 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. We're here today to talk about virtualization. Virtualization, as you know, has evolved from a test and bed platform, test and dev platform, essentially a sandbox for development, and a critical resource that became a way in which organizations consolidated servers in particular. But it's evolved to much more than that. We certainly, at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE, we talk a lot about cloud, talk about orchestration, and increasingly we're talking about what we call the software-led infrastructure business. Others call it the software-defined storage or software-defined data center. We also know that storage is a main issue around virtualization. People talk about the IO blender problem and the challenges around storage management. And it's critical to understand how, as we evolve from virtualization as a test and dev platform to one that is more supporting mission critical applications and becoming part of the business process, it's important to understand how storage will be managed, how other resources will be managed, and how automation can be injected into the environment to reduce human error, to cut costs, and the like. With me today to talk about these issues are two folks from NetApp's on-command marketing group. You know, at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE, we've talked about management and on-command for quite some time. We see it as sort of the secret glue underneath, if you will, on tap and NetApp's clustered on-tap approach. Lisa Crue and Christina Brander here. Ladies, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, great to see you guys. As you heard in my sort of narrative at the beginning, we've been following this space for quite some time. We first sort of stumbled upon on-command several years ago and it's, of course, evolved. A combination of organic and acquisitions that you guys have made. So Christina, let me start with you. So we're talking today, the sort of topic is how storage management has evolved from virtualization to cloud and this whole vision of the software-defined data center and it's all the rage now. Talk about how virtualization is evolved from NetApp's perspective and what you guys are seeing in the marketplace. Well, if you think back to a few years ago, as you said, NetApp actually grew organically and through acquisition and what people in the data center were really looking to address was that additional management complexity when you move from physical to virtual and in the past, they were probably using a combination of point tools, homegrown scripts. So now they're searching for other ways in which they can now manage virtualization and we have products that did a very good job at doing this. So we have products like on-command balance that many of you may have heard of for monitoring virtualized environments, optimizing performance, but really you're still talking about managing certain aspects of your storage. So as we look for data centers evolving from virtualized to cloud storage, it gets even more complex and many of the IT organizations really push to the limits of what they're doing with their storage management tools, with their homegrown scripts, with their virtualization monitoring tools and they're thinking, where is this going and what is the next leap that I'm going to take? So they're looking at different alternatives of how they're going to manage their growing complex environment. And now if we move forward from cloud to software defined storage, we're really talking about how can we automate all of these resources as well. So it's not just monitoring, managing, but also automation as well. So you mentioned scripts before. So talk about, what's bad about scripts? A lot of people out there write scripts, probably have scripts that are near and dear to them. Why are scripts a problem as we move into this whole software defined data center? So scripts are sort of like an Achilles heel. So they've been working for the company all along. They're very specific to that company's business requirements. But what you're looking for is to prevent situations in which the resources who have developed those scripts, who have taken those scripts, if any of your resources leave, then you're losing that knowledge. You have to bring someone in with an expertise that will be able to carry that homegrown script forward. And it's an ongoing investment. So as next generations of platforms are introduced, you're looking to adapt your homegrown scripts into QA and test them against these new platforms as well. So you're really investing in a technology that only your company can use versus using a standard software package. So Lisa, so it sounds like based on what Christina said, that scripts really don't scale that well. They're good for solving a sort of unique point problem. But I wonder if you could talk about the role of management in software defined and how that's evolved beyond just virtualization. What's changed? Sure, yeah, I mean, Christina mentioned automation as a key part of that. The way we look at NetApp, a key part of that is also open APIs and integration with third parties. So we can be broader and provide more value out above, over and above storage as well. So you're looking at storage as a platform that when you say open API, so specifically what are you guys doing in that area? Just opening up to other orchestration platforms. I mean, VMware is an obvious one, others as well. Yeah, OpenStack, Microsoft, SAP. So we actually have on command, the on command API and plugins. So there's a capability for our customers to develop their own tools that will integrate and be of more value to them. So I look at, we look a lot here at Silicon Angle and Wikibon at what's happening in the hyper scale market. We always say, you want to know what's going to happen to the data center, go look at what Amazon and Google and even Microsoft with Azure are doing, because a lot of those practices are going to be adopted into the data center, the whole consumerization of IT. It seems like automation is one of those disciplines that's really being driven hard. So, Christine, I wonder if we could sort of add some more color to bringing automation to the enterprise. Why is that so critical? What's the business impact of doing that? Okay, so automation is critical to moving organizations forward and being able to successfully deploy their cloud services and move to what we call the software defined data center. And one of the things that NetApp is doing is we introduced a product a few years ago called On Command Workflow Automation. And we worked with, at the time, certain organizations were looking to automate and what they understood was, first of all, you mentioned scale earlier. We need something that's going to scale for this type of growth. The second thing is openness. So we need to make sure that whatever we have today, whether we want to maintain some legacy management software, homegrown scripts, et cetera, we want to work with what we have in place today as we look to also maybe introduce some new tools as well. So with a product like On Command Workflow Automation, it actually uses a standard-based web services so it's able to integrate deeply, not only with the storage, but also with the orchestration layer. So when we talk about being able to automate workflow processes, we're talking about enabling automation of those workflow processes at the storage level but also integrating and tying in that automation throughout the IT layers by integrating with the orchestrations. So that's key. I mean, it says my discourse at the beginning of this segment talked about deeper business-level integration. So you essentially have IT connecting into the business and the glue there is, of course, the applications. And so the workflow automation piece is critical but there are other pieces too. So Lisa, I wonder if we can unpack On Command a little bit because I think sometimes people get confused with all the modules and how it's priced and how it's packaged. So there's essentially six modules, correct? Take us through those and what they do. Sure, there's six major products in the portfolio. There's a little confusion because we had On Command the product and On Command the portfolio but it's really just the On Command portfolio and then the six products within that portfolio starting with System Manager which is your device management tool. So setup and configuration. There's low level stuff, right? Low level stuff, element management. Typically one device at a time and then as you get a bigger infrastructure, more storage, probably like six to eight devices you kind of up level to Unified Manager which not only gives you those capabilities but adds on monitoring, integrated data protection, performance analysis, things like that. And this is a 10,000 foot view. Is that right? So you get a view of the multiple boxes basically whereas System Manager is one box. And then we have report which is integrated reporting for multiple data centers. So aggregating information from Unified Manager and actually using a backend Cognos database to develop customized reports of your NetApp storage. Would you call that analytics? Is that sort of built-in analytics or not? There is some analytics behind it in terms of correlating that information and analyzing it. But it's primarily reporting. It's primarily capacity-based reporting. And then workflow automation as Christina mentioned which automates your policies. I mean, you can, I'm sure she'll talk more about that later, but you can set up as long as you set up your system one time you can set up like a private cloud in two minutes with workflow automation which is really cool. A lot of people are really excited about that. And so all of those products are actually included free with your NetApp storage. So there's no additional cost to customers. The other two products that are in the portfolio are on command balance. And that is primarily focused on performance optimization of both your NetApp storage but also gives you the hooks in and the visibility into your virtual infrastructure primarily for VMware. As you talked about earlier, virtualization created complexity and abstraction layers and it's difficult for the VMware administrator especially in a small company to get that visibility into all those layers. It's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And balance really provides that view. And that's controller-based licensing. So for pretty cost effectively you can get that visibility. A lot of VMware customers really appreciate that and have added on that product to their infrastructure. And then finally we have on command insight which is our heterogeneous or multi-vendor performance configuration and capacity management solution. So primarily you're going to want to consider that and it's really a storage resource management product. You don't want to consider that for large, very complex, multi-data center, multi-pedabyte environments. And that's a four-pay product as well. Yes, that is. And that's capacity-based pricing. So talk about, well maybe Christina, maybe talk about some customer proof points here. Maybe share with how customers are using this. What kind of value they're getting. If you can name customers, that'd be great. Sure, so one example I'll give is recently I was speaking to our field about a service provider in the financial services industry. And they knew that they wanted to introduce automation to achieve some cost savings, but they weren't sure what they needed to automate and they needed to take a look at their operations. So they used a complimentary assessment that NetApp offers to identify what their processes are exactly, what those processes are costing, and where they might want to introduce automation to help them achieve greater efficiency and cost savings. So what they found out as a result of this assessment is they offer customized services for each of their customers. It would take them about 24 hours to clone their dev test environment and then to identify the code that they would have to customize. And they realized in doing this assessment that about 70% of the code had to be customized for each customer. And then they had to test this and then roll it out. So what they understood is that every time they take on a new customer, there's a high cost of engineering expense to do all of this. Plus you're looking at spinning up your new customer at least in one business day. It's not an immediate thing. So they said this is one place in which we want to automate. So they looked at on-command workflow automation and what they saw, they did a pilot. They were able to clone their dev test environment, identify the code, roll out the new services in four hours instead of 24 hours. So they said for them, this is immediate value back into their business. Because they can start charging for it. Exactly, and they're improving the customer experience as well. Yep, yep. Okay, so that's good. Now you mentioned assessment. Do you guys have other services that you provide? So with on-command, I mean, of course there's NetApp professional services. So there's a whole book of different services that we provide. The one that's close to on-command's heart, if you will, is our complimentary heterogeneous infrastructure assessment service. And we performed about 550 over the last couple of years. And as Christina mentioned in her example, lots of times customers don't have visibility into their multi-vendor storage environment. And so that is, and they don't know how to get it. They don't have the tools to be able to do that. And this assessment is actually powered by on-command Insight. So it's not using homegrown tools or scripts or anything like that. It's actually enterprise class software that we're using. And we go in, we have a small team of experts that work remotely. They plug in the software and about within two weeks, they'll generate a pretty comprehensive report that will identify vulnerabilities in the infrastructure, tell them what their capacity is like, whether they can reclaim storage, a lot of customers. Let's say for example, I know at a recent one with, I believe it was Floyd Medical, they were spinning up VMs and then not taking them down. So the storage was staying attached to them so they didn't realize they had a lot of unused storage that they could reclaim. And basically it's a report that the NetApp team will deliver to the customer. They find a lot of value in it and just kind of basing it on their infrastructure and understanding where they need to go next. So you're painting a picture of where they are today. And then when you say understanding within, now this is a freebie, you said? This is a freebie. Okay, and then can you help customers understand where to go and how does that all work? Is that part of this complimentary service or do you have four-pay services to do that? Well, they can go to their NetApp rep and ask for a complimentary infrastructure assessment service, but that particular piece is completely free, working with their NetApp account team. The professional services would be completely separate. And then are their professional services specific to like assessing the environment or is that you don't charge for any of that? No, no, just this, you know, if they want to take it to the next level and let's say they, you know, issues have been found that they want to work with our professional services team on, that would be an additional cost. So remediation or architecture. Right, exactly, architecture, something like that. Now how about, so we hear a lot at NetApp, we talk to NetApp, we hear a lot about clustered ONTAP, obviously data protection is another big theme. What are you guys doing to sort of align with those major corporate initiatives? So what we've started doing this year is every time we have a major release of clustered ONTAP or data ONTAP, all of our management software will support that new release of the operating system within about a 90 day window. So that's one thing in which we listen to our customers and they're using a lot of our products and they'd like to see that tight alignment so that we're supporting the latest and greatest features in data ONTAP. So we have that with the ONCommand products, we have clustered data ONTAP 8.2 which was released back in June. We had a number of ONCommand products which then supported that, which were released in June, July and early August. Okay, so I got kind of a curve ball question for you. So you did 500 plus assessments, you have all this data on customers, you've got this Cognos engine that you utilize. So basically you're providing information to the IT folks so that they can make sure that their environment is working efficiently, they can make changes as necessary, they make sure it's in aligning to their SLA, et cetera. Do you see the day where you can leverage that data and talk about big data? Is there a way in which you can leverage that? Do big data analytics inside this platform? You hear a lot about in memory. Do you see just conceptually, we're gonna be able to automate that level of function where the system itself makes a lot of the decisions that the humans are making today and if so, how far away are we from that type of environment? Well, not sure that big concept is on the roadmap today, but there are products out there that if, let's say there's a performance issue that's found, you can automatically rectify it. So that is using analytics and identifying. Do you feel like customers will be receptive to that? Are they afraid of something like that? Like, you know what I'm saying? They want to be able to turn the knobs themselves. What's your experience there? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends. A financial services company would be a little more hesitant, I think, just because it's more riding on the transactions there, whereas maybe a small business that's a little bit more fluid. It depends on the workload and the application. I think there's a lot of things that you have to consider before doing something like that. Christina, did you have something to add? So what I was going to add is it almost sounds like we're going along the thread of we have a phone home or an auto support service too, so we do have a number of customers that opt to do this auto support and you can pay for an additional service in which someone is doing the analytics so that you can be proactive. So I can see that we can move to sort of a self healing sort of situation, eventually. Yeah, I mean you have a lot of data and presumably you can develop and I think you're actually probably doing some of this already in your own IT. In fact, I think I was talking to your CIO about this and she was telling me that, at least if I recall the conversation correctly, you have the ability or we're on the cusp of the ability to actually predict when failures are going to occur and feed that back to clients in a proactive way. Right, right. All right, well, let's see. We're on the cusp of VMworld next week. We're all going to be out there and anything we should be looking for from NetApp generally, but specifically from the on command team. Yeah, there's a lot going on at VMworld. I mean, of course we'll have clustered on tap demonstrations along with all the hardware, flex pods and in the on command world. We're actually having kind of an exciting new promotion that's close to my heart. We're offering a free trial of balance with virtual storage console. A lot of customers in the VMworld, VMware world probably know the virtual storage console. It's a plug-in for vCenter that controls your NetApp storage, basically. Provisioning, backup, all the cool things that you would do regularly. And kind of as an added bonus, we're giving a free trial away for existing NetApp customers to try balance. So they got stopped by the booth, drop a card in. Actually, yeah, they can just go to the support site. They don't even need to be at VMworld. They can just log in to the support site, go to the virtual storage console page, and download the free trial. Yeah, and the workflow automation team is actually going to be showing a lot of great new things at VMworld next week. And I know that they're gonna have a number of demos showing end-to-end cloud deployments with backup and restore. An example of application is a service. And they're also doing re-tearing of workloads with non-disruptive operations. And I know I'm leaving another one out. Oh, they're doing a full backup and restore of a master boot destruction. So they're pretty excited about these things. Good, okay, and while we'll be there, of course theCUBE will be there. We're in Moscone South in the main lobby of the street level, so definitely stop by and see us. I really appreciate, Christine and Lisa, you guys coming in, talking about this important topic, management, automation. If you're going to scale, you've got to have it. So thanks for your insights today. Thanks very much. All right, everybody, thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.