 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to Oracle OpenWorld. I'm Stu Miniman, joined on this segment by Brian Gracely, we're with wikibond.com and this is theCUBE, going out to all the big shows, extracting the signal from the noise. Happy to have back onto the program, somebody that's been on a few times, Lee Caswells, the VP of Product Solutions and Service Marketing with NetApp. Lee, welcome back to the program. Hey, thanks, it's so good to be here. It's one of my favorite events. So Lee, it's almost trite to say that the only thing that's constant is change, but we were sitting here talking. I mean, we've all been through a couple of logos in our career. It's major changes, so I was working for the largest independent storage company that's left, how are things with you and NetApp? You know, it's interesting just to watch how this industry is going to evolve, right? I mean, we're seeing a couple different trends. You're seeing HP splitting up, Symantec splitting up, right? I mean, even big companies like GE looking at how do you go and focus more, right? And at the same time, now we're looking at Dell and EMC like putting things back together again, right? I mean, we think storage is big enough, right? That where focus actually matters, right? There's really so much to do here, especially with the cloud, but we've got a great opportunity to go and show the value we can do, right? And then work on partners across the industry. Ah, come on, we're going to make it easier. Brian and I were talking 10 years ago, remember everybody's sitting there with their stock portfolio. It's like, everybody's gone private now. So, one of the few public companies. So, what is the feeling at NetApp? Celebrating five years at FlexPod, right? So what's exciting there? Well, let's take FlexPod for a second, right? It's that type of example, right? We took, you know, with Cisco together, right? The idea of UCS, with ACI now, for example, like that, software defined networking. I mean, software defined everywhere. That solution for channel partners has turned out to be the answer for how I go make money, right? We've got a lot of new companies trying to do basically what I call box flipping, right? How do I go and sell this product, this product? But the idea of how do I transform and provide a solution from flash to disk to the cloud, right? That's the opportunity that we're offering to our partners. And, you know, internally, I think, we look at flash disk and cloud as something that has the massive amount of investment and opportunity. Yeah, so, Lee, one thing we look at, you know, buying storage in a system, whether it be a FlexPod or, you know, in a solution, like the cloud. So I talked to Phil Brotherton at AWS, right? Hundreds of customers doing that. You know, what, do you guys have any feel as to, you know, I'm sure you have some numbers, but can you share, you know, what percentage of NetApp stuff is sold as, you know, part of whether reference architecture built in, you know, integrated piece. How much of that versus, you know, selling another filer? Well, I think you got two things. We have a lot of cloud companies, right? Talking about, well, all right, cloud, but not integrating back all the way into what's happening on-prem. Now, you have a lot of flash companies that never mentioned cloud, right? Who's bringing all of that together right now? And so, you know, when we look at our flash products, for example, being able to snap and do replication natively into the cloud today, the only flash company where you could go and do that, dehydrated snaps and replication, that sort of technology, right? Core value add across that. So, what we look at is, you're actually starting on the data center, then moving into this virtual private cloud, right? And then extending into the hybrid cloud. And so, I think the element that we're talking to customers about is, when we started talking about the cloud, a lot of customers assumed what we meant was the public cloud was the destination, and the hybrid cloud was just a stop along the way. And actually, if you go to a lot of cloud providers, that's what they'll tell you, right? You're going to end up in the public cloud. This is just like literally interim steps. And we believe it's exactly the opposite. What we believe is that the hybrid cloud is the endpoint, and that the public cloud is the starting point. And so, when you look at test dev and shadow IT, that's happening in the public cloud, now what we look at is we start there, and then you repatriate things to go and run in production. You back them up onto disk. You put them into maybe back into the cloud for archive. And so, we started looking at all of this, we call this the data fabric, is how do you basically make data more weightless, and make it be able to move across all of these destinations. So, we're taking that approach that says, hey, we'll let you move to the cloud on your timetable, right? Whenever you're ready. Yeah, so, I got to give your team a lot of credit, the solution team in net of a lot of credit. I was actually there back in probably 2008 when we were first sketching out a flex pod on a napkin somewhere. And the thing was, you know, you were thinking through, you said, well, technically this looks great, but I've got to go through channel partners. I've got to figure out this partnership with Cisco, and how's that going to work? A lot of talk this week about engineered systems, this idea that you're going to have a system, you're going to know exactly what it looks like. You guys were way ahead of that curve. But also this talk about you've got to have the same system on-premises and in the cloud. Do you guys feel like that's great? You're finally getting validated for what you do. Do you feel like that's already been validated? Yeah, I think we look at the cloud. I think when you start, when you think of an on-prem system, right, there are architectural differences today about tightly clustered systems versus loosely federated architectures that are typical of cloud storage at least, right? And there's going to be a difference in performance that you'll want to consider over time. And we see that today, right? You can get a lot of things from the cloud. Guaranteed IOPS is not one of them, right? So you start thinking about where do you invest and how do you invest intelligently? I think when we look at the engineered systems aspects, the biggest thing we're trying to solve for today is the fact that there's a limited amount of IT expertise. I mean, I was in Milwaukee the other week, right? With a company, $2 billion company that's trying to go and shrink their IT from 110 people down to 45 people, shrink 20 data centers down to three, right? And at the same time, trying to add the cloud, trying to add Flash, which it all sounds like extra work, unless you're on an architecture that allows you to span out and include all of that, Flash, disk, cloud, blocks, files, right? And that's the beauty of where we're at today from a NetApp perspective is you can do all of that with the data fabric and go from Flash, disk, cloud and manage it all with a very simple user interface. Common management is a key element here. Let's talk about data fabric. You just mentioned it. It was announced at your big user conference about a month ago, a couple of weeks ago. Give us the basics. Give us the high level. What does it do? What benefit does it provide customers? Well, the data fabric is based on the premise that the hybrid cloud is the future and that based on that, you're going to want to move data effortlessly and manage it across different elements. You start with that. Now there's a technical underpinning it as well. We have a protocol that's defined so that you can start for the first time to take snapshot technology and share that across dissimilar platforms. You think about that for a data fabric that's extremely important because you want to be able to take basically compressed and deduced material and share it across platforms in a cloud in order to take advantage of a very efficient transport to start. That's going to minimize the amount of cost and the amount of time to move data around. And then secondly, you want to be able to do things like failover between clouds. And it oftentimes, I mean, the old joke used to be that the fastest IO is the one that never happens. And so in many cases, the fastest way to go and have data be accessible is not to move it in the first place. And so we're looking at that as a way to take the data fabric and basically locate your data, treat it separately. And I think this is one last key element is that we're looking at cloud computing and cloud storage thinking that the data is materially different. You want to think about that data in a different way because of sovereignty, performance, right? And then at the end of the day, like you really care about where that data is located. So this morning during Thomas Curran's keynote, he talked about, he made an announcement, hey, we're going to have direct connect to the Oracle Cloud with Equinix. You guys have been doing that for a long time. Talk about what are your customers doing in that? What benefit did they get? Give us a good understanding of that space. Yeah, you know, we started out with an idea that, hey, if you wanted to do things like back up to the cloud, right? You could go put your data in the cloud. What a lot of enterprise customers came back and especially partners came back to us and said, hey, the cloud kind of scares me, right? From a storage perspective, but I love the flexibility from a compute standpoint. So tell me, if I want to go run things and develop things in the cloud from a compute standpoint, tell me, how can I do that but still preserve the ownership, the sovereignty of my data? And so we introduced something called NetApp Private Storage. And the idea was that in a colo, you could go and have a low latency connection to the compute. And so it gave you an interesting way to go think about how do I go and maintain the storage but also access the compute? And so now you could burst into the cloud, for example. It's a really interesting use cases right around and as we expanded that, we've now had more discussions where we found out that we have hundreds of customers running this NetApp Private Storage. So I'm cloud connected for compute and I've got access and control. It's these types of models, right? That give customers the ability to go and test out the cloud in the way that they want. Yeah, so Lee, when FlexPod was launched, we talked about, I mean, it was really helping create a whole new segment in the marketplace. I mean, HP and Oracle might have had the first kind of engineered systems. There was the VBlock, but we talked about the reference architecture and what FlexPod's done. Today, it's a lot more crowded. I mean, Converge is relatively standard. So what does NetApp do that's different? And do you see yourselves kind of competing against all the other Converge pieces? What kind of state of the market there? If you look at the fastest growing market, certainly you've got Flash growing fast, right? Converge infrastructure though, still growing, right, at 20 plus points. And our solution there really appeals to that. Customer who says, I don't want to spend time managing things, how do I provision this simply and easily, right? Flash actually, interesting enough, is becoming less about just raw performance and more about how do I eliminate the time spent managing performance? And so we're seeing the Flash uptake, for example, on FlexPod is really, really kicking in here. What you're going to see from us down the road is just very simplified, automated provisioning, for example, and with partners like Avnet, for example, we've just announced how you can do things like desktop as a service, here's a skew, bang, I go and buy that one time and I can go and have a reference architecture where all the pieces are pulled together. It's all this work that makes it simpler and easy for customers to consume and for our partners to go and make money. Yeah, so software defined is a big buzzword, software defined storage, obviously, and on tap, NetApp's always talked about the value of our platform is on tap. What's the thinking, what's the roadmap, what's the reality right now of software defined on tap? It's a really good question, you know, we've had, over time, proprietary hardware is kind of where we all started from, right? Although NetApp, I will say, was the first company to go and deploy X86 technology in place of custom rate controllers. So we've had a long history of going to find out where can we take more commodity level hardware and wrap our software around it. That's always been the NetApp mantra, if you will. And now we've unlocked that, so if you want to run and get all the value of CDOT or cluster data on tap in the cloud, you can get that today. You can try it for free on Amazon, right? AWS, you can get a 30 day free trial and try that and get all the semantics files, semantics that we have today with cluster data on tap. And now what you're going to find is that we're taking and abstracting that value from any particular hardware. So whether that's white box hardware, right? Server based hardware, you're going to see a range of options where what you end up getting is in stateful storage, usually it's a different level of availability and the ease of use of going to deploy this. There's certainly a lot of interest in how we get and take advantage of scale out commodity hardware. You'll find that we've got some very interesting plans along that area. So Lee, can you talk to us about Oracle Open World, what kind of Oracle solutions, what are any new announcements at the show this week? What's NetApp's story here at the show? Yeah, so Oracle workloads have been one of the top deployment workloads for Flash. If you look at basically, we just announced a three times guarantee, right? So if three times performance guarantee, the technical specifics are you'll get three times the IOPS at one millisecond latency over any disk based system. And we think that's pretty much a layup. Our technical guys said really three X, that's it. I mean we should be getting more like five, 10, 15, 20 times. And we certainly have examples of getting 20 times their performance. We're taking this three times guarantee though as a way to say, hey, you can go and be confident. For anyone who had any hesitations about Flash, right? Let's go and say, we're going to go give you that level of confidence that you will absolutely get that and we're backing it up for the first time that a public company's given a guarantee like this, two days of professional services to go help with if they're config issues or anything. We'll help and back that up to make sure you get the results that you are expected. So NetApp's had a long history of really a tight leadership model. Mendoza, Warman Hovind, all those guys, you've got a new CEO. Talk about what he's changing in the company. What's he bringing in terms of new attitude, new energy and what's his outlook? What's his vision for NetApp? It's interesting because I've been at the company one year today and so I've seen over that time the company moved to a very, with George Curry and the full CEO, we have now a very decisive culture that is moving towards action oriented, basically market leadership. I think in the past there was a lot of analysis and certainly the company's history has been high capacity file-based customers and we've taken that space and that customer base and had a product almost without peer, right? And now the market is moving, right? To the extent of Flash as an example, we're taking performance workloads. You can almost think of this as the new unified, right? Unified used to mean kind of great NAS and so-so sand, right? And now what we're seeing is that unified means great NAS and with Flash, terrific sand block-based performance along with integration all the way from Flash to disk. You have to back that up somewhere. So I have to back it up, right? Flash's got to be backed up. And then I want to go and archive that in the cloud all within a common management. So from a leadership standpoint, what you're going to find is we invested very early on in the cloud, right? Probably ahead of the market. And you know, customers like that, they're investment protected for the cloud. And then on Flash, we're encouraging customers that you can invest intelligently today, right? So when you asked a little bit about, you know, and I didn't answer probably as details as I should, but you know, from a cloud standpoint, we're seeing Flash uptake happening at a massive level right now. The all Flash FAS product is one of the fastest growing products in the history of NetApp right now. At the same time, your investment protected in the cloud. So we have a roadmap that allows you to go invest today, right, get all the performance that you want, match that with the file that you've got on simple common management and then be investment protected into the cloud over time. Yeah. Talk a little bit about just the partnership with Cisco, right? Yeah. You know, the cultures, both West Coast cultures, very channel focused. Like talk about that synergy and why it works so well. Well, you know, in part, right? We have very, we have complementary strategies. If you think about the data fabric as a data-centric view of the cloud, right? What we're looking at is, how do we think about data? And you can think about even, you know, company, the acquisitions that we make as a company, right? So we invested in a company called Steel Store, which gives you a on ramp to the cloud, heterogeneous target or sources in that case, right? Into any S3 compatible cloud. Cisco with one cloud, it's what Cisco with the inner cloud, right? And with their strategy, we have a very interesting opportunity where they have a network-centric view of the cloud. And in that case, right? We've got a complementary view where they're looking at how do we move data, right? Intelligently across clouds, for example. Our complementary visions, right? Help us basically come to get the idea that we're going to help you move data wherever you want it. And the channel integration is that channel partners love the idea that they have sticky customers, right? Who can go and take all of the compute, storage, and networking, bring it all together. Yep, yeah, all right. Well, Lee Caswell, NetApp, really appreciate you joining us again, always a pleasure to catch up with you. This will wrap up day two of three of our coverage of theCUBE here at Oracle Open World 2015. We'll be back tomorrow morning with another full day of coverage. As always, check SiliconANGLE.tv for all the live and replay videos. Check wikibond.com for all the research. Check out theCUBE on Twitter and lots of other social channels, just at theCUBE for Stu Miniman and Brian Grace Lee. Thanks for watching theCUBE, we'll be back tomorrow.