 I've been talking a lot about what's changing in the storage industry, big trends, flash, hyperconvergence has been all over everybody's lips since last year when VMware made really their Evo family announcement. Excited to have back to the program, Peter Bookman, who is now currently the global strategist of Sphere 3D. Peter, thanks for coming back. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. All right, so you've been on the program a few times. Give our audience the update. What's new with you and the latest on Sphere 3D? Well, Sphere 3D has just done a whirlwind of progressive movement after acquiring V3 systems, which really started the whole hyperconvergence movement. Since then, we've acquired Overland Storage and created its portfolio and channel. And we continue to innovate and lead the way with things like, again, workload optimized hyperconvergence, where it gets to focus on the individual workloads and be the fastest at applications, at desktops, at storage, and whatever you need, however you need it. All right, and has your role changed since last time we met? No, it's kind of evolved, as it were, as other people have come on recently. Simon Bramford joined the team, who is now our Chief Technology Officer. We have integrated Overland, so now we have Vice President of Marketing and Les Patel and others. So the team has filled out quite a bit, which means my role gets to focus more on strategy and less on the tactical stuff, as well as integrate other great strategists of the team who are helping to bring about these workloads that really need optimizing so that we can all increase our productivity. All right, so workload optimized, hyperconverged. I think our audience understands hyperconverged. We've talked quite a bit about it. We just had VMware on, talking about their virtual SAN product. We've had a number of the hyperconverged appliance companies on here. We've talked a lot at Wikibon about some of the software pieces. Explain your vision and execution of the solution and how you fit into this hyperconverged discussion. Well, our view is really simple. Hyperconvergence took off where server virtualization went. So as it applies to applications and desktops and such, it might be great, but it is for generalized workloads. So we view it as kind of like a layer of the onion, so to speak, where the outside is unaddressed. And as you get closer to the center, it's less and less optimized. So we have appliances. We just announced our G-Series line of appliances for education, which is focused on our Glassware line, which is an application containerization for Windows hyperconverged appliance. It's just for that. We have the V3 appliances that are focused on different flavors. So instead of having a rack and stack, all compute, all memory, all storage, each appliance stands on its own as being able to outperform for the workloads they're addressing, whether that's GPU where we have and have delivered to customers. We are announcing soon the general availability of the fastest GPU appliance, hyperconverged appliance, available anywhere, and it can stand on its own. You can bolt it on to things you've done, or you can scale up and scale out those if you want. Yeah, so can you kind of compare, contrast, what you're doing for some of the other guys? I said, from a workload standpoint, most of the time, if I'm doing hyperconverged, I just took my traditional storage area networks and whatever VMware environment had those applications, and I've just kind of collapsed it down. And it should be a lot simpler on day zero to bring it up. Day one operationally, it's a lot easier. But I need to fit to certain workloads. VDI is often talked about, many others. But the application doesn't get talked about as much for most of the hyperconverged guys. Yeah, I think that's what's missing. I think that the joke is it's been the year of VDI for years. And I think there's a reason for that, which is the application, the end users applications, which are the ones that matter on an address. Speed is a funny thing. You never know you need it till you experience it, and then you can't live without it. Designing the hyperconverged workload so that it addresses the needs of the application. Early on, with the V3 product line, we were partners with Fusion IO and Fusion IO before it sold to Sandisk. And there were many workloads where it was amazing how much faster I could take advantage of that local storage and address it. But it's not all, so we have appliances that do that. We have appliances that have more compute. We have appliances that have more desktops at lower compute. And we have, again, the fastest GPU appliances, as well as a very entry-level GPU appliance as well that has been working well for our customers as well. All right, so if we look at the VDI use case, simplicity is one of the things we really needed, collapsing that stack. How do you help build kind of the full solution for that? You're working with some partnerships. How much do you guys do yourself versus working with your ecosystem? We're really proud of our partner ecosystem, and we're gonna keep growing it. We have some of the best partners I think, including that's why we're here. VMware is a great partner of ours. We love using VMware. All the great announcements that have been made. We're excited to participate with some of the additional features that can be incorporated into workload optimized. If you want security, watch for NSX and those kind of things that can be incorporated and simplified on a workload optimized fashion. I can say here is an appliance that's really geared towards security. If you're, again, focused on performance, you can have that. If you're focused on cost, then we can deliver that. Jumping back to our glassware side of things, being able to focus on the containerized applications. There's a lot of talk of containers here. They're wildly more efficient. I mean, we're talking about 10X more efficient than a hypervisor based solution. And having a Windows application containerization line of appliances that can deliver applications to schools and healthcare, ISVs and focus on that allows it to have its own partner ecosystem as well and give that to DevOps and others who can integrate it into workloads. So can you help unpack that a little bit for us? Because absolute containers is hot. There's a lot of buzz there. Most of the virtualization admins that are here aren't quite ready. They're really trying to understand it. You know, when VMware talked about kind of the integrated containers that they have here, you know, it's not like every customer, they're interested in it, but they're not running it. I'm not sure that most of them are ready for it. And even you talked a little bit about Microsoft. I mean, Microsoft is moving really fast. I think it's in like build three right now. So they're getting ready for it. But, you know, how much is this being ready for the future? How much of this is customer driven? And can you help understand that dynamic kind of the virtualization versus container as it goes to your environment? Yeah, thanks. My role as an entrepreneur has always been one where I appreciate the large companies being giant cruise ships that can't turn very fast. So there's all these works being done, which point the way for all the rest of us to do it ahead of schedule and faster and better. So although to use Microsoft as an example, obviously there's a lot of interesting containers, but so far it's been either to focus on the Linux based containers, or to, as you say, the longer tail for them is to focus on the kernel, Windows kernel based containers. But when it comes to having a legacy application written for Windows XP, or any flavor, and being able to simply put it in a container by installing it into a container, and then deliver it via remote desktop protocols of any kind, to Chromebooks, to any device, anywhere, anytime. It really comes down to, you know, there was one of the themes of this conference is ready for any, you know. It feels like it was made for us in that when you have workload-optimized cyber-convergence, including for containerized applications, and general availability of our first appliance for the containerized Windows applications, it's ready for that workload, absolutely. All right. I'm wondering if you can help, you know, discuss some of the customer deployments that you're doing. What are, you know, you talked about some of the, you know, the appliances themselves, and how you optimize this. You got any kind of mini case studies you can share as to, you know, customers that are using these? There'll be a lot more to come, but we have shared some of our partnerships in healthcare, in education, and those are two very diverse workloads. However, what we're finding is when you can break apart the workloads in each one of these, focusing on, starting with healthcare, we are doing the, that I know of, the largest distributed healthcare deployment for VDI, and applications, and storage I've heard over seen. Over 400 separate locations, all over the world, and growing, by the way. And not only that, but this particular customer, because they are in healthcare, is able to extend beyond that and deliver services that they weren't even doing to beyond those 400. So now they're at 430, and growing. So the beautiful thing about these drop-in, hyper-converged appliances that are workload optimized, means I can add applications that weren't there before. I can add virtualization to people who need it, to virtualize more desktops. I can add the storage, either for capacity or performance, to meet the needs of the customer. So in education, where I think, and what we are seeing there, is everyone is excited about going from one to many, where we have the labs for the students, to one to one, where I have, every student has a Chromebook, is great as an idea, right up until what happened at the lab. So addressing that, traditional virtualization technologies are just too complex and expensive. So being able to have a drop-in, hyper-converged appliance for containerized applications, where a school administrator, or whoever's administering that, can simply install the applications that were in the lab into one of these appliances, drop them in and address the needs of thousands of students, is absolutely game-changing for that industry and market. All right, so give us a little insight, really, when you talk about the administration, operation of your solution, that's one of the big shifts we've seen when you talk about hyper-converges, is it's typically, it's not necessarily the storage team, and it's usually the virtualization guy, and from a VDI standpoint, the thing I always looked at is, well, is it the desktop guy that ran around? Is it the server, the storage? It's like, I don't even know who owns this, and therefore, that was a really good use case to look at hyper-converged first, because I need to make a change, so I might as well try something that's just going to be much better and simpler to be able to do it. What have you seen from that kind of administration operation standpoint? I think it's a great way to frame where workload-optimized attracts a different kind of administrator than generalized workloads. Generalized workloads will tend to center around storage and the likes of that, because it requires that high level of administration. When it comes to addressing the needs of workloads, on the other hand, it tends to be the help desk, the desktop guys, the people who really don't have all the many certifications and these kind of things, and being able to install an application just like you can install it onto a PC into an application container that then can be streamed to any device anywhere is absolutely game-changing for the industry. I presume you can see that, and it makes a lot of sense, because I don't need to create farms anymore, and I don't need to integrate it into backend storage. It's all in one appliance that can be simply built to other appliances. It can be having desktop appliances and application appliances and storage, and any of the pieces combined or separately worked by themselves. And that just is extremely freeing for somebody who doesn't have the skill set of a storage administrator who has to deal with LUNs and all of the network and all these things. You just drop it in and go. All right, so, a lot of discussion at this show. I've known over the last few months about hyperconverge. I'm curious what kind of misperception do you see out there, and things that you think need to be understand better to help move this industry forward better? You know, I personally am baffled because it seems to me the biggest misconception is forklift versus bolt-on. We live in a virtualized world where when you move from convergence, which is being used a lot more still than hyperconvergence, the big differentiator has to do with how I can add and take away, how I can add functionality, how I can add features, how I can take away features and functionality as appropriate. And I'm not seeing anything where we're not, in fact, forklifting, where we're saying I can scale out and then scale out again faster. Being able to offer something that is bolt-on from a hyperconvergence perspective to me, I think it's not just important, but I think it's what everybody needs and wants. So be able to say, I didn't deploy GPU with VCE or FlexPod and now I need to do it. I don't really want to take it all out and I really don't want it to play a full other stack of things, wouldn't it be nice and isn't it nice that we can workload optimize and say, here's an appliance that just does that. They can be added to your VC, added to your FlexPod, added to whatever you want and you can move from there and do what you want to do. All right, so Peter, last question I have for you. Look out forward a little bit. What should we be expecting to see from Sphere 3D? How should we be able to kind of track as to the success of what you're working on? We're seeing one thing above all else and it aligns well with the hybrid cloud of the story here at VMworld and beyond. These things need to come together nicer and better, like Legos, they need to come together nicer and better so that I can just bolt things together at will and have one frame of glass where I can simply and easily manage not just an appliance or a set of appliances, but the application stack, the desktop stack, the storage stack for performance, for scale, for anything you need and be able to interact with that and dare I say it, automate it so that it's to a point where it can replace many of the error-prone components that come from today's system. That's why DevOps is so prevalent. We need that piece. All right, well Peter Bookman for Sphere 3D. Thank you for coming by theCUBE again. Look forward to catching up with you at future events and thank you for watching theCUBE. We'll be right back with more coverage here. Day three, VMworld 2015 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.