 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante and our next guest is Bill Philbin, who's the general manager of storage at Big Data for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Bill, welcome to theCUBE again. Good to see you. Since 2012, 13, 15 months. Is that right? We've been tracking our CUBE alumni. We've been tracking our CUBE alumni, but you're heading up the storage business. Do I get a pin? We're working on that. Jerry Chinnock. Seven of them. Jerry Chinnock Raylock wants to have now, badge value. So, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You were just on theCUBE at Veeamon, which was an event Dave was hosted. I missed it in New Orleans, but lots of stuff going on around storage. Certainly virtualization's been around for a while, but now with cloud, all new ballgame, programmable infrastructure, hybrid IT, Wikibon's true private cloud report came out showing that private cloud on-prem is 250 billion dollar market. So nothing's really changing radically on the enterprise per se. Certainly maybe servers and storage, but people got to store the data. That's right. What's the update from your perspective? What's the story here at HPE Discover? So I think there's really three things we're talking about amongst a number of announcements. One is the extension of our all flash environment for customers who, as I was saying at Veeamon, is always on. The New World Order, as we expect, everything to be available at a moment's notice. I was in the middle of the Indian Ocean using Google Voice over satellite IP on the boat talking to San Jose, and it worked. That's always on environment, and the best way to get that is with an all flash data, so that's number one. Number two, going back to the story about programmable infrastructures, storage also needs to be programmable, and so if you've had Rick Lewis or Rick Lewis is coming, you'll talk about composable infrastructures with Synergy, but the flip side of that is our belief that storage really needs to be invisible, and the acquisition of Nimble gets us a lot closer to sort of doing that in the same way that you have a safe, self-driving car is all the rage, right? So all that rich telemetry comes back, analyze, fingerprint it, and send out to customers to a point where, I call it the rule of 85, 85% of the customers, the cases are raised by InfoSight and closed by InfoSight, and they have an 85 net promoter score. We're getting to a point where storage can be invisible because that's the experience you get on Amazon or Azure. You swipe your credit card and say I want 10 terabytes of storage, and that's the last time you have to think about it. We need to have the economics of the web, we need to have the programmability of the web, that's number two, and number three what we talked about, and this is a big issue or a big thing we talked about with Veeamon, was data protection. The rules of data protection are also changing. Conventional backup does not protect data. I said it was with a customer a couple of weeks ago in London, 120 petabytes, this is a financial services customer now, 120 petabytes of storage, not unusual. 40 of it was Hadoop, and they were surprised because it's unprotected, it's on servers, it's sort of the age of the client server and the age of Excel spreadsheets all over again. We realized that most business were running on Excel, so all flash, a different way of supporting our customers with support experience, and number three, it's all around how do you protect your data differently? What's the big trend from your standpoint because I love that self-driving storage concept or self-driving car analogy because it speaks to simplicity and automation. That's right. The other thing that's going on is data is becoming more relevant, certainly in the cloud where that's data protection impact or having data availability for cloud native apps or in memory, all kinds of cool stuff going on. So you got a lot of stuff happening. So to be invisible and be programmable, customers' architectures are changing. What's the big trend that you're seeing from a customer standpoint? Are there new ways to lay out storage so that they can be invisible? Certainly a lot of people are looking at their simplification in IT operationally and then have to prepare for the cloud whether that's multi-cloud or hybrid or true private cloud. What architectures are you seeing changing? What are people doubling down on? What's the big trends in storage and laying out storage as a strategy? So I think if you think about storage in the large, one of the trends obviously that we're seeing is sort of storage co-located with the server, right? When I started HP now seven years ago, gen six to gen 10, which we've announced here at the show, the amount of locally attached storage in the box itself is massive, right? And then the applications are now becoming more and more responsible for data placement and data replication. And so even while capacities are growing, I think six or seven percent is what I saw from the latest IDC survey. The actual storage landscape from shared storage companies are actually going down. And the reason is application provisioning, application aware storage is really the trend. That's sort of number one. Number two, you see customers looking at deploying the right storage for the right applications. Hyper-converged with simplification is a really good example of that, which is they're trying to find the right sort of storage to sort of serve up the right application. And that's where if you're a single point provider company now in storage and you don't have a software only, a hyper-converged and all flashed in a couple different flavors, including XP at the top, you're going to find it very, very difficult to sort of continue to compete in this market. And frankly, we're driving a lot of that consolidation. We put some bookends around what we're prepared to pay for. But if you're a point providing storage company now, life is a lot harder for you than it was a couple of years ago. I mean, when we started with All Flash, I think it was like 94 All Flash companies. There are not 94 All Flash companies today. And so I think that's sort of what we see. Well, to your point about point companies are going to have a hard time remaining independent. And that's why a lot of them are in business to basically sell to a company like yours because they fill a need. So my question relates to R&D strategy as the GM, relatively new GM, you know well that a large company like HPE has to participate in multiple markets and in order to expand your TM, you have to have the right product at the right time. One size does not fit all. So the Nimble acquisition brings in a capability at the lower end of the market, lower price bands, but it also has some unique attributes with regard to the way it uses data and analytics. You've got three-par legendary at the high end. What's the strategy in terms of and is there one to bring the best of both of those worlds together or is it sort of let 20 flowers bloom? So I don't know if it's going to let me let 20 flowers bloom but I would probably answer a couple of different ways. One is that InfoSight, your right is unique value proposition as part of the Nimble. I would bet if I come see you in Madrid, if you have me back for the whatever the 13th time that we'll be talking about how InfoSight and three-par can come together. Okay, so that's sort of answer number one. Answer number two is even though within the Nimble acquisition, one party acquired the other party, what we're really looking at is the best of breed of both organizations, whether it's a process, a person, a technology, we don't feel wedded to just because we do it a certain way at HPE, that means the Nimble team must conform. It's really bring us the best and brightest. That's what we got. At the end of the day, we got a company, we got revenue, but we got the people and in this storage business, these are serial entrepreneurs who've actually developed the product. We want to keep those people and the way you do that is you bring them in and you use the best and greatest of all the technologies. There's probably other optimizations we'll look at but looking at InfoSight across the entire portfolio and one day maybe across the server portfolio is the right thing to do. And just to follow up on that, John, if I may, so that's a hardcore sort of embedded technology and then you've got a capability, we talk about the API economy all the time. How are you and are you able to leverage other HPE activities to create sort of infrastructure as code specifically within the storage group? So if you look at, you look at sort of our converged systems appliances like our SBHANA appliance. Database is greater than six terabytes. We have 85% market share at Hewlett-Packard. And the way we do that is we've, and that's all on 3PAR by the way. And the way we do that is we've got a fixed system that is designed solely to deliver HANA. On the flip of that, you have Synergy, right, which is a composable programmable infrastructure from the start where it's all template based and based on application provisioning, you provision storage, you provision the fabric, you provision compute, that programmable infrastructure also is supported by HP storage, right? And so you have, you know, you can roll it the way you want to. And to some degree, I think it's all about choice. If you want to go along and build your own programmable infrastructure on OpenStack or, you know, vCloud Director, whatever it is, we have one of those. If you think, you know, simplicity is key and app and server integration is an important part of how you want to roll it out, we have one of those, that's called simplicity. If you want a traditional shared storage environment, we have one of those, a three-part nimble. And if you want composable, we have that. Now, choice means more than one. I don't know what it means in Latin or Italian, but I'm pretty sure choice means more than one. What we don't want to do is introduce, however, the complexity of what owning more than one is. And that's where things like Synergy make sense or federation between, store version with three-part, soon we'll have federation between nimble and three-part. So to help customers with that operational complexity problem. But we actually believe that choice is the most important thing we can provide our customers. I've always been a big fan of the compose thing. I'm going back a couple of years when you guys came in and brought it out to the market. We're first, by the way, props to HP, also first on conversion infrastructure way back in the day. I got to ask you, one of the things I love doing with the CUBE interviews is that we get to kind of get inspiration around some of the things that you're working on in your business unit. Back in 2010, Dave and I really kind of saw storage move from being boring storage, provisioning storage to really at the center of the action. And really since 2010, you see storage really at the center of all these converging trends. Virtualization and hyperconverges, all this great stuff, now cloud. So storage is kind of like the center point of all the action. So I got to ask you the question on virtualization certainly changed the game with storage. Containerization has also changed in the game. So I was talking to some HP labs guys last night, and I'm looking at provisioning containers in microseconds. So where virtualization is extending and continue to have a nice run, on the heels of that we got containerization where apps are going to start working with storage. What's your vision and how do you guys look at that trend? How are you writing that next wave? So it's all about, it comes down to an application-driven approach, right? And so as we were saying a little earlier, our view is that storage will be silent. You're going to provision an application. That's really the, if you look at the difference between us and let's say in Nutanix with SimpliVity, it's all about the application being provisioned into the hyperconverged environment. And if you look at the virtualization business alone, I mean, VMware's going to have a tough go because Hyper-V has actually gotten good enough and it's cheaper that people are really giving Hyper-V a much better look at than we've seen over the course of the last couple of years. But guess what? That too will commoditize. And the next commoditization point is going to be, you know, is going to be containers. So, you know, our vantage point, and if you look at 3PAR, you look at Nimble, we've already got it, we've already supported containers within the product. We've actually invested companies that are container rich. I think it's all about, you know, what's the next sort of... And we had Docker on last year, so we know you're partnering with all the guys. That's right. But this is a big wave. I mean, you see containers as... I see containers as sort of the, you know, sort of the place that virtualization sort of didn't ever, you know, sort of get to. I mean, if you look at... For the apps. On the apps, absolutely, positively. And also it's a much simpler way to sort of deploy an application over a conventional VM. So, I think containers will be important. Is it going to be important as the technology inflection point around all flash? That? Flash is certainly very relevant. That I don't know. But I think as far as limiting cost in your data center, making it easier to deploy your applications, et cetera, I think containers is... What's the big news here at HPE Discover 2017 for you guys? What's the story that you're telling? What's going on at the booth? Share some insight into what's happening here on the ground in Las Vegas for your standpoint. So, I would say, you know, a couple of things. I think if you look out on the show floor, it seems more intimate and smaller this year. And there's a lot of concern, I think, that HPE is chopping itself off into various pieces and parts. I think the story that maybe we're not telling well enough or that, you know, that it gets missed is out of that is actually a brand new company called Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is uniquely focused on serving enterprise infrastructure customers. And so I think if I was going to encourage a news story, it's about the Phoenix of that. And not the fact that, you know, we've taken the ES guys and the software guys and the PC guys. It's that company. Maybe in Madrid will do this. And that company, that's really, really, really exciting. And as you said, storage sort of in a Ptolema or versus Galileo approach, right? We believe everything versus walls are on storage, right? We don't believe in Galileo. So if you look at here at the booth, we've announced the next generation of MSA platforms in 2052. We've got the 9450 three par, three times as fast, more connectivity for all flash solutions. We've talked about the secondary flash array for Nimble. The most effective place to protect your data is on a rate, it's on a pipe where the data came from. And that is a secondary flash market. We're big in the cloud. We've talked about cloud bank here, which is to be able to keep a copy of your store once data in any S3 compliant interface, including scality. And then, what am I forgetting? I'm sort of forgetting, I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but- There's a lot there. There's a lot there. I mean, you guys, I love your angle on the Phoenix. I think, you know, we've been seeing that. We've been covering seven years now. And it is a Phoenix. And the point that I think the news media is not getting on HP, it's a lot of fun out there, is that this is not a divested strategy. I mean, there's some things that went away that were the outsourcing business, but that was just natural. But this is HP owned. I mean, it's not like it's like, we're getting out of that. It's just how you're organizing it. And with the balance sheet that now is really a competitive weapon, if you will, you're going to see HP both grow organically and inorganically. And I think as the market continues to consolidate, the thing to remember also is there's fewer places to consolidate too. And so if you're a startup, there's a handful of companies that you can go to now and that probably the best equipped, right-sized, great balance sheet, great, great company is Hewlett-Packard, Edward. Well, we had hoped to get Chris Hsu on, but you know, I've always said the day we talk about the debates on management style, but I've always been a big believer as a computer science undergraduate, decouple highly cohesive strategy is a really viable one. I think that's a great one. Yeah, and there's still a great partnership with DXC. There'll be a great partnership with Micro Focus, right? And there's both financially as well as from a business perspective, but it's real an opportunity to focus. And if I was at another company, I would wonder whether or not their strategy is continues to be appropriate. Bill Phil, Ben Senior Vice President, General Manager of Storage and Big Data at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. It's theCUBE, more live coverage after the short break from Las Vegas, HP Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.