 This is Dave Vellante. We're live VMworld 2011. I am with wikibond.org and this is Silicon Angles continuous coverage of the VMworld event and I'm here with the killer panel. We're going to talk about beyond storage virtualization. I'm going to start all the way to my right, my colleague and good friend David Floyer. David, thanks for coming on and to David's left is Mark Farley who is with HP. But Mark, you're on as an independent blogger here. You understand that, right? Okay, whatever you say. And Mark, tremendous insights and thanks for coming on in a pinch. And to my right, immediate right is Steve Keniston, also an independent blogger and an observer, former analyst with ESG. Thank you, Steve, for coming on. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having us on. So guys, we're going to talk about beyond storage virtualization. David Floyer, I want to start with you. I showed some data at the top. It was data around the three-par metadata that you pulled, just metadata, no customer data, and that analysis that you did, that statistical analysis, and what was the bottom line of that analysis? What did it show you? The particular data you were referring to was the forecast or the metadata? 51% greater than 150% utilization improvement. Right, okay. So the VMworld, what that says to me is that the most important person in the data center is going to be the virtualization architect. And he's going to be the center of storage, a defining storage going forward for the next few years. Storage administration is going to get absorbed into that layer of management, and the decisions in that area are going to be made more from a systems point of view than the traditional storage point of view. That's, I believe, a very important long-term trend. The other part of that is that there's going to be a very interesting battle between the network people and them wanting to hold on to the network and organize the storage network. And if you like the Cisco view of the world and the more of the storage VMware view of the world where they want to manage it as part of the computing component of that. I think those two are very important. Mark, I want to ask you, you said you were the ecologic and you were three-par prior to the HP acquisition. Two companies, real disruptive, real innovative, along with left-hand, along with compelling. A lot of VC money went in and really changed the storage business, didn't it? In a relatively short amount of time. Focus on simplicity. What's next in storage innovation? I think the thing that's next is something that you've really got your thumb on. What's going on with SSDs and Flash? What the evolution of that's going to be? What the integration is with systems? How these different components integrate? I'm not just trying to blow smoke here, but I think some of the most intelligent things that I've read about that actually is what you guys have been saying. The analysis that you've been coming up with, and that's what I see as being the next thing that has a chance to rip a hole into the storage industry. That's the next thing that will change the industry. Steve, you agree? Anything you'd add to that? No, I would agree, and I would also go back to a little bit about what David was talking about. I see it's this dynamic pendulum that ends up happening. At first we had systems administrators, and then we went all the way to the right. We have storage administrators, network administrators, and server administrators. Now you have this notion of virtualization. You've got big systems coming in. These big systems are now taking up one single rack, and it's filling it with both network, servers, storage. It's becoming cloud. We were even talking at lunch today how now you're seeing the staff start to slowly collapse back again. The pendulum is now swinging back to the left, where the network administrator, the IT, you know, you're saying about the different network of people getting involved in that sort of thing. Now the lines are getting blurry and blurry, or it's going to be one person. Then all of a sudden you're going to have one system to manage the simplicity of that system. Now what do I need from that system? To Mark's point, I need speed, I need performance, I need flash. It just starts to keep evolving and evolve. Guys, I want to talk about the role of cloud service providers. Now we all know of, have friends who used to work at Storage Networks, a hot, high-flying company in the late 90s, early 2000s, and they set forth, Peter Bell and his team set forth this vision, where all this storage is going to be provisioned in the cloud, and of course it didn't happen, and we all, you know, can debate why, and I think we understand why, but now the cloud service provider trend is coming back. Mark, why is that, and is it real this time? Yeah, so the big thing is when Storage Networks first came out, there wasn't multi-tenancy capability with the systems, and that killed it, right? You can't really have the notion of a cloud service provider without having lots of customers, and Storage Networks didn't have a good way to accommodate lots of customers efficiently, at a reasonable cost, at a cost that could compete with their own IT organization, right? So today, with virtualization and the things that are going on with storage designs, you know, new storage designs, you can get multi-tenancy, and that allows the cloud service provider to have leverage that Storage Networks never could have had a decade ago. So much has changed in 10 years. A lot of that has to do with system virtualization, but also with the storage designs that are behind it. So David, go ahead, Steve. I was just saying, the big key to Mark's thought around multi-tenancy becomes security, right? So now, not only can I do it cost-effectively, the next thing I need to know is, is it secure? And as long as I have both of those, it's cost-effective and it's reliable, then I'm okay. David, I want you to respond, but I want you to do it in this context. The typical IT shop, what are budgets doing? They're flat, right? We all know this. The typical cloud service provider. Flat budget? No. No. So where's the innovation going? So is the gap actually increasing between the traditional IT shop and cloud service providers? And will that continue to increase? And what should IT people do about that? Should they outsource everything or change the way in which they're operating internally? What's your advice there? Well, I think the leading edge, as was mentioned before, is on having clear multi-tenancy and being able to offer not only security access to those resources, but also to offer very clear quality of service to each of those tenants. And that's quality of service in terms of bandwidth, in terms of latency, and in terms of IOPS. So to be able to monitor those, aggregate those out, and make the most efficient use of those resources. And that, to me, is the big next step. Flash is going to be a great enabler of that because it simplifies the whole access to that data. You don't have all of those problematical low-performance devices there. So that's going to be one of the big enablers of that strategy. And what's going to happen, in my view, is that data centers are going to follow the same path of providing that multi-tenancy within divisions or within applications within their own data center. So they're going to follow a year and a half behind that in providing that same quality of service. And that will be a key enabler in pushing out the cost of IT into the business. And it's when you've pushed that out properly and easily into the business that the new generation of applications will take off. In my view, that's a key prerequisite. And Dave, I think you asked a very interesting question, right? What's driving innovation from an IT budget standpoint into the larger vendors? And I think what starts to happen is, as IT starts to look at the value of their data and they start to delineate between which data they would keep in-house and want to apply some super powerful resources to, powerful servers and storage and have control and better analytics over more capacity versus what data is it okay that I can then lead into the cloud, you start to look at, yes, the trend in IT spend might be down or flat. We talk about it being flat at IBM. While it might be flat, what you're seeing it do is it's shifting towards the more valuable data in the data center. So the big spend around innovation comes around, what are those things where I need to get the biggest bang for my buck? And then what are those things that I'm willing to spend a whole lot less for and push off and let other folks manage? Okay guys, we're almost out of time. But my last question, Steve, this is a little unfair to you because you just got here. But in the context of storage and storage futures, what's the most interesting thing that you've seen at the event? I want to start with you, David. What's the most interesting thing we've seen here? I think the most interesting thing that I saw here was the VMware vision of getting rid of lones, basically, of going towards storage volumes, of putting all the data, the metadata and everything else, about those volumes, all in one piece, controlled by the VM. To me, that's very exciting. I think that gives a fantastic opportunity to value. The death of lones? Death of lones? Yes. Careful, Mark's going to start a blog. So I thought that was fantastic and I think that's something that's going to come out over the next three, four years. It can't come quick enough. Mark, you're a trend spotter. Anything you sniffed out there? The most interesting thing that's gone on here this week, I think, has been this whole VX LAN thing that came out this morning. What's going on with extended distances? To me, that's really got my imagination running right now. There's some people wondering, Scott Lowe is wondering, why do we need something else? Why do we need a new standard? So there's something going on there and VMware is building a coalition to go after this new standard. I'm just dying to find out what it is and why. How about you, Steve? So I think standards are always interesting to follow. The big thing that I have seen, and again because the hurricane I got in late last night, so walking around the floor today, is how many folks are actually talking about storage efficiency? So with all the different technologies that are coming down with whether it be tiering, thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, whatever it is. Reclamation. The fact of the matter is that a disk drive can't get any faster anymore and we can't put any more stuff into it. So what are the different types of techniques and technologies that we're going to be able to use to be able to make that disk more efficient? And in the process of doing that, then how do we leverage focusing the most important data there and then being able to do better things with that information, making my business more profitable? I like to look at it from the end user perspective to say, how do I become more efficient? How can I make my business more money? I see that as a way to be able to do that. Excellent. David Floyer, Mark Farley, Steve Kenneson. Thanks so much for coming on this in-depth spotlight panel. You guys are great and I'd love to do it again sometime.