 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Open World 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Oracle Open World 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.com and this is theCUBE. We go out to all the shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Happy to have back on the program, a regular of our program, Eric Herzog, who's the Vice President of Product Marketing at IBM. Eric, welcome back to the program. Stu, thank you. We love being on theCUBE and love everything you guys do. Really appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you at Oracle World. All right, yeah. Eric, I mean, you've seen us at many shows. Matter of fact, some of my guys might be at an IBM show right now, I think, but we're going to talk about Oracle today. What's new in your world since the last time we caught up? Well, a lot of things. We've done a lot of product announcements starting at VMworld on both our VersaStack offering, which you do jointly with Cisco. That's why Apropos being here in the Cisco booth. And added two new configurations. One is an all flash configuration, ideal for Oracle workloads or for things like SAP or other apps that sit on top of an Oracle database, as well as a low-end product. We've introduced some new high-end products, our greater than 69, available at DS8000. We actually announced a new version two weeks ago and we've also got some other announcements coming next month. So been a very exciting time starting in August and running through the end of the year at IBM Storage. Great, so let's start with the VersaStack piece. We're familiar with the announcement when it came out. Covered some of the stuff at VMworld, but Cisco's got a lot of partnerships. How does IBM gain general awareness in this product line and is there any kind of momentum, customer stories you can share with us when it comes to VersaStack? Well, we've got a number of public references posted either on the Cisco YouTube site as well as our YouTube site. Everything running from traditional IT configurations to a number of cloud service providers, the VersaStack, these integrated solutions combining compute, hypervisor, networking, and most importantly, of course, storage, since I'm a storage guy, are very critical to the build-out of virtualized and cloud workloads. Whether that be a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or again, a number of our public reference are actually public cloud providers that are using VersaStack to make their expansion, to make their growth, to be able to easily add new capacity and new compute to their clouds built around VersaStack and a number of public references built around that. So very strong in a multitude of workloads, cloud, virtualization, Oracle, SAP, all ideal workloads for VersaStack solutions. Yeah, so Eric, you mentioned cloud a couple of times here. Brian Gracely from Wikibon joked that, we should really call this Oracle Cloud World, from all the cloud discussions. Can you talk a little bit about how IBM Storage interacts with the cloud group? And I guess one of the things that I thought was really interesting, the clever, safe acquisition, which sounds like it's going to sit in the cloud group, but tightly tied, obviously, to the storage group also. Well, as you've probably announced on the clever, safe acquisition, we're going to be offering standalone object store, but also be integrating clever, safe into our software offerings as well. So from our perspective, we see that in today's environment, there are a number of different ways that people want to consume storage. One is traditional arrays. Obviously today, all flash arrays and hybrid arrays that are part flash, part hard drive. Second method is software defined storage, where you go all software. And the third way is cloud. So what we'll do is be able to offer clever, safe in both an array sort of configuration as a software defined configuration, which they already have today, and then adding software as well. So whichever method the company wants to consume their storage, cloud-based, software-defined storage-based, or traditional array-based, with clever, safe will have an object store in all three of those categories, and the customer can choose whichever is right for them. Yeah, so Eric, it was interesting. We were talking off camera. We've got the Dell booth next to us here. Just bought EMC for 67 billion. We've got the Sandus booth right behind us. Just got acquired for 19 billion. I mean, it's almost $100 billion of storage-related acquisitions in the last couple of weeks. I mean, I know you can't comment from an IBM standpoint, but you and I both worked at EMC. What's your thoughts on just, I mean, massive change in the storage industry? Well, I think there's no doubt that this is going to cause change throughout the industry in all segments. The OEM segment, what's the supply base going to do now as people continue to consolidate? Are people going to try to move up the stack, AKA the traditional OEM suppliers that supply people like IBM or our competitors? B, how does this impact cloud environments? Is Dell going to offer some sort of cloud configuration? As you know, they're not too strong in that area. How is that going to impact things? And what's going to happen with things like the channel? Dell is not known as a channel-friendly company. How are channel partners going to deal with and see about how are they going to do business and how are they going to continue to survive in a market that's going under incredible change in all areas, whether it be all the new technologies such as all flash and software defined. As you know, there's a raft of startups. We of course just recently announced our intention to acquire Cleversafe. We bought TMS, which now are flash systems. So we ourselves have been acquisitive with the startups. So a lot of change going through and these two acquisitions are going to add even more fuel to that fire. The good thing about storage is it's always changing and it's never boring. Yeah, I mean, storage is a big piece of how much people need, what they spend the share of wallet. And it's critically important to work on it. As I look at things, that hybrid story that we've been dancing around for a bunch of years, I feel like the stacks and what sits on either side of hybrid is kind of being a little bit more clear now. So you mentioned Dell actually. They made a big announcement with Microsoft that Microsoft inside their public cloud Azure is using the Dell hardware. So the Dell says, okay, you want Dell and eventually Dell EMC stuff, we're going to put it both places on the cloud. IBM, you've got SoftLayer, you've got obviously a large portfolio that you can put inside data centers. How do you look at that hybrid cloud story and where storage sits in kind of your environment, service providers, public cloud, what's IBM's role? So for us, cloud is a great opportunity for us. Whether that be a public cloud provider, we have a number of public cloud providers that use our storage, whether it be XIV. For example, Netflix is a public reference. So if you use Netflix, which is sort of a, we will video server as a service kind of public cloud environment that comes off IBM storage. We have a number of cloud service providers who use our technology, whether that be our all flash. We mentioned already earlier our versus stack configurations. So that's an ideal offering as well. The other thing we do is make sure that our storage can easily tier to the cloud. So for example, as we talked about last time on theCUBE at VMworld, we announced our new version of Spectrum Protect, and Spectrum Protect can see a cloud as just a target device. So Spectrum Protect can back up to a hard drive, can back up to a tape drive, can back up to an optical drive, or it now can back up to the cloud and treats cloud as if it was just another tape drive or hard drive, but it's really a cloud. So at IBM, hybrid clouds, private cloud and public clouds are huge opportunities. And the key thing is when you're in the cloud, you have all sorts of other vicissitudes. What's my network connect? How's the traffic working? The last thing you want is that storage not to be a highly available, highly reliable, and also provide high performance because you're subject to the traffic on the network. So you want that storage to be rock solid, and IBM is proving with all of our hybrid cloud customers and our public cloud customers that we can deliver on that promise. You know, when we talk to practitioners as our community, what's really clear on cloud is it's not one size fits all. Most customers have, you know, they're using public cloud, they've got their own data centers, they're using SaaS. And one of the big challenges they have is how do I manage all this? How do I, you know, orchestrate for how the piece is? You know, what has APIs, what plugs in? You know, talking to Cisco about, you know, when they built UCS, really that management orchestration's been a critical piece. Maybe if you could talk, you know, IBM's view on kind of that management orchestration layer, you know, what you tie in with Cisco and other partners and how much IBM does themselves. Sure, well, IBM is very active with all our partner base. In fact, not only are we here working with Cisco with VersaStack, but if you go over to the VMware booth, they're demoing our flash systems, running a virtualized workload of Oracle. So whether that be Cisco, VMware, Microsoft, you know, Oracle of themselves is a huge partner of IBM. So we work with all of the vendors. From our perspective, it's very critical to support. Again, as we already talked about, we have on-premise offerings that are array-based, if you will, physical entity. Software-defined storage, which is also on-premise, but you can use anybody's hardware. And one of the good things about our software-defined storage and two of the industry analysts have named us number one in software-defined storage now for two years in a row, is it works with anybody's hardware. Not just IBM's, but all of our competitors, or just generic white box storage, and we can manage that. And then lastly, we have, of course, cloud offerings. Spectrum Accelerate is available as a cloud offering. Spectrum Scale is available as a cloud offering. And Spectrum Control, which is our orchestration layer, our control layer, which, by the way, works not only on IBM storage, but on all our competitors' storage, is also available through software. So however you choose to consume, and I do think one of the key things you hit on, is most big companies don't consume one way. They're not all in the cloud, they're not all on-premise. If they have a cloud, it's probably part hybrid, but off in the corner over there, the marketing guys, or one of the engineering teams, is using a public cloud provider, whether IT knows it or not. So from an IBM perspective, the key thing is being able to span the gamut from on-premise to software-only on-premise to cloud integration, and make sure that our control plane, our Spectrum Control, which is available as a cloud, or on-premise as a software defined, not only works with IBM's gear, but all our competitors' gear as well. And that's how we see the world, and it's mostly a heterogeneous world out there as well, Stu. So you've got to make sure your gear works with everyone's gear. Absolutely, Eric. I would definitely give IBM kudos when it comes to working in a heterogeneous environment. I've hard to find another company that does a better job at that. The other thing that's been thrown around this week is, you know, how open is a company? I mean, Oracle throughout some, you know, oh, we're doing some open-source stuff, and sure they work with Linux, they're working with OpenStack. But I mean, IBM's got a very strong heritage when it comes to open-source. I'm curious how that plays into what goes on with storage. I mean, I know IBM has a strong presence out at the OpenStack Tokyo event this week. The cloud group's doing a lot there, but when it comes to open-source, what you're looking at. Well, when you look at IBM across the board, right, from the things we're doing in the cloud team, what we've done with now Linux and VMware on our system Z, what we have with our power open initiative, right, which is an opening up, not only running power on Linux, but literally offering our power chips to essentially people who would be competitors to create their own servers that can compete with our own power servers and let them use the chip in our infrastructure. On the storage side, we do things again, like tier to the cloud, like our Spectrum Protects, so again, supporting that. We're very active. Our Spectrum Scale product is not only scale out NAS, but supports the OpenStandard Swift for ObjectStore. So we've got support for OpenStandards. We have Hadoop connectors, for example, on a number of the products, again, trying to be very open and supporting all the new issues. And as you know, IBM as a global company is one of the largest contributor to the entire Linux space across all the divisions. Probably the biggest contributor to Linux is IBM Corporation and the software groups and the systems groups. So we have a strong tension to support OpenStandards and OpenAPIs across all of our products from storage to the rest of the systems group with Z and power and into the software groups and into, of course, our software infrastructure. Yeah, so Eric, you talked a little bit about analytics and we know IBM has a strong strength there. They've got a huge portfolio, as a matter of fact, that's the IBM Insight Show that's going on right now. Another item that's been talking here that has huge impact on kind of the infrastructure and architectures is IoT. So, you know, the IBM storage portfolio, how's that fitting to IoT? How's that getting ready for some of these, you know, potentially disruptive new architectures? So one of the key things is IBM Flash Systems and our spectrum scale products are heavily used in big data analytic environments. So if someone's going to do IoT and have all thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of data points that they need to analyze to control their network better, to control their security environment better, the best thing to do is run that on IBM Flash Systems. Low latency, high IOPS, incredible performance. We're across our spectrum scale infrastructure which can scale to exabytes. As we've already publicly talked about, we have one of the global enterprise that has an exabyte with spectrum scale in production. Can you think of any other storage company that's got a customer with an exabyte in production? Probably not. And they're running all kinds of workloads including heavy data analytics workloads. So, you know, big data, IoT, just generic analytics, even the older form of analytics, the old data warehouses, the Oracle data warehouse, SAP data warehouse, SAS data warehouse, we support all of it. We've been with analytics before it was called big data and we're in analytics today and with Flash Systems and spectrum scale, we offer ideal solutions for big data, for analytics workloads and for the IoT infrastructure. Yeah, so, Eric, the storage industry so often doesn't make big moves fast. Talk about customers take a while to adopt. Talk about market share. It's highly fragmented. See, Dell by an EMC, huge shift in market. The other piece that I saw, I mean, AWS, can be an eight billion dollar company this year, probably at least two billion in that that's storage by the end of this year. You know, when you look at kind of that changing system, rapid change, you know, where does IBM fit? Why are customers coming to IBM for storage and how do you position yourself? Well, there's a couple of things. First of all, IBM is betting on those waves of change. We are the number one provider of all flash array capacity and all flash array units and number two in revenue. By the way, it's interesting we sell more units. I guess we charge a fair price for our all flash arrays. Some of the other guys may overcharge for theirs. We're also number one in software defined storage, the use of our software with anyone's hardware, whether it be our own or someone else's. Integrated infrastructure, which we do of course with Cisco versus DAC, but we also have some versions with our own power technology, so integrated infrastructure. So when you look at how storage is consumed and then obviously all of those solutions, whether it be integrated infrastructure, software defined and all flash arrays are heavily used by cloud providers and hybrid cloud configurations. So the key thing and why people come to IBM is we're riding the wave. We're not fighting wave. We're riding the wave of all flash. We're riding the wave of integrated infrastructure with both Cisco versus DAC and pure power. We're riding the wave of software defined, being number one in software defined storage according to the industry and it's now for the last two years in a row. So they come to IBM because we're on the cusp. We're not conservative. We keep moving forward with technology. We invented the hard drive. We're still one of the biggest guys in the tape space. We were one of the first storage subsystems in the market space that was not embedded in a mainframe back in the day, back in the 90s. So we're always trying to widen the wave and that's why people come to IBM because we have a reputation, not only for rock-solid company and with highly-proppled rock-solid support and service but people view us as you know. IBM does more patents every year than the entire rest of high-tech industry can find. That's innovation. All right. I think we'll close it on that, Eric. Eric Herzog with IBM. We really appreciate you coming back, sharing with us all the new things that are going on in the IBM Storage Portfolio. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.