, you know, has that changed in the last few years or what do you see in there? It certainly has. I think what we're beginning to see is a lot of the tier one, tier two and tier three manufacturers all converging in the same space. And if we even go back to EMC where we are since we're in Gillette Stadium, they have come downstream with their products just as Nexan has gone upstream with their products. So the SMB space in the middle is where the battle is. And that is when the IT managers have a limited amount of budget, but they're getting a lot more requests, not only for speed, whether that be throughput, but definitely because of virtualization, they have the need to drive more IOPS. And the battle in that brackish water between the enterprise and the SMB, where that's meeting, those are the companies that you see here at this event that are competing for that business. So that presumably involves a lot of channel relationships, right, so talk about that a little bit. Why Nexan and that SMB space, why not the big gorilla? Channel has always been good to Nexan. We sell through the channel, have always sold through the channel. We're not a direct model company. We feel that when a var has the expertise in whether it be VMware or media environments or Oracle or SQL environments, we can fit their line card for the different specific stores that they need. Quite often if you go into somebody that is selling strictly to high-end financials, they're gonna need one of the big three for the tier one trading desk, but guess what? Off of that comes hundreds of terabytes of tick data. They have to store it and keep it. Is it feasible to keep that on your tier one storage? We really are able to work with our partners and develop strategies where we become part of the overall solution, and that's really Nexan's core. How was the big data meme affecting Nexan? What you just described is, okay, you got all this data that doesn't have to be on a tier one device, the multi-million dollar box. I want to put it on a tier two or a tier three device and in comes Nexan. We've got flash when you need it. So you gave your VDI example. How about the big data and analytics themes that are going on in the industry? How has that affected Nexan if at all? That has affected us in a very positive way because when you come to the big data, quite often you're getting data that is not being accessed similar to a database. It's going to be queried, it's going to be examined, you're going to be running data queries against it, and you're going to have to hold a lot of data. For example, in our E-Series, we can put two and a half petabytes in a single 19-inch rack. So when you have large data users that are going to keep whether it be mortgage records, credit card records, shopping records, that can then sell that as a service, they need to have that affordable pool of storage. Besides just being able to hold it inexpensively, we have the made technology, which is the massive rare vital disk. So if you're not accessing a long or a volume, you can have that drive sleep down. Power in Europe is essential. It's slowly coming to the US. Quite often you will ask somebody how important is power? It's a checkbox in the US, but the drops, if you have a drop into your data center, you can run it until you run out of power. In Europe, they charge you per watt. So slowly but surely we're seeing that more and more customers are worried about the power in their racks. So Mike, quick question on that. We've seen flashes that are great for power, really can lower power, and tape of course still is effective. We've actually even seen some architectures. Our CTO, David Floyer calls it FLAPE, where you have an architecture that's nothing but flash and tape. I'm Asian, it's got some background in tape, and Nexan, where do you see that whole flash disk tape playing out? I think it's very interesting, and there were many companies, Nexan, one of them maybe 10 years ago that said, hey, eventually with the four terabyte and five terabyte drives, tape is gonna be dead. But that's certainly not the case because I-Mation, which is a billion dollar New York Stock Exchange company, when you look at their 10K or their annual report, they're selling hundreds of millions of dollars in tape. Now percentage wise, it may be a smaller percentage of our business, but guess what? It's a larger percentage of data. Why? Facebook downloads 300 million pictures a day. That's more data in a day than Merrill Lynch had in five years, 10 years ago. So it's a smaller percentage, but it's a tremendous amount of tape. It's an important part. Now the key is backup, archive and DR. Once you have that SLA for your company set, then you're able to pick your strategy. Quite often people confuse backup with DR and vice versa. If you need an SLA that says, if my environment goes down and I just have to be able to rebuild it in three or four days, tape is spectacular. If you have an environment that says, I need to be up within two hours, then tape is part of it, but it's not the main focus. If you're in a situation where you have less power and you're working with smaller databases that need IOP, the SSD is absolutely perfect. The flash is perfect for that. But flash is very important where you put it in the stack. If you just go all flash and you're working for it with MLC as an example, you can burn out an MLC in a SQL database within a year or two. So if you're investing all that money, you have to know whether you're going MLC, EMLC, SLC, and more importantly, where in the stack you put that. And I think that's what Nexan does very well. So where do you think you should put flash in the stack? We use flash in the stack for your almost immediate tiering needs. What I mean by that is we don't pick out and put 20 terabytes in our SST and say, okay, run your high applications to let the data live on the flash. We will use the flash as a level two tier. So if all of a sudden a tremendous hotspot comes in and you're hitting the disk and your IOPS and the amount of time between your act start to climb, we will have that live in disk. And the SSD will come down and go into cache. So it's a very good system to offload your spikes and IOPS without actually committing the data to the SSD. Now we certainly have applications where if you had a small metadata target and you wanted to put in three terabytes of SSD and lock it in there. And lock it in, you do. But typically, if you don't have the budget to buy a tremendous amount of storage and have it on SSD, it's great to have a hybrid because the SSD comes in when you need it and the rest of the data lives on the less expensive disk whether that be 15K or 7,200 RPM. How about to talk a little bit about I-Mation. They were kind of out of sight, out of mind in my world anyway. Correct. And then they make the Nexan acquisitions and say, oh, I remember that company and they say something to do with tape how has that all worked out? Culture really got Southern California company kind of a cool vibe going on. I-Mation, New York Stock Exchange, like I said, billion dollar company, Tape. How has that worked? What's the fit like? Why did I-Mation buy Nexan? I think it really speaks to what's going on in technology and in virtualization and storage. There's a company that I think about that did photos, Kodak, right? It was one of the biggest companies in America. There were 16 people on the board of directors. How they then see Shutterfly and these other companies coming and they got snuck up on and they're out of business now. A company like I-Mation that's doing a billion five and has a very healthy business in a tape medium that may be shrinking in the environment made a decision. We want to get into the storage, the enterprise flash. How do we do that? Well, you can hire a bunch of guys and build that business or you can come in and take somebody like Nexan that was looking to go public and acquire them. What they've done with Nexan is when you take a look at our logo, it is Nexan buy I-Mation. So we are running in a stack of the storage part of I-Mation. The transition has been extremely smooth. They've got a viable business, but what do they bring to us? Extra research, deeper pockets, New York Stock Exchange, but they're worldwide. Distribution channels. Distribution channels. Australia, Singapore, wherever we need them, we get them. Awesome. All right, Michael, listen, we got to go. Thanks very much for stopping by the Cube. It was great to meet you. No problem, thank you very much. Enjoyed it, thank you. I'll keep you right there, everybody. We're back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE. We're live from Gillette Stadium. This is the V-Tug Winter Warmer. We'll be right back.