 The Cube at OpenStack Summit at Lata 2014 is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. You're live in Atlanta for the OpenStack Summit. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe Michoos, Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon.org. Our next guest, Cube alumni CEO of SolidFire, Dave Wright. Welcome back. Thank you very much. Good to see you. I did a keynote this morning. How do you feel? I feel great. You guys had a lot of customer testimonies up there. Really kind of introducing a lot of stuff. Quickly just give us an update on what, a review and an update on what you presented this morning. Yeah, so this morning we were really talking about how OpenStack has really emerged as almost this operating system for the next generation data center, is the way that people are able to orchestrate all of their pools of compute networking and storage through a software layer, move away from the siloed infrastructure of the old data center. And as people are trying to do this, they're looking for ways to get started. They're looking for ways to accelerate that process. And so we announced SolidFire AI. It's a SolidFire Agile infrastructure. It's a reference architecture-based converged infrastructure for OpenStack-based clouds that uses Dell hardware, SolidFire, SolidFire storage. So that's SSDs, right? Yeah, all flash storage with it. And then Red Hat OpenStack. So on the quote you had, you said you're going to break down the data silos and move to scale-out databases. Were you referring to transactional data there, primarily? Well, I think we're clearly seeing on the database side of things, the shift from, in many cases, relational databases to big-data data processing workloads to no-SQL databases. But the bottom line is, even if you're still in the relational world, people are having an explosion of these relational databases to manage. And the old approach of, I've got a new database. I need to get a new storage system is clearly not going to fly in the software-defined data center. Yeah, so Dave, we can talk a little bit about active infrastructure. So when your keynote you laid out, that converged infrastructure is all about simplicity. And one of the challenges of OpenStack today is I don't think simple has come up, when people have been describing it. Can you talk a little bit about how those mesh together, your reference converged architecture in OpenStack? Yeah, I mean, OpenStack has definitely gotten simpler as it's matured. The installation, the setup process, the guides that are out there make it a lot easier. But what's really been missing is something that puts all of the pieces together, the hardware and the software pieces, the best practices around deployment, the best practices around scaling to allow particularly enterprises who are trying to get started with OpenStack to have a solution to start with, something that they know is going to work out of the box. Yeah, so as far as I know, I think you have the first reference architecture that takes care of all the infrastructure with the distribution. Do you think that's true? I think we certainly have the first kind of community-based solution, one that takes a best-of-breed multi-vendor approach that doesn't try to deliver all of the hardware and software through one kind of vendor's viewpoint. And I think that's one of the strengths of the solution, is that it is bringing in the best of breed from the community. Okay, so I know from your hardware standpoint you guys have a long relationship with Dell, so I understand if you're looking for kind of a brand-name server that makes a lot of sense. Can you talk to us a little about the decision process? How did Red Hat end up as the distribution of choice? Well, first on the Dell side of things, obviously, Dell's made a huge investment in OpenStack. They're very, very committed to it. They make great servers, they make great networking, but they are really committed to being part of that ecosystem, and that's something we really support. You know, Red Hat, obviously, is a long-time leader in the open-source community and the Linux community, and they've really shown that leadership on the OpenStack side as well. They were a little bit later to the party than some, but they have come at it with tremendous resources on both the engineering side and they've already entered into a strong alliance with Dell, so it's a natural union for our first agile infrastructure. Dave, what's your use cases for your customers you guys are seeing in your traction right now in the product market fit? Is it transactional? Because I'm just thinking about big data as a huge, 80% of the landfill of big data is not necessarily IOP-sensitive, if you will. So you guys have more IOPs focused with SSD. Do you see that in your primary use case, or are you actually doing big data in SSD? You know, we do a mix of workloads, and that's actually really the strength and where we see SolidFire being deployed most is places where you have infrastructure as a service, whether it's in a public cloud or a private cloud type environment, you want to run a range of workloads, right? You want to run Hadoop, but you also want to run Cassandra, but you also want to run MongoDB, and by the way, you still have a lot of MySQL and maybe some Oracle and SQL Server in there as well, and you can take the approach of trying to build a storage environment for each of those and maybe you end up with one thing for Hadoop, another thing for MongoDB and another thing but that's not manageable at scale and it doesn't give you the agility that you need as your developers, as your administrators, as your businesses are trying to move faster and the promise of SolidFire is to give a platform that has a tremendous amount of performance but is also very, very cost effective on a CAPEX basis, very, very cost effective from an operational basis but has the scale out capabilities, the quality of service abilities to give each application exactly what it needs. If it needs a lot of capacity and a little bit of performance, we can give it that if it needs a lot of performance and a little bit of capacity, you can give it that and you can run all of those workloads in a single infrastructure as opposed to having to deploy islands of storage for each application. So you guys have an advantage on throughput and cost per gigabyte? We do, I mean it has, you know, just from a raw numbers perspective, our systems have tremendous amount of IOPS, tremendous amount of throughput, very, very capacity efficient with our inline deduplication, compression, thin provisioning but it's really the software on top that delivers guaranteed quality of service. The ability to provision performance separate from capacity, the ability to give each application the performance profile that it needs and then adjust that over time if needed that really allows us to run all of these workloads and not just be tied to a single use case. Where do you guys see the success for you guys? Who's lunch are you starting to nibble away in terms of attraction in the market? Is it EMC? Is it you compete with Pure and these guys? What do you guys fit in there? Yeah, so most of the business that we do is in the infrastructure space. So we work with service providers and large enterprises that are building out their next generation data center infrastructures and it could be open stack based. We do a lot of business with VMware, we do a lot of business with cloud stack as well. So all the infrastructure platforms with solid fire underneath and in many cases we are displacing existing legacy storage systems, EMC or NetApp or something like that. The best of breed approach to the next generation data center they're looking for storage that really is a more modern architecture that is designed for multi-tenancy, designed for scale out, designed for quality of service. So Dave, solid fire started really heavily focused on the service provider market since then you've moved into the enterprise space. Give us what you're hearing in the marketplace for open stack, service providers versus enterprise. Where do you see that going and I guess the follow up for that is this move to open stack, was that a pull for the customers or are you moving ahead of the market? We invested very heavily in the service provider space initially because it was obvious that's where a lot of these next generation data center technologies were being deployed first. The competition factor of the public cloud of Amazon in the marketplace pushing the service providers and the pull that they were having from their customers to deploy infrastructures, service platforms, service type offerings was going to push them to move faster into the next generation data center. But now we're seeing the enterprise as a fast follower on to that because they're now trying to get that agility, that efficiency, that speed that everybody's been talking about in this conference, they're trying to get that in their own data centers and for us open stack was something where we were pretty far ahead of the game. We've been investing in open stack for about two and a half years now really before just about anybody had production deployments of it but it was very clear that something like open stack was going to be necessary. We were going to need a vendor neutral community based open source platform for next generation data centers. It's not that there wouldn't be other options and there wouldn't be proprietary vendors that were coming in there as well but the pull of open source was clearly going to create a vacuum that was going to create an opportunity like this. We didn't know at the time if open stack was going to be successful or not but we saw it as a great starting point a great community, great organization, something we wanted to contribute to and clearly it has become wildly successful. I think it's a great start for the folks at home watching that might not be in the inside baseball as it's evolved. Where is it today? Give them a quick update from your personal perspective. You've been close to it. You've worked at Rackspace so you know what they had to do to kind of get into the cloud business. You helped build that out and now you're participating in the ecosystem as a CEO and founder of the company but people are trying to figure out how real it is. Obviously it's happening. People are certainly interested back to house but what's the state it's very clear open stack is now in its ninth release. It has reached a level of maturity that a lot of commercial software frankly never gets to and it is absolutely production ready and we've heard example after example of customers that are running it at large scale in production today. At the same time the breadth of the project has grown tremendously. It's gone far beyond basic compute networking and storage into a number of other platform technologies that have been rolled into it as well and so with that it comes to complexity. It's easier than ever to get started but now there's this very rich ecosystem of open source projects, of commercial vendors, of other pieces that people need to consider and so it can be fairly intimidating to get started and that's one of the reasons why we wanted to start with agile infrastructure with something that was just a very kind of simple clean standards based approach to open stack but one that people could build on. They could then integrate technologies, other vendors into that solution over time. SolidFire was heavily involved in the creation of Cinder. Can you give us the update what are you seeing in the community who's really helping build that where is there kind of the innovation that's going to happen going forward because it seems some of the projects are a little bit more unstable. Cinder seems pretty solid and we're hearing a lot of announcements from different vendors so give us the Cinder update if you could. Yeah so we early on realized that block storage was something that was going to be important enough that it needed to be broken out and managed its own project. We helped orchestrate the kind of breakout of Cinder from Nova and have contributed very heavily to that project, maturing it over time into something that is a very robust software defined storage management platform and one that is vendor neutral that other vendors can plug into and there are dozens of plugins now for Cinder today and many of those vendors contribute to the core project and we're also finding that many of the customers who are using SolidFire with Cinder have actually started contributing to the project so customers like iWeb and eBay are actually contributing to the development of Cinder and there's really great capabilities in there in each release integrated backup restore new snapshot capabilities remote replication a number of other things that it is enabling and that the vendors can completely tie into and leverage their own kind of storage architectures to optimize around it. So Dave I want to ask you about the update of the company, how many employees you have now what's the level of funding, you're going for another round acquisition talks, I mean obviously peer storage has certainly had a huge funding around that kind of an all flash market EMC world had a huge event around flash what's the update on SolidFire? Yeah so we're growing really fast we grew 700% last year our kind of employees we're now over 230 employees in the company we've raised 68 million in funding and probably we'll raise more in the future but we're also taking a very pragmatic approach to the market, again we are not a flash band-aid approach we're not out just to solve performance problems there's a lot of people that have performance problems and they're looking to flash as a solution for that and flash is a good solution for that but there's bigger problems that people are dealing with and these bigger problems around agility around efficiency, around scaling their infrastructures those are really the things that SolidFire is going to and that we're really uniquely positioned to deliver on among both the flash vendors as well as the traditional display systems. What's the final question, share it in your own words what's going on in the show here what's so important about this year more than any in this industry? Yeah you know I really think this is this year is a huge turning point for OpenStack, it has reached a kind of breakaway velocity where it's clear that nobody's going to put this you know back in a can this is something that is going to be part of our industry for a long, long time to come and everybody's going to have to deal with it service providers are going to have to deal with it Amazon's going to have to deal with it enterprises are going to have to figure it out every vendor has to figure out their role to play in the ecosystem in this summit the developers coming together the ecosystem partners coming together the customers coming together to figure out what that world is going to look like has been exciting but it's now something and it's clearly one of the most talked about technologies in the IT space for a very good reason Dave thanks for coming on the Cube really appreciate it congratulations because that's been following you guys and get to know your team fun to see you guys again here at OpenStack and we'll see you around This is the Cube, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break