 Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back, we're live here in San Francisco, California, VMworld 2014. I'm John Furrier, my co-host for the segment, Stu Miniman, and our next guest is Rex Walters, VP of Technology at Tintree, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. We're all getting our second win, I got coffee, day two, wall-to-wall coverage, Tintree, you guys have been a big player in the ecosystem for a while, great company, great success story, give us a take on what's going on with storage, and you guys here at VMworld real quick. Well, the amazing thing is this has kind of become, I mean, in my opinion, this is the storage show now, right, if you go out on the floor, it's just amazing the number of storage companies that are out there. I think it's a part and parcel with cloud virtualization is what the consumer of storage, right, you're running your apps inside of a cloud device of some sort, that's what's generating the data that's filling up your storage. Dave Vellante, we started theCUBE, it's our fifth year, I was EMC World 2010, and Dave said, oh, it used to be called Snorage, now it's the hottest thing, back then we're like, oh, it's going to be really hot with the cloud, Snorage being kind of boring, but now, since then, it's just the gift that keeps giving, you know, the innovation around storage, it's the engine around it because the confluence of the different trends, big data, you got Internet of Things, cloud, obviously changing architecturally, new with Flash, so it's been a massive upheaval in transformation, and it feels like it's just getting started, so give us your take on that. I mean, obviously, all those things kind of are happening, but where are we now, and how much more can this go? Is it a bubble? Is it real? What's going on? No, it's definitely real, but I think the biggest thing is people are demanding the same level of agility with their applications, with their other infrastructure, with servers and with networking, they need it with their storage as well, and people want to consume it as simply as possible, they want, I need this much capacity, I want the infrastructure to just take care of it, make sure it's delivering the user experience and quality of service that I need. So, customers really are also kind of in mid-flight of this transformation too, so I got to ask you the customer question, because the other ones on the ground have to deal with the, you know, V-Valls we're hearing about, things like that, we're hearing about Lons again, and automation clearly is the new thing, we had Carl Hatcher about saying they're in the data center automation business, but when you automate, you're basically doing a few things, you're abstracting complexity, but you're also eliminating things, so are people losing their jobs? Are they shifting? But this is what's happening, things are going away, functions are going away, what do you see there in the customer environment? What's being abstracted away? What are the key value things that are positive for the customers? I just want to, you triggered a thought, which is I remember you'd walk into a data center, you'd walk into an IT shop, and you would see the voice guys on one side of the room, and the data guys on the, excuse me, the data guys on another side of the room, and they couldn't really communicate, right? You had the voice guys knew all this arcane knowledge about trunking protocols, and arcane knowledge about tell switches and whatnot, and you know, they're not around anymore, they've all become data guys, data is everything, and I would actually not to put too fine a point on it, I think that the storage guys are kind of the new voice guys, right? I think everything is converging to this cloud model of being able to deploy your applications as quickly and agile as possible. At the same time, it's made it hard, right? It's not an easy thing to do when you've got more running on less, you've got to make sure it works. If I wonder if I can ping a night, that's a pretty bold statement, because you know, when I've talked to, I spent most of my career networking, I actually told Telcom Gear back in the 90s, and we- He was offended by the voice comments too, it's okay. No, no, no, but we looked back, and one of the things they said, oh, we can just put voice over IP, and that'll be real easy, and we look back and we say, wow, those voice guys were actually doing some things that we like lost. And for storage, storage is a critical component. I mean, if I lose my data, I'm out of business. If I have corruption, I could really mess up some really bad things. So, storage is a critical component. What's that transition? Storage roles change, we think, but does that role go away and merge into a virtualization of the cloud? Adminagely, what can you talk? Yeah, obviously it's an overstatement to say storage guys are no longer necessary, that's certainly not the case. There was a George Gilder quote a million years ago about things, convergence not meaning so much things combining into new, it's the new kind of utterly destroys the old. Open systems kind of replace mainframes, but we still have mainframes and we still have mainframe experience out there today. Automobiles replace horses, we still use mounted police. No, but the big points too, great point, I think that's a good point. Voice never went away, but PBX remember they were around, digital, the whole unified communication, it's just never happened, right? So like the bets were wrong, but the functionality never went away, right? So it still has voice mail, it's still phones and no, but now. No, no, but to John, it was specifically the administrators of the voice stuff. If we just eliminated that role, we lost something in our environment. Well, don't you think it shifts those two? So the guys that were doing the voice stuff to the point, right? If they clung on and said, no, I'm going to stay here, I'm going to stay peaked on voice stuff, they're basically out of work, right? The smart money said, hey, I need to get retrained. John, I'm with you a thousand percent, it's retraining, it's cross training, it's getting people involved. I just, right, as we're saying, we're not getting rid of the storage expertise, it is going to change the functionality. Hopefully your storage guys aren't going to be creating and managing lones, because we don't need to do that anymore, so it is a maturation and a change, but some storage management is still going to need to be somewhere. It's where you're applying the knowledge, right? I mean, ultimately now, all infrastructure exists to support your applications, it's all about the apps, your apps are seeing what they perceive as locally attached, direct attached storage, and that's where your different quality of service needs are, right? If you've got something that's doing nothing but sequential writes, you want to do something different for it than something that's got a very scattered random read-write max. And I think the thing that's changed is everybody making their policy decisions on a per VM, per virtual volume basis. Yeah, right, Rick, so that per VM, I think when Tintree first came out, it was, you know, VM aware storage, and what I kind of smile at this show is virtual volumes or V-Vols is coming out soon, and in many ways, the promise of it is what you guys are delivering. So what's your take on V-Vols and how does that affect Tintree and your mission? So we're, very bluntly, we think the first step to being able to deliver this cloud-like storage is having that granularity of per virtual volume being able to deliver a different user experience to be able to tune and optimize on a per virtual volume basis. What used to be virtual disks are now virtual volumes. We're looking forward to it becoming much more real here as in beta currently, and we're expecting to see it come out here shortly. And when it does, we can start comparing the degree that we believe supporting very large numbers of virtual volumes is going to be incredibly important. Being able to truly deliver different tuning, different on a per virtual volume basis, I think is going to be difficult for some vendors to implement. So we're looking forward to being able to compete on the implementation of the idea rather than just the IDP and the only guys out there. Now we also think that people, as they start developing this, are going to run into the things that we've had to do, like how it's not just how much flash you give something, how much CPU, how much network, how much NVRAM is just as important. So Rex, some of the other big themes, it's not just a VM world anymore when it comes to virtualization, it's a multi-hypervisor world, cloud of course is impacting everything. So what's Tintry's role in a multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud world? We have to support it. I mean, that's the nature of a cloud, especially the way companies grow as they acquire other companies and sometimes it's not the same infrastructure you're going to deal with something else. We think both supporting multiple hypervisors as well as being able to convert between multiple hypervisor formats is very important. It is the applications that are driving the storage, it's focusing on how those applications are running, it's not about the infrastructure. Rex, I got to ask you about, obviously the EVO rail announcement, how that ties in here, because some of our analysis is clearly showing that it's actually pure validation for you guys, right? I mean, what that actually says is purpose-built or hyper-converged, essentially just a word for packaging is the way and the software stack really becomes a critical aspect of it. So I want you to comment, do you believe that to be true? Do you see EVO rails announcement validating the consumption from customers is not about either approach, appliances are okay, but really it's a software piece and the software stack in particular. Can you comment on that? Yeah, well I think ultimately again, it's the apps and apps are being developed in a different way. I mean, we're kind of seeing this primacy of dev ops as the buzzword these days and what it really means is we're kind of going back to the mainframe days of having the IS organization where you're developing custom apps and especially as we have these cloud-like approaches to delivering your applications where you've got multiple machines delivering the same service, I think that model of having new software stacks using things like object storage and using, there's lots of different- That changes the game of manageability, scalability, right? Exactly. So those guys doing that stuff could move into different functions, not like there's not enough work to do. I mean, you mentioned the mainframes, we were commenting yesterday on our closing segment that we're seeing a rise of the developer in-house. Exactly. You really haven't seen that. Even in client-server, it was outsourced to the consultants, PC was shrink-wrapped, web was the web, but back in the mainframe days, you had guys in-house called spaghetti code guys like writing all that code. So now we're back there, right? So people are building more developers, more data science, more aspect. Does that change the management piece of it? Do you guys enable that? I guess that's my question. Do you guys enable that growth? We believe we do, certainly. And in fact, the nature of using some of these new storage protocols and using some of these new approaches requires you to re-architect and redesign your app. And I think all of it is a sign of the desire for more agility to be able to move things more quickly and not be kind of stone walled by, oh, we carve off our lones this way, this is the way it's always going to be. They need to be able to deploy things in a new way. So Rex, you've been in the storage industry for quite a while. One of the interesting trends we've been watching is moving beyond the storage of data in our storage. It's things like data management, of course, does that data gravity come out with what they're doing to kind of do some analytics on top of that? What's Tintree's view on that? Well, I mean, to be brutally honest, we try to stay away from what's inside, right? That we consider to be the application's responsibility. We recognize we are an infrastructure product. So we try, in our company, not to know more about what's inside too much, other than, again, the multi-hypervisor thing, we need to know how to convert between them. But we do see the need for it. That makes total sense to us, because that ultimately becomes a type of application. People do want to know more about their data. And we're seeing people deploying things inside of VMs to deliver storage services. To us, that's fascinating. That's something that we very much like to support. So if we talk about VMs, the workloads are changing a lot. There are plenty of applications that are still running on bare metal. Of course, Docker's been a big discussion at this point. Is Tintree reliant on the VM? Can we do some bare metal? Can we do containers? How does that all fit into your environment? To us, our whole point, when we say we're VM aware storage, what we really mean is applications that are talking to software pretending it's hardware. How that's done, we really don't care. It's that abstraction model of having virtual disk, virtual volumes, virtual machines, whether it's running in a Docker container or whether it's running in a traditional boot. So if Docker takes over the world, you guys aren't out of this. Absolutely, yeah, 100%. Thank goodness. Chris, here's the update on the company that's going on. Tintree, obviously, VentureVac from NEA. I think Pete's on the scene, he's on the board. Friend of ours, we had him on theCUBE this morning. Also an investor in our new crowd chat engagement container being called the docker of social media here at the show. Certainly a great investor. What's going on at the company for you guys? What's the status on headcount, engineering? What are you guys doing? What's the key milestones? We're growing very rapidly, which is a good thing. We've literally just moved. This VM world is obviously a very big show for us. Never fails, everything happens at the same time. We literally just moved into a new facility about a couple times by large than where we were before. I believe, what time is it? Last time I checked, I think we're about 280, 290 employees currently. And fortunately, things are moving up into the right. What's the product engineering culture like at Tintree? What do you guys really obsess about? We obsess about cloud. We really do. Private cloud, the cloud approach to doing things, the new styles of developing apps for object based storage versus the traditional file NAS type approach. We want to see where things are going, get to where the puck's going to be kind of a thing. But to us, it's all about how people are deploying their applications. And big customer changes for you guys in terms of adoption. What are you guys seeing for big trending, mega trends that you're riding in terms of customer on the customer front? That's the really fun thing about what we're doing right now. As we're seeing this quick uptake when somebody actually deploys one of our systems and sees how it can work, they're scaling very rapidly in their own environment. So we have some very large deployments now where people have started with initial, very focused use case, and then they've gone and said, this is so easy to scale. I'm not having to deal with my infrastructure. It's just taking it into the form. Yeah, very horizontally scalable. That's very DevOps oriented. Exactly. They kick the tires and then they go, let's move this out. It's all about agility. Is the value of the management side or scalable? It's ultimately, if you really distill it down, it's all about simplicity, but it's not simplicity as in lack of functionality. It's simplicity as in the infrastructure is dynamically adapting to stuff rather than the human administrators having to predict where you're going. Yeah, so Rex, since the last time we had Tintry on theCUBE, went through some management change, went through a complete rebranding. Now red seems as the new color there. You know, there's so many companies out there pushing SDS and SDDC and the various things. How does Tintry differentiate itself in the marketplace? So we, again, in our world, ultimately it's the end users and what they're doing. And what we're seeing is at least half of our customer base is moving to at least half of their business being outsourced cloud service provider oriented businesses. It may not be all of their applications, but it's some of them. We very much are approaching both markets. That's exactly where we're going. Whether you call it private cloud, SDDC, softwares of service, P-A-S-I-A-S, all of those things are kind of the same thing. It's all about VMs and containers and that method of deploying your apps. So there's always a disruption conversation. So I got to ask you who you're disrupting. We, on theCUBE, like to say, there's three levels of disruption. There's the disruptors, like Tintry, Nutanix, you guys, the new school, punching upstream if you will. The people who are being disrupted fall in two categories. The series C or D funded companies are trying to go public from many years ago and then fully the incumbents, the public companies, NetApp, EMC. So who are you guys? You guys are asking in the disruption phase, who are you nibbling at the lunch and dinner of? Is it EMC? Is it more NetApp? Some say you're taking some share from NetApp. Were you guys winning? Who are you agitating out there in the market with your product? You hit the right companies. I mean, honestly, it is the big improvements. I know each one. Top break amount, top three. I would say top one, two and three would be NetApp, potentially EMC. It's basically the traditional disk storage guys. There's, in addition to the big shift to cloud-based approaches to doing things, solid-state storage and flash is definitely making a big approach and you're having to do that. So when you're having to re-architect a product line versus starting from scratch like we did, it can be a challenge. It can be very difficult to make that reasonable. So I don't think it's a solely temporary that would say the same thing. But we... Yeah, Nutanix certainly doing well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, to us, just saying we have Flash therefore we're fast is not even interesting, right? That's not an interesting thing. Servers and storage in a box is not what we believe is converging. What's converging is the approach to how you deliver your application. This new approach to the modern era. We love talking about the modern enterprise. Rex, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Tintry, hot startup growing really rapidly. Eating the lunch of the incumbents soon to be dinner. If you guys keep it up, congratulations. Rex Walters, VP of technology at Tintry. It's theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.