 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. This is EMC World Live 2016 and this is theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Phil Bollinger is here as the senior vice president of the Icelon product line. Long time storage industry executive. Phil, great to see you again. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. It's great to see you, Dave. It's great to reconnect. So, new chapter in your life, now not so new. You've been in the storage business for a long, long time. Finally landed at EMC, the leader in storage. It was inevitable. It had to happen, right? And Icelon is just rocking. Major acquisition. We were just talking off camera. It's been three years, no, five years. Five years. From the, I believe it was a $2 billion acquisition. Massive move by EMC just to go, boom, and get into that space. Dominant player now today. So, give us the update. How's business? Business is good, as they always say. But, yeah, Icelon's on a tremendous roll. A lot of momentum in the business. You know, the product line, you know, the innovation that is Icelon began, what, back in 2002, 2003 with the first shipments. The company certainly grew. The acquisition really accelerated that. What EMC did was not only adding reach and momentum and scale to the business, but the product innovation along the way, along with EMC pulling the product into a lot of different use cases. Icelon was originally centered in media and entertainment and life sciences and some high tech workflows. The EMC acquisition really pulled it into a number of different vertical markets, financial services, healthcare, oil and gas, a number of horizontal workloads, home directories, file shares, and as a result, the business has just grown dramatically. You know, just a snapshot today. Icelon today has 7,500 customers. We added 1,300 last year on top of 1,300 the year before, so, you know, in any given quarter, a significant part of our revenue comes from people still trying the product for the very first time. We have about 12,000, at least 12,000 clusters in the field, maybe more. What's really interesting is the average capacity per cluster is very, very close to a petabyte. So there really isn't another file system on the planet, I think, that routinely every day manages a petabyte of data. That scale is just part of the garden variety implementation of the technology. Well, I remember Icelon's ascendancy and that whole idea of a global namespace and dramatically simplifying scale out NAS at the time we called it that, was really revolutionary. Yeah, and the interesting thing is, you know, the core value proposition, that is Icelon, a single file system that can span an immense amount of data that is easy to administrate, easy to deploy, scales linearly with capacity and performance. Customers can efficiently store their data, adding one note at a time only when they need to add capacity. You know, that value proposition was really important back in the early 2000s, but with the explosive growth of unstructured data, you know, it's even more important today than it was back then. So it's like the essence of why the product was created resonates even more today than it did even a decade ago. Well, and I kind of want to pick your brain before we get into the greatness that is EMC world because you've been in the industry and as an observer, if I look back, there was almost, there was like this renaissance coming out of the dot com blow up. And you had a number of highly successful companies, you know, there were some IPOs. Obviously, Isilon was one of those, 3par was one, Compellent was another one, Data Domain, another $2.5 billion acquisition by EMC. So you had some companies that achieved escape velocity. And you know, when you look at the companies today, you know, they seem to be struggling more to achieve that escape velocity. And I wonder, is it because companies the acquirers got smarter and got out in front, you know, made tuck-in acquisitions or got more aggressive? What do you make of that? You know, there will always be startups and I have a lot of respect for them. We love them. A lot of innovation, they're a great source of technology and talent and everything else. I think it's no doubt that as the market has matured and certainly the storage market has matured, the immense amount of R&D, the billions of dollars of R&D, frankly, that have gone into some of the companies that you mentioned that had escape velocity that were acquired that grew to significant scale. You know, we are innovating at a pace that is significant. I think that the thing that separates maybe this industry from others is even when a business gets to be a certain scale, the innovation doesn't stop or at least it shouldn't. It doesn't in my experience. And if I look at Isilon today versus Isilon when it was acquired versus Isilon in the early days, what we can accomplish is enormously greater today than what has been accomplished in the past. The pace of our roadmap, the pace of innovation and features, some of which are enormously challenging to develop. And so the other thing that challenges, I think startups to a bit is the stakes, the ante, to be credible, to gain footprint, to grow and mature is much higher in some of these spaces than maybe what it was for Isilon when it was first innovated. You have to bring a lot to the table to deliver that value properly. It's true, I mean, cracking the enterprise in the 90s was really, really hard. And then it was almost like if it doesn't kill you, it'll make you stronger. Again, post.com blow up, it seemed to get easier. I mean, NetApp did it in the 90s and then you had all these other companies that I mentioned. It seems to be getting really hard again. And when a large company like EMC acquires an Isilon who's very successful, awesome technology, building a sales force, struggling to go global and then brings it into the massive footprint of EMC, you've seen just a steep S-curve uptake. So what are customers sort of doing with the product today? You've mentioned a number of use cases, the early Isilon days. What are they doing today? What are the predominant use cases that are giving you sort of momentum? Absolutely, great question, David. So it's very hard to put Isilon in a single box, call it a capacity player or performance player. In fact, if you look at our business, it kind of nicely segregates into almost a 50-50 split between customers buying the platform and what I would call work loads that are performance-dominated, whether it's semiconductor design, genomic research, in the media and entertainment space, post-production visual effects, rendering. There's a lot of our business, half of our business is dominated by things like that. The other half of our business, frankly, is in capacity players. It's archive, it's origin store in the M&E space, it's home directory, file shares, where there is a performance component, but clearly there's just a lot of capacity. We routinely support 40, 50, 60, 70,000 users on a cluster from a home directory, file share perspective. The economics of the efficiency of that is enormous for the businesses that do that. So that, as I see customers deploy the technology today, it's really all about managing unstructured data at large scale. Some of it could be very performance-driven, some of it could be very capacity-driven. So we have to be great at both. So you've also done a great job with the notion of Data Lake. I always say, in the early days of Hadoop, it's like, oh boy, companies like EMC are in big trouble because all this stuff is going to run on commodity hardware and white boxes. Nobody's going to buy storage containers anymore. Icelon comes along and says, no, we're going hard after the big data space. They started partnering up with Hortonworks and Cloudera and others, and it's been another tailwind. So talk about the Data Lake portion of your business. So the Data Lake means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? The definition is not cut and dried by any means, but as we think about the Data Lake, and Icelon, I don't think I'm overstating that Icelon really drove the, and coined the phrase Data Lake, and really drove that vernacular into the market. A big part of a Data Lake is simply the age-old story at storage consolidation. Pull your storage together, you drive better economics, better efficiency, but it goes a lot beyond that too. One thing clearly Icelon brings is this idea of multi-protocol access into a large lake of unstructured data. You can run both legacy, as well as contemporary applications on the same dataset at the same time over traditional interfaces like NFS and SMB, but also Swift and object interfaces, RESTful interfaces, and importantly, HDFS. So the Icelon engineering team a few years back innovated native wire-level HDFS protocol on top of 1FS, the operating system. I think in the early days, we probably didn't realize exactly what we had created, but the reality is it gives us the ability to be a ubiquitous, agnostic shared storage pool underneath all of the Apache distros in the marketplace, as well as the value stacks on top of that. So this idea of a Data Lake really has grown a lot to the point where today we have 1,200 customers running some degree of HDFS workflow on Icelon. So it really has taken off explosively. What our customers asked for was some extensions for that. And in February, we introduced 1FS 8.0, which brought into the market a software-defined version of 1FS, which has all the functionality of 1FS, all of the Data Lake capabilities, all of the tiering capabilities, which you can run it on commodity hardware. And it was really designed to be at the edge of the enterprise, so a lot of our customers are becoming more distributed, not less. And they wanted the ability to drop a finite, small amount of 1FS around the edge and then coordinate that sort of with the mothership, the central data center. So we did that. And then we also innovated Cloud Pools, which is seamless policy-based tiering to the cloud, either to public cloud infrastructure, or a virtual stream, or Icelon, or another ECS is the most popular target for Cloud Pools. But this really takes the idea of the Data Lake and stretches it to the edge of the enterprise, as we would say, from the edge to the core to the cloud. Well, Phil, we're competing. They told us they're going to turn the music down tonight. Oh, it's great music. I guess this is very cool. But I got to ask you, before we break here, talking about the edge and talking about the Data Lake concept, I feel IoT emerging here with that, an edge processing component, you know what I mean? Instrument the windmill and take the key pieces back to the Data Lake is how much of an opportunity is that for you guys? It's enormous. It's enormous. You know, IoT, really, internet of everything, as Michael said on Monday. We certainly see that in our business. It's an insatiable need to capture and analyze and reason over and gain value from unstructured data at large scale, it's driving the business today. And I don't see an end to it. I think we're at the early stages of what is a pretty significant transformation of the internet of everything and by and large, that's unstructured data sets at large scale and that's what ISLON was built for. Hi, Phil, well listen, congratulations on your great career. You know, like you said, getting the band back together with Adele, Gerger, and it's going to be awesome. So thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Great to see you again. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back to rap if you can hear us. This is theCUBE. We're live from EMC World 2016, right back. Looking back at the history of Dell,