 Okay, we're back live here at HP Discover in Frankfurt, Germany. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. Hello, everybody. It's really a pleasure to be here with Bill Philbin, who's the vice president of virtual storage for HP. Welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. Hey, how come it took so long for storage to get virtual? Well, actually storage has been virtualized for years, so you look at sort of EVA, you look at sort of the products we've been shipping for years, it's actually been virtual. So I think storage was virtual before virtual was cool. Yeah, so okay, so now everybody's talking about it. Yeah, exactly right. You guys have been doing it for eight years, 10 years? Exactly right, yeah. So your role, we're talking off-camera, it's pretty much the entire portfolio with the exception of the three-part piece, right? That's right. So you know that we have four lead-with products in the portfolio, three-part being one, and then store all, for large and structured data, store once, our backup appliance, and store virtual, which is our scale-to-life SCSI storage, along with what we announced here at the show, which is how that applies to software-defined data centers as part of my portfolio. Yeah, we've been talking about this software-defined concept quite a bit. We actually had Bethany Mayer on at HP Discover, and she was talking a lot about software-defined networking. So you guys have been on that trend, and then of course, VMware buys NYSERA, and then all of a sudden, that became the real marketing message out of VMware last year. So you kind of beat them to the punch, but talk about what software-defined means to you. We call it at Wikibon software-led infrastructure. We just did a big report on that, probably the first, I think, in the industry, to just sort of define that and describe that, but there's still some fuzziness out there. Help us understand what you guys mean. Well, I mean, in the simplest form, what customers are looking to do is amortize the existing infrastructure they have and the ways that they want to. So if you look at sort of, we had a large global bank, which I'll remain nameless, who's got a very, very large, happens to be HB's infrastructure that they want to amortize against, and they're looking at store virtuals as a way of providing storage to meet their sort of VMware requirements first, but more importantly, to meet their entire compute requirements. So as they sort of build out their infrastructure, they want the flexibility that a software-led or a software-defined data center model would provide them. Okay, so one of the things that we said, Bill, in our study was that, we basically said, okay, look, you've got standardized hardware. Some people call it commodity hardware. Fine, pick your poison. And then services on top of that that are software, similar to what you just described. And that's really not anything new conceptually. I mean, Google's been doing it for a while. Everybody says, oh, Google doesn't buy storage from HP and EMC and IBM and NetApp. It does its own. And so, well, why wouldn't you, Mr. CIO, or Mrs. CIO, do your own? Well, because you don't have a thousand engineers running around. Okay, fine. So that concept is not new. It's like the enterprise is now delivering that. What we think is new is the ability to converge metadata that's all locked inside all those different platforms. And you guys announced something called Express Query. Which is this ability to really do fast querying on data, big corpus of data. Talk about that a little bit. And I'm interested in that use case in particular. Well, as we were talking off camera, I said that I was going to answer questions just like the presidential debate, right? Where I would answer the question I wanted to answer, not the one you're asking, right? So just to go back to the point you were on with Google, right? Using, not using bespoke hardware and basically build their own. Google internally for their own IT doesn't use their own hardware, right? They use industry standard servers, right? And so part of the answer around why software defined data center makes sense and why it's new, it's inside the firewall and actually it's written for enterprise applications. So it's not sort of just write, replicate data in three different ways that Google does it today. It's all about sort of with all the other enterprise protection. So that goes back to the Google comment. As far as Express Query goes, it's really two concepts locked into one. The first is with this large explosion of corporate data, it's almost impossible to find it. It's impossible to search it, right? And there's a couple of ways that people deploy that in the enterprise. You'll get customers, let's say a medical imaging customer who records all the medical images in a hospital. But then they deploy a database alongside of that to store the information about the patient that's not actually captured in the image. And that's a very, very expensive proposition. So one part of Express Query is a metadata tagging capability that enables our partners and our customers to tag data so they can later search it. So that's point number one. Then point number two is once you have that data tagged, then we provide an algorithm, again with the technology they've received from HP Labs, to actually quickly search that in a very, very scalable fashion. You heard the numbers that, I think it was David Scott yesterday was talking about, which is hundreds of thousands of times faster. So a directory of half a million objects, we search in a second. So I think I did the math on that. And I think I figured that if it took you 12 hours to run a job, you could do it in 0.4 seconds. I will have to trust your math on that one. I don't know if I did it right, but it was sort of live. When Alistair was on, and he said it was good, he's a lot smarter than I am too actually. So is it HP Labs, it knows that autonomy technology? It's actually HP Labs technology that they built that we've now put in the product. And what autonomy has done, what we announced here at the show is autonomy is actually leveraging that meta-data tagging capability to actually know when files are changed, right? So autonomy goes in and is examined sort of, what happens? So autonomy actually has a data source. Correct, so autonomy basically does two things. One is it rapidly searches data, but it actually searches inside the object, right? For information about legal discovery or whatever. So that meta-data tagging capability that you talked about, that's obviously done in an automated way, right? So you do that at the point of creation or use of the data. Or a point of update or whatever. Ingest or whatever. Okay, so there's not humans sitting around doing a lot of things. No, no, no, no, there's not anybody in the back room. Is it policy-based, so I can set policies on the tagging and all that good stuff? Yeah, and you can do it, obviously, the simplest of form is based on the file attribute, a photo as a JPEG, right? But it's actually more advanced than that. And actually, this is all partner capable, right? So what we announced is the technology. The technology is in the store-all product. But as well, we have a partner ecosystem that we're building. Autonomy being the first official ISV partner, if you will, that partners can use to extend for their own application. So you're giving unstructured data some structure? Correct. Okay, cool, so one of the things that's happening in the industry that we are watching closely, because there's two things. One, the Hadoop movement around open source, a lot of activity, obviously, on the commercial side, you guys have a lot of big data. But the market that's being disrupted right now is the data warehouse and business intelligence market. And the one thing that's killing those guys right now is the real time. Low latency, we call fast active data. And that is requirement for mobility, it's a requirement for apps. So that's a big issue. So how does that fit in here? Because the data, you guys have a nice story where storage is storage, the normal bells and whistles of storage, got solid state, Dave Town tell you, talking about that, all the great stuff. And now you start to get into this data layer. So that's an interesting, you know. So you can think about this as the costume on the patient, not the innards of the patient. So the sort of work that, stuff that you're talking about is actually the home of autonomy, right? So the rapid search of knowledge inside of the file or inside of the database. What this is is all about the patient on the outside. What color clothes is he wearing? What kind of tide is a blue tide? It's all that stuff on the outside that the Express query technology actually provides. And who's the target audience for that query? Man, as I said, it could be the medical imaging provider. It could be a large video production company, right? You look at some of the partners that we have in the video production where David Scott used this analogy yesterday, which is we're building a set of objects. We want to tag them, you know, Shrek, right? And then when we want to go back later and actually get all the objects that have, that featured Shrek, we can actually do that to actually build the next capability. So it's anybody where you have a large sort of file repository. Right, we've been talking all week about HP's new sort of storage portfolio. And I wonder if we could sort of clarify some things. So essentially in your press conference, you obviously went after EMC, you put up like 10 different platforms up there. I think so. I think that was the company. And point being, hey, our competition has all these different platforms. We are simplifying, less is more, I can say that as my words. And essentially you're saying we're going with three platforms, primarily. For primary storage, it's store serve. For archiving, it's store all. And it's store once for backup. Those are the three primary platforms. Okay, but you still have, in your portfolio, you said you're responsible for everything, but what we used to know was three par, I guess it's still branded three par. That's a lot of stuff. That's MSA, EVA, that's the left hand, XP is in there, so you got, right? That's you too? No, that's not me. So I have store all, store once, store virtual and store easy. Yeah, so the EVA and XP is not me. Okay, but anyway, you still got a lot of platforms. So help me understand the positioning of that. Is he saying that the future is these three platforms? Or are you saying? So I think there's two things. Once for EVA and XP customers, we're going to continue to support and advance those products, right? If you're very happy with those portfolios, those things are not ending. I think the second thing is, and I think this is more of what your question is, is that a lot of the products that I'm responsible for actually run our industry standard servers. So if you looked at a store all platform or you looked at a store once platform and you're an HP customer for compute, you would not be able to tell the difference between that platform and any other platform. A good story was that we had a very large customer of ours is using store virtual. And they're a all whatever vendor shop, not HP for storage, they got that product in because it looked like a Perlion and it managed like a Perlion. So part of the simplicity is the fact that we're actually leveraging the rest of HP as part of the supply chain. I think the third way to answer your question is, it's really about going forward, technology, scalable architectures, et cetera. If you look at, you look at from store virtual to store once, to store all, to store serve, it's all built on this sort of industry standard architecture which allows you to, the word that we've been using is, we were laughing, I don't know if you're laughing about this, but polymorphic, right? What that really- We love it, we love polymorphic. Yeah, what it really means is that you have an idea today of what you need and tomorrow it changes. How do you get there without ripping up the infrastructure and reapplying to new, right? And so the three part stuff we announced with store serve, all of it is scalable in that way. So it's simplicity from the way that we deploy the product, the way to build the product. So it's standard components. Standard components. So when you talk about converged storage, you're talking about the standard server. Correct. And the storage on top of that, and then the software. And then networking in that as well, right? So you look at sort of the large, sort of the 9730 store all platform where you look at the store once platform, it's converged, stored, stored server and networking in a single frame, right? Right. All right, good. John, I think we're out of time here. Okay, we're out of time. Bill, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate this. This is HP Discover Live, two-day exclusive coverage from siliconangle.com and wikibon.org. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.