 Okay, welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage live in San Francisco, California theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events to check the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante at wikibond.org. And our next guest, Patrick Rogers, Vice President of Product Marketing and Alliances at NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you very much. We had just an amazing time with NetApp at the VMworld. You guys had a great presence there. It really dominated the show. You had the marquee event at AT&T Park. We had theCUBE on the center field, grass. You guys celebrated with your top customers. Great event. Really, we got to see a little bit of the new NetApp. And I call the software-defined NetApp. You're seeing a real focus on NetApp. And Dave and I were commenting after that, you know, this software, everyone's talking about software is the focus. And that's what NetApp was based on. So you guys are in a good pole position, stocks up, companies kind of running in that direction. Tell us, what's the update here with NetApp and Oracle? And let's just jump right in. Sure. So, you know, it's funny, but we have a little saying around NetApp that our products are nothing more than software wrapped in sheet metal. And it's absolutely true to your tier point. It's all about the software. And, you know, one of the key topics and hot themes here, obviously, is cloud. And NetApp has a pretty fundamental assumption about the impact of the cloud on enterprise IT. And that is that IT managers are no longer going to be just builders and operators of IT infrastructure, but they're going to be brokers of IT services. And they are going to act like service providers themselves. And so you will see IT leaders making choices between deploying infrastructure at their own sites, as well as using cloud service providers and hyperscalers like Azure or Amazon or Google. And they will actually be brokering across these various services and choosing them based on cost, SLA's, security, you know, those types of factors. And the key implication for this is if you believe in this model that the IT manager is going to be a broker of services, that in order to make that work for you, you are going to have to have a data fabric that extends across both public and private cloud. That's a very, very key assumption. And if you don't have that universal data fabric, it's going to be very hard to easily broker and select and choose across those various services. And that's what our software is all about. So, you know, we just had an analyst on Elizabeth earlier from technology research, talking about how, you know, OpenStack could save itself from itself with Red Hat. And we're talking about Red Hat in particular. You know, Dave and I bump into a lot of CIOs where they have Red Hat, they have NetApp and are very interested in OpenStack. So you're seeing, you guys are involved in a lot of these operating kind of environments where you're in the middle of all the action relative to, say, OpenStack and Red Hat. There's a lot of enterprise requirements are in there, compliance issues, et cetera. What are you guys doing on that side? Because that's kind of a multi-vendor ecosystem play, but OpenStack really is getting a lot of traction on that. What's your take on that? So the underlying trend there is open source technology, right? And so we see an OpenStack, we see it in Hadoop. You know, we see Oracle using that with MySQL, right? So there is no doubt that open source is going to continue to be a very, very important trend in the industry. Yet customers are going to be looking to run that on enterprise-capable infrastructure. And they're also going to be looking for enterprise-level support. And you managed the alliances. So, you know, Dave and I were talking last night, we were the Gartner analysts. And, you know, we were going back and forth on the Magic Quadrant talking about, you know, how, you know, it's a static post in reality. It should be multiple dimensions. Storage is moving from a pure-play storage environment where you're now an element of a really big cloud offering. At the end of the day, it's a cloud operating system inside the data center and with the public cloud with the OpenStack. And then with Oracle, you have a lot of forces and different vendors, a lot of ecosystem issues. So with that, what is the take on NetApp storage role as you guys roll more into that epicenter of cloud? It's an alliance issue, but it's also a partnership and also functionality. Sure. So I was talking about this idea of a universal data fabric. In order to do that, you not only have to be able to run your software within Enterprise IT, but you need to be able to run it in the cloud and even with the hyperscalers. So NetApp has one very powerful advantage is that our software can actually run inside of a VM in a hyperscaler crowd. So we announced ONTAP B, which is our virtual storage appliance using our software. You can deploy that today with Amazon Web Services. So we're actually demoing that in our booth here at the show. The idea that you can have Amazon Web Services with NetApp Private Storage or run ONTAP V. Dave and I always joke about the storage. When back in 2010 we started theCUBE, we said that Joe Tucci is storage sexy. And we saw storage kind of being at the center of the conversation of the convergence. And it's funny, at Microsoft yesterday announcing storage, cloud vendor announcing storage, and the storage vendor is becoming more of the cloud. We think more of the storage is going to be the fabric of the cloud more than the cloud guys themselves. Tom Georgins had the best quote on that, by the way, because we asked Tom at VMworld right after that. And Tom said, I don't care if it's sexy. I just care if it's profitable. Yeah, that was last year. Here you have storage is driving a lot of the innovation in the cloud, not the other way around. So it's interesting. It's an alliance issue, but what's your take on that? Yeah, so it clearly is driving innovation. One of the big innovations for us has been cluster date ONTAP. And it's the idea that you can take multiple, discrete storage systems and combine those into a complete virtualized storage pool. That's a very powerful concept. There is no other storage vendor out in the market today that has that sort of capability that we do a cluster date ONTAP. That is essential for being able to virtualize your IT resources and be able to carve those up and assign different policy groups to those storage resources. So we think that in and of itself is groundbreaking and distinguishes our cloud strategy from what other vendors are doing. So Patrick, why don't we talk about the Oracle relationship for years. NetApp would talk about its relationship not only as a partner, but also as a supplier to Oracle. Oracle bought a lot of NetApp systems. When Oracle bought Sun, not surprisingly, that changed. So your relationship now is one of pure partnership, helping Oracle make its databases run better so you can ultimately sell more and add more customer value. So talk specifically about how that relationship has changed and what you guys are doing these days with Oracle. So we still continue to collaborate very closely with Oracle in three technology areas. One is core database and one of the things that Oracle did early on was take native NFS and compile that right into the database stack. So with 11G and with 12C we have a built-in advantage now for operating an NFS environment and everybody knows that files are much easier to manage than LUNs. But that's a key integration that Oracle has continued to drive and push as they go forward. So that's one area in the database. Another is with Oracle Linux and OVM. They're virtualization manager. We are now offering OEL and OVM solutions with our FlexPod Converged Infrastructure with Cisco. And that's been a very attractive offering. And then thirdly and very importantly Oracle Enterprise Manager which people are using to manage their distributed Oracle environments now has native integration with all the great on tap functionality like snapshots and FlexClones. And so from your Oracle console you can now manage your entire NetApp environment. So heterogeneity is your friend. You don't sell servers, you don't sell, you know, hypervisors, you don't sell database and applications. You guys do one thing. One thing really well, it's storage. So obviously you live in a heterogeneity heterogeneous world. Heterogeneous world, sorry. Just oppose that to what Oracle's doing, right? Red stack, everything's included in there and specifically I want you to tie it in to FlexPod. FlexPod, I mean it is, the name's great. And it says it all. So talk about your strategy there and how it's different than the other red stack. So one of the important decisions that we made with FlexPod is we said early on this was going to be a multi-hypervisor, multi-app infrastructure. And so you can actually combine different hypervisors, run them on a FlexPod or even run bare metal instances. That's a very, very important factor and that's what we hear consistently from our customers why they choose to deploy FlexPod. Because they want that ability to run multi-hypervisor environments. Even if they're using one major hypervisor today, they don't want to be locked into that particular decision for the future. And the same is absolutely true at the app layer as well. So FlexPod enjoys a really broad support across all the major industry apps and we have reference architectures and validated designs for all those apps running on FlexPod. That's a very powerful advantage. The point's absolutely right. Heterogeneity is the name of the game. Talk a little bit more about application integration. When we first met back when you were actually I think in charge of the application integration strategy and execution. So talk more about that. It's an area that's always been important to you. But also to NetApp. It's been something that's helped you guys a lot. Met with the Microsoft team, have been up to the Seattle scene, get all the posters of number one Microsoft partner and things like that. With that strategy. So NetApp brings a very simple advantage to an application administrator. And that's the ability to be able to easily snapshot and recover their application at any point in time. And then we further extended that snapshot capability to be able to clone and provision new application instances. So in essence we went right to the application owner and said we're going to make your job easier. And we started in fact doing that with Oracle and Microsoft have extended well beyond those partners to SAP and VMware and others. But the fundamental value proposition is we make it easier for the app admin or the VM admin to do their job. Both from a data protection perspective as well as a provisioning and monitoring perspective. Okay. So I also want to talk about one of the other big bets that NetApp is making. You guys made a lot of big bets over the years. Let's just listen to Dave Hitt's talk and he'll list through them not the least of which was virtualization. But also getting into the enterprise beyond just really sort of... Getting into database. Now the big bet is clustered on tap. Why is it such a big bet? Give us the update and what gives you confidence that that bet is going to pay off? Sure. Just to set the background is we had to start with an entirely new design for cluster data on tap. We wanted to preserve all the great functionality that our customers enjoy and value from NetApp, but we wanted to provide it in infrastructure that allowed for scalable growth and non-disruptive operation. That's what cluster data on tap provides. So now you can take multiple systems, combine them together, one single namespace. You can create storage virtual machines across that shared pool and those can be assigned to specific application owners or groups of application owners. That's a very, very powerful concept. So that's a big bet for us. That's virtualizing your storage infrastructure to the same level that people have virtualized their compute assets. Let's talk about the business value that that brings. One is obviously scale. People always push you guys, I'm trying to scale and it's hard and it's okay, so you deal with that. What other business value metrics are you seeing? Efficiency. Efficiency is really big advantage. The main reason why people virtualize is they want to make more efficient use of their IT assets. That really was the initial driver between compute virtualization. We're doing the exact same thing at the storage layer. So are you using your storage layer far more efficiently than you would if it was discrete silos? And then thirdly, right, is obviously non-disruptive operation so that you can add capacity, you can upgrade capacity without ever having to take the complex down. Very important. Okay, so my last question is so you're seeing Oracle in particular sort of looking at chops. NetApp, big install base. Trying to position the ZFS appliances, the NFS device talking about how it's growing. So going forward, what's your message to the Oracle DBAs? Because you guys sell to the infrastructure heads most typically. Oracle selling to the application heads and the DBAs. Big advantage for them. They're behind in storage, but they've got to pick their spots. They're obviously picking NFS as one. What's your message to the DBA crowd in terms of maintaining your value to them? Yeah, so that's a great question because if you look at products like ZFS, Oracle uses it in two ways. One, they use it as part of their dedicated infrastructure and it's very defined purpose. They're also trying to position that as a general purpose storage appliance or storage device. They're being far more successful in the former than the latter. And so if you are really interested in having a storage infrastructure that supports a broad variety of applications, offers choice, operates in private cloud and public cloud, you're going to want to go with a solution like ClusterDate on tip. Patrick, really appreciate you coming on, John. Another great segment. NetApp is really doing great and you guys are really positioned for the cloud. One of the things that Dave wanted to highlight was is that the OpenStack conversation is really interesting. I've had multiple conversations with Patrick. I want to get your follow-up opinion on this because OpenStack has got the attention of CIOs and it's a warm blanket for what they want. They want a little bit of Amazon like cloud but they don't want to go with Amazon with the lock-in that they have. People can debate that all day long but on-premise is where the preferred method is but also they want public cloud. But OpenStack still has a lot more work to do. So you're seeing the red hat step up. You're seeing some of the experience vendors. What is your relationship there with OpenStack and what's the update there and how do you see you guys bringing your expertise to the table with OpenStack? With OpenStack, as you know, there's a variety of groups. The storage group is called Cinder. We work very closely with the folks at Cinder the working group to integrate our capabilities, snapshots, cloning NetApp enterprise storage with the OpenStack environment. And then we're really counting on partners like Red Hat to be able to provide the enterprise class support for that entire software stack running on NetApp storage. So we actually work quite closely and quite involved with the OpenStack community. We have a, as to your point a large number of enterprise customers who really was appealing and started for a service provider community. But now the enterprise customers are really attracted by the idea of an open-source development environment and being able to get this very inexpensively compared to what they were paying for their prior software. Well congratulations to Software Defined NetApp. You guys are in a good position. Stocks up. You guys are pumping. Congratulations. We're here live at Oracle OpenWorld. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.