 Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm John MacArthur, President of the Walden Technology Partners. I'm here as part of the Wikibon team. I'm also here with David Fleuer, who's co-founder of Wikibon, and we are broadcasting live on SiliconANGLE TV at IBM Edge 2012. I'm here today with Roger Osmond. Roger is the president and I think founder, right? Co-founder of Sentia and IBM Partner. So welcome on theCUBE. Thank you very much. I appreciate your coming on. You came down here with a couple of customers? Yeah, there's several of us from Sentia down from Canada and we're here with two of our customers. Okay, and tell me why they came. Well, we have, one of them is a CIO at an organization. Another one is a senior IT director. And both of which are, actually one of which is a good IBM storage customer of ours. The other one is not today an IBM storage customer. So the- Okay, let's talk about the one who's not a customer. I want to hear what were the surprises for them? Was there anything that they, has this made a difference in their perspective? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So this particular customer has been an HP and a NetApp customer for some time. We're expecting an initiative to happen later this year. So they're open eyes now to different technologies that are available to them. And we've been spending a bit of time with them back up in Canada, filling them in on some of the advancements that IBM has made in their storage portfolio. So we're down here to, can just learn a little bit more about it. Get the position or hear from other customers and the little customer reference testimonial sessions that have been going on for them to appreciate more of what the portfolio can offer. The biggest problems that they're trying to solve today are what? Well, I'd say their problems are like the problems we see with most of our customers. And it's really one of manageability of their storage subsystems, how data is really growing out of control. So they're looking for ways to have a more optimized way of managing their data and their storage to allow their IT support staff to be more proactive in other projects they want to do and not simply reactive to day to day storage management issues. So could you tell us a little bit more about what's your customer base? Where are you based in Canada? No, I'd be delighted to, yeah. So Sentia Solutions is headquartered in Richmond Hill. We're a suburb of Toronto. We're an IBM Premier Business Partner and one of the storage specialty elite partners. Actually, we were delighted yesterday to receive one of the winning edge awards or the partner award for Canada, which was a great honor to receive. Congratulations. We're only about four years old, but a lot of the folks on board bring a wealth of past experiences to the table. We really work within the IT communities or IT community, kind of cross industry, working with CIOs and IT directors, IT managers on addressing the challenges that they face. So a lot of... Could you be a little bit more explicit? Could you pull out maybe a case study recently of something you've done where, you know, what were the particular problems that faced you in taking one particular customer, for example? Sure. What were the detailed issues that you got down to? Well, let's see, I think in a one particular situation that just happens at a later last year, a customer had a number of older storage subsystems, so things, you know, we do server storage, virtualization, but I guess because we're here at Edge, I'll talk more specifically to storage. No, no, I did. We didn't talk about anything. Talk about anything. Oh, okay. Yes, absolutely. No, absolutely. Okay, so let's make it real. Sure, sure. Okay, no, absolutely. In this case, it was a nice blend of everything. We had a customer who had taken some baby steps into server virtualization, so they had started just early stages of some VMware virtualization of their servers, but there was a concern or a requirement to perhaps have a more available environment. So we were able to work with them to deploy, firstly, some more advanced virtualization. So in my view, private cloud is really an advanced stage of virtualization, so we fully virtualized their server environment, but then we used the IBM V7000 to virtualize the storage environment that supported those servers. The V7000 also virtualized some existing storage they already had, so again, it was the reuse of that technology, you know, continuing to benefit from the investment they had previously made. So they're actually managing that storage behind the SVC that's in the V7000? Yeah, SVC and the V7000 managed not only its own disk, but the old storage as well. The old storage as well, yeah. So the return on assets already there increased. Exactly, but then to further enhance that whole solution, we created a second site solution, so I'm going to fit a very similar setup in the remote side, and again, in this case it was using the VMware site recovery manager, we have a fully highly available environment such that server and storage could fail over from site to site, should there be ever a need to do so. Yeah, this is one of the debates that you talk about in SVC, this is one of the debates that we have around what's the use case for SVC, and I was talking to an SE last night and he said, well, and I went through some of the use cases, he says it's all of them, but I'm curious as this particular customer, because you say he's managing non-IBM storage behind the SVC, is this a temporary migration strategy we're going to move them off, are they really going to preserve and keep the storage around a lot longer than they would have otherwise? Well, it's actually, in this case, it's a bit of both. So we actually use the SVC capabilities of the V7000 to do a migration of data from some of their very old disks that they needed to phase out anyway. Okay, so they move some stuff, they retire some stuff. But then they also had some other assets that were not that old and still had a several year useful life left in them. And so that remains behind the SVC. So what they put behind it, besides IBM stars, they put HP or? Yeah, in this case, there was an older HP box and then older and an EMC box as well. Okay, so it's all clarion or something like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they're actually managing it, all of the functions are the stuff that they still have to do through the management interface for EMC or is 100% managed through SVC? Yeah, in this case, once we allocated all of the storage to the SVC or the V7000, it's now completely managed by the V7000. So all of those management apps that I would have had to have had from the HP and from EMC, I turned those off. Absolutely, turn them off. And you can actually even enhance the value of those old boxes through the easy tiering. If you're familiar with that, where we have some SSD, some solid state disk in the V7000 and it actually is, you know, it's now taking some of the hotter data off of that external disk. So even that. So it's the tiering across multiple arrays. Across multiple arrays, yeah, that's very nice. Yeah, which is great. So we've had great success. I mean, the V7000 tremendous box. So from a business case, did you look at the business case with them? Do you develop the business case? Oh, absolutely, yes. So can you talk about that? What were the things that mattered to them and would save them money or what were the really important line lines? Sure, well, I mean, some of the ones we've already just chatted about was this whole integration of old with new, data migration, from a business casing point of view, that can be done, I wouldn't say trivially, but that's a very straightforward task with the V7000. So from a business case point of view, using the V7000 to accomplish this saves man weeks, man months of time, effort and risk in doing that. So that was one of the cases. The other case again, is using the easy tiering, being able to have a large amount of very cost effective disk underneath a very small amount of SSDs allowed us to provide at a very reasonable price, very high performance, without needing very high performing disk that you would in most other systems. So you could balance that out? Yeah, so that truly had a dollar savings to it. Were the software licenses that they could turn off, I know that you, as we see, will provide multi-pathing and, right? Yep. And so some of the vendors charge extra for multi-pathing and they charge with the whole box basis. Was that part of the savings or not? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so that some of the multi-pathing software back to the servers are all included. There's an awful lot included in the SVC there, I mean in the V7000, you can turn on a couple of extra features, but for the most part, you know what you get out of the box is really all you need to, all you need to turn around everything, which for other vendors is often, you know, as you multiple add-on layers of software and keys and things along those lines. So, always things are competitive. In this particular case, what were the alternatives that they were looking at? Well, pretty much them all. All of them? Yeah, in this case, well, because they've had- What were the things about the particular solution you put forward you think made the difference? Well, the other thing we haven't talked about was is the manageability interface, in this case, for the V7000? Big improvements in that area, right? I remember when I first saw SVC, it was all command-line and it was pretty grim, wasn't it? Pretty raw. Pretty raw, yeah, you need the PhD to really operate it, but now it's taken that easy, gooey feel of the XIV and it's been moved to the V7000. So in a business case, well, really when the big objective is to reduce the ongoing manageability time and effort, it's that interface that makes a big difference. So, we often find, when we're talking to customers, we have a very extensive demonstration lab in our facility and we find that showing, in this case, showing is so critically important because then an organization can be taken through an exercise of how to allocate this, how to grow, how to shrink, how to do these sort of things and then they can really realize by seeing that it's a three-click process or something along those lines as opposed to what can take a considerably longer otherwise. Any reactions from your customers on the inline D-dup? Inline compression. Inline compression, I'm sorry. Inline compression. Yeah, so on the V7000, I mean, we've had, again, customers being able to take advantage of that in the existing form, which is that separate box that can be put in front of a filer. I see the compression capability now on the V7000 as being a tremendous strength. And there's certainly some excitement here from the customers we have down on that. And when you see the use cases that are suggesting you can kind of get the equivalent of three times the storage by just turning on compression, I think that's, I think we're going to see a lot of uptake on that particular capability. Yeah, you still need the same number of IOs, don't you, to a large extent? Oh, the IOs won't change, so what might have needed X number of IOs. 10 terabytes in the background or 30 terabytes now really only requires a third of that of actual disk. And the way IBM's done it, there's actually performance improvements that you can gain, as opposed to a costly IO overhead that is how we see it deployed in other organizations, through other vendors. Other things that you're looking for IBM to do, so what do you want them to achieve over the next 12 months to make your life easier? Well, I think, I mean, we see, I think we see more functionality coming to the V7000, a little more combination of the new unified box where we're taking, now we have file serving capability to, I think as we see that enhancing more and as we see the capability inherent in our block serving V7000, and as we see that extending into the file serving side of it as well, really rounding it out, I think that would be, that'll be great and I know those changes are in plan over time. So it's a true unified box. So it becomes truly unified and it has, and has all of the functionality that you need. For a file, for a file. That's right, that today we may not have 100% of it. I really think most of it's there already, but the extra few bits and pieces still to come, I think we'll be really rounded out nicely. And consistent management across the two as well. Yes, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, that's a strong platform. The XIV on the storage side is great and actually peer systems, the peer flex and then the peer systems, I think is a really exciting announcement from IBM as we have. Have you got any early adopters of that? Well, we have some early interest, sir. We actually will be bringing, we are a business partner innovation center. So we have a, again, the demo lab I talked about, we'll be ordering in one of those as well. I think that whole converged approach, I think to a large degree is the way of the future. And I think to have that single point of management through the Flex system manager where it all comes together, I think we'll be, you know. Does that in some way threaten, I mean, it takes away a lot of things you used to do, and you're added value, and it just comes in and it's pretty automatic. It just kind of works. It kind of works. It kind of works, yeah. So that's one way of looking at it. I think though, but I think what it does, the same way it will allow a customer to be free up. There are times when you're more propped to do other things. I think it really allows us as value-added resellers to kind of be spending more time with our customers in other areas, you know. So what are the areas where you want to spend more time with your customers? What are the other problems that you're trying to solve that where you think you could add value? Well, I think the other big one is the whole explosion of data and how that relates to backup, recovery, restore, availability, business continuity. So things like multi-site solutions. Do you add, can you add value by having your own multi-site or being a backup? We do have a data center at Sentia, so that is an offering that we do have out there to be selected second site. So whether we're doing that to set up within our shop or at a customer second location, I see that being, well, that's always already largely deployed, but I think peer systems will allow an easier way for other organizations to move into that if they're not already there. I've talked to a number of value-added resellers who are trying to migrate their business from products, sales, and services to more of a recurring revenue model. Are you sort of going along that line as well? Well, absolutely. I mean, we have a number of contracts with organizations where they have actually outsourced either some or all of their IT management functions to us. What functions are they looking to outsource? Well, one that we particularly are strong on is the outsourced backup and recovery management. We are a strong partner of IBM and the Tivoli Storage Manager, TSM product for backup, recovery, and restore. So we are actively managing that for many of our customers. We also manage a number of our AIX or UNIX environments as well. And whether if it's not day-in, day-out management, there's a lot of the regular recurring kind of health check types of services where a regular quick visit online to a customer will, on a weekly or a monthly or perhaps quarterly basis, depending on the customer, will, services revenue for us, but it also is that peace of mind, that insurance to the customer that we were able to catch trends before they become, you know, responsible. One of the kinds of things that you find that you find that customers aren't doing as well for themselves as they ought to be and what are the easy catches for you? Well, I think, again, it probably is just what we were talking about, just sort of some of the ongoing management. You know, we actually come to, we will come to a customer for the first time and realize that they have some pretty serious, potentially pretty serious issues with their setups and, you know, the information is well described in the logs that are capturing this information, but they've just been so busy that they've not had the even chance to open up some of these logs to understand what those issues are. So, is that a potential added service of taking the logs from a lot of your customers and combining those and being able to analyze those? Yeah, yeah, we have some tools, you know, we have some tools that we use that will, you know, combine a lot of that log information so that for us doing this for customer, we can do this very time efficiently so that we're the one, again, with all of this information is being amalgamated into our systems and we're seeing the green, yellow, red indicators, whereas that may not be a capability that the customer has for themselves. That's because we've invested in the skills and the tools to be able to do this. Roger, we really appreciate you coming on with us today to tell us a little bit about your company and the problems that you're solving. John MacArthur here with David Floyer on Edge, at IBM Storage Edge 2012 on SiliconANGLE TV. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with our next guest.