 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. And welcome back to our continuing coverage here on theCUBE of AWS re-invent. We're on day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage that we brought to you here from the Sands Expo along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls, glad you're with us here. And we're joined now by David Flynn from Hammer Space, and David, good afternoon to you. Good afternoon. Been quite a year for you, right? Yeah. This has been something else. Set us up a little bit about where you've been, the journey you're on right now with Hammer Space, and maybe for folks at home who aren't familiar, a little bit about what you do. So Hammer Space is all about data agility. We believe that data should be like the air you breathe, where you need it, when you need it, without having to think about it. Today, data is managed by copying it between the sundry different types of storage. And that's because we're managing data through the storage system itself. What we want is for data to simply be there when you need it. So it's all about data agility. I need to know more. So let's talk about some of your past endeavours. The history, yes. Fusion IO, we watched you grow that company from just an idea. You solved the block storage problem, you solved performance problems, amazing what you guys did with that company. My understanding is you're focused on file. That's right. Which is a much larger- Unstructured data in general, file and option. So a much larger proportion of the data that's out there. Yes. So what's the problem that you guys are going after? You know, at Fusion IO, and this was pre-flash. Now, flash, everybody takes it for granted. We started, it didn't really exist in the data center, right? And it was there, if you're using SAN, most likely it's for performance. And there's a better way to get performance with flash down in the server. Very successful with that. Now the problem is people want the ease of manageability of having a global namespace, a file and object namespace. And that's what we're tackling now because file is not native in the cloud. It's kind of an afterthought. And all of these different forms of storage represent silos into which you copy data from on-prem into cloud, between the different types of storage from one site to another. This is what we're addressing with virtualizing the data, putting powerful metadata in control of how that data is realized across multiple data centers across the different types of storage so that you see it as a single piece of data regardless of where it lives. Okay, so file's not a first class citizen. You're making copies, moving data all over the place. You got copy creep going on. It's like cutting off Hydra's head. When you manage data by copying it, you're just making more of it. And that's because the metadata is down with the data. Every time you make a copy, it's a new piece of data that needs to be managed. So talk more about the metadata structure, architecture, what you guys are envisioning. Fundamentally, the technology is a separate metadata control plane that is powerful enough to present data as both file and object and takes that powerful metadata and puts it in control of where the data is realized, both in terms of what data center it's in as well as what type of storage it's on, allowing you to tap into the full dynamic range of the performance of server attached flash. Of course, Fusion IO, very near and dear to my heart, getting tens of millions of IOPS and tens of gigabytes per second. You can't do that across the network. You have to have the data be very agile and be able to be promoted into the server and then be able to manage it all the way to global scale between whole different data centers. So that's the magic of being able to cover the full dynamic range performance to capacity, scale, and distance and have it be that same piece of data that's simply instantiated where you need it, when you need it, based on the power of the metadata. So when you talk about object, you talk about a simplified means of interacting, it's a get put paradigm, right? That's right. So that's something that you're checking out. That's right. That's great, but ultimately, you need to also have random read and write semantics and very high performance. And today, the standard model is you put your data in object storage and then you have your application rewritten to pull it down, store it on some local storage to work with it and then put it back. And that's great for very large scale applications where you can invest the effort to rewrite them. But what about the world where they want the convenience of the data is simply there in something that you can mount as a file system or access as object and it can be at the highest performance of random IO against local flash all the way to cold and in the cloud where it's cheap. I got it. So it's like great for Shutterfly because we've got the resources to rewrite the application but for everybody else. That's right. And that's why, you know, the web scaler has kind of pioneered the notion of object storage and we help them with the local block to get very, very high performance, right? So that bifurcated world because the spectrum got stretched so wide that a single size fits all no longer works. So you have to kind of take object on the capacity, distance and scale side and block local on the performance side. But what I realized early on all the way back to Fusion IO is that it is possible to have a shared namespace, both file system and object that can span that whole spectrum. But to do that, you have to provide really powerful metadata as a separate service that has the competency to actually manage the realization of the data across the infrastructure. You know, David, you talk about data agility. So that's what we're all about, right? We're all about being agile. Just conceptually today, a lot more data than you've ever had to deal with before. You know, a lot more. It's a veritable torrent with a lot more demands. So just fundamentally, how do you secure that agility? How can you provide that kind of reliability and agility in that environment, like the challenge for you? Oh yeah. Well, you know, the challenge really goes back to the fact that the network storage protocols haven't had innovation for like 20 years because of the world of NAS being so dominant by a few players, well one, there really hasn't been a lot of innovation. You know, NFS version three, it's been around for like decade, right? NFS four didn't really happen. You know, it was slower and worse off. I mean, at the heart of the storage networking protocols for presenting a file system, it hadn't even been enhanced to be able to communicate across hostile networks. So how are you going to use that at the kind of scale and distance of cloud, right? So what I did after leaving Fusion I own was I went and teamed up with the world's top experts. We're talking here about Trond Mikkelbis, the Linux kernel author and maintainer of the storage networking stack. And we have spent the last five plus years fixing the fundamental plumbing that makes it possible to bring the shared file semantic into something that becomes cloud native. And that really is two things. One is about the ability to scale both performance, capacity in the metadata and the data. And you couldn't do that before because NAS systems fundamentally have the metadata and data together. Splitting the two allows you to scale them both. So scale is one. Also the ability to secure it over large distances and networks. The ability to operate in an eventually consistent to work across multiple data centers. NAS had never made the multi-data center leap, right? Or the securing it across other networks. It just hadn't gotten there. But that is actually secondary compared to the fact that the world of NAS is very focused on the infrastructure guys in the storage admin. And what you have to do is elevate the discussion to be about the data user and empower them with powerful metadata to do self-service and as a service so that they can completely automate all of the concerns about the infrastructure. Because if there's anything that's cloud, it's the being able to delegate and hand off the infrastructure concerns. And you simply can't do that when you're focused at it from a storage administration and data janitorial kind of model. So I want to pause for a second. Just talk to our audience and just stress how important it is to pay attention to this man. So there's no such thing as a sure thing in business, but there is one sure thing that if David Flynn's involved, you're going to disrupt something. So you disrupted SCSI, right? The horrible storage stack. So when you hear things today like NVME and CAPI and atomic rights and storage class memory, you got it all started. That's right. And that was your vision that really got that started. When I used to talk to people about that, they would say, I'm crazy. And you educated myself and Floyer and now you see it coming to fruition today. So you're taking aim at decades old infrastructure and protocols called NAS and trying to do the same thing at cloud scale, which is obviously something that you know a lot about. I mean, if you think about it, the spectrum of data goes from performance on the one hand to ease of manageability, distance and scale, cost capacity versus cost performance. And that's inherent to our physical universe because it takes time to propagate information to a distance and to get ease of manageability to encode things very, very tight, to get capacity efficiency takes time, which works against performance. And as technology advances, this spectrum only gets wider. And that's why we're stuck to the point of having to bifurcate it that performance is locally attached flash. And that's what I pioneered with flash in the server and NVME, right? I told everybody, you know, EMC, SAN, it sucks. If you want performance, put flash in the server. Now we're saying if you want ease of use and manageability, there's a better way to do that than NAS and even object storage, it's to separate the metadata as a distinct control plane that is put in charge of managing data through very rich and powerful metadata. And that puts the data owner in control of their data, not just across the different types of storage in the performance capacity spectrum, but also across on-prem and in the cloud and across multi-cloud. Because the cloud, after all, is just another big storage silo. And given the inertia of data, they've got you by the balls when they've got all the data. I'm sorry, I know I'm at AWS, but I said, yeah, okay, so they can't censor us, all right. So just like the storage vendors of yesteryear would charge you an arm and a leg when their arrays were out of service, right? To get out of your service, because they knew that if you were trying to extend the service life of that, that that's because it was really hard for you to get the data off of it because you had to suffer application downtime and all of that, right? So in the same fashion, when you have your data in the cloud, the egress costs are so expensive. And so this is all about putting the data owner in control of the data by giving them a rich, powerful metadata platform to do that. And you always want to have strategies that give you flexibility, exit strategies if things don't work out. So that's really fascinating. Give us the lowdown, I know we got a wrap, but give us the lowdown in the company, the funding, what can you share with us? Go to market, et cetera. So it's a tightly held company. I was very successful financially. And so from that point of view, it's, you know, we're Self-funded. Self-funded, funded for angels. Yeah, you know, I have some friends, I made some friends with Fusion IO, right? So from that point of view, yeah, it is the highest power team you can get. I mean, these are great guys, the Linux kernel maintainer on the storage networking stack. This was a heavy lift because you have to fix the fundamental plumbing in the way storage networking works so that you can, it's like a directory service for data and then all the management service. And that was, so this has been a while in the making, but it's that foundational of engineering. You love heavy lifts. I love hard profit. I feel like I misintroduce the great disruptor is what I should have done. Well, we'll see. I think disrupting the performance side was a pure play and very easy. Disrupting the ease of use side of the data spectrum. That's the fun one that's actually so transformative because it touches the people that use the data. Well, best of luck. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us, Dave. Appreciate the time. David Flynn joining us for Hammer Space and back with more here on theCUBE at AWS re-invent.