 And now your host, Dave Vellante. Hi, everybody, we're back. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is SiliconANGLE Wikibon's continuous coverage of the events around the IT industry. We're at VMworld 2015. This is our sixth year covering VMworld. And you know, I'm here with David Floria. David, everybody says this has become a storage show and it's a huge percentage of the content is storage. Narayan Venkata series, the CMO of Tejial. Tejial, Tejial. Tejial, yes, that is. Welcome to theCUBE, it's great to have you. And Tejial is a company that is in the heart of that storage land, disrupting transformation. So welcome again and thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me on the show. It's always a delight to have a discussion with you. So talk a little bit about what you guys are doing here. We want to get into the whole, you know, what's going on in the industry, but what's happening across the street, you know, in your booth, what are customers talking about? Absolutely, I mean, as you walk through the show floor, I mean, I'd say 50% of the companies exhibiting there are enterprise storage companies, right? So we're certainly in the heart of it, right? We've been in business for about five years. We are an enterprise flash storage company with a twist in the sense that we can do all flash and hybrid in the same system, right? And it goes back to the earlier discussion we had which is as customers look at enterprise storage systems, it's really the question of how much performance acceleration and business acceleration can I get and what are the economics associated with it, right? So we believe that any storage system out there, whether it's all flash or hybrid, right, needs to deliver on the economics as well as the performance. And we are in the market with a single platform that allows you to deploy both flash, all flash and hybrid with exactly the same feature set so that customers can deploy a variety of different applications that, you know, they gain the benefit of performance acceleration at the right economics. So we're going to talk about more, David, about the piece you wrote, the whole breaking down in latency and capacity storage and you guys fit into both of those segments but maybe you could talk a little bit about sort of where you're winning, how you're differentiating. I mean, there's so many storage companies but there's several like yourselves that are doing really well. So it underscores a couple of things. One, there's a problem with the sort of status quo and this huge market that continues to grow. So maybe talk a little bit about how you're different and where you're winning. Perfect, now I'll start at, you know, go back a few 10 years, right? We've seen this wave of virtualization, right? 10 years ago, you know, people were barely scratching the surface in terms of virtualization. Today, every customer you talk to is nearly 100% virtualized. So what that has done, essentially, is increase the amount of consolidation, the number of virtual machines that customers are spinning up for their applications. It's just several orders of magnitude what it was 10 years ago. So with that, it's actually changed the requirements for sustainable performance from your storage infrastructure. So if you look at the current, you know, incumbents, you know, incumbents, of course in the storage space are the likes of NetApp and EMC. You've seen a dramatic wave of new companies coming in to challenge their position. Why? By taking a different approach to storage, by leveraging the evolution in Flash and delivering tremendous performance acceleration and better economics than incumbents. So for example, you know, why are we seeing traction? We today have well north of a thousand customers, right? Across a variety of different workloads, predominantly which are virtualized. So think server virtualization, think database virtualization, think desktop virtualization, right? And then sort of the early evolution of private cloud. And customers, the big question in customer's mind is how do I run my applications in a highly virtualized context on a storage system or a storage platform at the best economics for the business acceleration that I want. And that's why we're in the business, right? So we see, I'd say 95% of our customers are highly virtualized, right? And majority tends to be VMware. And you know, we as customers look to new vendors. Why? Because existing storage infrastructure is aging, is unable to keep up with the performance and the economics needs. And so they're looking at new vendors like us. And one of the unique things in what we do is we deliver a full complement of data management capabilities that include inline compression and dedu which makes it much more economic to deploy Flash for the highly consolidated performance hungry applications. So it's really, you're winning against the big guys, EMC and NetApp are the big incumbents. It's not so much you're competing with the startups. You probably don't even hardly run into them as much but it's really the big guys, right? Yeah, I mean, if, sure, there's a number of, I'd say upstarts because we're well past that phase of a handful of customers, we've got 1,000 plus customers. But you're birds of a feather, really. Absolutely. And we're all going after the same, it's a very big market dominated by a handful of players. And what has really happened over the last, probably five, six years of the evolution of Flash where Flash has become more economical is the ground from under them has shifted, right? And so vendors like us have now gone off with a clean sheet of paper and says, hey, what does the world need to look like from a storage perspective, right? Our storage infrastructure perspective, five years out, 10 years out, right? And it's not like the incumbents aren't smart. They have pretty sharp people. They've been in the business for a long time, but it's tough to go make a hard right turn or left turn, which is what we have done as a small company and says, hey, we're going to go there. We're going to get where the puck is headed. And what value that can we bring forth for highly enterprise, I mean, virtualized workloads for enterprises, and it's the combination of performance economics, right? You know, there are certain things that are taken for granted, you know, resiliency, DR protection, et cetera, right? And so with Flash evolving, it's actually taken that the persistence medium from where it was from a spending this point of view to an all the Flash, right? Where the economics are, you know, quite appealing for the performance acceleration you get. Well, it's interesting to know, I mean, I say we've been covering this since 2010 and David, you and I have been here even well before that, right? So, and when we first came here, we said, oh, storage is a real problem. But VMware, you know, to its credit, you know, put out APIs, but at the same time, you know, sort of put a stranglehold on the industry and innovation because it could only support so many with the integration and you know, you took a while to get the SDK and so, and of course the cartel got it first. But that has changed. I mean, now you guys like, you know, smaller guys, okay, 1,000 customers, that's great. But five years ago, it was tough for you to compete here. Now it's just been open, open up the floodgates of innovation. Yeah, I mean, to credit goes to VMware in the sense that they recognize this, right? And, you know, they've been open with all of their interfaces, right? You know, it was VASA, VAI, right? VASA now with VVOLS, right? And VVOLS is going to actually spawn a great deal more innovation. You know, if you really step back, if you're a line of business person or a virtual admin, what do you really care about? If you have a reliable storage infrastructure, what you want to be able to do is to be able to spin up virtual machines, have disaster recovery policies. I want to, you know, start a virtual machine here and I want to be DL protected there and if something would have gone, I want to be able to spin it up there, right? And then if you step back and ask the question, hey, a plethora of different applications running in virtual context, I want to establish a certain quality of service metric. VVOLS really enabled that. And so, by plugging into that VM infrastructure, right? Or the virtualized infrastructure, you know, upstarts like us or storage guys in general can go out and innovate even more, right? And so, we see that as a, as the next wave of what I call virtual machine-centric, you know, quality of service or, you know, so you're now starting to see this from a business standpoint, right? Business applications, right? And the nice thing about being in a small company is we recognize that and so we can move as fast, faster than any of the incumbents. And that's how we're winning. We're winning in the market space. So, I see the evolution of VVOLS is the next major step towards innovation in the flash layer, flash in the storage layer. There's the announcements, very interesting announcements at the flash, at the flash level, the cash level, that would have been made this time round by VMware. Which really changes that, it takes away that bottleneck that existed. And really does make it a level playing field for everybody now. Yeah, and we are, you know, just sort of talking about it a little bit on the flash side, we're seeing the economics very compelling, right? I mean, we just announced, just coming in just before VMworld, an extremely dense flash solution, right? A half a petabyte in a 3U with the full complement of data management, this think inline compression, dedupt, snapshots, clones, replications, all of that fitting into a VM environment. So, while many vendors have been talking about going to the all flash data center, we're starting to see that twist, right? We're starting to see that change. And so we believe that we're one of the few, among the upstarts, we're willing to actually take advantage of that. While we've been a hybrid company, a single platform that does both spinning this and all flash, we're giving customers the choice, right? So, let's unpack that a little bit. So you're saying, and again, you just wrote this piece of capacity, latency and capacity, but you've also written pieces on the all flash data center. That's correct. You're saying you're seeing the pendulum swinging toward the flash, obviously, because the economics are just so compelling, and they're not saying that spinning disk is going away. Some people may be saying that, but I don't think we're really projecting that, are we? We're not projecting it. I mean, there is a finite life, probably, for it, because flash is getting better so much faster. And 3D, 3D NAND and 3D TLC are really just doing amazing things with economics. But I mean, generally, you're agnostic to that, I presume. We are, but what we're also seeing is that, you talk to the majority of vendors, and you talk to even customers, they will say, well, yeah, 15K RPM is dead for high performance application workloads, which is exactly what we're seeing, right? We're seeing the bulk of the applications being leveraging flash. Now, even in a hybrid context, you have a fair bit of flash and some spinning disks, 95% of the IO is still happening in the flash layer. You sort of fast forward, or sort of, as we call it, dial up the flash in your environment, you go 100% flash. It really comes down to which set of applications that require the kind of performance acceleration. So from a disk as a high performance medium or persistence medium for applications is kind of gone. Now, was this going to be around? Of course, right? I mean, are there archival applications? Of course. But I also see some interesting dynamic, which is there's a lot of chatter about cloud and private cloud and public cloud. I see less frequently accessed data moving into the cloud, whether that's private or public, however, which way, various different customers are in various different stages, right? In terms of their comfort with deploying things in the public cloud. But performance intensive applications will gravitate towards flash, and which is what we're seeing, right? Even among mid-range enterprise customers, right? I mean, you go back five years, flash was exclusively in the tier zero, tier one. Today, mid-range applications and mid-range storage systems are coming a tremendous amount of flash, right? So we see that twist happening, right? And the change happening. And by that, it's going to generate even more consolidation, right? And even sort of explosion of virtual machines. How about environments, as you said, most predominant customers VMware? Are you seeing sort of moves toward other platforms, be it more aggressive adoption of Hyper-V? Clearly there's adoption of that, but OpenStack, what are you seeing there? Yeah, so we've seen OpenStack in sort of the higher end enterprise customers that are still playing around with it, right? Or service providers, maybe. Or service providers, certainly, right? On the, in an all Microsoft environment, we've seen Hyper-V, right? Hyper-V in the context of virtual, I mean, in the context of SQL, virtualized SQL, right? Perhaps with even SMB3. So one of the things that we do uniquely, we support block and file in the same system. So we support NFS and SMB3. And we have a number of customers that were deploying SQL on Hyper-V over SMB3, right? So you are getting some pockets of adoption as far as Hyper-V's concerned. But needless to say, VMware tends to be the predominant, you know, hypervised platform. Okay, and so we talked a little bit about the cloud. What are you seeing in terms of customers? I mean, so actually, let me ask it in the VMware context since we're at VMworld. What do you think about VMware? It's where it's headed, it's strategies, obviously trying to expand its TAM. So now we've got the VSAN. You've got the Elliott management distraction going on. What do you think about VMware? So I'll refrain from any of the financial speculations as far as Elliott management is concerned. Whatever you say, you won't know. Nobody seems to know that. But certainly, you know, VSAN is, again, so if you step back and ask the question of what is VSAN trying to do, it's trying to bring simplicity to the deployment of virtual infrastructures, right? That said, I'd say that VSAN still isn't its infancy. There is a reason storage companies are around. Persistence and data resilience is hard. It'll take some time for VSAN to mature. But if you look at the economics today of a VSAN cluster and compare that to any one of us, whether it's a hybrid storage system or an old flash system, you'd be hard-pressed to find VSAN cheaper than any of the purpose-built flash storage systems or hybrid storage systems, right? So while conceptually, you know, it's the right thing for VMware to do, i.e., bring simplicity. But I also see the efforts that are putting in VVOL. They're trying not to distance any of the storage vendors. Why? Because you need a path towards evolution. And I believe that storage vendors will innovate, continue to innovate faster than any of the big players by leveraging interfaces like VVOL. So I think it's overall its goodness for the enterprise space, right? Where VSAN gets deployed, perhaps in smaller environments, where people are going to feel comfortable. As I said, data resilience and data persistence is not that easy. It's hard, right? And if you look at all of the upstarts combined, the amount of engineering talent that's there, the amount of engineering investments there, far outpaces the engineering investment that's in VSAN, right? So that is not to say VSAN is bad or good, right? It'll have its own time for evolution. Well, to your point, I like the way you set that up. They're trying to simplify deployments of virtualized environments, and that's what a software company should do. If you're Microsoft, you want to drive down the cost of storage and attack sand, and deploy to ask, because it'll make our software cheaper. VMware's doing the same thing. Let's simplify it, but the question then is, as an ecosystem partner, you're comfortable with the white space that's going to be available. You feel like there's plenty of opportunity for you. Absolutely. The enterprise storage market is, give or take a few billion, it's between 18 and 20 billion dollar market, right? Yeah, at least. Yeah, and for the majority of upstarts, if you get to a few percentage points, you have done phenomenally well, right? So the point is, whether you call VMware an upstart or startup as far as VSAN is concerned, or any of the others, we're all after that big pie, right? But I think even more than that, I think it's the innovation that is brought forth into that environment. What VSAN does is ensures that VMware ecosystem is a thriving one, right? I mean, we just talked about OpenStack or Hyper-V, right? So the more simplicity, the more integrated solutions that you bring into the VMware ecosystem, you'll find most of the customers are pretty happy and not migrate away from VMware, as long as the economics are there. So I think it's all goodness in my mind, right? And as upstarts in the market space, while we understand that Hyper-V and OpenStack are there, we all have to put food on the table. So VMware is the platform, right? And it's a predominant hypervisor environment. So, go ahead, David. So I was going to ask you, one of the things that I've observed is that the way that customers are managing storage now is changing dramatically. So how in your, for your customers, are they changing the way that they're managing storage, managing the systems themselves? Yeah, so, you know, gone are those days where, you know, you're still trying to optimize your storage system for the right set of apps, right? Database, right? And database admin says, okay, I got to have X number of disks with so many volumes and things like that. That kind of complexity has gone away. Why? Because we're delivering aggregate performance, right? At, you know, you're talking of hundreds of thousands of IOPS at a millisecond latency, right? And we sort of simplified that process, right? We also have more storage systems now being fully managed and integrated into VMware's vCenter as an example, right? Sort of other management frameworks. So the ability to provision a VM, get a certain amount of capacity, you know, tie them on the fly and have your applications running like that is dramatically, you know, easier than what it was five, seven years ago, right? So we recognize that. And again, you know, there's a lot of chatter about hyperconverge, you know, compared to what it was last year. It all gets to one simple thing, which is how do I make the process of deployment, ongoing management, and changes in the infrastructure simple? All right, so most storage vendors are working towards, you know, integrating whatever the management framework is. You know, it tends to be vCenter, you know, if it's some other management framework in the future, we'll work towards simplifying that because it really comes down to that simplification. All right, Narayan, we have to wrap up. I'd like to give us the last word on, you know, what's next for Tejial, you know, from a marketing standpoint, what should we be looking for over the next, you know, near to midterm? Yeah, so, you know, we've continued to scale the business really well, as I said, a little over a thousand customers. Flash has become, you know. What's headcount now? Sorry to interrupt. As a company, we're close to 400 people. So we've grown substantially. And a size of a portion of our business now comes from all Flash, right? So we see that continuing innovation in all Flash, the densities of all Flash, I mean, Flash systems in general, increasing phenomenally, right? And, you know, we'll continue to innovate on that. We're going to jump on that bandwagon and saying, okay, how do we be ahead of any of the other incumbents in terms of delivering sustainable data management? When we talk about data management, it's about data set management. How do I protect, you know, mobilized DR, you know, et cetera? And, you know, we're going to continue to innovate there. So, you know, I'd be thrilled to be on the, you know, next time around at VMworld 2016. I'm sure, I'll be sure that, you know, our customer base would have doubled by then, so. Awesome, well, let's make an appointment to come back and do that. I think we're in Vegas next year, I'm hearing. So, all right. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Always a pleasure. Thanks very much. Narayan Venkat from Tage Isle. Awesome progress, really congratulations. All right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. We're live from VMworld 2015 in Moscone. We'll be right back.