 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Moscone, everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is in its sixth year at VMworld. We're here at VMworld 2015 in Moscone North. theCUBE goes out, we extract the signal from the noise. Our friend Rob Stresche is here. He's with HP. We're going to talk hyperconvergence, Rob. Great to see you again. Thanks for having me back. Really appreciate it. So Stu, we've been covering this whole space. We came out with a server sand forecast a couple years ago. You guys came out right at the top of the list. So let's start with sort of what hyperconvergence is to you guys. The thing we like about hyperconvergence is, unlike software defined, hyperconvergence kind of came up out of the community. One of the alpha geeks, I think coined it. So it's not a vendor term. Something that came from the community. But so what does it all mean to you and HP? Yeah, so I think at HP we look at it as an extension of ease of management, ease of deployment. How do you get something up and running where I don't need a specialist? And for us, really that takes the form of our CS250 store virtual product, which is our four node and one appliance product that comes up, it's pre-integrated with VMware. By the licenses you light it up in 15 minutes or less. I think what it means is that there's a new design point and I think a lot of people across the industry are really looking at it as, I don't want to have a storage specialist anymore. I really need to understand and how to bring a cloud admin, a VMware admin, a virtualization admin in general, and they need to be able to deploy all the way up to almost the DevOps layer, like the nice talk about Ansible and Puppet and Chef and how can I integrate in with those? So people don't even need to know what the infrastructure is. And I think we also talk about composable infrastructure and how it's CPU memory and storage and used in different ways to solve application use cases or workloads. That's kind of where we look at it, playing is it's a piece of the puzzle, it's not the whole puzzle from our perspective. So it's coming, you're saying the driver is coming from the customer base standpoint, middle out, middle up, not really top down or even necessarily bottoms up. It's that mid-level company that has it big enough to have problems but doesn't have the skill sets to be able to just have these separate silos of expertise. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of where we see hyperconvergence being adopted mainly is Robo. So I don't have IT people in Indonesia but I need a product that I can put in there that can quickly come up with people just plugging it in, plugging in some ethernet cables and I'm up and running. How do I get to there and have the data services that stretch back to my core and may not be hyperconverged back in the core? Because companies are sweating their assets a lot longer these days and they're looking for how do I bridge the gap between hyperconverged and non-hyperconverged or traditional infrastructure that they're having there. So talk a little bit about what you guys announced a couple of weeks ago leading up to VMworld and what you're showing here and what the reaction is for customers. Sure, so about two weeks ago we announced the next version on our Gen9 ProLiant hardware of our CS200 family and it's our CS250 store virtual and what it is doing is bringing VMware's 5.5 or 6.0 pre-integrated into a three or four node configuration so a lower price point for the three node obviously. We also put in there as part of the package three four terabyte licenses of our software only product and the reason we did that was customers had been telling us for the past six months how do I get DR quickly and affordably without having to buy yet another box to put somewhere else. So part of what we did was by putting the VSA software our virtual storage appliance software in there it allows us to help them get higher ROI out of existing infrastructure back in their core they just put those VSAs there. Yeah, so Rob one of the things people have had a little bit of difficulty understanding in this space is you described it as an evolution. Some people say no no it's a revolution. These new companies coming out in the valley even in our neck of the woods up in Massachusetts where I'm re-architecting and I'm taking the old way I'm putting it together and VMware's VSA didn't do great in the marketplace and therefore there are some that look at that oh well that was a failed attempt. The history of the software product that went into the announcement I mean been along for a lot of years I mean those of us that have been around remember it was left hand that was a great I SCSI solution HP bought it it was the first VSA when we talked about software define it was there so can you walk us through a little bit about the what's been re-architected what's still there and why does it have a right to be in the discussion with all this cool buzzy new stuff. Yeah I think that's great I think it we've all been around the industry for a while and everything that's old is new again right I mean virtualization is not new where we're going with software defined data centers isn't new composable infrastructure isn't new I mean a lot of this has been there from the main frame for decades I kind of look at our VSA technology being eight years in you know as the grandfather or somebody called it I believe James Brown of software defined storage which I like better than grandfather and you look at it and say well why is it in the conversation well you still need these robust data services and I think storage technology is difficult we've had eight years of working with our customers on this and getting it right I think that what did change and I think what the people who are out there startups that are out there capitalized on the change of operations and they got simplicity really well and they get it so how fast can get up and running how easy is it to manage day to day they did a good job with that and I give our competitors really high marks on that I think what's different now is we've simplified that so using abstraction layers like VMware's vCenter so that's where you go in our one view for VMware vCenter plug-in and you're able to now have that single pane of glass in there and do your day to day management because what we found is our customers didn't want to move context from VMware into our management consoles and then back again they want everything to be in one spot yeah so what would you say is it a virtualization admin some of the VMware is it that simple do I just use vCenter is this an extent to what they do and kind of compare contrast to how if this was two years ago the solution looked yeah and I think that's exactly where we're headed I think that we would like a lot more of our stuff to be exposed through there and we're going there and that's with each release we do about four releases of that software a year and each release it gets simpler not only for our hyper-converged systems but for our three-par systems as well so what we've found is that people just want to abstract it down and I think that as we keep going each release that's where people want to be they're not looking to have us yet another single pane of glass and I think that's where some of the hyper-converged people forcing you outside of vCenter or if it's in a Microsoft environment being forced out of their operations management framework with SCOM and VMM it really doesn't play well in those so it leads me to the next question which is you got all these megatrends you got cloud, you got open, open stack you got containers now popping up what does all that mean from the hyper-converged standpoint and what's HP's strategy around those yeah so I think you'll see us part of the reason why we've leveraged the store virtual underlying technology is that right now today it already plays on Hyper-V it already plays in KVM we have it as a standard feature of our helium open stack so if you go buy a license of helium open stack you get a license for that server of store virtual it's part of the solution there's no, and then we do a lot of integration we'll probably be for Liberty and about a month now we'll be one of the top contributor if not the number one contributor in lines of code and you'll see we'll bring new things for Cinder and Manila which are the APIs I think that's really the key is the API economy as Meg started to talk about it's more the workload economy and how do we keep moving that forward it's really gonna change things and it's how do we keep that in mind for our customers because they don't care about Hypervisor as much they want to know it's supported 5.9s available and cost effective and I think that's where our focus is on how to make it more cost effective so Rob, we talk about use cases you know, does the, you know, we look at hyperconverge is this a robot solution is this the on-premises version of my hybrid cloud all the above, you know how do you see that playing out and how does HP solutions that fit that so we look at it as being really nicely set for things like VDI which has been one of the main use cases we also see it for departmental databases manufacturing and oil and exploration production has really because these things can go into areas that are hostile environments so we have people who run things like SAP for their manufacturing but they need 5.9s and they want to do a stretch cluster across their manufacturing facility because if one side of the factory if they're doing stuff that is volatile blows up they need to still be able to run the control systems on the other side so that criticality is really some of the use cases we're seeing for it. All right, so here at VMworld last year you know, the VSAN EVO family announcement we're really big everybody was talking about hyperconverge I fast forward a year and VSAN is important I've talked to some VSAN customers most of them are taking VSAN not a ready node not an EVO they're kind of building their own stack EVO rail, I don't hear it discussed as much and the EVO SDDC is coming out next year so bring us up, what's the HP relationship there what are you hearing from customers at the show? Yeah, so I mean the elephant in the room that we discontinued EVO about a month ago and we're really focusing on our relationship with them and the pre-integration that we do do still with ESX and we are building on that relationship which is a 15-year relationship we still resell VSAN as you know and we have more VSAN ready nodes than any other partner of VMware still Any commentary, I know you've got the solution set customer adoption of VSAN in general? I don't, we don't comment on specific sales numbers for specific product lines we have a lot of VMware certified people around the world that are helping customers with it so I think what we've seen is that just in the hyper-converged space and in the storage space it made more sense for us to focus on our intellectual property from the store virtual side it also allowed us to have a little bit more configuration leniency based on it rail was a reference architecture whereas we can focus on needing some more flexible needs of our customers quickly So I know you don't share numbers from the VSAN but from store virtual, I mean you've got thousands of customers that have been using it years our estimated revenue showed that your hyper-converged segment grew over 50% revenue wise and had you as one of the top players in that space Any numbers you can share? I can't share any specific numbers about it I can say that our sales of the hyper-converged platform have been very robust and I think that we're looking forward to revisiting the numbers in the hyper-converged market over the course of the year here and we've only been out for six months we're on our second generation platform already and I think that it's really hitting that inflection point And Robert, it sounds like you've got pretty clear swim lanes between the hyper-converged and so the rest of the portfolio Is that, well I think that's fair to say based on, but from a positioning standpoint do those swim lanes start to get some gray area and clouded? Or how far can it go? Yeah, so it's naturally, I think that if you look at a good customer example was I have a SQL database that's 24 VCPUs with 50 terabyte data set Do I do that on hyper-converged or not? And where do I do that? Everybody else is going to say you go of course you do a hyper-converged or you do it this way we can look at that and say, you know what really that should be on blades or on a DL platform and an all-flash array and I think part of what we try to do is really make sure it works for the customer versus trying to force-feed hyper-converged even though I'm the hyper-converged guy I still know in reality our customers are going to look at where does it fit? Okay, last question, Rob so what should we be watching, you know I mean you guys are on a pretty fast cadence of announcements, we've got HP Discover coming up at the end of the year without given specifics what are the things that observers should be paying attention to indicators of success, momentum, progress? Yeah, so we'll be rolling out and discussing and having a lot of our customers out there talking about the solutions that they've done both in the build your own space with software-defined storage as well in the hyper-converged space I think you'll see us with a number of product announcements between now and Discover including Discover that will take where we are today to the next level and I think there's some indicators about bringing the families closer together across the storage portfolio that will be announcing as well over the course of the year. Awesome, well Rob, thanks very much for coming to the CUBE HP we're seeing the evolution of the portfolio and a lot of success so congratulations on that and really appreciate you coming on. All right, keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest this is theCUBE, we're live from Moscone 2015 VMworld, right back.