 Okay, we're back inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv, and this is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, and get the scoop and share that with you. And this is our third day at EMC World, wall-to-wall coverage, eight hours a day, big week for theCUBE on SiliconANGLE.tv. We've had two locations in San Francisco yesterday, 120 guests, 32 hours of programming. We're on our last day. We've still got a great lineup. We've got Howard Elias, the president of EMC. We also have the CFO coming on board, and a lot of great guests, and our next guest is another senior executive. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we have a longtime friend of theCUBE, Brian Gallagher. Brian's the president of the Symmetrics and Virtualization Division at EMC. This is the heart of the company that sells the products, that basically solve the hardest problems, the banks, the insurance companies, the high-end transactions, the big-time manufacturers running their businesses on your product. So welcome to theCUBE, Brian. Thank you. Good to be here. It's always a pleasure to see you. So we're seeing the transformation of EMC, everybody's talking about that, but we're also seeing the transformation of your division. Virtualization is sort of a new part of the title. You're seeing the transformation of your product sets. You're starting to integrate with other parts of the organization. So give us your take on what's going on there. Yeah, if you look, you know, this theme of EMC world is all about transformation, and it's our customers, our technology, ourselves, right? And if you look across the board, a lot of change in IT, and we are driving a lot of that change. And so as a result of that, we're also aligning our teams. I actually, we're now at the Enterprise Storage Division, and that includes the V-Plex, the recovery point in the V-Max technologies. And it's really, as you mentioned, we deal with the most mission-critical applications. And as customers go about their change of their data centers, it's important that we do this pragmatically, right? And as we make this transformation from IT to IT as a service, in mission-critical environments, there's a lot at stake, and we pride ourselves on making sure we do the right things for our customers and our partners in service providers. Brian, Pat was on earlier, and we had you on theCUBE a couple of years ago. We know the question was that our first EMC world three years ago, when we started theCUBE out, we asked the question, M&A versus organic growth, and you were very candid, so was Richard DePolitano. Hey, you know what? We're going to do our best to grow internally as fast as we can, but also we're going to do some M&A. Pat came on earlier today, and basically was really proud of the fact that the integration amongst product groups has been a core tenant amongst the management team and the product groups. And you mentioned recovery plans as a specific example. Can you elaborate on what that means for the products and what it means internally to the groups? Yeah, I'd say where we derive the greatest value is in the complete solution for the customer. And it's not a one-size-fits-all, right? So the technologies that we've had in the portfolio for years have always been best in class, and we've prided ourselves on that. But where we're going is really the integration of these technologies into more complete, comprehensive solutions that take a lot of the challenges out of IT. And so we're trying to leverage these assets. We've got decades and thousands of manures of development into these various products and technologies, and we want to continue to leverage that. And at the same time, we want to grow inorganically through the acquisition. But we also want to kind of put these components together, you know, Project X, good example. You can contemplate in the future where we'll start to do more and more integrations of that technology into our core product set. But specific to your question and recover point, you know, recover point was technology that we bought inorganically. Brought it into the portfolio, it was used initially with our Invista technology to provide replication services. Since then, we've integrated the splitter technology into the VNX products. When we went to market last year with the VMAX-E, which is now with new software, the VMAX 10K, we integrated the recover point splitter so we could replicate from a VNX to a VMAX 10K. With 5876 code, we now can do that to the 20K and 40K so we can replicate across the family. And with Vplex integration, now we can replicate to EMC and non-EMC storage, right? So we can virtualize with Vplex, replicate to and from EMC or non-EMC storage. So that to our customers is much more beneficial because they look at their data center assets, some drive multi-vendor strategies, others do not, but it gives them the flexibility of choice, which is what EMC is all about. Brian, you guys have obviously, your division always been known for the very highest reliability, the old razz discussion. And you really, there's a class, we still call it, I guess, the tier one, right? And you're in the top of that tier. And it's interesting, because you're two other competitors that are both used to make mainframes. You guys are the only ones who never made mainframes, but obviously you have a mainframe heritage and then you've brought that to the open systems world that's now renowned. My question is, are we seeing, are we on the cusp of a new definition of what that tier one is? I mean, you look at things like the extreme IO acquisition, all flash arrays, you announced the 40K, huge, huge, you know, impressive system. Are we going to start to see composites of those things come together? Is that going to change the definition of what we used to think of as tier one? Yeah, I'd say over the past several years, what we've done is we've worked with hundreds of customers around the globe. We've actually, they've let us come in and allow us to analyze how their applications access information. And we collected a ton of information about this, right? And a ton of metadata about how applications access information. And we actually collected over two petabytes of trace data, analyzed over 84 billion IO transactions to storage. And what we found is that, you're absolutely right. You know, there was a belief in the market a decade ago that said, tier one applications require tier one infrastructure. And it's really not that, right? The center of gravity in the data center is data, right? And the data is not necessarily mapped to the application, right? In fact, with tier one applications, you may have tier one, tier two, tier three data sets. And the value of information declines over time. So this brought on the whole genesis of fully automated storage steering. And as we look at information, it serves a purpose for certain periods of time. And as time goes by, that information becomes less and less valuable. But as we look at big data analytics, you know, over time, dependent on the correlations that are made, we see that value of information start to increase as more and more data can be aggregated and correlated. So we have to be able to have data dynamically changed through the infrastructure. And as you look at these infrastructures, it's less about the tier one, tier two, tier three application. It's more about the data. And then it gets down to what do you want for an architecture? Do you want a scale out architecture that can start small scale big? Or do you want a very cost effective architecture that might be more suited for a VNX or a dual controller system? And so that's why, you know, again, it's back to the flexibility of choice. And we're driving technology to help make it easier to move between our architectures, right? Federated live migration, other non disruptive technologies and things like Deep Blacks that can say, hey, I want to sit on top and then I want to be able to move stuff, you know, between disparate systems in my infrastructure. Yeah, so you're starting to see your group starting to work with other groups within EMC, a lot more integration and cross-pollination. You know, it's kind of internal plumbing, but I want to ask you, do you see the organization changing somewhat? I mean, you've observed EMC from the early days and you've seen all the changes and sometimes little organizational shifts can have a huge impact and everything is just so coming together now, you know? And it's not so segmented as it used to be. Do you think that will actually ripple through to the organization? Yeah, I think what you'll see, you know, obviously with things like Unisphere for VMAX and Unisphere for Vplex, there's a lot of sharing that occurs and you know, we're bringing that to the next level, which is how can we, you know, create internal sources of technology that can be collaborated across organizations. So consider it like our own internal open source capabilities. Vplex is a great example. I've got a lot of our enterprise customers that say, Brian, we want it running inside of VMAX, right? Rich has got a lot of his customers saying, Rich, I want that inside of VNX. You know, this is the ideas to, you know, have these capabilities, products and technologies shared. Pat also talked in his keynote on Monday. Hey, you'll start to see a lot of these things operate as virtual machines. You know, our systems are scale out core scaling technologies and you can contemplate that these technologies start to get consumed inside the core platforms that we have. So the answer to that is yes. We've broken down the walls, you know, across the organizations. Very good collaboration between Iceland, between USD, unified enterprise storage division, as well as our BJ's backup and recovery division. So is there a shared R&D function? How does that work? Can you pick and choose technologies? Do you contribute them back? Do you have like a little mini open source thing going on inside your own? We're still nascent in the company, but you know, we're trying to flip things upside down that say, hey, if you got technology that's relevant to other businesses, make sure you prioritize their business over your own business, you know, to increase the collaboration. So what you'll see from EMC over the next several years, more and more integration, more and more commonality, bringing our products together. But I think Joe said it well in his keynote, he showed you the Swiss Army knife that was like this big with all the blades. You'll never see a Swiss Army knife like that. It's just not, you know, these things are purpose built, but the components can clearly be shared, you know, in order to say, okay, I want to take apart from here, apart from here, mash them together, I got something new. And that's where we're driving towards internally. So you've always had fun in your talks, your keynotes, and you were max, right? With the V-Max announcement. You got a little Alec Trebek thing going this year. How's that going? We had storage enterprise, storage, Jeopardy. I transformed myself into Alec Trebek. There's a transformation that occurs. It's by far the best session at EMC world. And it's predominantly, it's at the end of the day, we serve appetizers and alcohol. And I think that, you know, tends to make it. So you run that every day? No, it's just done. It was actually yesterday. So you missed it, you have to catch it. Next time, Brian has some fun, that's a good idea. So you're a really good sport about that. You have to come to EMC world to see that. But yeah, it's fascinating because we get our customers up on stage, they compete for the prizes. And it's just hysterical, some of the knowledge that they have about some of the more obscure things that have occurred at EMC over time, or you know, in other technology areas. So some new announcements, obviously going to give a big boost to the business. I mean, you guys have had quite the resurgence. You know, actually two years ago, you had an unbelievable, you know, you had a huge growth quarter, I recall. And then of course the first quarter is down a little bit because you had a tough compare. Tough compare, yeah. And now you've got a whole new set of products that I think Joe said on the call. People won't be disappointed. No. So you must be excited about the next six to nine months. Yeah. 2012, year of the cloud, you know, year of VMAX. Yeah, in fact, one of the areas is the new VMAX service provider. So we think that's going to help accelerate this transformation to hybrid cloud technology. It allows for easily deployment and consumption, you know, of kind of predictable, reliable infrastructure. So that I believe will also help with this resurgence as well. Yeah, hybrid cloud is really actually picking up steam. The marketing was a little bit ahead of the game. It seems like 2012, the customers you talk to are serious about it. And you've got Vplex going for you, the service provider piece. Brian Gallagher, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Always a pleasure to see you. Okay, I'm here. Brian, thanks so much. Okay, we'll be right back with our next guest after this break on theCUBE.