 We're here with Bob Bram, who's the Vice President of Marketing for the Symmetrics Division, the high-end group within EMC. Welcome, Bob. Thank you, it's good to be here. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE first time, but long-time storage industry vet at EMC now, relatively new to EMC, but background at NetApp, you were at Brocade, so you know the business. Yeah, the way I tell people, I worked at a competitor for EMC, a partner for EMC, and now I'm inside the firewall. And frankly, I like within the firewall a lot. Symmetrics is a terrific brand, and it's a lot fun to represent the product in the marketplace. Are you drinking from the fire hose inside the firewall? I just finished up my six-month anniversary today, so yes, I'm drinking from the fire hose, absolutely. So that's, yeah, I want to come back to that and talk a little bit about the culture. It's something that we always find fascinating here, but so you're running marketing for the division, which is kind of an interesting thing. We know Jeremy Burton, he's been on theCUBE a number of times, so he's got the corporate messaging, and we love what he's doing, very crisp. He says, I'm big on messaging, and clearly he is, Cloud meets big data. I mean, we're seeing that take place, but not a lot of product messaging at the corporate level. That's really your territory, right? That's what I worry about, and Symmetrics and the enterprise storage division is going through a bit of a metamorphosis because historically, 200 customers have represented about 80% of our business. So it's been a very high-touch sales and enablement kind of motion. Well, as we're moving aggressively to new markets, new geographies, and new products, we need to do some classic marketing to promote the message. So I work very closely with Jeremy's team to provide the content into his messaging framework. Yeah, so, well, we saw a huge overhaul of the Symmetrics platform with VMAX. I don't know. 2009, yes. 2009, I guess, two years ago now, and Wild Time flew by, and a different philosophy, different approach, quasi-scale out, rapid IO, all kinds of new, you know, fangled technologies. Why don't you give us an update on VMAX? You know, where it is, how's it going? What's the uptake look like? Let's start there. Sure. Well, VMAX continues to grow, and we have new innovations coming out with it. This spring, in fact, we introduced a update to our software, so no hardware change, but we doubled the performance of VMAX with a software update. We currently, we announced today at the show that we can manage 5 million VMs on a single cluster array. How do you back up 5 million VMs? You would a whole lot of cheap disk, Dave. Yeah, the answer's you don't. Not tape. Not tape. Not tape. And so, look, we've actually gained market share worldwide. We are seeing tremendous growth in APJ right now. There, yeah, which is fine, because there's a traditional three-letter competitor based in Japan who's owned that marketplace that we're taking share from them, so we're pretty excited about that. Yeah, so, you know, it was interesting. You know, we're seeing the stock market tank today. The European is, you know, European softness. It's interesting that you see pockets of strength globally, don't you? I mean, Oracle had a huge quarter in Europe last quarter. I mean, just giant. Are you seeing that, that globally there's strong pockets? U.S. is pretty strong as well? We're seeing strength in the U.S. Look, there's no secret about what's happening in Europe right now. And if you sell enterprise products, you're going to be some way challenged, but we're seeing terrific growth in the U.S. They continue, if you're selling a value product, you're going to see the growth. People are finding ways to innovate because they can't hire people. So if we can innovate, we help them innovate, become more efficient in what they're doing, scale up, create breakthroughs and achieve innovations and business barriers that they couldn't, enable them that they couldn't before, they're going to invest in those areas still. So we were talking off camera about Vplex. You were talking about some of the growth, if you can share any metrics, that would be great. But, you know, when I first saw Vplex, I said, speed of light. I said all work. And then, you know, started to understand a little better, knew a little bit about the technology that you guys acquired to enable that. But where are we at with Vplex? What's new, what's the uptake look like? Share with us any insights and metrics that you can. It's kind of funny. The startup we bought was called Yada Yada. As a marketing guy, I get a little shy about that. From a Seinfeld episode. But Vplex solves a very fundamental problem, particularly as people are implementing virtualized data centers. When you move data, it's hard. When you move it remotely over distance, it's real hard. You've got to move the data. You bring a system down, haul the data over, bring the system back up, reconcile the difference. It can take hours or days. With Vplex, it takes minutes. And what we're showing people in our booth this week is a sneak preview with an announcement we're having with Oracle later in the fall. It's integrating Oracle Rack with Vplex. And we've got the integration so finely tuned it's not minutes to move data, it's milliseconds. So instant access to your data, Oracle Rack across distance. So one of the things that struck me is interesting about Vplex, and I've been following this for a long time. I know a lot of symmetric customers. Migrations from one generation to the next are a bloody nightmare. They are. They're very expensive. I mean, upwards of $50,000 per migration is the estimates that we've come up with. And it seems like Vplex can enable a perpetual generational migration without any application interruption. It's a great way to put it. No downtime, non-destructive migration. In fact, we are even working with customers to do migrations on non-EMC arrays. So one customer of ours we love talking about is Denny's, America's diner. They wanted to do a migration across IBM arrays. They brought in Vplex. They estimated that the effort would take 200 hours. It took just over 14. So we're seeing those kinds of efficiencies with the capability with short-term, short-haul movement of data like a migration, or like we talked about distance across the country from Miami to LA. Yeah, so that was a very compelling use case. I'm still curious as to some other use cases where you're moving lots of data, but of course you're doing it in a way and the Yada Yada technology allows you to do it in a way where you're not necessarily moving tons of data over the wire, right? And so we're looking for new emerging use cases, but that migration is one that we talk to customers about all the time and hopefully gone are the days where you got to bring the system down and spend $50,000 per rate of migrate. All right, let's talk about VMware, specifically virtualization generally if you like, but VMware really is where all the action is. What's going on in the VMware base? You think Symmetrics and VMware, a lot of small shops have VMware so they might not have a Symmetrics, but actually Symmetrics does pretty well in VMware accounts, doesn't it? It's a great assessment. So I was at VMworld just about a month or so ago. I was amazed at the number of VM administrators I talked to who were saying help. We need to better understand the storage environment. There's a lot of storage admin being spilled over into our space. We've got to tell the storage admin how to do their job to help us out. One of the technologies we've come up with is really to better integrate Symmetrics with VMware. And we've got capabilities right now that are in plugins that allow our customers to watch as some of the administration spills to the server side, but be able to manage the storage away as a VM administrator. So customers are seeing the ability to provision 10 times faster, have 10 times more VMs per storage device and do it with 10 times less IO overhead. So some great efficiencies we're getting with our partners VMware in the virtualization space. Yeah, we did an analysis on Wikibon earlier this summer and we basically lined up all the vendors, did a user survey, asked all the questions about who's doing what, looking at all the VStorage APIs and Symmetrics came out on top of all the platforms. Dave, we enjoyed that survey and we'll wave that banner proudly, thank you. Yeah, but it was good, but it was a good piece of research. David Floyer and Stu Miniman did it. And the great thing about it is we went to the customer base, we got their feedback, we got all the feedback from all the vendors. Now, you know, there's a lot of horses on the track and it looks to us like, you know, there's a lot of good competitors there. I mean, NetApp does a great job. 3PAR has done pretty well. Now that it's part of HP, Component was behind, but now that it's part of Dell. So you're seeing a lot of guys there, but obviously EMC put a lot of resource behind that and you guys and even the VNXE guys came out on top. So congratulations on that. Yeah, thank you very much. Let's touch on big data. You guys actually started all the marketing around big data, I would say, at EMC World. Cloud meets big data, thank you, Jeremy Burton. And the industry's picked up on it. I mean, everybody in the storage business now has a big data strategy and we've seen confirmation of Oracle. Oracle didn't mention big data last year really at all. Even in Ellison's keynote Sunday, really wasn't much big data talk, but today a lot of talk about big data. So that's, I guess, confirmation of EMC strategy, but how does that relate to Symetrix? Well, we like to feel, we've been doing big data for 20 years on Symetrix platform. Historically, what customers would do is put their online transaction processing on the same platform as their online analytics processing. And today, if you want to grow that through volumes, through performance, we have the Green Plum appliance that sits on top of Symetrix. So right now for unstructured data, where people are housing their Oracle, their SAP, VMware, Exchange in some cases, we're doing quite well as they want to move that up and climb up the stack with either by putting both the OLTP and OLAP on one device or scale it to a Green Plum. That's very Oracle-like, by the way, because I heard Ellison say a while back that, hey, we've been doing unstructured data for a long time. Our database supports it. There's no reason you can't put unstructured data on a Symetrix, although it's not necessarily the most cost-effective platform. Although people have argued with me that to me with fast VP and with Flash and with SATA, it actually can be very cost-effective. And in fact, and I'll respond, but Steven Zay today said, you know what, we put our unstructured data on our Symetrix because it's just more efficient for us and it's not a ton of our data, the wealth management firm. So kind of interesting angle there. What are you seeing in the customer base? Well, fast, you mentioned that fully automated storage tiering has been a game-changing technology for us. So the ability to, through some very complex algorithms, analyze the movement of data, look at where that data best resides on a user's array at the Flash or SATA or in between fiber channel to place that data where it's best utilized is a tremendous game-changer for our customers. Now how it applies to big data is that we're seeing, because of those algorithms and the data being placed where it's most efficient, people are seeing queries that 300% better performance now than they could before. They're seeing batch jobs downloaded almost twice the speed, so they're getting great benefit from their Symetrix and their big data environments. Excellent. Well, Bob, we really appreciate you coming by theCUBE late in the day. We're out here for all week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday we'll be broadcasting eight hours a day. Stay with us. Bob Ram, head of Symetrix Marketing, thanks very much for coming by. Dave, thank you very much. Good to see you.