 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back everybody. Stu and I are really pleased to have Eric Herzog on. He's the VP of Marketing of IBM Storage, Software Defined. Eric, always a pleasure. Great, well thank you guys for inviting me. Always love talking to the guys at theCUBE. So, let's see, we saw you in February. You had just joined IBM. Knowing you, you've been at it. Working hard, getting people charged up. Everybody's talking about you. So, give us the update. What's new since you joined? Well, one of the things we've done is made sure that we focus on really three legs of the stool. And those three legs are flash. We of course lead with all flash. It's the fastest growing storage market right now on the system side, but also hybrid. If you buy our storage wise family or DS family, you have full on hybrid arrays that combine flash technology with traditional hard drive, gives better performance than traditional hard drive system. So, one is about flash and the importance of flash in both the all flash space, but even as a hybrid. Second thing is around software defined. As you know, some of the analysts track the numbers. We were again, the number one provider of software defined storage in the industry. And we continue to do that. We've got a broad line. We did a big announcement in February. So, rallying both our sales teams, our existing customer base and prospects, as well as our business partners on how to focus on software defined storage and the value it brings. And then the last thing is integrated infrastructure. We have a product we've done jointly with Cisco called the VersaStack. And we make sure that it is a new consumption model that's being heavily adopted in the infrastructure space and the server world. And we're making sure that we're all over that and making sure that our customers, our salespeople and our business partners know about VersaStack and what it delivers to the end users. So a lot of talk about software defined. You mentioned you guys are a leader there. If I understand it correctly, a lot of it's the XIV stack that you've extracted, but you've got other components in there as well. Right, so we have six major components into the spectrum family. We have spectrum protect, which is basically backup. Spectrum archive, which allows us archiving and integrated with our LTFS file system. So literally you can drag and drop like you're moving things around on a Macintosh and keep all the file extents and you're not doing a traditional backup. So we have traditional backup with spectrum protect. We have the spectrum archive. We have spectrum control. So the control plane from, especially for mid to large customers, how do I control all my storage? You have spectrum control, spectrum virtualize, which allows us to virtualize the complete heterogeneous storage infrastructure. One of the big benefits there is transparent migration of block data in the background while keeping the systems live. Migration's awfully a pain point, particularly for larger enterprises. And then also around that is the ability with all of our functionality from replication, snapshot, thin provisioning and all of the various data services we offer to allow customers to offer, especially those that are heterogeneous in their storage environment, to have one storage operating model. So instead of learning three different replication packages if they have three different storage vendors or three different snapshot packages, they can use our spectrum virtualize for that. Spectrum scale, we're talking exabyte class here. As you know, some people talk about data lakes. For us, our customers talk about oceans of data. And we have oceans of data. It's not about petabyte scale out. It's about exabyte scale out. And spectrum scale delivers that. Think of it as scale out NAS on steroids. Yeah, so Dave, I can hear John Furrier jumping up to say oceans, absolutely. Oh, we just had Royal Caribbean jumping in. Janine was saying, yeah, it's a data ocean out there. Okay, that was five. What's the six ones? Did I miss one? Spectrum Accelerate. So Spectrum Accelerate is what you talked about at the very beginning, Dave, which is our XIV solution instantiated into a software-only version. So in the software-only version, you can use anybody's hardware. So we still sell the XIV. In fact, we had a big announcement around XIV at the show here, and it's now integrated with our real-time compression. So with an XIV solution, you can get up to, oh, 82 petabytes in a single pane of glass because our real-time compression giving you five to one advantage. But that's on the full solution side. But we also offer Spectrum Accelerate. And Spectrum Accelerate allows you to use that powerful software with anyone's hardware, not just get a full solution from IBM. So lots of flexibility around the Spectrum family. So protect, archive, control, virtualize, scale, and Accelerate, that's the software standard, essentially. And what is it? I get it, and I can turn keys on, or how does that work from a deployment standpoint? Well, from a deployment standpoint, we sell each one as separate because someone who wants Spectrum Scale may not need Spectrum Protect. So we sell all of them separately. We are looking, and we'd love to get feedback from customers about should we suite it up? Just the way Microsoft did, right? I made it software. So there's nothing wrong with creating a suite at some sort of discount bundle, but we haven't had a lot of feedback yet on that because the announcement was only in February, but we're looking at that as a possible way. But basically you can buy it. One of the key things around the Spectrum family, and really our overall direction, is to steal something from Burger King, have it your way. So if you want to be cloud deployed, we have cloud deployment models. If you'd like to use our software with someone else's hardware, you can do that too. If you'd like our full hardware, if you'd like a hybrid. So for example, we are demoing jointly at the show with Iron Mountain, basically a service that they're going to offer, which will allow you to have IBM storage or other people storage sitting in your shop. And then you can use that service and it will literally archive and do multiple tiers across a cloud and end up in an Iron Mountain vault on giant tape libraries. So you can have everything from hot data to medium data to cold data and all consume that as a service. But in this case, combine the service with on-premise storage, which gives you again a different consumption model. So whether you consume your storage as a cloud model, consume with Spectrum family, our software, but someone else's hardware or buy the full solution from IBM or literally as what we've done with the demo we're doing with Iron Mountain, combine and literally have all three models in one solution. We give that level of flexibility and that's part of the power of software defined is giving you that flexibility. And what about the programmatic control of this platform, this portfolio through APIs? Can you talk about where you're at with that? Well, depending on which one, so several, some of the products for example, we have support for the REST API. We have on the scale side, we've already announced that we have OpenStack Swift, right, which gives you an object store. So the idea here is depending on what you're doing and obviously Spectrum Protect, which is the new name for the old Tivoli storage manager, worked with anyone's medium, hard drive, flash, tape, optical, works with anybody's servers from any vendor, whether those be x86 servers, whether they be some sort of Spark device, whether they be our power solution or some of our partners with our PowerOge Open Initiative. Yeah, so we do sell the power chips to other people that create server infrastructure and then of course any operating system, whether it be Linux or Windows or the power system, AIX, the old HP UX, right, so that works with everything. So clearly from that perspective, it's an open platform from a Spectrum Protect perspective and allows you to back up any type of server, any type of storage and go to any type of medium. Let's talk about flash. Got our pins on, hey, kind of flashy. I said to Mike Keun, I said flash is hot, he said, no, no, flash is cool. Flash is cool, a lot of cool stuff going on. So from your perspective, now it's interesting because recently you were at EMC, you were at violin, you're now at IBM, all going hard after flash. What's different about IBM? What's the big value proposition differentiator that you see? Well, I think the clear thing for us is that we don't use SSDs. Almost every other vendor in the market uses SSDs. We use raw flash. We've added a lot of value add in the performance perspective. For example, we can be under 100 microsecond performance. No one can touch that performance. At the same time, we've now integrated an enterprise class data service who have taken our Spectrum virtualize and merged it into creating the V9000 product line, which is an all flash array that gives you not only the performance and endurance that we have by using raw flash, but gives you those enterprise class data services to be tier one. We've integrated real time compression. So for example, with real time compression up to five to one compression ratios, we can deliver an all flash array solution for tier one storage as low as $2 a gig. Now that's unheard of. Most of our competitors are way above that price point. So we are pioneering pushing flash out of just tier zero niche for high performance only, but making it the standard storage medium for tier one as well as tier zero storage, which opens up a whole raft of opportunity, which is why we're growing so quickly while we have the number one capacity in the market and the number one units out there in the market today. So from a TAN perspective, somebody once told me, you're always going to get way more business out of your existing customers than you are out of new customers. But a lot of time people say, oh yeah, IBM, all they sell is to their new customers. What's the strategy there? Obviously, when you guys got first into the flash market, you were using SVC as the stack. You've now consolidated that into the 9000, single product, very rich stack. What's the philosophy there? Are you going hard after new footprint? Are you primarily servicing your existing customers? I wonder if you could talk about that. So we are going hard after new footprint. We would like to tech refresh all of our installed base and get them to see the value of all flash, or if it's not all flash hybrids, one or the other, and see the value that flash delivers into their infrastructure from an application perspective or virtualization perspective for cloud deployments. I mean, if you're going to do a cloud, not using flash is a huge mistake. You can't control the vicissitudes of the network of a cloud, but you're sure as heck when you land on the beach can control how fast the storage is on the beach. And that's an important thing in a cloud infrastructure. So we are clearly working that with all of our existing customers, but we're going after prospects too. We are expanding our market. We are already number one in unit shipments. We're number one in capacity shipped. In fact, according to one of the analysts who tracks some of the numbers aspects of it, one third of all the capacity of the all flash arrays in the world last year came from IBM. And that can't just be from our installed base of customers. We are going after new customers. We're working with our business partner community. We're recruiting new business partners to get on the flash bandwagon as well as our existing business partners. So really scaling it out. So you're pricing aggressively, I mean, right? We are pricing to win. We price to win. And we need to deliver value to the customer base. And as you know, from your past experience, it's all about application workload and use case. A lot of storage guys, and I've done storage for 30 years almost as long as you guys have done storage. They all like to talk about storage this and fiber channel that nice guzzy this and flash and 15,000 RPM. You know what? When you talk to CIOs, A, almost all of them are software guys. B, none of them gives a flying heck about that stuff. What they care about, how are you going to make my applications, use cases and workloads better? How does your storage do that? And we're very focused on that at IBM and with our all flash arrays and or hybrids, how you deliver value in a virtual infrastructure. How about SAP HANA? What can you do for new world databases? We have several customers, you know, our flash arrays, for example, with Hadoop and Cassandra. Okay, what can do with SAP HANA? IBM has more certified solutions for SAP HANA than any other storage vendor. Than any other storage vendor. So why do we do that? Because it's all about the app. And that's what we need to focus on. So Eric, you know, we've seen, you know, just great adoption of flash of last few years. I remember it went from kind of what is flash to when should I use it to? Of course I'm using it. And David Floyer wrote a piece talking about the all flash data center. I've talked to a number of service providers that say, you know, heck, I'm going to go all flash because it takes performance off the table and I can get business value out of it faster and not have to think about that. So, you know, you've been talking to a ton of customers. Where are they with, you know, their applications? Are they still trying to justify every app? Or, you know, do you really see that all flash data center coming for more of them, you know, down the near future? So I would agree with Dr. Floyer, as always, that the all flash data center is arriving and it's arriving rapidly. There's some more conservative accounts out there that, you know, I need a hybrid array or a hard drive array. Okay, now by the way, flash doesn't mean you're not going to use tape in certain vertical markets, right? Legal health care, you have to go off the tape. And in fact, tape can be as cheap as two cents a gig. So if you've got a high performance all flash data center, maybe certain of the data, you tear off to a tape at the back end or a service like we've doing with Iron Mountain to get that data off of the flash so you can optimize that data. But with things like data reduction technology or real-time compression, you'd be surprised at how much data you can put on an all flash array. So the era of the all flash data center is zooming towards us. It is not crawling towards us, it's zooming. And as you said, every end user, it's not if I buy flash, it's when I buy flash. And actually a lot of them are already starting. Well, I thought John Tuego, Stu, said it well. He said, look, I'm not one of these guys who said, tape is dead, I'm not going to say spinning disk is dead, but you know us. I mean, we're very much advising our folks in our community to take another hard look at flash. And especially from the standpoint, not even just TCO, but look at the CAPEX and look at the data sharing aspects of it in terms of what it can do for developers because you've got copies all over the place. If you share those out of a single copy or fewer copies out of flash, you're going to drive productivity. So we see the all flash data center is coming and we see a one-way trip, one lane highway to the bit bucket, which we see as flight flash plus tape. And we would agree with that scenario. We think that all the application workloads are going to flash. It's again, flash started as a niche for high performance, just like coincidentally, 15,000 RPM disk drives did years ago when I was much younger and didn't have any gray hair. But now that I do have gray hair, we're seeing the same thing all over again. So storage is often very cyclical. Right in the old days, oh, the 15,000 RPM drive got to put all my high performance apps. Now, eight years ago, 15,000 RPM drives were everywhere in the data center. Flash started off as this niche. We need it for only these tier zero apps and now it's become tier one. Now that we can offer with our V9000 snapshot, async replication, synchronous replication, thin provisioning, thin cloning, all the features you get in a traditional hard drive or hybrid array, there's no reason not to go flash. So Eric, I got a question from Dr. Floyer actually. He says, how does your flash interface with solution marketing? How are you doing with integrating analytics with the transactional side? So we do a lot of stuff in that space. We have a number of customers who bought flash actually with spectrum scale. So they're creating ginormous hundreds of petabytes, if you will, using an old term data warehouse. And now they have to run analytics, so you're now doing big data and big data means lots of data. And so how do you accelerate that? A, you can run the analytics engine on your flash, yet still have our spectrum scale to give you this incredible size. B, you can ingest the data rapidly. So depending on the application use case, often you want to ingest very rapidly from a multitude of inputs, right? So if you have to ingest from a multitude of inputs, flash allows you to get it into the big data repository faster than if you don't. You, of course, will need to search that repository to get access to all the big data you've just done all the analytics on. And for that, you're going to put the metadata on flash and the search engine on flash. So you can actually combine flash with big data analytics in a number of different ways. So we see that as a huge opportunity for us. And in fact, at the session on Monday, Jamie Thomas, our general manager, brought up two customers who were using flash for big data analytics environments, as well as traditional database and traditional virtualization plays. So flash truly is going mainstream and hitting every aspect of the traditional data center, moving into the cloud data center and hitting new apps like big data analytics. Well, it used to be a taboo to bring transaction data and analytics data together. Flash is making that possible, along with other sort of transformative business processes. Eric, great to have you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure. Well, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. We really appreciate it. All right, keep right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from IBM Edge 2015. We'll be right back.