 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and this is theCUBE, and we've been talking at SiliconANGLE and Wikibon for quite some time about storage no longer is just the container. It really is an end-to-end system. And we're here with Brad McCready, who's the CTO of IBM's STG division. This is the server and the storage technology group coming together at Brad. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit. I had Steve Mills on earlier, and I asked him about his organization, how storage and servers were brought under the software division or as part of the software division. Storage has been sort of bouncing around over the last 10 or 15 years, and now it's pretty much solidified as part of the entire systems business. So talk about your charter as the CTO of STG and how you see this end-to-end systems and storage and software piece coming together. Oh, great. We've been doing a lot these days to pull and make the server and the storage an integrated piece. You know, and one of the things that we're here talking about today, Flash really, really has lowered a lot of the barriers into making a single entity out of the server and the storage. You know, so much of what we talk about right now with what Flash can do, we talk about how much power it can take out of the system and how much lower floor space, less expense, you know, dollar per eye up, coming way down. And one of the things that you need to think about, you know, it's like, what's really enabling that? Is it really the Flash device? And the Flash device, of course, has a lot to do with that. But one of the biggest things that's really causing that to be enabled is the fact that we put so much between the server and the storage to make that random access, that sequential access device look like a random access device. You know, if you really think about it, what is the storage controller? It's a whole two another servers. You know, you got to put a whole server there with a whole pile of DRAM to make that sequential device look random. And then you got to put two of them there because it's storage, because you can't have it fail. And then you got to go and put two power supplies behind it. And when you get to a true random access device as being the element like Flash, the storage element, then you can get to the point where you can take all that away. And like some of the pictures we've been showing here today where, you know, now you got this big old rack of Flash and maybe one, one new SVC to give you a few enterprise services to go with your storage. And now you've taken in a lot of the stuff that used to create latency, that used to create delay between the storage and the servers, gone. And we can pull it a lot closer. And that's enabling us to do a lot. Now you can start putting those enterprise services in one spot, maybe even embedding a partition on the server. And now you got, you know, tons of less path length, tons of less latency, tons of less everything between the server and the storage. And you can start mashing it together. And we're doing a lot of projects in that space right now around IBM to bring those two really tight. So what's your role specifically as CTO of STG? Are you, you know, do you get involved in sort of the obviously product roadmap? You must be scouring for acquisitions. You know, you're visionary. Talk about how the process works within IBM and what your specific role is. Yeah, you know, most of it, you know, and sometimes even on place, you see a strategy versus, you know, maybe CTO. But we're setting strategy, my team does. You know, our role is to go and just try and say ways that we can strategically go and, you know, take advantage of our breadth in IBM. You know, certainly going across, you know, server storage network and integrating them into a single product is a big advantage. And we're a lot of the, a lot of the leverage is today to take costs out of our customer installations. So my job is to try and bring those three things together and make it into a seamless presentation to the customer. Pulling those things together is probably, you know, as we've gotten virtualization, we've gotten consolidation to take hold in the customer's market, in the customer's data centers, probably proving server storage and network together is probably now the next vehicle ever to take cost out of data center. Yeah, of course, that's right. You have those parts of the portfolio server storage network. You've denounced expert integrated systems, which brings those components together. You've got software components on top of that. So you talk about strategy. So how would you summarize the strategy of STG generally and then specifically how it relates to this whole flash, you know, initiative? Yeah, and so with our strategy in general, you know, there's a million ways to go and attack the market. Couple of the key places that we're focusing and they both do come and attack in the storage. Analytics, you know, let's go and build a vertically integrated system. You know, you could almost argue, you know, what STG has done for transactional processing over the past 10 years, you know, undisputed leadership and transactional processing. We took that workload, we tore it apart, we built servers optimized around it, we built storage optimized around it, benchmark leadership, all those types of things, a top to bottom strategy to dominate that. You could argue that maybe one of our strategies you could argue is gonna be, we can do the same thing with analytics. We're gonna go top to bottom leadership on analytics and what you find when you get that clarity of focus around a topic like that, you know, it brings so many other things with it. You know, what it's gonna take, what it will take to get analytic leadership. Certainly one of the things is server storage integration just like I was talking about. Flash will be a big piece of that analytic leadership too. Going and taking the flash, moving it very close to the processor, you know, having DRAM and then just right behind that flashed and maybe off to some solar storage after that. All those types of things would be something that we would do and say, hey, there's a strategy. We're gonna go dominate analytics. That might be an example of one of our strategies that we're executing on. Well, that's a powerful vision because if you can own the transactional piece and you can own the analytics piece, which you guys are well on your way to really doing that. I mean, you guys are a leader clearly in that business. Flash enables those two worlds to come together, doesn't it? You're basically populating, you know, analytic systems with transactional data and making real time decisions. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. You know, that's, you know, one of the things that I like to talk about that is, and I get excited is, is, you know, so often, you know, you go and you engage with the customers, you know, and you get caught in that quagmire of this conversation of, well, what's your job, Mr. C? I want to take 10% out of my business. You know, I got to take 10% cost out so I can give 10% back to the bottom line of my company. But when you get into that, you know, taking the analytics and merging it with the database, which is already on many of their IBM systems. Say, let's go run analytics on them. Now let's go kick somebody's butt in IT. Let's go get in a competitive advantage. Let's go and have that conversation. That's where budgets start going up. That's where companies start spending money and we see so much evidence of that in the marketplace. And I feel like, you know, if you start taking that, that transactional discussion and moving and marrying it with the analytics discussion, now you're talking about going on the offensive with IT and winning in the marketplace versus just trying to create an efficiency plan. Yeah, I'm always picking on Nick Carr back in 2003, he wrote this IT matter and he said basically IT cannot give sustainable competitive advantage and he advised being defensive and cutting costs and so forth. But you're saying there's evidence in the field, you know, clearly, even in traditional IT that people are really using IT as a competitive. I mean, we've seen it with Google and they're an IT company. You've certainly seen it with Amazon and Facebook. We're talking about banks and insurance companies and manufacturers and the like. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, anybody that's got, you know, anybody that's got a petabytes of data sitting around in their data center, you know, utilities, boy, utilities can even gain, you know, they got all that data of, you know, how many watts were used here and how many current, how much current was delivered there and who supplied it and who consumed it and all that. When you start running analytics on that stuff, marrying it up with, marrying it up with, you know, let's beat that against the news of that day, let's beat that against the weather report of that day, you know, you can just keep running those analytics and analyzing it. You know, you can save a ton of money in the utility industry, healthcare. You know, I was with some customers just yesterday, you know, talking about, you know, how they're going to go and, you know, and save insurance companies a ton of money by running more and more analytics on what treatment led to what results. Look at all the data, you know, and conglomerate it. There's so many different ways that you can just take what's this, you know, in often cases just piles of data that were saved for regulatory reasons. You know, most of it was saved for regulatory reasons and taking it and using that to try and go and gain a competitive advantage, you know. So what just yesterday was a burden was something that they had to keep around the data center for some regulator can become a competitive advantage tomorrow. Talk about open source a little bit. I mean, obviously IBM has a great heritage in open source. I had, again, Steve Mills on earlier and I asked him. I went back to the 1990s when he said, we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source and that clearly has paid off in a number of different ways. You guys are very big there. But in the classical STG business, what role do you see open source playing? I presume you're a consumer of open source technologies. Do you see increasingly that infrastructure is going to become more sort of open source friendly where you're committing more to open source? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it's, you know, the hard, you know, open source is, you know, traditionally a software discussion, right? You know, Linux, you know, the icon of open source. That's a software discussion. But, you know, you're going to see that hardware consumption, oh, maybe we won't open source and make the hardware free. But certainly you're going to see, I think you can start seeing the hardware consumed in different ways. I think those trends are clear. You know, more and more people that have the larger installs are consuming hardware in a much different way than buying a vertically integrated, you know, tower of, you know, hardware software, middleware. You know, they're starting to consume it more piecemeal and consuming it in a more open manner. And we're going to be committed to delivering our hardware that way. That's a big piece of what we see in the future. And then you're also going to find that, you know, there's going to be certain layers of that OS hypervisor firmware stack that you'll have to have as true open source and that as well. And I think we'll be delivering it that way. But so, let me push on that a little bit. So when you think about software defined and the like, do you see that whole meme is actually becoming a reality where you're abstracting function and then sort of running it on, you know, quote unquote commodity hardware or is that just sort of too far off? No, I think that's going to become a reality. And, you know, there's a couple of charts I show to some of my customer presentations where you look at trends, where you look at trends where something takes cost out of the system and improves the agility or the capability of the system. And software defined networks is one of them. You know, it takes some cost out of the system. You know, you're moving some function to software. You know, you're going to more of an open standard and it's making the network more agile. Those things take off and go. And certainly it's like software defined networks. That's a great example of something that does that. All right, Brad, we got a wrap. Listen, thanks very much for coming on. It was great to see you. Nice to meet you. And I appreciate you coming on theCUBE. All right, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next guest.