 This is theCUBE, live from the Mastoni Center in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010, now Inside the CUBE. The continuous coverage of theCUBE, VMworld live 2010, continuous coverage of the show. We're here with Yulia Packard, with Dave Roberson and Paul Perez to talk about convergence, storage, virtualization, and everything else. And with Dave Vellante, my co-host, Dave, you want to kick it off and get right into it? Yeah, so we had a good session on storage, two key executives, some storage works, guys that I've known for a while, you know, the old joke, great, there's 100 people in the storage business and 99 seats. And luckily, we've had a few of those over the years, so it's great to have you guys on. I want to talk today about the transformation of HP's storage business. It's been, something's happened at FAST at HP, but these kind of big transformations generally take a while, and you guys have been at it working hard for a number of years. Why don't you start by talking about, sort of start with Dave, what's new at HP Storage Works? Give us the high level overview, and then we can drill down into some of those transformative activities that are going on. Great, well I think if you've been watching us over the last few months, there's been really three areas that we've been focused on in terms of new, and probably the most exciting is our store once technology that's been developed with HP Labs, it's a end-to-end data de-duplication solution, the first instance we brought out is a disk-to-disk backup device, but very excited about the price performance, and very excited about the end-to-end capability of that software. So that's been one thing that the customers and market have been excited about. Then we've also been focused on our P4000 product line, which is our iSCSI scale-out architecture. We introduced the 4800 in June, which is a virtual machine essentially for the virtual desktop pre-configured with a blade infrastructure, ready to provide an end-to-end solution for our customers there. And then the last thing where we've been very focused has been our X9000 product line, which is our single namespace scale-out, file-based storage, very excited about the acceptance of that in the marketplace. So that's the de-dupe piece out of HP Labs, John, which is kind of interesting, because we've been talking, you and I have been talking about HP getting more innovation out of the labs, and the other piece is through acquisition, correct? Yes, that's right. And then iBrix, just to connect the folks in the audience. Although the things we introduced in June were developed after the acquisition, so particularly the 4800 is a virtual machine design for scaling out a virtual desktop. That was all developed after the acquisition. So we got the core technology through the acquisition but continue to build on it afterwards. Yeah, so that's, I think big win, right? HP Labs, tremendous resource, sometimes not monetized enough. Correct. And so Store 1 holds a lot of promise, doesn't it? It's a hot area. Yes. I know it's not de-dupe, but IBM completed the acquisition of StoreWise the other day. You saw the data domain last year with the EEC, so a key area, everybody was wondering, okay, what's HP doing there? Come out with Store 1's. Very interesting technology. And the interesting thing to me, if I understand it, and maybe there's a good question for Paul, is it's not just a technology that has a single use case and disc to disc backup, for example, it can be applied to different areas. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes, Dave, that actually starts getting into some of our roadmaps, but in general, we love roadmaps here in the Q&A, go for it. I know you do. But essentially what we see is an end to end secondary storage environment as a vision, where customers can optimize that backup stream and that content people stream starting from, whether you start from a virtual machine, whether you start from a backup to disk appliance, or whether you come in through a media server, we can capture it, dehydrate it, and from that point on, through WAN, and into a central store. Yeah, so the problem with a lot of the technologies that we've seen out there, again, for some of the folks in our audience, is they're stovepipes, right? You've got a situation, a use case here, a use case there, a use case here, and they're all different technologies and they don't talk to each other. So when you start moving stuff around the network, you have to- You have to rehydrate it or expand it back and then- And what does that do that causes clogs in the network and it's a little problematic? So HP's vision, to talk about a little bit, is to really put the IP everywhere throughout the network, right? So you don't have to do that. Is that consistent? Well, dehydrate it once and because it's the same algorithm, the same process, the same software, you move it around, you don't have to rehydrate it because you have a different platform that you're moving it to. It's all consistent across these different use cases. So it's interesting, you've got innovation that you've bought in through some of the acquisitions. You've got others that are coming out of HP Labs. What do you see as the mix going forward there? I don't know what you say the mix is. I mean, obviously we prefer to innovate ourselves as much as we can, but if we have gaps in the roadmap where there's a good technology available in the market, we're not opposed to acquiring also. So you feel like you can get more out of the HP Labs? I mean, is that a misperception on my part that HP Labs hasn't been as productive as perhaps we would like to think? I think the relationship between Labs and Storage Works is one of the strongest in HP actually. Talk about that a little bit. We'll store once as a great example of real technology that is leading in the industry developed together with HP Labs and us. And I think there are other things we're working on with them that we're not ready to talk about yet that again have that kind of impact potential into the market going forward. So how about this whole convergence story? HP for years has been talking about leveraging its server expertise and you have to a great extent obviously leveraged your great large portfolio. It seems different now, is that? I mean, obviously you're bringing in the company like 3Com. You've always had really strong server business. You're bringing a storage guy like Donatelli, which brings even more credibility in the storage business. So it seems those pieces are coming together. Do you feel like you can leverage that to a greater extent than you have been able to historically and why? Yeah, I think simple answer is yes, we can. And I think if you look at the shared components or the shared infrastructure across the solutions we're bringing to market today, many of our solutions are built on industry standard servers or our blade servers so that we're not having to engineer the hardware platform to run things on now. So we can focus on the software, the differentiation, leveraging HP's supply chain across the various businesses including the PC business to really take advantage of the engineering, the purchasing power, and the relationships we have with strategic suppliers to really be on the leading edge of that all the way through. So let's talk about that a little bit. And then Paul, I wanted you to take us through some of the philosophy that Dave was talking about on the software side, but your supply chain is enormous. Donatelli talks about it a lot. I think it's 50 billion is the number. More than that actually. More than 50 billion. How do you leverage that as a tactical and strategic weapon in the marketplace? Paul, you want to? Sure. I think that if you think of converged infrastructure as a development community, right? There are benefits that we derive from the members of the community, but we also give back. And it's with a slingshot effect. So a good example is there's a lot of conversation this week at VMworld around the storage provisioning manager, right? Because we didn't have to work on some of the hardware and platforms, and we were free to innovate at the software level. We're doing it within the storage domain, and we're also using it to bridge across server, storage, and networking to accelerate automation. So let's talk a little bit about the vision and the execution of that vision of a common platform, modular components, and then changing the personality, whether it's block or file through software. Talk about that vision and where you're at in the maturity model, if you will. Well, I think if you look at the platform itself, we're there already, because many of our products run on our standard servers. So I think that's, you know, we're down the road there. The CloudStart initiative we announced and capability we announced yesterday. Good example of it, where our storage is playing a part of it. So you have the storage, the networking, the services, the software, the hardware all brought together to work with our customers to make it much, much simpler to bring a Cloud together from all aspects. In other words, you don't have to bring in three different partners to provide the end-to-end solution. So I think where you're seeing it is, storage is part of our end-to-end solutions. Rather than, here's a server, here's a storage device, here's a networking connection, go figure it out how to bring them together. And I think if our Cloud starts a great example of how we can leverage all these capabilities into one answer, it's much easier for the customer and we bring the integration to the customer. And historically, the customer or a reseller or some other partner has had to do that. Now not to say they can't, and then certainly there's a lot of value add from our partner community, but at the same time, we can make it easier for our partners as well to bring these solutions to their customers. Dave, I have a question on that to drill down. A lot of people in the mainstream press are analyzing why storage is so hot in the context of Cloud, they're kind of coming to that conclusion now. And I'll say this a lot of news, I don't want to talk about that, but specifically the analysis of storage as it's changing in this new environment. Storage wants where it was, you do OEM deals, it holds data, but now it's the linchpin of Cloud with virtualization. Talk about what that means. HP has a breadth of resources across the board, portfolio of technologies, one little ingredient like storage where data's involved. Talk about some of the things that people are missing in the analysis. The synergies as they would say if someone's doing that, not in specific detail, but the big picture. What are people missing when they think of storage as just price X, vendor A? What does that picture look like, and can you dig deeper, Paul? Yeah, maybe Paul, you want to start now, I'll join you. I'll start, and Dave had asked about vision as well. So if you look at the plate tectonics, there's two big shifts in the market, right? One of them is the unrelenting growth, especially of unstructured data. The other plate tectonic is the acceleration in server virtualization, right? The fault line where those two things meet is storage. And so from that angle, storage is the biggest barrier to adoption of private cloud and virtualized environments is the constant complexity of shared storage. So at a high level, what we're doing is we're making that simple, we're making that cheap, we're turning an exposure into an acceleration factor. And data playing a role in it, latency, mobile devices, L stuff. Absolutely, and what happens is the old model was taking data and piping it through a network to make it available to applications. The new model is bring the virtualized apps to coincide with the data and run it there. It's a lot more efficient, it's a lot higher performance. It's a complete rethinking of the network. And so the disruptive enabler of that is virtualization. And I think what people are missing and what you're saying is that storage is now fundamentally like a server and networking in one. That's one way to think about it. And I think by bringing these elements together with a simpler management paradigm, which we've done, makes it much more cost-effective. I think one of the other things to think about is what's historically we've had network administrators, storage administrators, database administrators, server administrators. And if you look at what this new world looks like, it becomes an infrastructure administrator at some point in time, where it's a different view. And what you're doing is focusing on what are the policies, what are the use cases, how do we want to protect the data, how many copies. It doesn't matter what plane they're landing, it's stuff that they're doing. Yeah, so it's very, very different. And I think some of the customers are waking up to this and saying our IT organization needs to have some additional or different skills going forward. And so it's a different way of providing the interest. You mentioned an exposure becomes an accelerant in the new model, which is really great. Talk about security then. I mean, because I see security has been one of the other points of barriers, adoption issues with cloud. Any comments? How is that going to be? Well, security is important, and HP touches security in many different ways, shapes, and forms. We have a very broad security set of capabilities. I think our tipping point software, for example, that we picked up with the three-com acquisition is one of the leading network intrusion softwares. So that's a great example of taking security seriously. It is important, and every customer cares about it, particularly in the financial services world. They care a lot about it, but everyone cares about it. Can you talk about your multi-vendor? Because you guys play in all the environments. I mean, HP's the 800-pound gorilla with your EDS force out there, and just the portfolio is just massive and impressive. You know, you got to deal with open source. You got to deal with existing legacy. What's the general philosophy at HP around that? I mean, the open source with Hadoop on the data side, and you got mobility now, and you guys have that product there. Yeah, well, I think, if I understand your question, I think one of our fundamental building blocks is an open standard-based architecture so that people are not locked into a particular answer, a particular vendor, so that the legacy in our mind needs to work with the new. And so you can't tell a customer, okay, you know, all that stuff you bought over the last five years, throw it away, so you can use the new stuff. And because number one, they can't afford it. And virtualization plays there. You can do things. Absolutely, so let's virtualize it, bring it into the new world, and over time, you transition from the old to the new. And that's our view of it, but it has to be based on open standards. You can't, well, you can, but the customers usually don't accept it. And that's one of the questions we get as HP is, gee, you know, we can buy everything from you, but does that place us at risk? My answer is absolutely not, because we're based on open standards. You can replace any piece you want along the way. You can't put a Dell Blade and an HP Blade chassis, but you can certainly connect other storage to our servers or our servers to other storage. There's no inability to do that. So you guys had the pro-curve division, you got 3Com in there, the storage is changing, you guys got some innovation coming out, hopefully gets out and the new deals coming down. How has that converged organization going? What's the feeling there? People energized and now that HP's got a path ahead of them. Well, I can just talk about my part of the organization, but certainly the engineers are more excited than they've been in a long time. We're investing in R&D, we're actually spending more than we were before, which is, if you're an engineer, what do you want, more money for your projects? And at the same time we've introduced, I think, strong accountability. It's one thing to have more money, but if you don't produce better products with it, then you really haven't accomplished anything. I think Dave Donatelli has brought us a great combination as a leader of, okay, here's some more money, but here's what I'm going to hold you accountable for and delivering to the market with that money. Very clear accountability and yet we're investing more, which to me as an engineer, as an engineering team, that's what you want. That's exciting. Dave, you want any final comments? No, just like this quick summary, I mean, we're seeing, I said the transformation of HP's storage works business, focused on taking commodity components and adding value through software, giving your systems the different personalities. We're seeing innovation out of HP labs with store ones. We're seeing you bring together a lot of pieces in the portfolio, driving your value chain hard, and it's going to be really interesting to watch. Paul Perez and Dave Robison, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks Dave, thanks John. We'll be right back with siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010 with theCUBE, where we're broadcasting live at the Moscone, we'll be right back. Todd Nielsen, up next.