 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2016. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation and headline sponsors Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here with Brian Gracely and we've been digging into the broad ecosystem here at OpenStack Summit. Going to talk a little bit about some of the storage pieces inside what's happening here. Happy to bring back to the program Dave Wright who, of course, is with SolidFire now part of NetApp through the acquisition of his VP and general manager. And first time on the program, Mark Pregman who's the CTO of NetApp. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks a lot Stu. All right, first of all, Dave, I got to start with you. We've gone through kind of the acquisition. I see kind of the red and the blue. So before we get into some of the OpenStack stuff just give us an update. How are things going with you, the team and everything? Yeah, things are going great. We closed the acquisition back in February. We've been in the process of integrating our teams and integrating the sales teams and really training the NetApp teams and partners and starting to reach out to the NetApp customers about SolidFire and it's exciting. There's a lot of enthusiasm within NetApp, within NetApp's partner community and it's really exciting to be part of the new NetApp. So Mark, since your first time on the program if you could just give us a little introduction to kind of what got you to your current role. And the other thing I'm asking is I've seen the SolidFire guys here many years at the OpenStack show. NetApp hasn't been here as much so maybe you can help bring us up to speed on the NetApp OpenStack story too. Sure, well I've been with NetApp only slightly longer than Dave. I joined as CTO in September last year. I had spent a number of years at Veritas and then when it was combined with Symantec I was the CTO of the combined company. And then I went to a customer, a business on the other side and implemented a lot of open source sort of SaaS platform technology and started to dabble, we started at that point dabbling in OpenStack and other technologies. What brought me to NetApp is I think we're at a major inflection point in the industry, driven by cloud technologies, driven by changing storage media, flash and new generations of technology, driven by changing role of data, big data is different than traditional transactional data and finally driven by different programming model and OpenStack is clearly a big part of that. This ability to do compositional development, very rapid iteration. What I've seen is NetApp is at a position where it really has to transform itself. The acquisition of SolidFire is a big step in that direction to bring in talent that's very grounded in open source in rapid development and software orientation and I already see that impact both at the senior executive level where they're getting educated about what it really means and also at the engineering level where they're seeing a lot of these things can actually be done. You mentioned our participation in OpenStack. Interestingly, I think both SolidFire and NetApp are the number one and number two players in the storage elements around OpenStack. So while we may not have been participating as much as NetApp in the OpenStack Summit, I think we've been very involved for a long time in the community and in developing technology. Yeah, just in general, for either one of you, what's the state of storage for OpenStack? Obviously, Flash by itself has tremendous changes in terms of performance and economics. Software-defined storage has all sorts of different permutations and definitions but from your perspective, what is the state of storage for OpenStack? Yeah, so I would say that storage is actually in a pretty good state in OpenStack now. When SolidFire started participating several years back, storage was an afterthought. There was object storage and that was really it. There was local instance storage. The Cinder project didn't exist. Commercial storage vendors weren't involved in OpenStack at all and people were kind of left to fend for themselves and in the last couple of years, obviously we've seen the Cinder project mature, the Manila project, which NetApp helps start, has taken off and become mainstream and there's extremely broad industry participation in OpenStack when it comes to commercial storage vendors and the array of options, the selection of options that customers have is extremely broad and SolidFire obviously has been very successful in production OpenStack environments, helping customers be successful with performance-related storage for OpenStack and so I think customers today, you've got a mature set of storage projects inside OpenStack. You've got a wide variety of different vendor solutions as well as open source solutions to choose from and customers I think are in a very good place when it comes to storage, right? Right, and obviously John Griffin used to run the PTL, was incredibly visible, like you said, you carved out a big niche of the early OpenStack sort of block storage market. How much of that knowledge is transferable to NetApp in terms of typically went after a little bit different customer base, a different way of looking at it, like how do you help transfer that knowledge to the broader corporation? Yeah, well obviously one of the big reasons NetApp was interested in SolidFire was the success we're having in OpenStack in production environments as a leader in flash for next generation data centers and they do want to understand more about how we've been successful there and what parts of it are the actual way we participate in OpenStack which has been a very open inclusive and kind of community-centric approach as well as the technology and how well that fits with the ethos of how people think about building OpenStack clouds and that's a big part of it as well. And I think going forward, NetApp's entire portfolio is going to participate in OpenStack in some way, shape, or form. There is a place for the FAS product in OpenStack, there's certainly a place for the storage grid, web scale, object storage product and there's a place for SolidFire and so we're helping to position the NetApp portfolio across the OpenStack ecosystem based on the depth of understanding we have of what customers are doing with OpenStack these days. So, Mark, I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit on NetApp's cloud storage strategy. I've seen NetApp, you're doing plenty with AWS and Azure. We've actually been talking about the multi-cloud world here a lot and how those solutions, can you help us kind of broaden how OpenStack fits into the overall picture of cloud storage from a NetApp perspective? Let me add one thing also which I think fits into that. I think that one of the other important factors we heard about it in the first keynote yesterday is this idea of bimodal IT. A lot of our customers are coming from that world of mode one. A lot of the people embracing OpenStack that are strong customers for SolidFire are coming from that world of mode two and there's an enormous opportunity to help customers that are trying to bring those pieces together within their enterprise and I think that's one of the things we have a lot to learn from the SolidFire team on OpenStack and how to participate and I think there's also an opportunity to help position those mode two solutions for customers that are moving from a mode one world. Similarly, we've seen this huge shift towards the cloud. I think there are a couple of interesting factors that often are overlooked. Cloud's compelling, you get the immediate business value, oh it's elastic, I can pay for what I use. Data is different than compute, it doesn't go away. So the idea that I'm going to ramp up a lot of cores and use them when I need them and then turn them off is great in compute. I'm going to put a bunch of data in my cloud storage and then when I'm done, oh I'm still paying for it because it's not going anywhere. So people are beginning to realize, customers are beginning to realize that this hybrid model is going to have long legs, it's going to last a long time. There's place for data that's going to be on-prem, there's a place for data in the cloud and one of the things that we're very focused on is how do we help them manage across that diverse world. They're great solutions if you're a pure AWS or a pure Azure or a pure Google cloud user. They're great solutions that have matured over the years if you're just in your data center. There's not so much to help you manage that data sprawl, understanding where's my data, is it in compliance, am I putting it in the right place from a performance and economic perspective? That's really what we're focused on is sort of the next wave. So right now's a little bit of a chaotic time in storage, you've got some big industry leaders are having flat in terms of financials or going through a lot of change. The cloud's obviously having some impact. How do you, when you're talking to customers, whether you're talking to them about flash or cloud or just transitions, what's that conversation look like and how's it changed the last couple of years? You know, in SolidFire's case, you're right. I mean, the two biggest disruptive trends in the data center right now are flash and cloud and we've been right at the kind of intersection of those two for a long time. And the conversation we're having with customers is really about, hey, I've got to do more with less. I've got to become more agile. I've got to become more dynamic in my IT delivery. I've got to deliver a wider array of services with a higher level of quality because public cloud has raised the bar. And if I don't find a way to do that, I'm not going to have any workloads left to manage. And the question has really been about how can we do that? How can we build a cloud-like infrastructure that has the agility and the economics of the public cloud with the type of capabilities that I need for my enterprise applications? And SolidFire has really been helping them on the storage side to find a way to do that. And that's really been the big conversation for us with customers is how do we help you advance the way that you build your infrastructure and truly build a next-generation data center offering inside your four walls? Yeah, yeah, makes sense. As you think about, you know, you see this community evolving. There's other projects that are going on. How do you try and keep thinking about the business versus open versus community? I mean, to a certain extent there's competition, to a certain extent there's innovation. How is that evolving either within SolidFire, within NetApp? How do you keep the right balance between those things and listening to the customer and figuring out this sort of new dynamic market? Well, I think one of the things that is true about NetApp is that we have a pretty diverse portfolio today. That wasn't always the case. For many years, we had sort of fast. That was our thing. Big on tap and little on tap. Right, and now we've got a broad range and they are at different stages of evolution and maturity. So they're parts of our business where they're going to be driven not by innovation from a feature function capability point of view, but by continuing to make the more efficient, easier to adopt, sell into our traditional markets. Other areas, the market's changing very rapidly. I think one of the things that we've recognized is there's a big shift across our whole industry away from building big barriers to entry with IP and proprietary investment and so on, much more towards speed. Help the customer get where they need to go quickly, keep moving, so you stay ahead of their requirements and needs, and it kind of is less important to do things in the back room that you can keep secret or protect, because if you stay ahead of it by the time somebody's adopted what you did last year, it's like, well, that was last year and we've moved on. And I think that's changed our attitude within NetApp towards open source, towards collaboration, and frankly, internally, towards how fast we have to move. So speed and agility sort of, here's some of those evils of the past that you may want to forget about, yeah. So one of the themes in the keynote this morning was all the collaboration going on and of course open source has a lot of collaboration. When we look at the storage world though, it's usually much more of a competitive marketplace here. Dave, I'm wondering, here at the show, hear a lot about staff. Of course, the all flash array market, you've got the EMCs and the purers of the world. What's your commentary on this data, the kind of storage competition today? Well, obviously storage has always been a very competitive space, that certainly is no different today. And to me, the really exciting thing is actually around OpenStack, you have a truly vendor neutral community supported product that everybody gets a seat at the table, everybody gets a voice in, and decisions are made by contributing code and actually participating as opposed to vendor control. And realize that's very different from where we came from in the past in the IT industry where the platforms were owned by big vendors like Microsoft, like VMware, that had large strategic alliances and there was a lot of certification, cost and complexity, and especially for smaller companies, very hard to participate in those ecosystems. And so to me, OpenStack is encouraging competition, is encouraging smaller companies to be able to come in and be involved and be part of the process and build products for this community in a way that you didn't have before. So that's part of what we're actually seeing is a proliferation of companies participating in this ecosystem, not just the big vendors. And everybody's out there and playing on a level playing field, which is actually unusual in the storage world in a lot of ways. So I think it's great. We certainly believe in our product and the merits of it and we think it's the best solution out there and we're happy to participate in the community on a level playing field with everyone else. Mark, any of the partnerships you want to highlight? Of course, I mean, Cisco, Red Hat, Microsoft, and I've worked with a lot. I would echo what Dave said, which is I think the whole nature of innovation has moved to a much more open fluid model. And while we're going to compete, all of us will compete actively in the market with our solutions, we're not doing that on the base of proprietary self-contained technologies, nor are we building, nor do I expect to see the same kind of bilateral limited partnerships that we may have seen in the past. They'll be much more open and we will have multiple partners working together. We will expect our partners to have multiple partners. I think that's the nature of this open collaboration. And I think OpenStack is an example of that for what it provides, but I think we're going to see that more broadly in the industry. In Solid Fire's case, we've always had broad partnerships across the OpenStack ecosystem, Red Hat, Cisco, Platform 9, Mirantis across the board. We've worked with everybody that has come to the table and all of their customers as well. Dave Wright, Mark Bregman, really appreciate you coming. All the participation in the open stores and OpenStack communities. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack 2016 in Austin. You're watching theCUBE.