 Hi, and welcome to a special presentation in theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here in the SiliconANGLE Media Studio in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome on to the program, back to the program, Jesse St. Laurent, who's the VP of product strategy. Jesse, thanks for coming to the office. Yeah, always good to be here, Stu. All right, so Jesse, we've got one of the big industry events coming up, VMworld, one of the things I joke, there's, you know, 200 vendors making 400 announcements in the weeks leading up to the show. So Ted, tell us, you know, what's the news with SimpliVity? Sure, so two big announcements for us. The first is around an all-flash platform added to our portfolio, and that'll be comprehensive across all of our partnerships. So you'll see it in our OmniCube offering, as well as across the OmniStack offerings with Cisco and Lenovo as well. And the second we're really excited about is a product called RapidDR, and that's really about accelerating time to application recovery. Okay, great, so, you know, always a good idea to, you know, have some new things to talk about at the conference. Let's dig into those pieces. So first, you know, all-flash, you know, give us your perspective, kind of, you know, the hybrid to all-flash, there's economics, there's architecture, you know, give us kind of the, you know, why now and what it is from SimpliVity. Yeah, so I think if you look at the why now, it's really about what we're hearing from the market, right? As we do more and more business with large enterprise customers, there's inevitably applications in the data center that need higher performance results. We never wanted to build an all-flash platform to have, you know, some offering in the portfolio that looked good in a marketing brochure. We wanted to build it when there was actually economics made sense and it made sense for the customer. That's really the logic behind it. So it's designed to be a logical extension of the portfolio for customers who need just a bit more performance, bit more predictability and their latency within the infrastructure. Yeah, and in the software itself, architecturally, are there any major changes? Is this something that architecturally was ready for, you know, how does that look at? Yeah. Kind of the all-flash piece. So the core underpinnings of the product for us is we call it the data virtualization platform. The great thing about that is we spent a lot of time, as folks have heard from us in the past, building that architecture from really day zero for us. And what you see in the all-flash offering is the exact same data virtualization platform. It was designed really to be media agnostic. So whether it's flash today or other things coming down the road, it's designed to be aware of that and take advantage of it appropriately. Okay, so all of those, you know, talk about, you know, what's it, I don't know, 16 different, you know, boxes that I can, you know, put down to a single, you know, SimpliVity solution. All of those features, you know, replication, the way in optimization, everything, it kind of works the same where I would guess performs better within all-flash environment. Yeah, the feature set of the product is exactly the same. So our customers who are used to managing anything from the core of their data center to a small remote office, the feature set of the product is exactly the same. Flash is no different from their perspective, defining policies, all the built-in data protection, no changes there. The real big change is we think of the world in this spider chart of criteria and two of the key criteria on that spider chart that we track are predictable performance and peak performance. And either one without the others, somewhat useless actually, right? I mean, if you can't predict when you're going to go fast, not very useful. And if you can predict you're going to go a certain speed, but it's not very fast, that's also not very useful. So the real change here is, you know, absolute predictability around the latency side and obviously much higher IOPS than you can get out of a hybrid system. Great, so Jesse, are there any kind of new applications that you'll be targeting with this or applications where now SimpliVity is even a better fit today than it was before? I think it's the same applications, right? What we're hearing from those enterprise shops isn't, here's a new app. Today, 83% of our customers run SQL servers. So that's the number one application deployed in our environment. We see a lot of Oracle, we see a lot of Exchange, we see a lot of even SAP, which oftentimes surprises folks, that pushes us further into the size and the performance level that we can reach for those deployments. So it's not that we couldn't manage SQL before, we've got tons of them out there. This is that last SQL application, the Enterprise Data Center, that needs to have absolutely flat line performance. Okay, and have you been getting kind of pulled from customers? Is there about a pent-up demand for the all flash? Yeah, so there is, and I think customers are asking about what does the transition to flash look like? And I think there's been a lot of talk about flash for a long time in the marketplace, and the question is, when did it make sense for everybody? And there's always the outliers who will buy the very fastest thing the first day it comes out. And I think that's a small segment of the market where it's just what they do. What we were focused on is really the core of the market, right? The folks who run a SQL on it for their core business applications. And we think that's really the question about timing. And for us, we think that time is now. It's a combination of really what are customers seeing? It's a combination of where are the economics? And it's not one dimension on the economics side, right? It's what's your capacity look like? What's your endurance look like? What are your performance expectations about this platform? And even the total capacity of a box, we didn't want to have a system that was a terabyte of capacity. It's not very interesting. This system will have, even without compression duplication, a dozen, 12, 14 terabytes of capacity. When you start throwing an average customer efficiency of 40 to one in there, the numbers get big quickly. Okay, how about if I'm an existing customer, can I upgrade to this? How do I manage a cluster? Can I have all flash and non-all flash nodes together? So within a cluster, we try and keep it somewhat homogenous. Within a federation, which for us is, you can think of as a group of clusters that have cross-cluster policies, you can mix anything together. So technologically, we're perfectly happy to put our lowest box in the portfolio right next to the all-flash system. For a behavior perspective, though, you're not gonna get that predictable performance. The reason you're buying flashes for that predictability, you don't wanna mix together. Absolutely, but we could see a primary site running all-flash and remote sites running a less expensive configuration. Absolutely, or even in a core data center, have a couple of clusters. One that's for the highest performance applications where you just really need that. Another where you're doing all your test dev QA, and then even higher density, lower cost nodes, potentially off-site for DR to your point. Okay, so let's talk the other big piece you said. I believe it was rapid DR, so I know SimpliVity since day one, things like replication and backup have all built in, so what's the new feature? Yeah, so rapid DR, the change there is we're taking it really up a higher level in the stack. So what we've always talked about is built-in data protecting to protection. We talked about it sometimes as self-protecting virtual machines, these policies that really abstract the policy away from the infrastructure. Customers today restore VMs in terms of 10, 15 seconds. We have customers who tell us stories about going from 100-page runbook to a three-page runbook in a SimpliVity environment. We wanted though to not just get that VM back online, not just get the data restored, but to get the application restored. So rapid DR is really about that recovery time objective for the application, bringing that down to be as fast as we can. That's great, and what about the admin person themselves? How easy is this to interact with? How do they ramp up on something like this? The goal is to make it point and click. So if we think about big enterprises, they go into this application, it talks to their virtualization environment, it talks to SimpliVity, gives them a list of virtual machines, they can order them, select which ones they wanna restart within this workflow, do all the things you'd expect in terms of, start this one first, this one second, I need a delay, I need a script, I need to execute, change this IP address, change this route, do all those things that you need to truly come online in DR. In big enterprises, that might be a single application, could be dozens of virtual machines. As we come down towards the mid-market, it might be one workflow is the entire cluster, the entire data center. So this really turns that into connect, define your workflow, when you come back in the event of some type of disaster, everybody's heart rate's going a little bit faster, the stress level's up a little bit, you don't have to pull out the runbook and hope that all the details are right, you open the app, you pick the workflow, you say recover and you're off and running. That's great, one of the gaps that we've seen in the marketplace is, storage is really complex, and if I want to choose private cloud, hybrid cloud, there's got to be more the management orchestration. We need to have simplicity in there, and that's where we need to transform storage and solutions like yours to take advantage of that. Yeah, absolutely. So when we look at the dimensions of the product, simplicity obviously, in the name of the company, is the goal. And it also means for the operations team, getting rid of a lot of the day-to-day headaches that they have. So if you look at RAPID-DR, another thing it does is it self-documents everything. So you can still have a policy, you can show all the steps it's gonna take to recover your virtual machines, your applications, and when somebody does an audit or somebody's threatening to do an audit of your environment, you can hold up that policy and say, here's my recovery runbook. Now, what we would like is that you never actually have to do it, right? The tool created that for you, what you have to do is click the button that says go and it'll take all 2,000 steps or whatever to just go through that process. So it gives you the documentation, self-documents does the same thing if you execute a procedure so that you don't have to build that yourself from an operations perspective. Yeah, absolutely. We had a recent major IT failure that people knew of, like Delta would have been nice if they could have just pressed a button because I knew a few people sitting in airports for many hours. Yeah, you never, the experience of the runbook, it's great to build it. No one likes doing it. Operations dread it, right? No one likes that process. Having a self-documented runbook and then when something inevitably goes wrong, it'll happen to the best of us, right? Any company that claims they've never had some type of issue is either too young or just not truthful about their infrastructure, right? Everybody has had some type of issue. The key is how you can respond to that and if you can turn it in to click a button and everything comes back up and running, it's a pretty good day for the operations team. Okay, great. So we've got All Flash, we've got RapidDR. It's not a software release of the SimpliVity code but anything else from kind of the announcement that you wanna cover? Yeah, and those are the two biggies. I mean, there's one addition that's part of the RapidDR portfolio as well that kind of fits with that which is we're taking it up into some of the applications as well. So on the SQL side, when you recover SQL, it'll go through the recovery procedure all the way through the SQL playback. So automate the log rotation, automate log truncation as part of your policies. So that's really part of that same family of features around improving the operations experience and really reducing it down to a point and click operation. All right, great. So Jesse, if people want to find out more, I know SimpliVity's got a nice presence at VMworld. It's always pretty easy to find your guy's booth there. We're going to have some of your customers on our program on theCUBE. How else can people find out more? So obviously SimpliVity.com is a great place to go. The other thing is actually we've got some sessions at VMworld that'll be great. If you're going to be at VMworld, certainly come check them out. We have some great demos in the booth as always. I'm going to show me kind of guys so there's nothing like seeing the product actually working to make it more real. So come by, see the demos. Okay, great. Well, Jesse, really appreciate catching up on everything there. I expect to see you and many of our audience in Las Vegas at VMworld. So thank you so much for watching. You've been watching theCUBE.