 Okay, we're back, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of Dell Storage Forum 2012, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host, we're with Wikibon.org, and we're also here with Randy Kearns, who's a senior strategist at the Evaluator Group, a Colorado-based consultancy, and Randy works very closely with a lot of customers and practitioners. Randy, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks a lot, Dave. Good to be here. Well, first of all, Dell Storage Forum, you were in the keynote this morning. Were you at Orlando last year? I was. You were? Okay, so you can compare this year to last year, obviously you're seeing the progression of Dell, right? There's no question this is a step up from last year, wouldn't you say? Even the last year was really good. It is, and I think you mentioned it earlier when you were talking about it, Dell kind of went from zero to 100 miles an hour fairly quickly, and a lot of the companies that they're competing with have taken 20 or 30 years to get there. It's interesting to watch through acquisitions, through hopefully some very intelligent moves. They're putting things together to be very competitive very quickly as a storage vendor. We love that. We've been following storage for a long, long time, and I've always known the strategic importance of storage as the value of information. It's always been surprising to me, Randy, that it's taken so long for some of the leading vendors. Obviously, EMC did its thing and really changed the market, but it's taken a long time for a lot of the traditional server vendors to really come to that realization. When Dell made that decision, it really acted forcefully and has a clear commitment to storage. Right, and they certainly have war-chested money to invest, and they've hired lots of people, and they've grown the staffs both of ecologic and compelling significantly, and they've talked a lot here about their roadmaps and what they're doing, and they're very ambitious, and they're the types of things that you can't do without significant investment. So quite the commitment. More importantly, though, I think the center of the universe is where your information lives and protecting it and being able to process it, and they've done a pretty good job recognizing that, and that's what I think the storage vendors have known for a while. So you got a chance to sit through the keynotes this morning. Carter George laid out the vision, and some of the head technology folks of the various divisions were there to do chalk talks. What was your take on what you heard this morning? Maybe you could help us summarize and squint through Dell's vision. Well, from this morning I've got three really different things came out. The first one I think you and Stu were talking about earlier is the distribution of solid-state technology through the servers to get the information quicker to the servers, feed the beast, so to speak, all the processors, and then using some software to manage coherency of the data. That's a big part of that, and like you pointed out, IBM and EMC have initiatives that are similar in those areas. The second thing was the ability to be able to take coherent snapshots when you may have data both on resident on the storage system, but data also may be in that cache area. Taking a coherent snapshot that is actually recoverable with the application running is much more complicated, and that's what they talked about doing with App Assure now. That was very interesting, and then they also talked about that coherent snapshot could be recovered as a virtual machine or as a physical machine and can be failed back from a virtual machine to a physical machine as a snapshot entity. So that was very interesting. And then the third part of that was this other vector that other vendors have been going down is taking their storage systems embedded software and actually making it an application that runs on a virtual machine. And that's been done by a few vendors and there's several in process of it. And so they're doing the same thing there, maybe a little bit more aggressively with tying it together with some of these other capabilities, whereas some vendors are doing it independent as more isolated. So this is an example where the storage component is actually the VM. Exactly. And I think it's going to take quite a while for end users to embrace that. I think they're going to have some degree of skepticism. They're a very conservative bunch. They're going to have to have other people go out and prove it to them, so to speak. And the value proposition to them is going to be very much explained because they're used to talking about A box, storage as A box, and then you have devices there and they can be disk devices or solid state technology. Now the fact that the application moves into their server, they're going to have to embrace that, understand it, and get the value. And it's going to take a while for customers. So what is the value prop of that? Is it a cloud play where I can easily spin up virtual arrays in the cloud in a more simplified fashion? Or what do you see as the value prop there? Yeah, if you use that definition for cloud, yeah, that works. The idea is that I can scale my storage functionality more dynamically to meet demand. I can rather than wait in order and wait for the next box to show up, which could have a lead time, I can just bring up my storage application and start going there. And I can potentially bring my storage functionality closer to my processing and make it more into even an appliance model, in that case, dynamically. And so now I can limit or reduce my amount of infrastructure required to set things up and get things going like you were saying to make it happen quicker. And the key to that scale is the separation between the storage software and the storage hardware, right? Exactly right. Yeah, well, I mean, conceptually, that makes a lot of sense. But as you say it, end customers aren't prone to knee-jerk reactions. So they're going to have to see that it works and see that it can be recoverable and all the other processes that go with that vision. It takes time. And even if they believed it's the greatest thing in the world, it takes time for them to put into their schedules to do deployments, to bring it into production. So it's never as fast as anybody would like. Well, that brings me to the next topic that I wanted to talk with you. Off-camera, you were talking about the dissonance between the vendor marketing and messaging and where customers and practitioners are in terms of their adoption of some of these technologies. And you were saying that customers are still trying to really fully exploit things like thin provisioning and snapshotting. And I presume data compression would fit in there and even data deduplication. You work with a lot of customers. Maybe you could summarize what you're seeing in that regard. Yeah, it's very interesting. I've been doing several projects on where these customers should go in the next five years in storage deployments and what technologies they should purchase and invest in. And it's very interesting when I go out and talk to them. Their adoption rate for some of these new technologies, like you listed there, very low. I suspect thin provisioning is less than 30% adopted in most customer environments. That is a astounding number. And for most of us in a deal with the storage, that's kind of old news now. It's something we've had for a few years, so we've moved beyond that. But yet, customers are still down at that level. And a lot of it's due to really lack of understanding. They're too busy handling their day job, so to speak, to look beyond and say, hey, this makes a lot of sense. Number one, and number two is, I don't think it's been explained very well to them through their sales channels. Now, some of the vendor marketing materials are very good, but remember, a lot of these people are reached through salesmen or even through reseller channels. And their articulation of what it does for them may not be at the level they need to understand to say, yeah, I gotta do this because. Yeah, Randy, one of the things I've heard many times people say, you know, if you save a few bucks, you get a pat on the back, but if things go wrong, you're out of a job, so. They're very risk-averse is what you're getting at. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely true. They're very risk-averse, and that's a part of it. The bigger part of it, though, is that, and I think this has happened over time, is they've got so much work to do. They just don't have time to do trials or proof of concepts unless there's major, major payback. And so they just look at it and say, where am I gonna invest the limited time I have? And they just don't have the time to do that. And it's like, I get brought into some of these environments with the end users about helping them with their strategy to meet their demands, and I have to look at their businesses and understand where their growth is and what type of data and what they're gonna be doing. That's a job that they normally do and guard preciously. They just don't have the resources to do it today. No, that's a great point. You talk, you know, most customers can't start from a clean sheet of paper. They don't have green field environments. They don't have time to train their workforce. So virtualization is supposed to help this in theory, but I mean, do you have any kind of quick bullets that are helping customers to adopt new technology and take it faster? No, you just got to work through it. Everything's a project. That's the key thing for them. There's no silver bullets. Just deal with everything as a project and put project plans in place around it and that minimizes risk. They're, like you say, very risk averse. They can be career limiting to take a flyer on something. And so to deal with everything as a project. Now virtualization, you're talking about as a storage virtualization. Unfortunately, when you say virtualization, most customers now, the first thing they think about is server virtualization and server virtualization has created a big upheaval in storage. It's forced a lot of off cycle storage purchases because of, you know, the VAI type of capabilities and things. And so that's been a sore point for a lot of customers right now. And very interesting area. So something's going to come to mind when you think about this whole push towards storage efficiency, thin provisioning, space efficient snapshots, compression, deduplication. And your recommendation to customers is take it as a project. Are you recommending, advising, seeing customers, take it as a project in a holistic view or are they taking the piece parts of those so-called features? For instance, are customers saying, okay, we want to initiate a storage optimization or a storage efficiency project and here's the assets that we have and here's the application portfolio and let's figure out where to apply all these different technologies to those assets, what the business impact and the performance impact is going to be? Or are they more exploiting the individual features on specific products? Oh, I can do thin provisioning on, for instance, a three-par array or I can do data deduplication on some kind of Dell array or a NetApp array. What are you seeing there? It's a little bit of both. Unfortunately, a lot of them do it based upon the salesman has sold them this capability for a particular product. Just did one for a city government recently and one particular vendor sold them on a particular feature and so now they're focused on that and they didn't realize that their other environments they had that they could exploit that as well. So they didn't take the big picture and that's unfortunate. I always recommend, hey, look, step back and see where the big value is and look at the economics and like Stewart was talking about the risk, where are the risk here? So those are the things that I always do but you're right, a lot of them are doing it right now because they've been sold something on a particular platform. In reality though, optimization initiatives are our pan platform, if you will and they really are about delivering value to their customers and their customers are these different business groups they serve and normally you don't want to go in and disrupt a happy customer so to speak and so normally it's when you are doing something where there's an unhappy customer or you're doing a new project or a consolidation or even an upgrade and that's where we really talk about the opportunity to introduce an improvement is much easier to do. You know the other thing I know you got to go shortly here, you got some meetings that you got to attend but I want to up level it one more time again and circle it back to the industry and it really is changed, our business has changed a lot but it used to be you'd see a lot of innovations coming out of companies like EMC or Storage Tech or even IBM or whomever, NetApp and now it seems like the vast majority of the innovations are coming from these startups and you have four or five large companies with the big balance sheets and very stable companies, trusted brands and we know what those names are and they snap up these companies and then they bring these innovations to market for wide adoption. I mean we're basically a year or two out of the virtualization, storage virtualization bubble, the three part, the compelling, I guess Isilon is certainly putting in a data domain really not a kind of a virtualization play but so all these innovations that get snapped up with what you're suggesting and I believe it is relatively low adoption and now the whales are bringing those to market. That's a whole different model for the storage business, isn't it? It is, but it isn't. If you take a look at it, what's happened over time is larger companies put lots of their infrastructure in place, there's processes in development and phase reviews and there's just a lot of systemic impedance, if you will, of delivering technology. So it's much easier for a startup to take an idea and run with it with a lot less headwind against them and then they can prove it out. So what's happening then is these high-end vendors or larger vendors like you're talking about, I didn't call them whales, you did. These larger vendors. We got whales, we got tuna, we got minnows. So what they're doing is saying this technology is what we need, it's great, it's the right direction to have and so they acquire it and it ends up being much quicker to deliver than if they'd done it in their current processes. And of course, I spend a lot of time at big companies in development and I saw those things firsthand and I've done three startups and it's just much easier to get accomplished in a startup because you'd have less resistance. That's why I think we're going to continue to see acquisitions like this. So there are going to be technology acquisitions. There are also our product acquisitions where big companies acquire a product and you guys were talking about earlier. Dell acquired a couple of companies and they just didn't continue and milk the product. They invested and they are trying to integrate and do more with it. So there are product acquisitions but there are technology acquisitions which are I think the more interesting things going on. And I think the one exception in my premise is NetApp who's got the waffle file system and they're able to do certain things like what they do with deduplication and compression and whereas some of the other folks really do need to take that buy it versus make it approach. So I know we got to go. Randy, thanks very much, great segment and appreciate you taking the time out. Come on in the queue. Just Stu, always good. All right folks, keep it right there. We'll be right back with more live from the Dell Storage Forum in Boston. Right back.