 the bit density per square inch of RAM. And because it doesn't require power, a hundred times the density on a module. So it's not flash as a faster disk drive that's made solid state all that important. It's the fact that flash is a higher density memory device that has really made for a big change in the enterprise. So translation meaning it's really now cost effective. It's very cost effective. It costs less than RAM per bit and you can pack a hundred times the density on one module and get 800 gigs on one card up to five terabytes. And it's persistent, now you're right, you could have created battery backups before but it's a lot cheaper to do it with flash. Yeah, and even if it were not persistent, even if it forgot the data, just as a memory device it would be huge. But the added bonus of the fact that it remembers the data when the power's off is extremely powerful because now you don't have to wait for all that time for the data to load in. I mean some of these scale out properties like you were talking about have to stage a database and run traffic against it for several hours before it's ready to go live because they have to warm up all of the cash in the RAM with Fusion IO, IO memory holding the data sets you can go live and it's instantly ready because the data has been persisted there. So what does that mean for an application developer, say developing cloud applications? So it's a totally different mentality because things that you thought were impossible to do are now possible. You have to ask yourself what would I do if I had a system with terabytes of memory and didn't have to wait for that to get restored after a power outage but it was holding it all the time. The fact that this is a hybrid memory slash storage device makes for some really interesting designs. You can start combing through massive amounts of data in exhaustive ways that would not have been feasible before. David, can you talk about some proof points around the applications? I mean, honestly, it's like having RAM and a PC back in the old days, right? It's all on demand there. What are you seeing from your business and that you're disrupting and some proof points around those new things? It's an interesting question because it spans such a large spectrum because we're talking about a fundamental new building block, right? So it impacts and will impact everything in the entire data center but we can take out some for key examples. In the database world, like we were talking about, it typically means that a database server can do about 10 times the throughput for the same server and those responses, the queries, are answered 30, 40% faster. So it means faster page loads, more throughput per server. So answers.com retrofitted their MySQL scale out database tier and saw nine times the throughput per server. What they chose to do was to shrink the database farm four to one. So they got a 75% consolidation and with that remaining one out of every four servers, they were still getting in total more than twice the throughput they had before. So they re-architected essentially their database platform. And one way to think of what we do is we sell server consolidation, just like VMware but our server, we do that on the data intensive end of the spectrum where it requires such a large data set or such fast access that it wouldn't all fit in RAM, it wouldn't all fit in spindles. Well, you know, we cover a lot about data on SiliconANGLE and Dave, researchers with Wikibon. You know, everyone's talking about big data, you know, Hadoops of the worlds. But there's little data, we've been teasing out this notion of little data. Low latency, fast response times, edge devices. With virtualization, little data becomes big data because you can pack as many workloads as you want. Exactly, you've got fast big data. Compounds at that point because now you've jumbled all the IO together. So you're fast big data. That's right. So that's the way to think about it. Fast big data and in combination with VMware, what it allows you to do is to further increase your consolidation ratios. Because what limits the number of virtual servers or virtual desktops you can fit on a single machine is the memory capacity required and the IO performance required. This fits both of those bills and allows you to completely remove those as constraints. So talk about what that would mean, just playing it forward, the fantasy in a couple of years. I mean, never talk about VDI virtual desktops and the end user experience, but people have iPhones and iPads. So what is that experience going to be? I mean, spectrum is a problem for wireless and everyone wants faster everything now. So to explain that enablement, what would be some of the things you'd see? So what we're seeing is that flash is transforming your endpoint devices, right? So you're carrying around even more intelligent devices with more capabilities thanks to that very cheap capacity in the NAND flash and ever increasing processing performance. Where we play is in the back-end infrastructure, what it takes to support those, to run those services in the sky, this makes them much more cost effective to scale out. So it'd be safe to say that my iPhone will be more powerful, my iPad will be more powerful? Those will be more powerful and they will appear infinitely powerful because they're going to have fast access to large arrays of servers outfitted with IO memory that lets them hold huge amounts of data. So you're like a little memory cache that sits on the edge of the cloud that serves up the edge device, right? Almost a way to think about it? Well, metaphorically, it sits in the cloud and it provides a new tier of memory. So it doesn't displace disk drives, you'll still use disk drives for the cheap capacity that it gives you but for your active data sets, those will all be stored in IO memory and you'll still use RAM but you won't have to put as much RAM per server because now it can access the flash-based IO memory. So it's a new type of server class memory really? It's a new type of server class memory, that is the exact way to put it. The fact that it happens to be non-volatile and that it happens to be accessed through the storage interfaces is really a convenience. Just like a RAM disk sets aside part of your memory to pretend to be a disk drive, this, actually it's our software stack called the virtual storage layer, it takes IO memory and expresses it as if it were a storage device but the way it's physically connected, the way it's communicated with is much more akin to how you communicate with memory. So John mentioned VDI before, can you share with us any metrics or again more proof points around VDI and what you're seeing? We set up for the show here a demo where we have 512 VDI desktops being served from a single server and the amazing thing is that it's CPU bound, it's a 48 core server and we have in essence removed the bottlenecks of the amount of memory required and the amount of IO. So it's, you can even, you should stop by the booth and see it. You can log in through an iPad and start interacting with any one of those desktops. They're going through a scripted procedure showing users very actively using the desktops. So we've talked about it but I wonder if you could summarize sort of the difference between the Fusion IO approach very close to the CPU versus taking SSD and putting it into a disk controller-based subsystem. That's right. Two general schools of thought, one is to have it pretend to be a disk drive and sit inside of the disk infrastructure which seems like an easy target for very quick deployment. That would be kind of like having flash chips, you know how you carry a USB thumb drive? Sure. Well see, flash already displaced one form of magnetic media, the floppy drive. Notice it didn't replace the floppy drive by looking like a floppy disk and going in all those floppy disk readers. There was actually a company that did that and they didn't last very long because the USB port was just way too convenient to get more capabilities. Well, we thought the same thing. Flash is a memory device and should be integrated in the systems as a memory device to be able to truly exploit the additional capabilities, right? Because the last thing you want to do it's more expensive than disk drives, right? So you don't want to handicap its potential benefit. So we said we should be focusing on how to optimize to extract the most benefit from the flash, not optimize to have it pretend to be like the old school stuff. Can you talk a little bit about how you could potentially share that resource? Is that something that's on the horizon? Well, you know, the thing is, is all storage starts local and gets shared out over iSCSI or Fiverr channel through some sort of a director or service and you can take IO memory and serve it out iSCSI or put Microsoft or open source on it and have it out of filer. So anything that can serve storage over a network can serve IO memory virtual storage out over a network as well. So we're demonstrating, you know, iSCSI based targets, et cetera, downstairs. Now, it's best used locally because of the very high performance. We have cards that have the performance of 16 FC4 ports. So just one card and it gets very expensive to try to extract that much. So you'll see a tendency and it's very in line with cloud scale out to have the storage local and have it used locally, even if you have a sharing layer of software. For example, Datacore, one of our partners is here showing how with their software they can create distributed shared, sand-like storage from servers that have IO memory under VMware ESS. Yeah, we had George Tashara on the show on Monday, I think. Yeah, it was good. John, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about David's business, about Fusion IO, the company. Yeah, I mean, what's going on with the status, what's the momentum you have and revenues? As pause, I think. You bit? As you might expect, when you're introducing a new kind of building block that's this radically different, the question becomes, well, how do you drive adoption and make sure that there's traction with it? And I'm happy to say that we have OEM wins with all three of the major server vendors. IBM sells our product under the name HiIops, PCI Express. It's actually designed into their web sphere appliance, their web server appliance, and designed into their info sphere appliance, their database appliance. It's already built in. And HP also has OEM the product. Again, sells it as if it were their own. And it's called the IO accelerator. And that's across their server line. And most recently, just a few weeks ago, we announced an OEM relationship with Dell, who is actually sharing our branding on the product. So it's a Fusion IO branded product, but it's a full OEM relationship with Dell. Dell also happens to be an investor in the company from our seed round investor. So you're going to run the table on the server vendors? I mean, Dave and I were very excited that you were coming on by the way, because we think your company is really hot in terms of those huge success. And IO is a problem, right? I mean, we all want the faster edge device. We figured that we had better work well with the server vendors, because what we're selling actually ends up being server consolidation, right? And just like VMware had some of that constructive conflict with what does it mean to be consolidating servers, we have that same thing. So we felt it was very important that our products were sold by the server vendors and allowed them to make a business. It gives them more performance. I mean, they can still serve their customers and deliver better value. And you know, the amazing thing is, is one might, at first blush, say you're going to consolidate servers, that decreases the server spend. But in actuality, when you lower the cost per unit of useful computing, you make it more cost effective for problems that weren't before. And now you can take business models to market that wouldn't have been viable. So it actually expands the overall IT space. This is something that David Floyer from WikimHunt has talked about a lot, that compute and storage resources. It's an elastic market. It's very elastic. Lower the price, people will buy more, they'll push applications harder. So we may talk about consolidation, just like VMware, but what it really ultimately means is expanding the overall market. So you guys are obviously growing very quickly. Can you talk about headcount, revenues, I mean, or even just give us some general guidance? Yeah. You know, the company is doing extremely well. Waz is in there. Everyone wants to know about Waz. Steve Wazniak joined the company now going on two years and is extremely active with the company. We're very pleased to have him. He's, aside from being a celebrity personality, I mean, dancing with the stars. Great promotion. Yeah, but actually that happened just as he was joining up. He accepted. We thought we'd go out on a lark and ask him not just to be an advisor to the company, but maybe actually take a paycheck and be an employee and come in on a regular basis and be part of the executive team. And he accepted. Because he was so excited. Solid state has always been a special place in his heart. But then he said, but I'm going to be unavailable for the next three months because I'm going to be sequestered down in Southern California for this thing called dancing with the stars. It's like, it worked out really well because now even people who don't recognize him for being the inventor of the Apple computer, they recognize him for being that guy on dancing with the stars. Good, so uptake is strong. It's one of those up to the right charts. It sounds like what you guess. The impact that it has on business is incredible. We have some customers who are using us under autonomy and Microsoft's fast, unstructured text search. That's a growing area is corporate kind of search discovery. And their improvements are incredible. They went from minute level response times to comb through the inventory of every last email, what have you, down to fractions of a second in the response time. So it can really change the business and the services that they provide. So we're seeing a very rapid uptake. So the reason I think is my personal opinion that companies like Fusion IO are so interesting is because not only are you attacking the efficiency play, consolidation, right? It's a big theme, VMware, big theme. But more importantly, and this is true, I think for VMware as well, helping IT become a value producer, right? Whether it's a revenue generator or a new business enabler. And from your standpoint, it's enabling orders of magnitude greater application performance, potentially. That's a good way to look at it. And we kind of segment it too. There's folks who want to use our product as a way to reduce cost and improve efficiency. The more forward looking guys are actually the ones who look at the creative ways of, now that this possible, now that this is possible and cost effective, what kinds of things can I do that I couldn't before? And it means thinking outside the box. Just more tactically, what worries you as a CEO? What keeps you up at night? My biggest worries nowadays are around supply chain and building stuff fast enough. It's a problem that we always said, hey, that'd be great to have. Well, it's still just a problem. What do you say, just a final question to wrap it up, is advice to other entrepreneurs? I mean, you've built a great growing business. Great wins. What do you tell other entrepreneurs out there? Boy, run with your dream. Go through, analyze it well, make sure you're targeting a good market and just trust your gut on stuff. And be a little bit of a non-conformist. I think that's what's really played well with us. As we said, look, everybody else is trying to conform to those same drive bays and storage controllers. And we said, you know, that all needs to be rethought. So being ambitious enough to take on daunting tasks. Okay, David Flynn, the CEO of Fusion IO, hot startup, exclusive coverage of VMworld 2010 Live. So look on angle.com. Thanks so much. We're here in theCUBE. Feel free to mingle with the bloggers and I'm sure they have a lot of questions. App developers are really interested probably in all this. So thanks so much, Dave. Great. Great to have you on, David. Appreciate it. We'll be right back. Thank you. Taking a break. We're going to have an analyst come on from wikibon.org and Juniper Networks talk about networking and possibly some data and security. About computing, but across the street, the Apple store, tons of trucks, tons of activity. Apple's got the big announcement. We're here talking to all the people making that happen. I mean, Apple does not exist without the cloud and the future of applications will not exist without the cloud, Dave. So it's an exciting day. We've had the CEOs of all the hot companies here, VMware, top executives. We had startups with entrepreneurs. We had industry analysts talking about cloud and the impact of cloud computing. And to me, cloud computing is about enabling a new generation of applications, a new generation of entrepreneurship, new, cool stuff. So Apple epitomizes that. Apple is about the app store, about entrepreneurs built spinning up an app on Amazon or a cloud service. And now enterprises all want app stores. So VMware powers that, powers that new generation. So what is your assessment of how the Apple news and just cloud in general? Well, I think that to me, been following the industry for a while and we're in the vortex of the wave. It's great to be here with Silicon Angle and wikibon, David Floyer is on with us and we cover this stuff. This wave to me was started by Google. But the interesting thing about this is previous waves were defined by monopolies. This one is not, right? The monopoly is maybe more subtle. There's no Microsoft anymore. So companies like VMware can ride that wave and create some kind of virtual. VMware is that new player. VMware is the new company that no one's really ever heard of outside of the tech business. It's emerging as the critical player that powers all this virtualization, which is huge power to like phones, to PCs. And you've got companies like EMC, power in the storage for you and IO. I mean, it's just amazing. And Apple. You're right, Apple is just amazing. You're seeing stuff with Android. It'd be interesting to see how that's going to play out. But so we have David Floyer here. David, you've been walking the show. You follow this business. You've done servers and storage and infrastructure and applications for years. What are you seeing at the show? What are the high points that you're seeing? Share with us. Well, I think the following on what you were saying, well, following on what you were saying about the change in the industry is the platform that's now the crucial thing. And VMware is establishing itself and extending itself in being the platform of choice for the deployment of cloud applications. What do you think VMware has to do? What's on its to-do list to really keep this momentum going? So there are two things that it's focusing on and has focused on this show, on this particular announcement. The first was the vCloud director. And there what they're trying to do is make much more clear the division between virtual and real. So they're trying to help define virtual data centers, virtual sets of resources and make them as building blocks that you create. Whatever it is you want from all the resources around you and still maintain the control and availability and reliability and security that you require within a normal data center. And that's a big, big drive they have, very challenging one indeed. But so first of all, they're creating all of these virtual data centers from this pool and being able to allocate them out. And then the second starting set of products is around vShield, which is trying to protect them, creating, instead of having physical boundaries, having logical boundaries, virtual boundaries and being able to have the set of resources just to start to begin with the vShield edge. But obviously that's a very, very important line that they're on because they've got to convince a very skeptical and conservative group of people out there who do security that this is as secure as that physical boundary. Now, Dave, you know what this is. This is Microsoft in a new bottle. I mean, VMware is laying out all this inner vShield, vCloud director. I mean, under that, the average user's going to get huge acceleration in new apps. Yeah, the huge benefits with power and compute power. I mean, your iPhone today is tiny compared to what's going to be. I think you're right. It's a very Microsoft-like play in 2010 and beyond. Is VMware the next Microsoft in your eye? Yeah, I think they're clearly taking the playbook, right? And you've got some executives that understand that playbook. So the infrastructure, the platform, and even the applications, I don't think I'm sold yet on the applications piece in Zimra, but the infrastructure and the platforms are really, to me, the two key legs of the pillar, and I think they have to enable applications, right? And that's what spring source is all about. That's the right business for them to be in. And application development's got to make money. I mean, but we're hearing people want faster. They want everything now. These enterprises where people work. Really, no one's happy. I mean, we're hearing over and over again that the average user inside a company is really unhappy with their PC and device. Now, I want to switch topics a little bit. Bill Cook from Green Plum is in the house and you've been doing a lot of research on that. Why don't you give us a quick preview as to what you've been finding. Well, explain what Green Plum is. They were bought by EMC. That's a Green Plum. Green Plum is a database and is focused on data warehousing and different ways of getting that data with different architectures. And what EMC have bought Green Plum and what they're looking at is how they can use their resources to use the great things about Green Plum. For example, the way it segments things, how they can map that on to their V blocks and their storage and really make the Green Plum sing. And they've been doing some very interesting work. There's a very interesting market segment where Green Plum- Why did EMC buy them out? Because, you know, they were playing with a lot of open source players. I mean, why did EMC, what was... Guys, you guys are right on the list. I mean, you got to know the inside, you know, deep stuff. Well, I mean, I'll give them my opinion is you basically EMC is a leader in business intelligence and data warehouse. And they do a ton of- What position are they in the market right now? They got to be number one. They do a ton of business just by- And number one in storage virtualization? Yeah, absolutely. And so we just wrote about that, right? And the ESG data showed that. But I'm specifically talking about now the business intelligence market. Just by the fact that they're so big in storage, they were doing a bunch of business there. Now you have companies like Oracle and Netiza coming in with new models that really threaten, you know, the traditional model. EMC, I think, saw that as an opportunity for growth and defending its current base. What do you think? Two things. A, I think it saw an undervalued company and a great opportunity to make some money in the software business. But secondly, to learn with a database company on how they could connect it with storage, connect it with the V blocks and actually make them sing in a business warehouse. Well, a lot of people are saying that the green plum sold out a little bit. You know, is that true? Green plum, what, sold out? Yeah, they sold EMC. Oh, sold out. The CEO's in the house. So let's bring Bill Cook. We have to get him all riled up. Thank you very much, appreciate it. Bill Cook, why don't you come on right in? We'll just stay live. CEO of Green Plum, startup recently acquired by EMC. Great story. We had to get him all riled up. This is a, we've been following these guys and all of a sudden they started swinging at me. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you in person. Well, we've been following you guys when you guys started up and obviously when EMC snatched you up, we were at EMC World and we had Pat Gelsinger on the cube and I asked him specifically about some acquisitions and he said there's some things coming and then I find out that Pat really likes the deal and yesterday he was on and, you know, and so Pat Gelsinger's, you know, almost his one year. So I was only teasing you about selling out. You literally did sell to EMC but we were following you with some of the open source side as well. I mean, and we were on the analyst call and I brought that up and you addressed it. So first question, talk about Green Plum. What happened? What evolved for the folks out there? Your company sold to EMC. Take us through that quick story and we'll get into it. Yeah, I'll give you the, obviously the condensed version here. Green Plum was founded, you know, almost 10 years ago actually by Luke Launderegen and Scott Yarra and the whole premise of the company was to their credit was that data warehousing and analytics was going to explode over time and that the predominant view of how data warehousing was done at that time was around Teradata and then at that time Natisa was coming on board as well. But it was this integrated proprietary hardware platform with software to solve a specific, you know, what I would say is a niche problem of data warehousing. And a lot of times the CIO would be upset about that box coming into their environment because it was a proprietary box didn't fit into their architecture of what they were trying to do. And so the simple premise was if you believe this is going to be a big market and not stay, you know, smaller or niche oriented that history will prove that a software only play is the right direction. And so that's the premise of the company. Now, the challenge with that is building a world-class MPP database engine is non-trivial, right? And so there's just no shortcuts to hiring great people and getting kind of the world's best talent assembled in a room to go tackle that. And get some proprietary technology and do all that great stuff. Yeah, and so we took Postgres as the underlying database from the open source question at the beginning and kind of ripped out the innards, if you will, to make it work in this MPP scale out architecture way. And so that's what Greenblum's about. And so we came to market in 2006 and I guess the controversial decision I hired in in 2006, my background was Sun. I'd spent 19 years at Sun. And so the controversial decision we made, normally at a startup, you start small and then grow your way into the market. And we felt this market was going to explode quickly and that we had to take on, and our software was built for the world's largest data warehouse analytic environments. And so we went after the largest enterprise environments in the globe. And as a startup, that's a challenge. That's a challenge and that's a tricky proposition. Now, the lucky break we got, as we say, and this is a bit ironic, was that Sun Microsystems, under the leadership of Jonathan at the time, had a box coming out called Thumper that Andy Bechtelsheim had designed and was looking for more applications and solutions that they could build on top of that. And so he got introduced to Greenblum at the time and to their credit, they quickly embraced Greenblum as part of their data warehousing strategy. And so that was the break we needed because that gives you credibility to show up in larger enterprise clients and have a bigger vendor behind you. And so that's how we went to market in 2006 going after these enterprise class customers. And so the last three years have been focused on building that customer base and proving our technology and their environment. So how much was EMC paid for you guys? Was that disclosed? That was not disclosed. You want to disclose it in the cube? I don't want to disclose it. I'll let Pat or Joe or someone do that. One of my clients, I would say we were undervalued. Of course, one of my clients described their problem in the data warehousing business intelligence problem and they used the metaphor of a snake swallowing a basketball. And it sounds like that's the business that you guys are really in is helping address that challenge. Yeah, and I would characterize it a little bit differently, but I think the analogy somewhat holds. I mean, I think what's coming at every enterprise around the globe is the notion that data is critical to their future and not just taking extracts of data. If you look at everything around the room here, everyone interacting with the internet, every one of those interactions contains some data that's probably useful to the business. And so historically data warehousing has been about extracting the data and doing an extract or a summarization of that data and then looking for insights in more of a batch-oriented way. We think that world's changing dramatically. It's like looking back in the rearview mirror. Yeah, it's looking in the rearview mirror for trends and analysis. And so we believe that you have to take much more of an internet-scale, agile approach to data warehousing. That's the big change that's going to happen. And what's underneath that change is that the advent of commodity hardware, if you think about multi-core technology, the storage technology that EMC and others bring to the equation, and then the advancement of interconnect and ethernet, so 10 gig ethernet, et cetera. Those things have been advancing at a tremendous pace over the last 20 years. And yet data warehousing and analytics is still viewed as this big batch environment. And so what we believe is that the scale out being very agile from an analytics perspective will be the way that businesses start to do business. This won't just be about a data warehouse technology. This will be about how do I plug in to the existing infrastructure, and that's why it's timely here with obviously VMware and what's going on, to leverage a virtualized stack to allow data warehousing workloads to drive business value to customers. We had a guy from Excel Partners, big VC, invested in a company called Cloudera. That does a lot of commercializing Hadoop. And big clusters of commodity hardware you mentioned. You got the big data argument. We just had Fusion IO, they talk about fast big data. What's your vision around this whole movement? I mean, you're right. Facebook is throwing off more data. People's gestural data, whatever you want to call it. I mean, it's being used. I mean, Dallas Cowboys are using data from real time data around promotions, concessions. So this business policy around data, it's very valuable. So talk about the Hadoop kind of world, big cluster farms. We were talking on a session earlier about, power is going to be a big issue. It's going to be massive clusters. You need agility and speed, low latency data transfer. So where does that open source community fit in? And where does that, the big EMCs kind of fit into that? Well, it's like any of these big, big movements along the way. So first off, we believe in it. We embrace it. In fact, we did a MapReduce interface into our engine. We know, Mike Olson, the Cloudera guys are pretty well. Great guy. Stay tuned, stay tuned for us working together. So we don't think there's one answer to the question around big data, right? There's still going to be lots of SQL access. Top of the first inning, there? Totally, totally top of the first inning. And I don't think it'll stop at MapReduce and Hadoop. There'll be other constructs as well. And so from our perspective, we're providing an engine for that to run on. And then it's about provisioning and how do you start to get collaboration across that data? So we are embracing that. You're excited about that. We're very excited about that. And I think it fits in perfectly to where enterprises are going to go with their big data problem. Can we talk a little bit about, you know, the whole VMware play? Because, I mean, a lot of the clients that I talked to say things like, we're not going to share this infrastructure. We need all the horsepower we can get. But we were talking earlier, you actually see, especially for data markets and the like, a real big opportunity to virtualize that infrastructure. Yeah, so there's two, two, and that's a really good question. There's two points going on here. So one, the point about sharing infrastructure, so it's the same infrastructure that you can use for multiple applications. So we believe that world exists and will continue to exist. If you think about my premise, that people are going to look for access to all types of data. And by the way, you know, at the beginning of the day, they may not know what they're looking for, right? And so that evolves. So you've got to have that kind of agility. Secondly, you're right. In a lot of cases, when you're looking at workloads for data analytics, you want as much power as you can throw at it. So we're not talking about turning that off. We're talking about having a way to provision that automatically and have some user management around that. If you want to, if you've got a big problem you need to solve from an analytics perspective, you may want to throw a thousand cores at it and, you know, 100 terabytes. But you also may want to scale that back tomorrow. Yes, right? And so when we talk about virtualized worlds, we're talking about being able to have that, that knob that you can turn to get that infrastructure and get that data quickly and then give the power to the user, you know, with some management around that. Obviously security, authentication, all those things matter. And then having the kind of the business management over the top of that, of getting the right resources to the right users. Okay, so this is, you're feeling that, based on what you just said, that will resonate with application heads, right? Because you're going to make their lives a lot better, more resources faster. Yeah, it's a funny world because in data warehousing, if you talk to most enterprises, from a user community perspective, they'll say, it's really hard. I'm not happy with my CIO. I'm not happy how I get access to my data infrastructure. I say I want a 100 terabyte data mart. And three months later, I may have it, right? And so what we're providing now is a bridge to the IT organization through partnerships like with VMware that you create these virtualized environments that people have access to. And now all of a sudden, the business users are much happier, right? They've never had that capability. And also give them that knob that they can turn up the power and the performance that they need and the access to the data sources that they need. That's the other problem we're solving for is how do you do data integration? Right, better across the enterprises. We've got a couple minutes left. I know you got one question. I got one final question. Looking forward, I mean, you have a lot of history with Sun, you're at a cutting edge company with Green Plub, you're now with EMC, the leader in storage virtualization, number one, as Dave wrote about. What's the future look like? Give us your view, I mean, given what you know and your experience and kind of what cloud enables, how big is it going to be and what are some of the things that you might see? And not even related to the data business or your business, it could be, but what are the things will the world be seeing? I mean, Apple has a big announcement going on today. Apple's the epitome of edge robustness, user experience and the expected user experience now. So talk about from your personal perspective what you see unfolding. Yeah, I think what's going to happen is, so we think data will become core, right, to how applications get delivered, et cetera, both in your business life and in your personal life. And I think our job is to provide access to those data and engine that allows you to scale and provide those services in meaningful ways that we just can't envision today. If you think about all the things that are coming at people, about who you are and how you're interacting with these systems, I think just being that enabler from a technology perspective is going to be a huge trend. And I think it's fundamentally going to shift the way people think about their interaction with infrastructure. I think Paul talked about it the right way, right, that the fundamental shift that's going on around virtualized infrastructure is going to be critical and touch every aspect of our life. I think the other point that maybe is a little less visible is not only about moving infrastructure closer to data, if you will. It's also about connecting people to this new world, right? So how do people collaborate? People-centric model. People-centric model, totally, around who are the rock stars, insights, enterprises, getting insights into their business? And how do they share that with the executives of the organization? Or how do I share that into my personal life, et cetera? Now, obviously, to your earlier question, security, authentication, those things really matter. There's some minimums that need to be achieved. They have to be there. Table stakes. But that speaks to why you have to have this common infrastructure, like VMware is talking about. That speaks to the whole VMware proposition. Exactly, exactly. So you can think of us as really the killer app on top of that infrastructure, connecting data across enterprises. Data Warehouse has always been this weird, like, back room operation. Like, what's going on back there? Slow, archiving. And that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about bringing data to the forefront, to the masses, to the users. That's a agility message, too. It's a agility message. But it's also, as I mentioned, the power user to the executives, to the consumers. Making that work in a very seamless way. And this speaks to why, I think EMC, to give my boss a little credit here, to Pat and Joe, I think had the foresight to see where this was headed and thought Greenplum was the right asset to put inside of EMC. Well, we want to congratulate you on the acquisition, your team, well done. You guys have been working hard. Now, of course, you've got more work to do. You've got to start hiring people and ramping up. So good luck with that. Thank you. We're the top CEO of Greenplum. We've got Sanjay Mershandani, CIO of EMC coming up next. He's my customer now. Yeah, that's right. Okay, we'll be right back. Okay, thanks guys. Thanks. Thanks, Joe. This is The Cube, live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010. Now, Inside the Cube. Hi, we're back live. This is Dave Vellante, cube casting from the Moscone Center, VMworld. I'm here with Sanjay Merchandani. Great to have you on Sanjay. Silicon Angles, continuous coverage here of VMworld. So we've got the CIO segment coming up. CIO of EMC, a little company in New England. And then next we have Brian Bosserman, CIO of Foster Pepper, one of your customers. So let's get right to it. Talk about EMC's journey to the private cloud. You guys have been out marketing this concept. Our audience wants to know, are you guys eating your own dog food or you're able to absorb these technologies? Why don't you talk a little bit about what you guys are doing? Sure, sure. Well, first of all, great to be here. Thank you. Journey to the private cloud, I mean that's something that's evolved over the last couple of years. And a couple of things in that that we should pay attention to, it is a journey. And today we have a better definition around cloud, you know, what it was. When we started this out, it was probably four or five years ago. And it was more in journey and virtualization and information management. And quickly evolved into private cloud as the technology and the industry got shaped the way it is today. We started this much as any other customer of ours or any large company like ours would do, which is, you know, we were growing, we were global, we were acquiring companies. And, you know, keeping up with the pace was a challenge. And classic situation where our data centers were almost 100% allocated at every given point of time, but not necessarily 100% utilized. So we went down the path of really taking, being very early adopters of core VMware technology as well as some of our own storage technologies. And putting them into their paces in production early in the life cycles. And rapidly moved beyond dog footing. I think dog footing is a term that Paul Moritz gets credit for many years ago. And we go beyond dog footing. We're actually, you know, we're making sure that the product roadmaps fit our roadmaps in IT. And we're working together both pre-GA products as well as once they come out and use cases that we can take to our customers. So we, it's a program. We call it EMC IT proven. And in a sense that we test the technology, we work with the technology, talk about it. A little bit ahead of some of the other EMC customers potentially. Yes, and we do that with VMware as well as all the products that EMC produces. Get nice and close to the audience in here. So talk a little bit about your virtualization strategy. I mean, how far have you been able to push it and what are the barriers to pushing it further? Well, when you have Joe Tucci and Paul Moritz doing your review, so to speak, the goal was very simple. You know, we had to run Mission Critical, a $16 billion enterprise on 100% virtualized infrastructure. So that was the goal given to me. 100%? Yeah. And so we're about 70% down that path. Mark Egan was here. He said, you know, they're 97% of the way. Right. And Mark and I talk frequently and we're about 70% of the way there on the computer side, on the server side. The goal being early part of next year to hit 100%, x86, 100% virtualized. That's what we're working towards. How about the application portfolio? Talk about that. Sure. So roughly 60% of our Mission Critical applications in some significant manner are virtualized. And you have to keep moving up that. You have to be relentless about driving that. The dashboard we look at looks at server virtualization, looks at storage virtualization, looks at Mission Critical applications, look at the overall applications, looks at desktops. So we track that very closely. We track that on a monthly basis. And you know, the goal there again is to drive to 100%. So actively working on that. How about your Oracle apps included? Large piece of the Oracle. You know, the app side, the web tier, the middleware. Yeah, we... Is SAFRA helping you with that or? Well, we continue working. We're going to be here in a couple of weeks at Oracle Open World. I'm sure you will be. We'll ask her. And how about VDI? Do we need to think of the desktop? Yes, we are. So VDI is, you know, Windows 7 and upgrading the user experience on the core Windows side. You're looking at virtual desktops as being a key way to deliver that in the whole VDI technology elements. And basically a great announcement yesterday that we're obviously looking at working with. The goal is to have about 5,000 users in the next couple of months on virtual desktops. And a good mix. So we've got about eight use cases that we look at on VDI and we're going across them. So we're striping right across the use cases to make sure this is something we want to roll out and then actively go, you know, full force next year. So, you know, I appreciate you sharing with the audience some of your internal infrastructure. As a CIO though, you know, it's really not just about the technology. It's about so much more. So I want to talk about that. I'd like you to touch upon just your organization, the people side of it. And then I also want to talk about IT as a transformative tool and concept. So maybe start with the people and that side of the equation. It's a great, it's a, you know, it's an absolutely great topic. I mean, at EMC World, I had the, you know, the opportunity to share with the audience of what we've been doing with the private cloud, what we were doing with our journey. And a big piece of what we did was I shared the stage with our vice president of infrastructure, IT infrastructure, whose title is now vice president of private cloud, IT private cloud. And not just by title, it's by function. And the two of us, John and I share a lot of, we have a lot of passion around the topic because as much as we work for a technology company, the bits move faster than our abilities to digest them. And we have to make sure that our best and brightest are working with this technology in a way that really makes them productive. And no one gets left behind because it is moving at an incredible pace. Set a different way. It's an incredible opportunity for IT professionals. One that, you know, having been in this industry for over 20 years, I'd say that this is one that really allows us to not only go deeper without technology, but go wider as well. So if you're business-facing in IT, you have a classic IT role where you're interfacing into the business, your customers, you've got to now start thinking catalogs. You've got to start thinking capabilities. You've got to start thinking, you know, price models that are different. If you're delivering, if you're managing storage you may do it for two sets of two stacks today, three stacks, four stacks. Tomorrow you're going wide across the enterprise. You're provisioning for the enterprise. So the opportunities for us to grow both this way and deep are incredible. You get a V-block. The joke around the, you know, the IT shop we run is who gets to it first? Is it a systems person? Is it a storage person? Is it a network person? Is it a security person? Who gets to it first? So we're, you know, we're going across and deeper. So I think it's an incredible opportunity. We could talk for hours about process, you know, how that evolves, you know, classic ways of triaging a problem when it occurs is get everyone that touches that application, that touches that situation into a room. You've got a conference call going, going to bridge you. Nobody leaves until it's fixed. Nobody leaves until it's fixed. Well, you know what? The cloud changes that significantly and, you know, and so someone's having an issue with performance in, I don't know, pick up, you know, an Indonesia. Well, you know, you can't get everybody on the call to start figuring that out. You've got to, there's got to be much better ways to manage it, roles, cross skills, tools. It's, it's a, I think it's exciting. Yeah, so you've seen a lot of changes in this industry. Now, let's see, if we go back to the post.com crash, you know, 2001, 2002 timeframe, Nicholas Carr wrote the book, does IT matter? And I know at the time I was running a CIO practice and all of our COs, you know, what does this mean? You know, what do you guys think? Help us communicate that this is not true. This is insanity. But we've gone through a decade of, you know, serious, serious cost cutting. Interestingly, meanwhile, you've had companies like Google and all these cloud players, they've used IT to really debunk, you know, Carr's theory, which was actually quite interesting and well written, but they are IT companies. Google has proven that you can gain competitive advances through IT. And it seems like traditional IT or corporate IT is really now starting to see that. Essentially, if I could say this, competing with, in a way, those cloud service providers or, you know, the web 2.0 companies, do you benchmark yourselves against them or should you be doing that? We definitely should. It's a journey. So, you know, it's on our, we do in some cases and others, we're building that into our dashboard, but absolutely have to be best of class. We, classic IT organizations, have to stop thinking themselves as sole providers. You know, the question we ask internally if our people is, if our internal customers had a choice, would they come back to us? And would they come back to us happily, right? So, not only is the total customer experience important, but the efficiency with which you deliver that experience is also very important. So, we absolutely want the seductiveness of what public cloud services or Uber cloud services provide, but we want that inside our shop. And so, the evolution of a classic data center into a virtualized data center, into a private cloud, we absolutely want the best practices of that. So, that is the high watermark and we're striving to get that. A lot of being a CIO, a lot of it is being a leader as well. A sort of a personal question is, what do you see as your qualities of leadership that you emphasize? And one of those that you try to balance with others, maybe skills you don't have, can you share that with our audience? That's a good question. One of the things that, coming into this role that was different was I wasn't a classic IT, I didn't come up with the IT ranks, I came from the business, but I'd been around CIOs for a long time selling into them, working with them, being in services. And what's important, I think, what I learned very quickly, early in my tenure as CIO was, IT professionals don't get paid to take risks. We get paid to make sure that the business runs, it's safe, it's predictable, and that's what we do. But being IT for an IT company, we have to be a showcase for our customers on what we do and how we build technology and how we run the shop. So we've, through our IT proven program, gone out and said, our value within the business is helping our company build better products by being a user and giving feedback, and helping our external customers use our products better through our experiences. So we have to do both of those things and infuse a little risk, calculated risk into the environment to be able to do that. So that's, I don't know if that's leadership or not, but that's what we're driving towards. Well, it is, and it's a big challenge you have. I mean, I think you're right. Companies before you sort of started that whole eat your own dog food, I remember Sun Microsystems went through a major transition from IBM mainframe to Sun Systems and there were real glitches there on this very high profile and so you've got to manage those through your people, your process, and obviously your technology. Last question from me, Sanjay, is talk about what advice you would give to your peers who want to take this journey. What do they need to be thinking about? Well, I'd say, firstly, it is a journey. So you've got to pace yourself and you've got to set yourself realistic goals. So think of it as a, I think of the private clouds as the state we want to achieve, not necessarily a skew I want to buy, but every skew I buy should help me get to that state that I want to achieve, right? What we also see is that you'll hit 25, 30, 35, 40% virtualization and you go, well, that's pretty good, I got all these savings, I'm done. You've only just begun. So be relentless about making sure that you don't put physical back into this journey into the private cloud. You've got to stay virtual. So we are absolutely ruthless about any technology that we put into the enterprise that doesn't fit the bill towards the private, if you were towards the private cloud. The other thing we say all the time to ourselves, another way of saying that it's no U-turns. So we're going virtual, we're going virtual all the way and no U-turns. And you're all in. So far so good and I'd say almost cliche, but I'd say especially if you're not from an IT organization and the cloud isn't as obvious as it may be in the business we're in, is you really need to be able to communicate or get executive support on what you're trying to do. It is more efficient, it is more agile, but it isn't always obvious. And so you've got to be able to make sure that you've got the top-down understanding on this as a CIO as you move through this journey because there will be a little pushback as you go through it. It's great advice. So I'd say I'd share that. It sounds a little appreciate, but it's important. All right, we're here with Sanjay Mirchandani, SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage, live at theCUBE. Sanjay, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives. Thank you very much. All right, up next is Brian Bosserman, CIO of Foster Pepper. Should we bring him right in? All right, let's go right to it. CIO chair. You know the CIO hot seat today. All right, so we're here at the Moscone Center. Another great day, day three. Kristen Nicole here with SiliconANGLE.tv. We were sitting at theCUBE at VMworld 2010 and noticed a bunch of stuff going on right outside. New stations are lining the streets. Thanks to Steve Jobs' announcement today with Apple. We've got a new Apple TV coming out today. It's the size of your hand and it comes with all kinds of new features. It's got Netflix streaming and YouTube support, Flickr, MobileMe access, and all sorts of other sharing features that you pretty much always wanted with your Apple TV. We have Ethernet, HDMI outputs, Wi-Fi support, and all kinds of other fun features that you'll hear about later on. Another announcement from Apple was the new iTunes 10 coming out. It includes a new social feature called Ping. Looks a lot like Facebook. You'll be able to share things like comments and your music preferences. It's got social music discovery incorporated into its features and you'll also be able to see things like concert listings near you. Other than the new iPod redesigns, one of which includes the iPod touch that has FaceTime features in it. That's about all the news we have on the streets. Back to you with theCUBE, John. West, we have offices in Seattle and Spokane, about 120 attorneys, and we have a broad range of practice groups that service lots of great clients. Okay, so what are you doing here? What's your virtualization affinity with what's going on? Well, this is my third VM world, so I'm an alumni. Officially now, right? Yes, exactly, exactly. And just here to get the latest, greatest on the VMware technologies that are coming out, figuring out how to further take advantage of those offerings in our data centers. And we have been very successful so far. We're about 95% virtualized. So I just wanted to take a look at the new stuff and talk to some of the people in the industry that have helped me along the way. And that's kind of why I'm here. So talk a little bit about life at your organization prior to virtualization. What was it like and take us through sort of the transformation? Sure, so I guess about two years ago, we had about 60 physical servers in our Seattle data center. And we were getting kind of full, kind of maxing out our power and our AC and our rack space and all that kind of stuff. And we decided to take a look at VMware and we'd done a little bit of work with it up at that point, but we really decided to kind of go full tilt. And that was in the 3.02 days. So we got about 25% virtualized about a year ago. We upgraded to 3.5 and then 4.0 and we're on 4.0 update two now. And we run on six physical servers, 110 Windows servers. So we've reduced the amount of physical servers, 10-fold and we've doubled the number of virtual servers. So it's been a great journey for us. Now how about the apps? Did you start like everybody with Test and Dev and then sort of roll it out? We did, Test and Dev, then we kind of went to our lower utilization servers, kind of our domain controllers, print servers, you know, kind of the low hanging fruit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now we have Exchange 2003. We just implemented Exchange 2010. We have our SQL servers. I mean, we have everything running our line of business app. So it's great. I thought you weren't supposed to do that. We had Microsoft any other day and they didn't say this, I'm tongue in cheek. I mean, Microsoft's generally been saying, you know, use Das on 2010. I say Microsoft has its head up its Das. But it works pretty well. 2010 SQL, virtualized. We had some other customers telling us similar stories and we love it. Yeah, and in fact Exchange 2010 is actually certified on VMware. So it depends on who you talk to at Microsoft, but at least part of their company is embracing the VMware technology as well, even though they compete against it at the same time. Yeah. I think the Exchange group is looking at, you know, Google and Google apps and Gmail saying, wow, we need to lower the cost wherever possible, at least the perceived cost. But I think as you know, at scale, the cost of a shared infrastructure is going to be lower. Right, and just, you know, the other thing is agility, right? I mean, in our environment and everybody's environment, you want to be supporting the business and you want to be able to react to the needs of the business and the VMware infrastructure lets you do that. So if a new technology comes up that we want to invest in, for instance, SharePoint 2010, there's some technologies there that are very valuable for our law firm, which we do a lot of documents, as you might imagine. And we needed to build a bunch of servers real quick. So I built five SharePoint 2010 servers in one day and put all the specs in, got them all patched up and you know, all that kind of stuff. You know, in the physical world, you just can't do that. When you consolidate all those servers, 10x consolidation, I presume that they were underutilized at the starting point. One of the things we hear from a lot of the clients in the Wikibon community is when they do that consolidation, one of the few applications that wasn't underutilizing servers was backup. So did you have to change your backup strategy? Can you talk a little bit about that? I'm not sure if we had to change our backup strategy but we chose to and the reason why is we use EMC as our storage area network and we're currently using the EMC NS480 in Seattle and Spokane. And so we replicate all of our data between Seattle and Spokane. So we have a full copy of all of our servers in Spokane. So that's great to be able to do that. But in addition to that, we use snapshotting technology through a product from EMC called Replication Manager. And what that does is gives us a local copy of all of our servers as well. So in the event we need to restore something, we don't have to go to tape. We don't have to go to archival disk. The copy that we need is already in our sand and ready to go and ready to be restored. I just have to mount it and I can mount and restore the whole server or just one file, however I want to do it. So you don't use any tape? No tape at all? We don't use any tape. So it's all disk to disk? It's all disk to disk. Do you use a deduplication technology? We do use data domain for our deduplication and we do replicate that also to Spokane. So that's kind of a transition. We haven't fully transitioned to the new model of snapping and replication using the EMC sand. We're just going through that process still. So we still have our old process which is copying to the data domain storage and then replicating that. So we have both ways of doing it right now. So last question for me is, what advice would you give to your peers that want to take a similar journey? What should they focus on? Well, I would just say, get started because there's lots of reasons not to go down a new technology path but what we have found is we have a lot more flexibility in this new environment and we can respond to the business much quicker. So initially we were just kind of doing it as a cost savings project but now it really gives us that agility and the ability to go into new technologies and it's so much easier to manage. We've gone from three engineers managing our infrastructure to one and those other engineers now can focus more on application and delivering to the business instead of working on network hardware and server hardware and that kind of thing. That's a big theme that we're hearing here from Brian Bosserman and other CIOs is moving beyond cost cutting into business enabling. Brian Bosserman, CIO, Foster Pepper, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, we're going to stay live here and let's see, is Kent here? No, we're going to go to the news package. Oh, great. Okay. And then Stu. Okay, Dave. Coming up for me. So Dave, we, having a good morning. Yeah, actually. EO from Green Plum, bought by EMC. We couldn't get him to tell us how much they got paid. He's a tough character. He's good. So, we're live at the Moscone Center, exclusive coverage on SiliconANGLE.tv, VMworld Live 2010 in theCUBE, and we're downtown San Francisco at the Moscone Center and there's a lot of action going on. So, here at VMworld, but the world just changed a little bit today because Apple announced some new products. So, we sent out Kristen Nicole, our news editor with a video camera. Mark Hopkins went out there with her and she's out there on the scene and we're going to go to her. Michael, when is she available? Is she ready? Okay, we're going to go to Kristen Nicole who's on the scene to talk about the Apple announcement. Kristen Nicole here with SiliconANGLE.tv. So, Kristen, what's going on down there? We were sitting at theCUBE at VMworld 2010 and noticed a bunch of stuff going on right outside. News stations are lining the streets. Thanks to Steve Jobs announcement today with Apple. We've got a new Apple TV coming out today. It's the size of your hand and it comes with all kinds of new features. It's got Netflix streaming and YouTube support, Flickr, MobileMe access and all sorts of other sharing features that you pretty much always wanted with your Apple TV. We have Ethernet, HDMI outputs, Wi-Fi support and all kinds of other fun features that you'll hear about later on. Another announcement from Apple was the new iTunes 10 coming out. It includes a new social feature called Ping. Looks a lot like Facebook. You'll be able to share things like comments and your music preferences. It's got social music discovery incorporated into its features and you'll also be able to see things like concert listings near you. Other than the new iPod redesigns, one of which includes the iPod touch that has FaceTime features in it. That's about all the news we have on the streets. Back to you with theCUBE, John. That was a great Apple. I got a big billboard across the street. We can see it in the Apple stores packed with trucks, CNBC, CNN, Dave. You know, they've got the big trucks and we've got theCUBE here. And social media broadcasts going on here, live at VMworld. Wall-to-wall coverage, blanket coverage here live. Three full days, eight to 5.30 every day. We've gone in depth with CEOs. But let's talk about Apple. I mean, let's just riff on the Apple thing. I mean, Apple is the epitome of the edge. I mean, the user experience that Apple has innovated on has been game-changing. Everyone's following suit, Google putting a ton into Android, trying to catch up, they're going open, Apple's going to stay closed. But, you know, Apple is just really killing it. Doing a great job, just pumping out great products. And the user demand for that kind of user interface is driving a lot of the force behind, you know, VDI and virtualization at the desktop. And it makes IT guys look like, you know, amateurs. I mean, the old PC model is not working. Bring your PC to work. All this stuff's crazy. You're right. I mean, innovation is tremendous. One of the things I've seen, certainly a theme at this show is I think the IT people are waking up to that very quickly because they're getting such demand from users. And they're saying, we've got to accommodate this. I mean, even VMware itself, sort of changing the whole discussion from desktop, you know, to end user computing. I mean, that's a clear trend and they don't want to miss it. Yeah, and Jeremy Burton from CMO of EMC was on here. He was talking about the consumerization of IT. And Apple really is a great example of the consumerization. And the question, you know, for you to talk about is, what do you think that's going to be in the IT environment? Will that ever be, will the IT departments ever be Apple-like? Enabling that kind of really great user experience? Well, I think that innovation is totally flipped in this industry, right? It used to be that all the innovation was coming out of the big, big data centers. And now that's clearly not the case. You know, it's the user's laptops. It's the user's desktops. It's the user's devices that are driving things, really driving back into the data center. So my feeling is that eventually the data center is adopting these technologies, but the consumer is now the center of innovation. It seems like the conversation we're hearing from everyone we talk to is the old ways stuck. The network model, the compute model is stuck. And there's a new network that's emerging and it's flat, like, you know, layer two is Doug Gorlesa for the geeks, but really flat, enabling the kind of Apple-like experience. I'm talking about what they're doing here with Facebook. I mean, they're integrating Facebook into iTunes. That's just about time. They got this new ping service. So Apple's just leading the way. And new apps, I mean, right? It's all about this new breed of apps. And Troy's trying to catch up. John, you should do a cube app. What do you think? I guess some developers would do it for free. We don't have any cash, no low sponsors. Yeah, we need money, but we'll do the apps. We're going to have social networks. We're going to have, you know, transport or rooms. You name it, we'll have it. Seriously, what do you think about Android, though? I mean, Android is really getting the numbers up in terms of deployment. Apple's taking that, you know, monolithic. I mean, I've written about this and Android just surpassed iPhone as number two. It's a number two platform, according to Gartner, right? And so my feeling is that Android, that open ecosystem is ultimately going to be a winner and it's unclear what oracles move recently. We're going to have Rod Johnson as the CEO of Spring, now at VMware on at two o'clock. So, you know, that to me is a real key point in the VMware architecture around spawning some innovation around developers because, you know, Android is just a totally robust platform for developers to get distribution. If you're developing an app, you're going to need to have a platform. You got Android and you got these new cloud technologies out there. So, to me, I'm going to watch that pretty closely and we're going to track it on cloudangle.com. That's great new publication you guys launched. So congratulations on that. All right, we have to wrap here at theCUBE. We'll be back this afternoon. We've got a great lineup. We're speaking of new networks. We're going to have a guy from Juniper Networks come in and they have a new architecture. So we're going to talk to him about that and what that enables. Yeah, we'd like to learn more about those new networks and how things are flattening and what meets it for cloud service providers in particular. Okay, great. We'll be right back. Continuous coverage, SiliconANGLE. Stu's coming up next, Stu Miniman and Juniper Networks. So we'll be right back. Exclusive coverage, SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv here at theCUBE, on the ground at Moscone, live in San Francisco for VMworld 2010. We'll be right back. For all the actions happening, we just ran a news report. Kristen Nicole out in the streets getting the scoop on the Big Apple announcement and what better way to transition from the Apple news, which really is about user experience. But something's got to power all that, all that action. So we have Abner from Juniper Networks and Stu Miniman from the Wikibon Project, senior analyst, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So Abner, we were just talking about the Apple news and obviously Apple's epitome of the user experience out there at mobile and mobile is, everyone expects mobile. User experience has changed and the demand is unprecedented in terms of this disruption. They want everything at the edge. They want it fast. They want it secure. Your company, Juniper Networks, competes with Cisco Systems. And so, you guys are the guys running the networks. You have the plumbing, running the bits in the packets, work with the carriers, running the data across the network. What's changing? You guys have a philosophy that's quite different than Cisco. Cisco's the fully integrated stack, pushing some video as well. So they're pushing innovation measures, but you guys have a new architecture. So compare what you guys are doing with Cisco and Stu, let's riff on the whole, what is the preferred network architecture for the user experiences? And I think what was really one... All right, two big questions, actually fairly closely related. So, classically networking was a black box that I bought into and a particular vendor would develop the silicon, all the software for it. And I bought a box. And so, today you hear network people talk about, oh, I've got a Juniper over there, I've got a Cisco over there and they refer to their boxes as the way that they build networks. What's happened is that in the networking world, Juniper in particular has looked at, well, what's the architecture that the rest of the IT industry has adopted? And that's an architecture that's a layer cake model where the applications are separate from the operating system, which is separate from the silicon. And that allows you to innovate very quickly and do some interesting things like start to solve management problems because no longer do you want to manage just one box, you want to manage all the boxes in concert with each other and you don't want to think of them as boxes anymore, you want to think of them as a network, which brings us to virtualization. So, one of the things that's happened with virtualization is you have a set of virtual connections that applications connect to and then you have an underlying infrastructure that's physical. And if your underlying infrastructure is spaghetti, you can't connect those things together. You're just sort of layering some sauce on that and it might work for a little while but it doesn't necessarily get you the ability to move things around in a very fluid fashion. And so, one of the things that we look at is, well, one, how do you innovate on the network in a way that's identical to the classic IT innovation model, which is open it up, give you an open interface for people to develop new applications, have a common interface across multiple components of the network. So, Juniper runs Junos, which is our operating system across switching, routing and security and that allows us to do some really cool things with partners and help drive down the cost of building the reliable network that companies always wanted but has been very difficult to achieve with legacy architectures. Stu, you're an expert in this area. You're an analyst covering this new architecture models that are emerging from the vendors and the company's innovating out there. What's your angle on, and you work at EMC so you know the storage business up and down but you also know networking, what's your angle on what's happening from your research and what you're seeing out in the marketplace? Talk about what that is. Okay, John, so before it used to be network was just kind of the pipes that got me things and the separation, there wasn't a real strong connection between my application and what I needed to do. It was just the network guy was over there, go provision me some bandwidth, maybe if you got to go play with quality of service that was usually a dirty word to the networking guys and today it's not set it up once and forget about it and it grows and expands and moves incrementally but now we have a completely different scenario where what you put today is going to move all the time. It's changing all over the place and the biggest challenge here is really from a management perspective. Security is also a real big issue but what I've seen Juniper doing is the integration that they've done with VMware and I think they're talking about that here at the conference is have some great solutions pulling together the virtual infrastructure and management. Right, so the question I have for Abner maybe Stu as well is that we heard about server consolidation around with Fusion IO and all the stuff where they're consolidating but yet increasing performance so the question is, is it the same on the network side where this consolidation or reconfiguration and higher performance is at the same kind of direction? Do you see that going that way or what's going on at the lower levels there? Yeah, you don't have consolidation in the same way that we consolidated servers or for the same reason we had server, we consolidated servers. We consolidated servers because there was an efficiency problem, we just wasn't getting utilized. The consolidation that's occurring on the network is we have a new design problem so when we move from client server architectures the design problem was how do I get the traffic from the server out into the rest of the world? Now it's how do I pull it into the data center, bounce it around a whole bunch of times and then spit it back out? So Abner actually, if you don't mind me jumping in here so actually I think there first of all there is an efficiency issue with networking today. Juniper and a lot of your competitors out there are solving that because rather than having blocking architectures, over provisioning we're now building much bigger scale out architectures that are going to be able to support cloud type applications and we're using every port and we're going to much higher speed. We've got 10 gig now, 40 gig and 100 gig just been approved and they're coming soon so the price per port is such that it needs to be used and we can't just waste resources the way, waste maybe is the wrong word but we have to more efficiently use everything that we have so. The efficiency problem is one of basically asking a very simple question. How do you get traffic from one side of a data center to the other? Whether that traffic is application traffic because our application architectures have changed whether it's a VM that's moving across the data center because our compute architectures have changed or whether it's moving storage across the data center because our storage architectures are changing that requires a fundamentally different architecture that where you need to be as efficient as possible in a number of different places. It's not just moving the packets, it's management and just how do you operate the network and automate all of those different moving parts? Right and I think really networking bears the brunt of a lot of the changes that are going on in virtualization before you would have a steady growth and a really predictable pattern of traffic and now we're moving things all over spikes and there's not the downtime to reconfigure so. I'd like to chip into the virtualization but let's hold that for a second because I think I have memories of a good point. Change is happening. The fact that the constant thing that we're seeing is change. Randy Bias on earlier, an entrepreneur who's building clouds from scratch. You know, it's this disruptive change we haven't seen in 30 years and it's going to continue to disrupt for 20 more years as his quote which is great. The question is is that we have a philosophy difference. I mean Juniper in particular you talk about Junos it's kind of an open. So here in the VMware world you've got open models where there's innovation extraction from ecosystems Todd Nielsen saying for every dollar is $15 of ecosystem money which basically means people can make money and go public and things happen. And you got guys like Oracle, right? So we heard that at SAP. Oracle, SAP. Open, VMware, closed. People want to know really Juniper and Cisco. It seems to be the same argument like Cisco, Oracle, Juniper. Talk about you guys, how you differentiate and how you position via Cisco. So just to add to that point I guess so VMware laid out a new vision today for where they're going with networking. So VMware they're calling it their V chassis vision. So this is taking the virtual switch they had the virtual distributed switch and now they really have a virtual director. So Avner and I were talking earlier because I've talked to a lot of the networking players out there and there's that there's let's say some friction between VMware's vision and where some of the infrastructure players are going. So I'm curious to get your take on this. Yeah, well we don't have a big legacy infrastructure in the data center to protect. So the faster disruption occurs, that's okay with us. And the piece that all this comes down to is what are the components that an IT manager can move around. So today a VM is somebody said the atomic unit of cloud computing. And if I've standardized my VMs I can move them within my own infrastructure and out into other infrastructures. I think there's an open question in terms of how does that do those atomic units and what are the different slices that managers can move around to optimize their own infrastructures burst into clouds for that capability and the economics around that. And we look at how do you interface with those sorts of systems like the VMware V chassis and that's where you need a web services interface that crosses all of the components of the network and we do that with a platform called Juno Space. Right, I mean, let's talk about the virtualization. We got two minutes left. So what if you want to address the Oracle kind of open, closed issue that you could do that real quick. Yeah, and you know, and the open closed look everybody's trying to open all sorts of interfaces. And so the issue isn't how many interfaces do you have open and are your interfaces more open than the other guys. The issue is can developers develop on your platform in a way that at some point you don't pull the sand out from underneath them, right? And they can't develop on sand, they've got to develop on concrete. Let's do on the virtualization piece. What are you seeing in terms of virtualization? Because virtual machines can be used for configurations, help balance networks. Doug Gorley from Arista Networks earlier mentioned, you know, load balancing is going to be kind of a big area. We heard Fusion IO with the storage site. What's going on in the networking? What does virtualization enable? Right, so I mean, you know, virtualization, if you look that, you know, we had a bunch of years that virtualization was a pure economics play where it was doing consolidation. Now we have many operational pieces of virtualization that are making changes. But you know, on the economic conditions, you know, hopefully we're doing a little bit better globally and therefore that it's giving us some opportunities for hopefully take advantage of some more innovations out there in the marketplace. I would say, you know, virtualization, when you start moving VMs around, it loads the network, which is great. It creates a series of security problems and we have some nice solutions with a couple of partners. We also think that, you know, you need to get the network out of the way to a certain degree. Because the network's not the important part as, you know, pays my paycheck, but the network is secondary to the application. And when you look at how do you spin applications up very, very quickly, the infrastructure can't be in the way of that. And that's where people are trying to make sure that it's not, you know, one way that people are getting in the way of each other today with virtualization is what does the network guy manage on the physical network and what does the server guy manage on the virtual network? And is it a interface problem or is it an orchestration problem? We believe it's an orchestration problem. Yeah, well we have one minute left or just under one minute. So real quick, just predictions, I mean, in the networking business, what's going to change? What's going to be the disruptive neighbor? Just real quick, kind of summarize that real fast. It's what is the software architecture and how does that software architecture drive costs down for customers in both CapEx and OpEx? Stu, what's your vision next couple of years with networking? So, you know, it's a great time to be in the networking space because while we've had a long time that nothing has changed, pretty much everything's changing now. So, you know, a switch isn't going to look like a switch anymore. The physical and virtual barriers are all coming down. And, you know, when you talk about the Apple and everything, you know, consumerization of IT, you know, that's going to hit the network side too. We're here with SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld Live 2010. We're hearing about the networking side, how all this disruption is going to be changing, even how networks are built and scaled and managed and to support these consumer apps, whether IT or mobile consumers. So, that's great. Thanks guys very much. We'll be right back. We'll take a short break and we'll be right back this afternoon. Two minutes. Discussed here at theCUBE as client server was. So, that whole disruptive client server, LAN, PCs connected, created huge opportunities. Nobel was a great success story in the 80s and 90s around networking. So, cloud. Cloud is a disruptive new opportunity. So, what are you guys doing here? What's this all fit in? Tell us about the VMware relationship and you have news announcing right now. Yeah, we do. Hey, thanks John. Let me tell you a little bit about Novel first. Sounds like I need to bring you up to date. So, Novel is today an infrastructure software company focused on what we call the intelligent workload management market, which is the combination of private and hybrid clouds and the ability to move work where it's best processed. We help customers secure and manage that environment and we're very excited to be here at VMworld 2010. Today we're announcing the general availability of SLEZ for VMware, a co-branded Linux distribution that'll be shipping at no extra cost to every vSphere customer starting today. And that's a pretty exciting announcement for Novel. Very exciting announcement for the industry. It's a landmark. Talk about your relationship with VMware. Okay, you guys have a relationship. Not, it's not a new thing. So, just give us a little color on your relationship with VMware. Sure, we've had a longstanding relationship as being members of the IT industry, helping each other in standards boards and cooperating on certifications. But this is a landmark agreement, very different. VMware will be OEMing, SLEZ, sending it out through their distribution channels and VMware will be providing support on the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution through their channel and they'll be providing a level one and level two support and Novel will be backing them up. So this is a very integrated agreement that brings their customers a lot of value. So they laid out the roadmap and VMware's been buying a lot of companies and Novel's probably too expensive to buy but you're OEMing it. So what does that fit into VMware? What's their interest in this? I mean, they got the new architecture, infrastructure, apps and user experience stuff with virtualization at the core. So can you drill down on that for us? Sure, if you look at the virtualization journey that VMware is leading, they're seeing their customers now want to bring mission critical applications onto their virtual infrastructure as well as Linux being the fastest growing operating system in market today. And it's really that combination of the customer trends and the customer requests that have brought this agreement together because they'll now be able to bring 6,000 certified applications, many of which are mission critical that are certified today on SUSE Linux to their customer base immediately. So Novel's really transformed itself with a big open source proponent to talk a little bit about how that whole open source movement fits into the VMware ecosystem and how you add value to customers. Sure, Novel, as you know, back in 2003 purchased SUSE Linux and that's where our open source journey started and we've been very committed to the open source community and there are many companies that rely on what the community develops including Microsoft even today and VMware and what this combination brings together is the flexibility and the power of innovation that the community has into the virtualization journey that VMware has been leading. So is there a resource people can go to to find some more information about the announcement that you made? Sure, absolutely, we've got a really nice booth right behind VMware's booth. It's booth 931. This afternoon at 4.30 Pacific time, Raghu Raghuram and myself will be giving a super session on the announcement in Moscone 134 North and you can always go to VMware's website, www.vmware.com slash products slash sleds for VMware. Dave, we're excited. We had a compelling press conference this morning, big press conference with Todd Nielsen. So it was really great. Thanks for coming by and announcing your product on the queue. We really appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity, John. Thank you very much, Joe. It's great to have you. We've got a big, big audience today. I just found out we had, John, we hit up to 140,000 over the last two and a half days. Big day today. 140,000 people watching the CUBE live. We're really appreciative and any feedback? Send it our way. We're on Twitter, we're watching and listening. Although I'm not, we'll be interviewing most of the time but thanks for watching silkenangle.com is the website. New site is cloudangle.com. We will be doing extensive coverage, deep coverage, blanket coverage of the cloud growth, the revolution around cloud in a whole new way. There's new people, new topics, new conversations, new analysis and we'll be covering it wall to wall. So thanks for watching and we'll be right back. This is the CUBE live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010. Now inside the CUBE. And we're live. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE. Here with Dave Vellante, the founder of Wikibon. Big research firm. Dave. Thank you John. We're back. We're here with Kent Langley of N-Scaled, CTO. And founder, right? Yeah, that's right. CTO founder. It's great to have you here. Thank you guys. Thank you guys very much. The cloud, we're hearing all kinds of disruption stories around cloud and it's all a lot of high level messaging developers are great. Going to be ecosystem boom. People going to be making a lot of money. Growth opportunities up and down the stack, infrastructure apps and user. Apple's got the big news today. But there's a lot of little nuances in the cloud. And a lot of them are configuration, backup, recovery. I mean, meat and potatoes kind of stuff. I mean, what your company N-Scaled is in that world. So how does this all affect you and tell us what your angle is on all this? Yeah, absolutely. Cloud computing for us is at N-Scaled. It's very much a way to deliver a service like business continuity and disaster recovery that previously was incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and absolutely not capital efficient. Using cloud business delivery models as well as technical delivery models were able now to deliver, N-Scaled's able to deliver disaster recovery business continuity to our clients at up to 80% less cost than running their own data centers today. And this is a lot of work. And you're the CTO, right? I am the CTO, yes. So technically, what is all the meat and potatoes around some of the things you got to do to make this thing work? What are the core issues? I mean, obviously you got people to choose from and buy products, what's happening? Yeah, absolutely. There are literally dozens of different pieces of technology you have to put together end to end to provide disaster recovery and business continuity. We've integrated with partners like Falcon Store using their CDP replication services very effectively as well as some of their snapshot technologies to enable things like RPO and RTOs of 15 minutes or less across the WAN in another data center in another state literally by clicking a button. You click activate, your server starts and your clients can get back to work straight away. That's the most important thing is making sure that people keep working. So talk a little bit about what you're doing with VMware and how you're deploying it and what it's meant to your business. So our use of VMware is global. We have, I believe approximately 28 distinct geographic locations where we have VMware hypervisors installed in varying concentrations protecting over 300 and somewhere around 300 or 400 terabytes of client data today. VMware for us is, it's our operating system. I mean, we view it that way very much. Everything that we deploy runs on top of the VMware hypervisor from the replication technology to the networking technology we're integrated with and so on and so forth. So it's an enabler for us. We were talking earlier about the old, remember the managed service provider, the storage service providers in the late 90s, companies like Storage Networks and a number of others and how it was just, I think you said wrong decade. Yeah, I think I mentioned loud cloud. Yeah, you're right, brilliant wrong decade. Yeah, wrong decade, right. You've also said that you've been waiting to start this company for a while. So talk a little bit about the way in which you've developed this company and what's different now and why is this the right decade? And particularly I'm interested in how the whole notion of data protection is changing. Okay, so the way that we've developed this company is really straightforward. We realized that there are any number of companies that want to go to cloud. Everybody here's the buzz. Everybody knows what it's all about. But using the cloud today, it's really about solving real business problems. And so what we thought we needed to do was provide people a path, a gateway, if you will, or a bridge to the cloud. So we've deployed in a true hybrid cloud model where we have an on-premise and an off-premise component to our hardware. The off-premise component are the data centers we manage. On-premise is, think of it as a little slice of our cloud that sits in your data center. And in doing so, what we've allowed people to do is sort of get rid of the vendor alphabet soup that they have to deal with every day. They can sign up with us and pay an on-demand rate and can only use what they consume or only consume what they need at any given point in time. Only pay for what they consume. Yeah, exactly. Pay for what they consume. Use it when you need it, and that's it. And I think that what we've found is the market is incredibly receptive to this. They say things to us like, our actual live customers say things like, thank you, this has enabled me to go and do what I want to do, which is provide true value to the business. And I think that that's, as long as I can do that every day, then people are going to keep coming to us. So you mentioned CDP. We actually, on the Monday we had Jim McNeill on who's a CSO at Falcon Store. And we were just riffing on backup, how it's changing virtualization and the impact. And the kind of model that we had in our brains was Apple Time Machine for the data center, where you're essentially doing recovery in a very seamless and quick fashion. John, you're a Mac user. You use Time Machine, right? It's just, the backup's there. It's a fundamental aspect. I don't even think about the data. But that's a big story here is data management, data protection, the number one issue we're hearing from cloud service providers is data protection from their clients. They want to go cloud, but they want data protection, right? So is that what you see this headed? Is it sort of that more dynamic backup and recovery? Well, it is. It's absolutely dynamic. CDP means a lot of things to a lot of people, but for us it means a very low recovery point objective, say five, 10 minutes. And being able to always have the most technically possible available image of not just files, right? Of every file, folder, disk, or server that you have, and being able to recover that either on-premise or off-premise, it's technology like the Falcon Store, CDP devices, and the underlying micro-scan replication that make this possible because it's so efficient. And when I looked at dozens of different replication technologies to choose that one. Jim talked about, Jim McNeil from Falcon Store talked about how backups change and all this stuff's changing. The definitions are changing. What key things are you seeing around the redefinition? When we had Juniper Net was just on about changes is the constant, and what are you seeing specifically around that that's changing? Well, specifically people don't want to do it anymore. I mean that, to be honest with you, that's the big change, and now- Backup sucks. Yeah, for the first time ever, really for the first time, you ask me why is this the right time? The network is there, the servers are there, the virtualization is there. And for the first time ever, people can actually look at their backup services and go, there's a better way. And that is about being able to do it on demand all the time out of band so that you're not impacting your users when you're doing it. This is crucial, right? Because everybody wants 24-7 up time on everything. And so with these types of technologies, what InScale is doing is enabling that. And also enabling the sort of the global- It's a more business issue for you, right? Yes. So we've said it a few times, shorter RPOs, a lot of people may not know what we're talking about, many do, I'm sure, but we're essentially talking about how much business, you want to, how much data you want to lose. Yeah, absolutely. Our RPOs are getting shorter and shorter and shorter because businesses are saying, I don't want to lose any data. Right. It's as little as possible. On our website we have specific client case studies of clients that have adopted InScale that have gone from one hour to 24 hour recovery point objectives down to 15 minutes within a 30-day implementation life cycle. So let's talk about what that means. So you're talking about if something critical or disaster occurred, you're talking about not losing a day's worth of data, but maybe 15 minutes. Maximum. Big, big difference. Maximum. And there are paths. There's a disruption to the business. I mean that's potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars or more. Absolutely. And our client base is in the legal industry. They're in the financial services industry. We call them risk intolerant. I like to also call them high value content creators. If you have a lawyer making a very nice salary for every hour that he works, it's very important that he keep working. Because for every minute that he's not, and especially for every minute that email is down, he's not producing in the way that he should. Dave, we got two minutes. So let's, I mean I wanted to get one question from my standpoint. Then Dave's going to get one last question in. You guys are in the business cloud service provider business and a lot of your vendors that support you have to have the cutting edge technology. Dave and I talked about cloud service providers being a key integral part of this new architecture. But what do they got to do to be successful? What do you say to the folks that are trying to interface with you and get you new technology? What are the key things that you need to run your business going forward? Not today, but with virtualization, it's going to enable a whole new set of requirements. What do you demand from the falcon stores of the world and other vendors? What do they got to continue to do or do differently? You know I think the biggest change is something that we have to push all our vendors very hard on and you can call it whatever you like, on-demand business model, SPLA model, Splaw model. They have to be able to allow us to consume their services in an on-demand model as well. And we've had to fight that a lot over the last couple of years to reach that with all of our vendors. That's changing, it's changing very quickly. Additionally, we need rapid agile development and iteration cycles. I can't come to a vendor and say, this doesn't work right. And the guy will have that fixed six or eight months from now. No, it's got to be two weeks. Four weeks because you've got to match the speed of the market. And no one is going to sit around and wait for you to change a piece of code six months from now. No one, you'll move on. So my last question is Kent, where do you see this? Look out in your crystal ball, where do you see this in five years? The whole cloud service provider space, the whole concept of backup and how it's changing. Where do you see that going? Wow, that's a big question. It is big. In five years. Yeah, so. In-scaled, think about your objectives as a company. Where do you want to see it? And how does the whole vision that we've talked about play in there? Okay, so for me, five years means that the customer adoption life cycle will have gone full circle multiple times. And that customer adoption life cycle goes from adopting a protection service, replicating it to your local device, getting it into the cloud, and then being able to have the powers of business to make choices like, you know what, I don't want to run that server anymore. I'm going to fail that over, never fail it back. I'm going to leave it there. And that data set will also remain mobile. So if tomorrow I want to take it to a different cloud, or if I want it back for any reason, I'll be able to do that. Today, we're able to achieve those things, but it's difficult still, even today. It's, that in five years is going to be like nothing. No one's going to think twice about clicking a button that says, move my stuff to Dallas, move my stuff to Hong Kong or anywhere. And I think that's what's really exciting. But changing the whole way in which recovery happens. Cloud computing. That's a great vision. Yeah, cloud computing is a renaissance in the way we do business. It's going to be amazing. So we, I mentioned this to McNeil when he was on, in the Wikibon community, we're setting forth that vision of how the industry needs to respond to the changes that virtualization brings, particularly around data protection. So we'd love for you to be part of that. Have you back on Wikibon and SiliconANGLE. Thank you very much guys. Great to have you on today. We're here live at the Moscone Center on ground floor and scene of VMworld 2010. Live at SiliconANGLE.com's continuous coverage, blanket coverage, wall-to-wall coverage, and analysis every day. More interviews, it's like the mail, and never stops coming. Rich Napolitano, president of EMC up next, a repeat guest. He's a head honcho for the unified security. Most important guy in the company I always say. I bet around the other way. He's a great guy. We'll be right back with Rich Napolitano for EMC. This is theCUBE. Live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010. Now inside theCUBE. We're back at theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.com's continuous coverage of VMworld live 2010 in San Francisco, California, at the Moscone South VMworld 2010 is rocking. We're on the third day, really the second day of big announcements. And I'm always excited because we've done three CUBE events, kind of a new product for us, but we've had some consistent guests. Pat Gelsinger from EMC, Rich Napolitano who's joining us right now, president of unified storage at EMC. He's a regular now, so we're expecting to have you back. Great to have you back, every time we do the CUBE. Got a lot of people watching. We have over 140,000 in the last two and a half days. Good audience, so you're a good draw. So we need you to come back in. You guys are super. So tell us, just give us a vibe from your perspective, EMC's been doing a lot of things. I was with customers here, you're showing us some technology, I was with the relationship with VM where everyone knows about. But just give some color to the show here in San Francisco and we're on the scene, cloud revolutions going mainstream. We're covering it wall to wall here at Silicon Angle. So give us your angle on that. No, great, and great to be here with you guys today. And first of all, I'm looking out here at a beautiful 60 degree day in San Francisco when there's not a cloud in the sky. But here at VMworld is a really exciting time. Technology, customers, 17,000 I think it was. Huge numbers. Huge numbers, fantastic momentum on this transition to the virtualized world, to enabling the cloud, just use enthusiasm for this. And it's pretty clear that we're still in the very early days of this massive technology transition. And there's tons of technology on the floor, a lot of enthusiasm around it. But at the end of the day, what we see here is I think a fundamental shift in our business models and our technology to enable this next wave of data center. And it's really all about taking out cost and complexity and enabling flexibility in the IT infrastructure. Unified storage, give us a definition of that. Because Unified has been kicked around, it's kind of a punchline. Unified communications, unified storage. But it's, you know, convergence had that same effect now, it's real. But it kind of has that trajectory of hype buildup. Talk about the reality of unified storage in context of the cloud real quick. So, you know, one of the byproducts of cloud and virtualization is that you're bringing many, many different applications together on a common infrastructure. So really I think it's all about what the applications are doing. So as you bring these many different types of applications onto a common infrastructure, frankly either physical or virtual, but more and more, you know, 40, 50% of server deployments now, I think we saw some data yesterday that half of the server deployments, more than half of the server deployments now are virtualized, which is a major tipping point. But as you consolidate these applications, what you find is that these applications are going to use storage in many different ways. Historically, you know, a database would be a block oriented infrastructure. So you have the emergence of sands and other block oriented infrastructure. Then you had the growth of more and more unstructured, file oriented data, and you saw explosive, continued explosive growth on the file side. And now you see the emergence of really more programmatic interface, you know, restful and soap oriented application interfaces. And so these trends I think are really, you know, with the consolidation of the apps, driving to a storage infrastructure that needs to be more diverse and flexible in how it provides service to these applications. So to me unified means unification, right? Look up in the dictionary, right? And so you're bringing, unifying these different access methods together on a common infrastructure to really enable the applications. You know, I want to talk a little bit about the transformation of your organization. It's pretty diverse, probably the most diverse within EMC, I think that's fair to say. A lot of different technologies, of file, blog, different software technologies. It's not something that you've undertaken overnight. Can you talk a little bit about your portfolio, how you're bringing that together and what some of the drivers are? So, you know, you have to have a vision and a strategy, and then, you know, a vision and a strategy starts from some insight on where things are going, right? And we talked about virtualization and these applications coming together. And so once you have a vision and a strategy, I think you really need to organize around it. And so, you know, what we've been doing the last couple of years is really bringing these groups that have historically been very product oriented more into a functional structure. So we announced the last couple of days and you can see it on the floor here, Unisphere, which is, you know, our common management element manager, we call it, for the mid-range products. And so, we had a strategy, we had a vision that we had too many different ways of managing our infrastructure and we needed to bring them together. So that was our strategy and now we've organized that way. So, we've actually taken the management groups that were in these separate product lines and brought them together. When you think about our block, our Claryon product offering and our Solara, our file offering, we've actually brought those groups together as well. And so, you see us bringing these disparate technologies together, both from a strategic, from a code base, and now from a people perspective. And that allows us to really drive a common vision and strategy forward and have the strategy aligned to the organization so that we can execute and even see it's all about execution and building great products. Yeah, what is the impetus behind that? Can you give us some insight there? Is it customer demand? Is it response to the success, for instance, of NetApp? Is it the technology is now, coming together, talk a little bit about that. It's probably all those things, David. I mean, I think one of our biggest challenges, I think, is technology people is that we're so focused on the technology and the features that we need to kind of bridge that gap. We need to be sure that our R&D investments are creating business value. You hear that a lot. We have, I have thousands and thousands of engineers in my organization. We can build a lot of technology. We can probably build more technology than people could possibly consume. And so, our challenge is, how do we build the right technology that creates business value and deliver it to them in a way that can actually consume it? And so, we really need to think more strategically about the business problems and to really align our strategy and our organizations that go do that. So, let's talk a little bit about virtualization. ESG just released a study. I don't know if you saw it. They shared some of the data with us around shares in virtualization. I was surprised. I had figured, okay, your number one in the mid-range, however you define it, whatever IDC price bands you use, I had assumed, okay, virtualization opens it up. It opens the playing field up. I was surprised to see that you guys were number one in virtualization. Now, I don't know if the shares were the same or larger or smaller, but they were comparable. Talk about that a little bit. I mean, why are you number one in virtualization from a market share standpoint? So, it's multiple things. Joe Tutucci, the CEO of the company, is very, very focused. Obviously, he's chairman of both companies and enabling this next generation data center, cloud infrastructure, is fundamental to the corporate strategy. And so, we drive very, very aggressively to support and actually accelerate the adoption of those technologies. So, we announced here in the last couple of days and demonstrated on the floor some 67, 68 integration points with VMware. It's ridiculous. It's great. And we really wanted to be seamless. So, we want that experience to be seamless. The other thing is that that's very, very important from a technology perspective is to understand that historically, storage substances in people have been very focused on sands or SIFs or NFS, but in the virtualized world, the control functions, the not what we call the data path versus the control functions are more and more important. And so, we have significant investments and significant focus in really enabling the services that VMware provides with and using our products. Yeah, I'd like to give you my opinion on this if I may. So, when we started this business, IBM was number one, they dominate everything, they were the low-risk bet. I think EMC today in storage is the low-risk bet, but there's more than that. You guys do a great job of at least what you call proven solutions. And that takes a lot of risk away from the customers. The other difference, I think, is that unlike the industry when IBM was there, it's way more competitive today and you guys are insanely competitive. So, do you buy that premise? No, I think you're onto something really big there. I mean, the idea that people want to buy integrated solutions is why we partnered with VMware and Cisco around the VC Alliance. It's why we've created this joint venture to really enable a single face to the customer, the Acadia investment with Cisco and EMC, to really create an integrated solution that people want to buy. I was just at lunch, sat down at a random table with some customers and the amount of interest in VCE and our V-block technology is, and so people want to buy that way. There's just, again, so much complexity that by integrating our technology solutions, which is why it's so important for us to have this control path, is native integrations into VMware to make ourselves more and more application oriented in how we build and deliver products to market. Rich, a lot of the conversation we've had with other experts has been about cloud forward, right? So everyone's buying clouds here. It's about going forward. What's going to innovate going forward? You mentioned you can look at a lot of different technologies but you have to figure out what to build. It's got an integrated, makes total sense, I buy that. Question for you is, obviously M&A's been a huge activity with seeing all that stuff going on, new approaches, startups are coming out. So R&D has been a big point. So you run that organization. You get the captain at the wheel. How do you looking at that R&D? Because you have to be selective in how you're doing your R&D, got acquisition strategies. What's your angle on that in your opinion and just kind of, what's the vision there? In your opinion. Yeah, I mean, there's multiple things there. I mean, any big engineering organization actually can never do all the things they want to do. I mean, it's kind of a dichotomy, right? So you have to have a set of priorities, right? And so what are our priorities? I mean, first and foremost, first, second, third priority is quality. I mean, just how the world we live in. Our stuff is expected to work at scale. If you're going to work in the cloud, it has to work at scale. It has to have five nines of more availability, serviceables to be supportable, et cetera. That's the first, second, and third priority and we're known for that and that's a key part of our proposition. But in parallel to that, you need to simplify, you need to get more application oriented. And so those priorities trickle down into the organization and so you have kind of the core priorities. And then outside of the core priorities, you want to really bet in a few strategic areas, both organically and inorganically. And so you want to have your core strategy and you want to have some adjacencies because you never predict the future precisely and you want to push the envelope on innovation and keep a kind of a healthy balance of kind of routine development, keep your quality up, build the next product, but create some groundbreaking capabilities. We just announced FastCash, which is a phenomenal capability. The only mid-range system, frankly the only system in the world to have this capability is Clarion. And I got some email just the other day, yesterday from a rep, one of our big telco customers came back and said they're seeing 4x, the transactions per second in their billing system from a software upgrade to their existing Clarion. That's groundbreaking revolutionary stuff. And then you got to think about inorganic stuff as well. So the world spins in any different direction, you don't know what's going to happen. Exactly, so have a core strategy, look for adjacencies, break some glass, do some things differently organically, as well as inorganically. Dave, what are you seeing in the Wikibon community from customers? You got 10,000 practitioners in your organization on the Wiki. 15,000. 15,000 in your organization, I mean customers are chiming in, kind of a back channel. We're growing, we're growing. So what are they saying? I mean they agreeing with the unified message. You know, there's a huge simplicity theme. There's no doubt about simplicity and efficiency of big, big overriding themes. But I have to say the other thing we're seeing is there are a certain set of customers, and there are a lot of them, that don't want to sacrifice their mission critical operations for the potential of unification. So a lot of customers, I don't know if you see this Rich, are fencing off their block from their file and they're happy with that. At least for now. They create a nastier and they're saying, hey you know what, it works fine. We're creating business value in other ways. There's another segment of customers that's really just driven by cost cutting and efficiency and those are the guys that are really clamoring for unification. How do you see it? I think you see both camps. I think you see, you know, when you look at virtualization, the idea that, you know, the idea that if you think about VMDKs and virtualization, those are all file oriented semantics. So you see performance oriented, low latency things around the block, and then you see more and more on structured data, whether it be VMDKs or user data around the file. And so we see these infrastructures coming together really in both ways. And there's no question that the file is, whosoever number you look at, dramatically outgrowing the block and so you got to address that, right? So Guy just kind of changed gears a little bit because we got rich on, had some fun. So at EMC World, he gave some advice for people. So there was a nice clip and actually got a lot of traffic. So, you know, do the entrepreneurs out there. So today, you know, what, you know, putting on the hat of experience, been there, done that, you run a big organization, huge entrepreneurial activity going on. And this is more of a VMware kind of story. I mean, they're saying one dollar of license is $15 of ecosystem revenue, especially the Microsoft model. I mean, it's going to be a gravy train of innovation and money making, you know, the company's getting public. A lot of entrepreneurs out there spinning up apps, Apple's got the big announcement. What advice do you say now, you know, to add to that, how to approach their business, how to get funding, just, just, advice, tell them. That's an hour, at least a conversation. So I would say that it's a Chinese curse, but, you know, we live in interesting times, right? And, but I think in these interesting times, there's so much change in consumption models of technology around, you know, enablements of things, you know, whether it be solid state flash or Intel's processors or the speed of networks and, you know, so many new entrants in the marketplace. It's a very, very rich time. So I'd say my first point of advice is be bold, right? Because it's really not clear what the outcome's going to be. I would also say that, you know, if you're, you know, a growing entrepreneur, you know, know what you're good at, right? I see a lot of my friends who want to start companies, they have kind of lots of ideas, but there's no unique insight because they're actually not expert enough to really have a unique insight. So I would say play to your strengths, not your weaknesses, right? If you're an expert in a particular technology, whether it be, you know, Internet or service providers or chips or operating system software or applications, play to your strength and look for a unique idea where you have a unique insight that's really kind of beyond the horizon and don't be afraid to go after it because what do you have to lose? Awesome. I saw I had one last question for you. You run a big organization that's growing at the epicenter of technology. If three par is worth two billion, what's your organization worth? Well, multiple revenue, a very, very big number. A very, very big number. No comment there? I can't comment. We don't unbundle the earnings of revenues that way. All you start-ups out there, Rich DePaulitano's great advisor, EMC. He's going to be buying companies and doing... I didn't say that. I didn't say that. That's our prediction. Our prediction. I'd be bold and create new opportunities so that EMC's and the big guys can buy you, I guess is my advice. Do something interesting. They're always looking. Little some white space. EMC, the leader, number one in storage virtualization and just kicking butt, holding the unified story together. VMware enabling all that through their relationship. So we're excited to have you. We're here at SiliconANGLE, the CUBE coverage exclusively live from San Francisco, California at VMworld 2010. We'll be right back. Thanks Rich. Thank you. Take care.