 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for day two of Silicon Angels theCUBE's coverage of HP Discover 2015. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. We're here to kick off, again, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Next is Manish Koyal, SVP of the HP Storage Group and the new head honcho leading the charge. Took it over for David Scott. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you. Delighted to be here. So obviously you're a storage veteran. Let's talk about what's going on with storage right now. You know, the industry is seeing the kind of a change that I think it hasn't seen in a very, very long time. Storage used to be simple. Do you want sand or do you want NAS? How many tiers of sand do you want? And today, the kind of questions that the customers are asking is just like multiplied. Object, hyper-converged. Do I want open source or do I want to go hybrid? The number of questions are just absolutely multiplied and making sense of it is hard and it is impacting the vendor community. It's a technology set of questions. It's a delivery model set of questions. So yesterday at the keynote with Meg Whitman, they went to the floor. You did the live broadcast down. You really walked through at the booth, the three-part stuff and all the storage stuff. But you had a quote, you guys are number one in growth in all flash. And the all flash is a trending hashtag. Certainly at the show is seeing that all over the crowd and the Twitter sphere. A lot of buzz, all flash. I mean, flash is hot, right? So all flash. Data center has been a big conversation. What's going on with all flash? What are you guys number one at? You mentioned that stat. What's going on with all flash? And has it relate to the overall portfolio? Yeah, you know, the dirty little secret of the storage industry is we have made billions of dollars in performance over provisioning because customers needed the performance and the only way they could get performance was buying more spindles. And we sold by the terabyte, right? And we made a lot of money doing that. And flash changes that game. Flash removes the performance tax. And that's why it's a game changer. And just like 30 years ago when disks came on board, tape was offline, disk was online, and it changed the game. Flash is high performance and that's changing the game. So, Manish, you're 100 days in almost. Yeah. Your new role here. Not quite. So you've got to figure it out, I'm sure. What's your initial take? Give us the good, the things that surprise you in the upside or the things that surprise you in the downside? Yeah. Or was it sort of as expected? Yeah. So, I mean, my sort of thesis of taking this job was that over the next decade, the winner in the enterprise data center is someone who has access to technology assets in the entire stack of compute, networking, and storage. And HP is probably one of the very, very few companies, especially after the separation to HP Enterprise, which has the entire stack assets, right? So, my 90-day, 100-day observation is amazing storage foundation with 3-par and all flash and store ones. Actually, we're driving a level of simplification in the customer data centers. That is something that I'm very used to from the NetApp days, right? So, great storage foundation, but an ability to exploit our server footprint and the market share that we have over there, that's a huge, untapped opportunity. So, you are sort of sanguine about the integration of storage network and compute. And I've had this conversation with David Scott all the time when he was an independent company at 3-par. Can you survive as an independent storage company or do you need to, you know, this world is integrating? I take it that you joined HP because you see so that opportunity to integrate. The days of a standalone storage company are over. You think so? Absolutely. Absolutely. Flat out. Flat out, they're over. So, you think these startup guys won't achieve what David Scott called the escape velocity, for example. You know, it's easy to achieve, it's easy to be a $150, $200 million company in any space, right? There's always a... Well, not easy, it's doable. It's doable, that's fair, that's fair. It is doable to solve a point problem and become a $150, $200 million company. But the last time a billion-dollar and revenue public company was created in the storage space was NetApp in 1995. There has not been one after that, right? So, I absolutely believe that a standalone storage company will not get created in the public markets because the technology is moving to integrated stacks. I mean, there were... We questioned, could EMC remain an independent storage company? Essentially, EMC's no longer an independent storage company of all these other assets. Obviously, like you say, NetApp is the one and they're kind of a tweener. So, what gives you confidence about HP's future? Is it the portfolio, the people, the customers maybe talking through that? I think it's all of the above. I think the three things that HP has going for us if going for it is, the first is just still a very strong engineering and a technology culture and roots. I see it in the time that I've been here. Every conversation starts with, how do we apply technology to a new opportunity or a problem that we're seeing, right? The second thing I'm super impressed about is the leadership. Super impressed about the clarity that Meg is bringing to the table. I work for Antonio Neri and I love the way he's approaching the entire enterprise stack and asking his entire team to work much more closely together. So, there's a mindset of saying, hey, we got to work together and we got to stay focused on the enterprise opportunity and we'll win. And the third thing, which I think is sort of testament to what HP has been, is the loyalty of our customers. I am here at the customer event and every single customer I've met has been an all-HP customer for a really long time and I asked them only one question. It says, how have we been treating you? I said, really well. I like being an HP customer. And once we have that, we feel confident that we can win. Misha, got to ask you a question around 3PAR and what that meant for HP and then kind of connect the dots with this HP enterprise and get your vision on something. So, storage was kind of out there with HP kind of bumping along. 3PAR comes in really re-energizes the whole HP storage. And for the reasons you mentioned, it was made you attracted to kind of come in and lead the charge. But the new bell of the ball if you have the prom queen is Aruba Wireless. So now, which I use as a data point to connect the dots because what that brings to the table is two successful acquisitions. One is already in kind of growth mode with 3PAR and the reboot of or the growth of storage, as you said. Aruba Wireless is a new environment out there with storage as a center of value proposition. You mentioned servers. How does that connect beyond that infrastructure piece with DevOps, with Cloud and potentially a wireless gigabit kind of backplane or a license spectrum. I mean, it's a whole nother world. How do you see that connecting out? Because you mentioned you can't be a peer-placed storage. Start up or vendor. You got to be an integrated approach. So, how do you connect the dots to Aruba, another successful acquisition that's just getting started inside HP that could be the next 3PAR in this segment. I kind of think of it as I almost think of it as it's a building with four floors on it and at the ground floor of this building is really the technology building blocks. Call it the do I have the right storage building block or the compute building block or the networking building block. I mean, that's the individual building blocks conversation. The first floor of it then is in each of those domains are we doing the appropriate level of solutioning to be able to make those building blocks more consumable or soft, right? And it comes with software, it comes with hey, am I applying this to the mobility problem or to the database problem, etc. The third level of it is really taking it and saying can I now tie it to a business problem that the customers are having not a techno geeky workload, etc. kind of an approach which is a vendor out but how do I tie a customer in, right? And then the fourth building in this sort of the fourth floor in this building is is there a customer who wants to be in the business of owning and operating their own IT or do they want me to be the owner and operator of that IT and call it cloud call it services, call it whatever you would like but is the customer looking for you to become the owner and HP Enterprise as we go forward we have to make progress on every single one of those four areas and I think that's what we're driving. What does Flash fit in that? Because Flash seems to give you more headroom and more range for diversity whether it's latency for mobile apps or you know I mean because Flash seems to be unique in its impact, obviously it's huge, right? So talk about we're now in that paradigm all Flash fits in and what does that enable? But Flash just makes some of the challenges of managing the storage infrastructure just disappear, right? And I said that yesterday in my talk that the goal of Flash is to give a storage administrator his weekends back, right? So you think about the life of a storage administrator he would like to go fishing, he would like to go play golf, he would like to spend time with his family but he doesn't get to and the reason why he doesn't get to is because he's back in his data center dealing with performance problems load balancing Flash makes it just go away because it absorbs all of that crab and it just all goes away, right? And that's really the power of Flash. Now you guys are one of the few large integrated companies that are talking about the all Flash data center. I mean obviously the start of Flash startups will talk about the all Flash data center but many companies are sort of walking a fine line there seems like HP is taking a different approach. Yes. Maybe you could talk about why that is and then I got a follow up point. You know I think we are connecting the dots and saying that's where the real transformation is going to happen, right? And we're not trying to preserve our disc revenue because there are some business imperatives that we have to hold on to that disc revenue. I've been in this industry for a long time, Dave, and you know this and our belief has always been that if you can solve a customer's problem dramatically better than the current solutions on the market in the long run you always win, right? And we won that every time we've lowered the cost and storage by near line or DDU, etc. And Flash has absolutely the same opportunity. What it's going to do is there are going to be new winners and losers as this transformation takes place. We want to be one of the winners, right? And we think we can. So anybody who follows Wikibon knows that we believe that in this all Flash data center we've been pounding that but we get backlash sometimes from the Wikibon practitioner base. And I wonder if you see the same thing where customers don't fully buy into that vision. They see $8 a gigabyte and they don't necessarily buy that you can actually get that down to under two or that with data sharing you're going to dramatically improve developer productivity. A lot of them are still thinking about that cost per terabyte model. What do you see in the customer? It's a classic adoption curve, right? So any new technology there always is the early adopters who see it and then it goes mainstream and there's always going to be the laggards and the mature customers who are going to be dramatically more risk averse, right? Probably the single biggest misconception that exists about Flash is many people are still considering it as a unit cost mental model where they're saying, hey the unit cost of a terabyte of Flash is significantly more expensive than the unit cost of a terabyte of disk and therefore it must be a niche application, right? The fact is at a system level a Flash system for the same workload, the same performance is actually cheaper than a disk system because you don't have the over provisioning tax, you don't have the OPEX complexity and as a customer realizes that they suddenly begin to say, well wait a minute this makes so much sense. You hit the tipping point. I wonder if we can talk about the portfolio a little bit. NetApp and Genio aside you basically had a pretty simple portfolio at NetApp, right? Okay great. Most of the larger organizations have courses for courses type of strategy and certainly HP is in there. What do you like about your portfolio? Where do you think it needs to be shorn up? Yeah. I break our portfolio into sort of two buckets. One is what's the core of the portfolio and then the second is what are the things that surround the core to fill out the portfolio because our company and our customers have diverse needs, right? So the core of the portfolio is actually relatively clean and straightforward. We have a systems piece of the portfolio and that's really driven off of 3-par. You can buy it as an external system or you can buy it as a part of converge infrastructure and then we have a software defined piece of our portfolio that's built on store virtual. You can buy it as an external system you can buy it as a VSA or you can buy it as a hyperconverge appliance. So really it boils down to two core technology platforms, the 3-par and store virtual. Around it, there are tactical pieces of our portfolio, whether it's a tape portfolio, whether it is XP, whether it's MSA in the entry space and they have their own place but they surround and complement the core. So from a development perspective you care and feed for those the core pieces kind of separately or do you try to force an integration? No, I mean it's the classic R&D investment model of saying what's horizon 1, what's horizon 2, what's horizon 3. We are managing it very diligently. There are technologies that are in maintenance and support mode for us. There are technologies which are in growth and investment mode and then we are making new beds in incubation areas all the time. We're getting a hooky every one minute but I've got a question from the crowd chat out there people want to know, love the storage but how does that relate to cloud and big data because that's a theme obviously at the high level, big messaging around really on cloud, cloud in general and then big data, obviously storage is integrated and quick lay that out Absolutely, so the cloud and big data conversations are actually significantly bigger than the storage piece of it. On the cloud piece we are doing a bunch of different things. You need to store the data somewhere, right? Yeah, exactly. On the cloud piece of it we are doing a lot of integration with OpenStack. In fact we are very aggressively checking in code into OpenStack which will make the underlying pieces of storage fit in much better in an OpenStack orchestrated cloud and that's a part of our HP Helion strategy and on the big data really there is a lot of it is coming in with the integration on the server side of the house because big data is a shared nothing kind of an application model. So it fits in much more nicely with our industry server side of the shop and that's where we are going in with big data. Good luck on the new job, we'll be seeing you around Manish Koyal, the SVP of HP Storage here inside the cube at the Helm, at the center of the value of storage we've always said Dave's storage is really kicking butt so Manish thanks for so much. It was my pleasure, thank you for having me. We'll be right back after this short break.