 Hey, welcome back to SiliconANGLE.TV's exclusive coverage of HP Discover Frankfurt, Germany. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecaster. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise, and you can follow all the exclusive HP coverage here at SiliconANGLE.com and all the great research at wikibon.org, and we're here to extract the signal from the noise. HP is in the news and they're making a lot of big announcements. Last night was some of the biggest announcements we've ever seen in the storage business, converged infrastructure. The world of big data is driving a lot of value, a lot of hype as well, but also the infrastructure's changing, and we're here to document that for you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined with my co-host here in theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. We're here with Tom Joyce, who's the VP of Marketing, Strategy, and Operations at the HP Storage Group within the Enterprise Group. We just heard from Dave Donatelli. Welcome, Tom. Thank you. Glad to be here. Glad to be back. Good to be back. Yeah, well, a lot going on. We were at your press conference last night. Obviously, big media announcement, getting a lot of discussion now. We've just come out with a report on wikibon around what we call software-led infrastructure, the whole software-defined theme. A big part of your portfolio is playing into that. So why don't you just give us your high-level overview of your announcement and we can talk about what it means for customers and competitors and the like. Okay, good. Yeah, we've been turning over our storage business for the last really kind of two and a half years. We set a strategy starting about two and a half years ago to say, because of all the things that are changing in the world with big data and cloud and IT as a service and just all the things that are hitting, probably the highest rate of change we've had in the history of the storage business, it was time for a new approach and it was time for some new technologies and new products. And I think the centerpiece of that two years ago, really kind of two years in a month, actually we closed the deal, was the acquisition of three-part. It wasn't the only piece, but it was kind of the centerpiece. And a big part of our announcement this week is centered around the future of three-part. When we acquired three-part, we had a product that kind of was part of the high end and part of the mid-range was an exceptional technology but we saw a huge opportunity to expand it. And so what we announced last night was that we have expanded that down to cover the whole mid-range storage market with a product called the HP three-part store serve, which is the brand, 7000 series. So the 7000 comes in starting at about $25,000 entry price. So it's the first time kind of a real high-end storage technology's brought down to that part of the market, which is the largest part of the market. It's where most of HP's channel plays where we've been very successful with some of the other products in the past like the EVA. So it's a huge expansion. It's a massive opportunity for us channel partners, customers, et cetera. I'd say the other big piece of the announcement was store all. And that plays into the whole unstructured data space, which includes big data, includes archiving, includes business analytics, sharing, consolidation, kind of the whole, the storage of all the files and objects that customers are kind of inundated with. And store all combines a number of different technologies into a product offering that is software-based and includes file system technology, some advanced metadata management and search technology that came out of HP Labs, as well as object storage for doing kind of things like cloud-based storage services. So we had a ton of news yesterday and we've been working on it for two years, so you'll see an awful lot of excitement for our staff. I got a question last night on Twitter. The questioner asked me, how is HP positioning its new mid-market three-par offerings relative to left-hand? Can you address that a little bit? Yeah, so left-hand is a product that is kind of, we've had it for about almost five years. Store virtual, you know, calling. Rebranded store virtual, so I'm sorry to use the old names, but they stuck them ahead. We'll have it die-hard, and what we've moved to is something that's a lot more consistent, so the products kind of all make sense together. I think where that product is tended to play is in places where customers want to build storage out on general-purpose servers like Proliant-class machines, and up until now, we've really packaged that as kind of a fully turnkeyed appliance. You'd buy two nodes of a store virtual and then you'd add two more and you could build out, you know, fairly large storage environments, but kind of all built on general-purpose server technology. So where we see that going is into this whole area of software-defined data center. Software-defined services, software-defined networking. There's a lot of software-defined. My view of the world simply, what it means is you want to do kind of what VMware and Microsoft and Citrix have done with virtualization technologies. To play a service as a software that's going to run on a general-purpose server. Well, that's what store virtual is becoming. So whereas, you know, 3PAR is going to cover general-purpose storage from kind of 25K all the way up to the largest data centers in the world. Store virtual is for somebody that says, you know, I've got VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V running on servers. I want software to build my storage on run on those same kind of servers. And that's, you know, again, a simple view of kind of where software-defined is going. So it's a different kind of customer. Sometimes the same customer might have uses for that in different places. But you know, we see a lot of folks, even like service providers, that are building out hosted services where they got a rack of general-purpose servers and they're going to do the storage using store virtual. And that's kind of the future of that problem. And then I want to talk about store all a little bit, you know, it's just the file and object, you know, together. You and I have talked, it was a couple of years ago, I was asking Tom, what's the object plague? I really have a lot of enthusiasm around object, but it hadn't taken off the way we had hoped, but I still hold out a lot of hope because of the simplicity and, you know, get put as an alluring model. So that's also a rebranding, right? So you really, now, as you said, bringing the portfolio together, talk a little bit about that whole unstructured data opportunity. We all know it's huge, but specifically how HP is attacking it. Yeah, so, well, I'd say a couple of things. First off, I think we concluded, starting a couple of years ago, really again in that two-year, two-and-a-half-year timeframe, that whereas classic NAS, you know, SIFS, NFS protocols for doing file server consolidation had been, you know, a huge success over, you know, 10 or 15-year period, you know, the next wave was going to be not classic NAS anymore. It was going to build on NAS, you know, you're going to take NAS-based systems and file systems and that class of technology, but you had to add something new. And that something new was going to be object storage. And I think the most people say, well, you know, what does that mean? You know, what it means to, you know, people is that you do things like you might do with Google Drive or you might do with Dropbox or Box.net. Those are all object storage. So people are very familiar with that model. You know, my mom uses object storage, you know, to store pictures and things like that. People know what that means if you describe it that way. So what we're seeing now, though, is moving from that kind of consumer model to large enterprise saying, I want that level of simplicity in my data center. I want to build a large object storage cloud inside my data center where it's going to be secure and I can, you know, have all my people in the company build their own applications and services on that kind of a, with that kind of approach. So what we did with Store All, one of the things is we've added that and that was an internally developed technology that builds on everything we've done in file services for kind of bulletproof, you know, large scale, scale out, you know, file services. We've added this object capability, it's very simple. So you said it's taken a while to ramp up. You know, I think it's something where, as companies say, look, I'm going to move applications to this simple model, it's going to ramp fast. But as we've all seen in the past, it does take time for people to, you know, reprogram applications or, you know, it'll take some time. But we're positioned at the right spot, I think. Yeah, and that's been the barrier. There's having to rewrite applications to exploit object, right? But once that happens. We saw it with client server, right? It took three, four years, right? But once it started to take off, it became the way people do things. And so our view of the world is that the classic NASA approach isn't going to be enough anymore. I think we think the world is going to move to object storage. Now you say that as an internally developed technology. You're talking about, you're talking about express query out of HP Labs? No, I'm not actually, so. Specifically the file system, et cetera. I'm talking about the object storage layer on top of the file, so. So you built on top of iBrix, is that correct? So yeah, okay, great. That's what we did is we used a number of pieces. So there was technology from iBrix. There's some other, you know, file services technology that came in. So it's not strictly speaking a rebranding of iBrix. It's actually a refashioning of a new platform that includes a fair amount of that. Some raw material from it. Yeah, some raw material. It also includes express query, which we haven't talked about yet, that came out of HP Labs. And it has this piece of object storage capability. And so yeah, there's a lot of new parts. And frankly, you know, we're not going to go into the whole roadmap today, but we have more things that will come in there over the next year. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming in that area. Well, I think you set it up front. You're kind of turning over the ground through some fertilizer and added some pieces. You planted some new seeds, you're cultivating it. And we're talking to Dave Donnelly about this. You've got this sort of bifurcated business. You've got some really new hot products that are growing at high double digit, triple digit rates that are pretty exciting. And you're managing the decline of the older products. And you see a point where those are coming together. You can see HP being in a pretty strong position to start gaining share. Yeah. Now, of course, you competitors I'm sure are attacking that older business, right? You seem to be holding on to it pretty well though. Maybe talk about that whole dynamic of it. You know, I mean, look, I'll be very candid as I usually, maybe sometimes more candid than folks would like me to be. But we weren't where we wanted to be two and a half years ago. I mean, we'd experienced a market share decline. You can look at any of the analysts and say, you know, we'd lost ground. We'd lost ground because we had kind of a confusing product line with too many products in it and a lot of them were old. Now, that having been said, one of the things you see with HP is these customers are very loyal, right? And we have still, we sold 100,000 EVAs. We've got an alliance share of them are still out there, right? So, you know, it was time to basically go say, there is a new direction, you know, getting to the point where we were ready to kind of launch a complete product line. It took us about two years, but we're there now. So what we'll see over the next probably year or two is we'll be still selling those existing product offerings. We're not going to force anybody to make a switch, but we're going to go out and make a very compelling offer. We're going to say, look, you know, the next generation of EVA is here and it's based on three part and you should move to it. And it's your, your choice as to when, but eventually, you know, we think that you're going to make a decision to move to it. Now, I want to talk about flash a little bit. So we've seen function move out of the server, out to the storage, the sand for the last 15 years. And you're starting to see the pendulum swing back a little bit and flashes as part of that, that trend with a persistent medium that now sit closer to the processor. How is HP storage specifically and then generally HP as a company taking advantage of that trend? Yeah, we could spend an hour on that. So I'll try to be as brief as I can. You know, this, we think the whole area of solid state storage, and we're not alone. I think most people that are playing in this space see this as a very big transition. We think, I think it's going to be one of the biggest transitions that we've experienced in the history of storage. Now, I also think it's going to play out in a number of steps over about a 10 year period, right? So today, we have, we've already experienced folks using kind of single level cell, solid state storage drive very effectively. Almost all of that's now moving to MLC or multi-level cell and a fair amount of it's moving to flash, kind of more commodity flash, EMLC and kind of PCIE based flash. So the net net is that there are a number of technologies in the space we're still in the early stages of that sorting itself out. And the next thing on the horizon is, you know, two or three classes of non-volatile memory that'll replace a lot of what's, the flash stuff people are deploying today and that's going to start to emerge over, you know, four, four, five years. So this is going to be a big transition. It's going to be very confusing for customers because you got to make a choice. Nobody makes a choice for a technology decision that's going to last them a year or two. You know, so they're looking for, I think, vendors like an HP to come in and say, look, you know, we're going to give you a platform technology that will work with any and all of those options. You know, when you have to move from SLC drives to PCIE based flash for the next thing, you'd like to be able to say, I want to slot those new drives into whatever platform I bought. So, you know, that's part of what we did with 3PAR as we said, that's going to be our platform. What we're not going to do is what some of our competitors are doing is saying, okay, for flash I need to go acquire a new company and for PL, you know, MLC I need to buy a new company and we're not going to do that. You know, you invest in 3PAR, we're going to support these things as drives within 3PAR. Now, there's a fair amount of engineering work to do that, right? Now, the good thing is that the 3PAR platform is a highly programmable, very new technology. So, as these new platform technologies come out, we can integrate them very well, we can optimize for the kind of IO and high IO, low latency you need to do that. We've got a very solid roadmap, we know what to do. So, I wonder if I could follow up on that, because I got some other questions on Twitter last night and somebody pointed out, hey, Dave, 3PAR was formed in 1999, and so when you compare that to some of the other products that are out there, that's relatively new, but when you compare it to something like an acquisition of an Israeli-based all-flash company, it's not. So, and one of the things that 3PAR did very well at the time was to say, look, all these other guys are bolting on thin provisioning. So, why is the all-flash strategy within 3PAR not a bolt-on? Help us understand that. Yeah, well, so, you know, I think a couple of things. So, first off, 3PAR was formed in 1999, and they shipped the first version of the product, I think, in 2002, 2003. So, you're talking about something that's still, you know, for the first V1 release, it's less than 10 years old. You know, and it really kind of came into its own, you know, three years or so after that. So, it's a very, very new technology, but it's reached a level of maturity a lot of these other ones haven't reached. The second thing is, the folks that designed 3PAR, the kind of the three founders and their core group of people, didn't actually come out of the traditional storage space. They came out of the high-performance computing service space. And so they were, the mindset they had was similar to the mindset that people in that world have, which is we need to build on something that's going to utilize general purpose platform technology. You know, whatever components come next, whatever processors come next, we need to be able to absorb and adapt. Software led in a way. It's software led in a way. Now, you know, I think if you look at some of those older storage technologies, our competitors and ours included, you might take three or four years to move to the next generation of Intel, right? You can't do that in the server space and you can't do it in today's storage space. So my sense of it is that 3PAR lines up very well with kind of anything else that's been designed in the last, you know, five or six years. We have the advantage of having proved it already. We have the advantage of all the feature function is there. And frankly, we have the advantage of those founders are still with the company, you know, which is a remarkable thing in this day and age of acquisitions. Yeah, you're saying the architecture is such that it lends itself toward change. And you get the benefit of 10 years is not, you know, it's a long time in this industry, but it's not a long time to be proven from a reliability availability and serviceability standpoint. So you got that double threat. All right, Tom, we're getting the hook. So I really appreciate you coming on. Always a pleasure. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good luck with the announcement. Keep it right there, everybody. This is SiliconANGLES continuous coverage. We're live from HP Discover and Frankfurt. We'll be right back.