 This is day one of SiliconANGLE.tv's theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. This is San Francisco where all the ground zero actions happening for cloud, future of the data center, the shift from the old way to the new way, the new modern era in computing, the future of the data center, big data about mobility, old days are gone, the PC, traditional apps. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE and I'm here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org and we're here with Rory Bolt who's the CEO of Proximal Data, a new flash startup. First of all, Rory, welcome to theCUBE. Well thank you so much, really appreciate having us on. You guys just won the best in show at the Flash Memory Summit last week, so congratulations on that. And here we are at another big event, VMworld. How you doing? How you feeling? Feeling great actually. It's been a decade or more that we've been watching the emergence of flash as a disruptor to the storage industry and we've been on point to bring that into the virtualized environment. Really excited to see the announcements this morning and we think that we play strongly to these new motions in storage. Yeah, so you saw, I presume you heard the keynote and of course you heard when Gelsinger announced the end of VRAM pricing, everybody got very excited about that going back to the core based pricing. So I was commenting earlier that that makes VM density products that can increase VM density all that more critical for users, doesn't it? Exactly, and storage has been probably the most significant impediment to driving density and consolidation efforts coupled with that licensing that everyone is happy to see change. So tell us a little bit about proximal data for those that don't know about proximal. You guys just came out of stealth a couple of months ago. You're going after the market with an all software solution. There's a lot of flash players. What makes you guys different? Take us through the story. So proximal data has been founded to try and address the storage IO bottleneck problem that is pervasive in virtualized environments, particularly when consolidation levels go up. We've seen the emergence of flashes in enabling technology, but the key value proposition is to integrate flash in a automated way that does not disturb the IT infrastructure or operations. And that's really our differentiation is the ability to deploy flash into the environment and have our solution totally manage the flash, what gets put into the flash based on the actual requirements of the system without any manual intervention, any reconfiguration of your virtual machines. It just works. So talk about that a little bit more. I mean, that's a two-edged story. Right on the one hand, and you used to be at Avamar. Right, and Avamar was largely a rip and replace solution that helped really solve the problem in VMware environments, and it did very well, but then there's data domain, which was a drop it right in, no friction, and I guess data domain won that battle a little bit. I guess they both won, they both got acquired, but you've seen both sides of that spectrum. Indeed. And so how does that apply that concept to flash in particular? And what John and I were talking about in terms of data infrastructure, the new data center infrastructure that we see coming. So you hit on something that I'll pick up the lead on. So yes, I was with Avamar, and we sold for $165 million, but this competitor of ours, Data Domain, sold for 2.2 billion. So I think it's fair to say that they won that battle, although we didn't do too badly ourselves. Post acquisition by EMC, I had the opportunity to talk with hundreds and hundreds of customers deploying VMware and the universal message coming back with the deployment of Avamar was, they do not want to see guest agents. Agents are a major, major impediment to rolling out new initiatives in the data center. And so we took that message to heart. I took the experience of Data Domain versus Avamar to heart and we specifically designed our product so that it wouldn't require agents and would totally be transparent to IT operations. That was one of the cornerstones of our product design. That's a good point, in fact, we have a spotlight later on this week on Backup and we have an ESG analyst on Jason Buffington. He just did some research and showed that the predominant model for deployment for backup is still agents and backup as we know is one of the most heinous, challenging processes in a virtualized environment. So you guys are circumventing the need for agents. Talk a little bit more about where you fit in a stack and essentially what your value proposition is and where the use cases are for proximal. Okay, so we actually integrate directly into the hypervisor itself. And as such, we see all the traffic from all the virtual machines and we analyze that traffic and determine what should be placed on Flash and what is better served remaining out on the disk. So having done that, we will just work by default. Once we're installed into the ESXi host, there's no further action required, but as is the case in all scalable management solutions, the key in an enterprise is management by exception. And so we recognize there are certain applications that have different service level requirements to them and we allow you to turn off caching either for a data store so you can have a pool of storage at a different class of service or actually at the individual guest machine level. But once again, that's management by exception. The default position is you install us and that's it. We're running. Rory, talk about the IO centric infrastructure that Wikibon put forth. We're now extending that to call data infrastructure to kind of redefine what's relevant around kind of the old of converged infrastructure. Obviously data is at the center of the value proposition. Specifically, Flash has changed the economics obviously. It's still expensive technically as a component, but in the overall scheme of things, the ROI people are seeing 30%, 40% economic improvements and then performance. Flash has been at the center of this surge of on-premise performance and economics. Talk about that impact too. It's notion of abstract pool and automate, which is the big messaging from VMware. I mean, obviously Paul and Pat are like amplifying abstract pool and automate, which is around net security, storage availability and compute essentially converged infrastructure, but we're calling it data infrastructure. What's your take as you play at that layer of the data? Well, we view Flash as sort of the ideal medium between physical DRAM, which is more expensive than Flash, but even faster than Flash and the disks, which are obviously much cheaper and slower. And so we view Flash as being a precious commodity, a precious resource, and we want to make maximum utilization of those resources with the highest level of efficiency. And so in the end, that is really what's going to differentiate the solutions out there. Flash is going to become pervasive in the environment, but the different levels of management required and the different efficiency in the use of those resources is really going to set players apart. We think that the first steps that are being announced in vSphere 5.1 are a little too granular, but they will refine that over time, right? Yeah, so let me ask you a question. Now take your CEO hat off of the company because you guys obviously are hyper-focused on a specific market. Put your industry hat on, you're a tech athlete, you're out there leading the company, you've been around the block, you've seen a few things. So tell the folks out there that are watching about that aren't in the inside baseball track of the marketplace. They're the IT professional guy out there. They're the data scientists, the analysts in the corporation who are chartered with figuring out this new modern era of infrastructure. From your perspective, tell them what's really happening in this marketplace right now, this modern era. And how would you advise that IT professional or that data scientist or that analyst or that someone who's watching the tech industry is not in the know? So I think probably the two largest trends that I see going forward are actually fairly obvious. One is that flash is truly a disruptor that's going to touch all levels of storage, both the storage within the host themselves and also the network storage. But the second is that data has grown so large that it really is impractical to be moving data between tiers in any sort of reasonable timeframe. And so this has to be a continuous automated process. It can't be reactive, if you will. It has to be managed proactively and in real time because you can't afford to get behind the ball when the stakes are so large. What about data insights? Obviously insights in predictive analytics, big data is the rage. You need to have access to the data. Data is providing some valuable insights for folks in this new application and certainly mobility. Not a lot of real estate on the screen. So you're going to see all these new types of experiences and applications. So talk about mobile data, big data and how you see that happening. How that changes in the architecture. Well, as the price of storage decreases, it becomes feasible now to store everything and pretty much the price is decreasing at a rate where it doesn't make sense to expend the management resources to try and prune out the old data. So the data sets are becoming truly, truly enormous and as a sort of a factor, a result of that, is that you end up with small relative working sets of truly valuable data in these oceans of historic data that is being kept because you might need it someday. You really don't know whether that's going to be. And once again, we think that this is a strong opportunity for the flash technologies. If they're able to identify what subset of the seas of data is truly relevant for the current operations and do that in a real time. My final question, we're getting the hook real quick but I want to get you to get your comment about VMworld this year. Obviously they put up some stats, attendance is up, number of virtual machines is exploding, Paul Moritz was laying out kind of his final chapter of look what we did going back to 2008 up to today. What's your impression of where VMware is today in contrast from where they came and where do you think they're going? So the growth of this show is just tremendous and it's pretty astonishing to see. I can truly say I've been in the storage industry for about two and a half decades. I have not seen anything change the data center as radically and as quickly as the pervasive conversion to virtualization and in particular VMworld, VMware. It is taken over by storm and in a very, very quick way. That's Rory Bult, the CEO of Proximal Data. This is theCUBE where we see IO centric infrastructure, data infrastructure replacing convergent infrastructure as that next modern era where you're going to see data availability, new applications and everything's kind of coming together at the storage network and obviously the compute level and it's a great vision, congratulations on your success. We're here in VMworld, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this break, thank you.