 Okay, we're back live inside theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com's coverage of IBM Edge 2012. We're in Orlando, Florida. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org, and we're here with Ron Reif, who is the business line manager for the IBM software division. Ron, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. So we're talking off camera. Your involvement in, you actually sit inside the Tivoli organization. You work very extensively with the STG, the server group, and presumably the storage group as well. That's right. I mean, IBM storage is a business that has both hardware and software in it. We're in different divisions inside IBM, but externally, we, you know, we're IBM storage. It's all internal plumbing, right? All internal plumbing. But it does matter, right? I mean, it does matter because you know, organizationally, sometimes if the organization is aligned correctly, you can get more stuff done, but you guys seem to be sort of reaching that equilibrium state between hardware and software. Yeah, it's very, internally, it's a very close partnership. I've personally been back and forth between the divisions two or three times. I'm just, I'm an IBM storage person. By trade. By trade. I was a customer long before I was an IBMer, now an IBMer, stored softwares in my life. So, from a practitioner's perspective, what are people asking you for these days? You know, one of the, I think the biggest challenge that we've talked about here at Edge has been this explosive data growth. And people talk about it as a data avalanche, a data explosion, a data, you know, tidal wave. We keep seeing tremendous growth in storage. And it's really not a whole lot different than what we saw, oh, I don't know, five, six years ago with servers. servers were completely out of control. And folks, if you're here at Edge, you're probably using a server hypervisor nowadays to manage your server environment, virtualization is taken over. Same things happening in storage environments too. Just as we took physical server assets, we consolidated those down into much more modular, much more centralized server footprints, I think you will. And then we virtualized everything to improve utilization, to speed up provisioning, to create mobility of our virtual physical, our virtual server environments. We're doing exactly the same thing in storage. Storage hypervisors are sort of now the conversation that I'm having with a lot of clients with servers taken care of through virtualization. The new fastest growing piece of the CIO's budget is storage. And so we're looking at a lot of the same techniques, consolidation of storage resources into much more centralized modular physical storage and then virtualization of everything. One of the announcements that we're making here this week is the Smart Cloud Virtual Storage Center, which is IBM's storage hypervisor, if you will, for those environments. Okay, so we had Mike Sylvia on before. He's a practitioner inside of IBM, you know, the CIO group. And he was basically describing the environment. It sounds like a very well-run organization. Now, of course, he's all blue, right? Now, not all your clients are all blue, so there's a heterogeneous world out there. Is that what the sort of storage hypervisor vision is designed to do is to incorporate some of these heterogeneous assets? That's exactly right. What Mike does at IBM CIO office, they use the Virtual Storage Center, but they do it on IBM physical hardware, of course. You know, we're IBM. But the Virtual Storage Center, like any storage, or like any hypervisor. You started interrupting, John, at IBM, you get fired for not using IBM. By the way, we're joking before, nobody ever gets fired for coming on theCUBE, nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. It's actually kind of cool to be on theCUBE. I've watched theCUBE, never been in theCUBE, so far, so good. Sorry. Tough questions, get the easy ones out of the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, butter me up. The Virtual Storage Center is designed to work regardless of your hardware choice. So it operates on anybody's physical hardware and can migrate data, improve utilization, as we talked about earlier this morning. You can compress data regardless of the physical hardware that you choose. You have mobility. I can move data from one tier, from one vendor to another, regardless of your hardware choice. It makes it available to every single client that we talk to. Every CIO can take advantage of a storage hypervisor of the Smart Cloud Virtual Storage Center. Is that a mindset, mind shift within IBM over the last 10 years? I mean, the old IBM, right, would not want to sell software to manage other people's hardware. They would really want to push IBM hardware. At some point, did you come to the realization that, wow, this great margins in software, these are problems that customers have that if we can solve, we can make a lot of money. Can you go back a little bit and share with us that epiphany that you guys had? It is a difficult kind of a conversation, but it's a reality. What's happening, what happened in the server environment, servers today, when you talk about compute infrastructures, it's very much a software conversation. You have physical hardware, the actual engines that provide the MIPS, right? But when you talk about servers to any client today, it's a virtual server. It's a software conversation. Same thing's happening in storage. A lot of the value in whether it's an IBM system, fully integrated system, or in the virtual storage center, it's all in the software layer. The underlying hardware, it's improving. It's there for performance. It's there for reliability, availability, but all the capability is in the software layer. And we chose to invest in a software layer probably back 2003, about 10 years now, invest in a software layer that was portable, would work across anyone's hardware infrastructure. We've been advancing that to the point where it is today with the Smart Cloud Virtual Storage Center. Ron, I got to ask you about the manageability, because that comes up a lot about the management software. It's been around for a while. Manageability is always a cost. And the labor issues going on, the big data, new skills that's coming in. How has the management equation changed on the software side, even how storage is evolving? You mentioned virtualization, owning mindset. What's going on with manageability and the software side? I think there's really two things. One of them is from a traditional administrator's perspective. You want it to be easy. You want to be able to figure out how do I get to what I want to do quickly? And one of the investments that we've been making is taking an acquisition we actually did several years ago, XIB, had an award winning, super easy to use, administrative interface. And we've been taking that interface and moving it across our storage systems portfolio. Here this week at Edge, we're announcing that we're putting that same user interface in our Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, which is the management console for storage. And so administrators working across any kind of IBM storage, able to take that administrative interface and just very quickly do what they need to do. We're also integrating that same management interface into our Smart Cloud Virtual Storage Center, so that now, whether you're IBM hardware or anybody else's hardware, you're able to get that same simplicity of management, a common way of doing things, regardless of your hardware. Yeah, so multi-vendors big. Complete multi-vendors. And depth of the command line interface? Yes, depth of the command line interface. I'll tell you one other interesting point about manageability though is this cloud idea. It's shifting who does the management, right? Organizational, explain that, it's a good concept. Yeah, so used to. I'm an application owner, I need some storage. I make a call or enter a ticket, it goes to the storage guy. The storage guy sits down at his console and he provisions the storage, sets up the network, et cetera. That's a little bit slow for in the cloud environment. So with cloud, what you have are orchestrators or portals or whatever that are much more self-service. They're reacting in real time. So what we've done with our smart cloud virtual storage centers, we put a cloud services API on top, a RESTful API that portals or orchestrators can get at and they can ask for storage to be provisioned out of a catalog of available services. Again, regardless of your hardware choice, and it's done automatically, and the role of the storage administrator changes from being the guy who's punching the buttons to someone who simply defines the list of available services in a catalog and the orchestrators or the portals are the ones that do more self-service, real-time, high-velocity provisioning of new storage. So people always complain about managers of managers and managers of managers of managers, right? At the same time, those sub managers have certain functions that are valuable. So can you appeal to both ends of that spectrum with a single, people talk about the single pane of glass and it's like the paperless office. So can we achieve that? And is that really your fundamental strategy? It is for storage and really you think about something like the virtual storage center. It's the hypervisor for storage. So it's the storage resource manager, the subject matter expert. He's gonna be right alongside the server hypervisor, VMware, IBM PowerVM, and they're going to be covered by a larger orchestrator, IBM Smart Cloud Provisioning, IBM Smart Cloud Orchestration, that's going to drive down provisioning compute resources, network resources, storage resources. They'll be asking those subject matter experts, if you will, to do their job. Okay, so now, VMware wants to own that. Microsoft wants to own that. So why do you win? Well, VMware, Microsoft, they're focused, they start with and focus on the server resource. And then they sort of dabble off into maybe the compute or the storage or networks that have already been handed to them. What we're doing is creating the complete end-to-end storage hypervisor to take care of all storage resources, whether they're used by VMware on x86, or Microsoft on x86, or KVM on x86, or whether they're used by PowerVM. Regardless of your hypervisor, server hypervisor, the storage hypervisor will provide services to all of them, and then orchestrators on it. Okay, so that's what customers want. Your contention is you're going to do a better job of managing those heterogeneous assets than, say, I'll just pick on VMware. Because they're going to want to push. From a storage perspective, that's absolutely true. Even though, obviously, they do have a lot of storage partners, but they're not doing, your argument is, and I would agree, by the way, they're not doing a great job of managing heterogeneous assets. That's not their intent, that's not their strategy. They provide interfaces, and we provide interfaces, they'll talk to each other, so the server hypervisors can talk with the storage hypervisors and take care of the entire virtual data center. We had the VP of data on the queen, or the big data lady, as you call this. She said, data mobility is huge with retention, data retention, huge challenge. We also talked to Ed Walsh about the four horsemen, one of them is mobility, right? So with mobility, you have huge latency, you got real time, all the cool things that people want, real time analytics, real time data, for the edge of the phone. What's going on with data mobility is in terms of the software side, is that right? Yeah, so let me maybe talk about mobility in a practical use case, for example. Since we're talking about server hypervisors and storage hypervisors, one of the things that the virtual storage center that we're announcing here does, is allows you to have a virtual storage infrastructure that spans physical sites. So I can have a site on the east coast of the United States and another one, two or 300 kilometers inland, for example. If I notice hurricanes coming up the coast, I know my data center on the coast is in danger. I can, through mobility, ask the storage to move all the data transparently while the applications are online inland two or 300 miles. At the same time, coupling with the server hypervisor, I can use server mobility to move all the applications inland, virtual machines inland a couple hundred miles. So the entire data center up and moves. Okay, wait, so that sounds good if I'm moving, you know, half a gigabyte. What if I'm trying to move large volumes? I mean, does it take longer than backing up my laptop, for instance? So is that really a practical and feasible solution, or have you somehow come up with a way to solve the speed of light problem? Well, it's actually not, I said moving, mobility, but what's happening is both of these data centers are being kept in sync, active-active. In fact, we just had one of our customers who's managing all the chambers of commerce in Germany doing the same sort of thing. Data resides in both places. It's the small changes that are being moved side to side, and there's a single virtual instance of that data that everybody sees, even though there's too physical. Data at a distance, essentially. Data at a distance, yeah. And that's, I'll see mobility there, but then there's also actually mobility mobility, which is the fun, the smart function. Moving it out to the phone? Yeah. Yeah, that's a piece of the portfolio I don't deal in all the way out to the telephone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that'll be both flash guys who deal in the low latency stuff, data retention. Cool. I don't have any other questions. I think we're out of time anyway, John. Ron, thank you very much for coming inside the Cube. Tivoli, great story. Frank Moss, the guy I used to know back in the day. Yeah. You know, it was a great acquisition from IBM. One of your better ones, and it's really panned out, and I think IBM's clearly a leader in that space. So congratulations. Thank you much. Thanks very much for your perspective, John. Nice job. Okay, we'll be right back with SiliconANGLE.tv's coverage. We want to thank IBM for making it possible to come here to allow us to do our independent cube analysis and commentary. So watch the IBM ads. You're going to see IBM ads all today and tomorrow and on SiliconANGLE.tv. So support IBM and you're supporting us. So we'll be right back with our next guest.