 Welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is our live coverage, SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the advanced extract to signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Hi, buddy, Doran Kempel is here. He's the founder and CEO of SimpliVity, an infrastructure specialist. Doran, I don't want to say converged infrastructure, because you guys do more than just converged infrastructures becoming sort of, you know, rote. But so we'll talk about that a little bit, but welcome back to theCUBE. We had you at the Wikibon offices a couple weeks ago, so it's good to see you again. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, John. So you guys have the, I think, the best booth out there because you have an Audi that you're giving away. Give the folks a taste of what the vibe is in your booth down there. Well, great excitement. We are raffling an Audi R8. It's a beautiful car. It's important that it's an R8. And basically the scheme is the more you learn about SimpliVity, the more you earn, which means that your chances of winning the R8 increase as you participate in more of our events. If you participate in the presentation, you basically get one chance to win. If you see a demo, another 10 or 15 options, and so forth. So it's a nice car, and we think that it's symbolically high performance, very elegant design. We'd like to think that SimpliVity's OmniCube has similar features. And we- Probabilities are pretty good though, right? I mean, it's taking 20,000 people in. Very good. I think that if you participate in all the events of SimpliVity, you have about 50 chances to win. 50 out of probably 2,000, 5,000. So we love your company because the OmniCube, not to be confused with theCube, Silicon Angles, the Cube is a great name. So, good sponsorship opportunities for us to work together. But no, seriously, you guys have a big pack booth. What's your core message at the show here? And how are you reacting to all the conversations around agility, everyone's talking about hybrid cloud. It's going to take some technology to do that and performances. Talk about what you guys are doing here and how you guys tie into that key message of VMware. Sure. So SimpliVity's humble mission is to simplify IET. So the question is, what's to simplify? Well, if you step into a data center today, what you'll see is that the infrastructure stack is comprised of about eight or 12 different products, starting with servers, running virtualization, then a storage switch, then highly available storage, then potentially a dedupe to backup appliance, then probably a WAN optimization device, then potentially a cloud gateway, maybe SSD arrays, maybe SSD caching, a few software applications. Basically, Dave and John, you end up buying anywhere from eight to 12 different products from as many vendors. You train as many people to manage these products and this creates clutter. So basically, IT is very complicated and expensive to manage. This is challenge number one. Challenge number two is that the data that we use today is a relic of the 20th century. Basically, it's bloated and is not meant for a virtualized, cloud-enabled world. The third problem is that people cannot manage their remote offices and data centers. We've addressed all of that as hard to believe as it is. What we do is we take all these 12 products and we assimilate them into a single product that we call the OmniCube. Secondly, with our unique data architecture, we deduplicate, compress and optimize all the data at fine grain, four or eight K, once and forever, and we do that using the OmniCube accelerator, which means that you actually enhance the performance of the system. How would you do that? First of all, we reduce the amount of IOPS to SSD and HDD because we eliminate all the IOPS that are redundant. Secondarily, we sequentialize all the rights. So basically, you get a system that is high performance and all the data is dedu-compressed and optimized across all the tiers within an OmniCube, DRAM, SSD, HDD, and across all the phases of the lifecycle of data, primary, backup, when, archive, and the cloud. Lastly, all of the OmniCubes anywhere in the world are managed by a single person, a VM admin from vCenter. So if you put all of that in scope, yes, it's hyper-converged, but there's also a new data architecture, and we offer this global federated architecture that allows one person to manage as many OmniCubes anywhere in the world. So the old days of IT, you had multi-vendors, the big trend, go back 20 years ago even, that started that big trend, oh, multi-vendor support opened, still kind of closed, but now you have the mish-mass. So is that what you're referring to in terms of all these different vendors? So is a multi-vendor problem and a multi-technology problem kind of combined, is that what you're solving? Basically, so the answer is yes. So if we think of the last 30 years in computing, basically we went from a world that is mainframe, fully integrated, which we like, but centralized and closed. And over the course of the last 30 years, the pendulum has swung all the way to the left, and what we have now is clutter. If you want to establish your data infrastructure or your IT infrastructure, you need to buy all these products with all those management pains, and if you look at each one of those products, basically they have a lot of built-in resources that are islands. So basically, when your DDoop backup appliance is not doing DDoop, all those resources are not available to the rest of your applications. So we've changed all of that. All the capabilities running on x86 resources globally. So we believe that this is new IT infrastructure. So good leverage, great leverage, great leverage. And if you think about it, when we think about what Google and Amazon are doing, our assumption is, us being the people in the market, is that they're running on commodity x86 resources, so do we, that they've developed a very rich functionality stack that runs underneath virtualization, so do we. But above and beyond what they have done, the unique aspect of SimpliVity is our novel data architecture. All the data in real time on very fine-grained basis is DDoop compressed and optimized once and forever. Nobody does that. And let me just point out something very important. So DDoop is part of our data efficiency play. When we think about companies that have been very efficient and successful, with just DDoop, names that come to mind are? Data domain, obviously. Data domain and riverbed. And how do they go about that? Two very important characteristics. One, it was part of their original design, it's not an add-on. Secondly, they do it in line real time. It's not a post process. Now we do much more than DDoop, and we don't just address the when or the backup. We address all the data, primary, backup, when, archive, cloud. But very importantly, we do everything as part of the original design. The OmniCube is built around this novel data architecture. Everything is in real time, but very importantly, it's accelerated. We use the OmniCube accelerator in order to increase your performance. And this is very unique. So as the OmniCubes are out there, one single plane of get-at-last from a management standpoint, so the manageability becomes kind of a differentiator as well. So that's awesome. So talk about some of the customers. Because, you know, and what's your experience with your customer base? Because you kind of got to go in there and you're like, hey, I got the modern technology here. Try it, so you got to kind of come in and get a beach head. And then are they happy? Take us through the day and a life of that process. Great, so this is an excellent question. We're very excited. We're very excited because on average, what we see in our deployments is a three X TCO reduction. Let me say that again, because it sounds a little unbelievable. Three X TCO reduction. Of course, it could be higher than that. We see that across a gamut of customers, starting with very small dentist offices, law firms, companies that basically use one or two OmniCubes in order to put all of their IT on these OmniCubes. Think about it as data center in the box. Go slightly larger than that. We have manufacturing customers, a city, a credit union bank. And what these companies do is they run on two OmniCubes in the central side and two additional OmniCubes and a remote side. So now they have disaster recovery across those sites. And again, this is a concept whereby all of IT, all the application are running on the OmniCube infrastructure. Move up a notch. Very large companies that have 10, 20, 30, we're even in dialogue with a company that has a hundred remote offices in the US. And the value proposition here is again, significant reduction in complexity. This is very simple, but very importantly, a single person manages all those branch offices from vCenter. So this is scale out and branch office, remote data center management. The largest, now I'm taking it one more step, are global cloud providers. So we've deployed in a company that you probably all know, T-Systems. T-Systems is part of Deutsche Telekom and they're in the process of building a very large public cloud and they're going to be building it on OmniCube building blocks. And we're in dialogue with some other very promising telcos. So if you think about the deployment, all of them are very interested in this architecture whereby basically we run on x86 resources. We simplify the management. We offer all the functionality within these atomic IT building blocks instead of buying many different products. So very exciting. And you asked me about the dialogue that we have with customers. So in the first 30 seconds, people say, oh, you're like this or like that. And 30 seconds after they understand that there's this novel data architecture, globally federated architecture, and in addition, we've converged the whole stack. Very exciting. Yeah, I mean, so that's a hard, I mean, that's something that you have to get over. I mean, people want to put you in a box. Well, you're like a cat or a dog. Right now, we're like a racehorse. So you have to get over that. How long does that take? So I think that into the fifth minute of a conversation, people understand what are the underlying technologies. There's still the aspect of disbelief. So people's first reaction is, okay, now understand this is a completely different story, but it's impossible. How could one company, how could a startup grant its impivity, worked on it for three and a half years until you went GA? But how can one company offer all of that? And the good news is that we have reference customers and the good news is we're happy to offer a POC. And it works. And it works. That's a great point. I mean, that's what we job one. Yeah, that's always the key right now. Everyone, people think you're trying to sell way too much features that you did for three years. What's your take on the commoditization of the hypervisor, that conversation with apps and management moving up the stack? Is that a battleground? Is that a co-opetition? How do you see that management layer moving up? Obviously, everyone's trying to move the stack. Obviously, with Amazon and Cloud, commoditization happens. A lot of hardened layers now. So people have to move up the stack. That's kind of the trend that we're seeing. What's your take on that? So our technology is hypervisor agnostic. However, we recognize the fact and we've made a choice to be part of the VMware infrastructure. And clearly, as Isaac Newton said, we stand on the shoulders of giants. And one of those giants is of course VMware. But we're a virtualization agnostic and if customers want us to deploy under other virtualization options, that's possible. So, Doran, last year you guys had, you know, introduced SimpliVity to the world at this event. Now you've given away the best swag at the show. What should we look for next year? 12 months now. What should observers look for in terms of progress in this, not only this business, but specifically SimpliVity? So a lot of the customers are asking us for additional features, new form factors. We just released two more form factors. We used to sell just the CN3000, which offers 12 cores, 20 to 40 terabytes. Now there's a CN3000 with 24 cores, same amount of storage. There's a CN2000, which is smaller, half the cores, half the storage. And there's a CN5000, which is a juiced up version with twice as many drives and more SSD. So as we speak with very large customers, they say to us, what about giving me an OmniCube that I can run my SAP environment on? What about an OmniCube or a few OmniCubes for my Adupe environment? What about an OmniCube, especially for VDI? So what we're doing is we're starting to focus on some of those vertical environments that customers want, but note that today we offer OmniCubes for all of the applications that run on a data center. So that's one thing that people should look for. Secondly is the massive scalability that is inherent to our architecture still needs to be qualified in the lab. So today if we promise a customer 20, 30, 40 nodes, we need to qualify in the lab. And by the way, just last week, we had a third party test 40 nodes, 40 CN3000 nodes delivering 1.2 million IOPS. So the fact that the underlying technology is there doesn't mean that we can just ship it, we need to qualify. And last time that you and I spoke, I referenced a project that we call 512 by 64. 512 nodes across 64 sites that we're in the process of qualifying. And what I shared with you is that the reason we're going up to those numbers is that we have a customer that needs that much at that point in time. Well, there's now another customer that has ex-leapsed that amount. So we now need to qualify more. It's a massive spectrum from dead to soft. It is a massive and it's a significant execution challenge for us just to get all these systems in the lab and testing them. So back to your question, there are going to be more features, more form factors, and we're going to be qualifying larger and larger federations. Well thanks for coming by theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Great to hear from you. Congratulations on your success. And we're hopeful the raffle will kind of come our way. I'm sure we're going to have to step out of the recruitment ourselves from being getting the, now if we win we can't accept the car day because now I think that we're going to... You can accept it. We'll make it work for you. Great booth. Congratulations. Great to meet you. Thank you very much. Hot start up. It's great to see you again. This is the future. This is about the modern infrastructure. These guys have it. This is theCUBE. We're getting all the signal from the noise here at VMworld 2013. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. We'll be right back with our next guest in this short break.