 Welcome back. It's IBM Edge 2012. I'm John MacArthur here on Silicon Angle TV. I'm here with my co-host, David Fleuer, co-founder of Wikibon. And we have, as our guest now for this segment, Doug Babcock. He's a solutions architect with Evolving Solutions. So Doug, tell us a little bit about Evolving Solutions. So we're an IBM Storage Lead Business Partner out of the Minneapolis area. We handle a full breadth of IBM product, server storage, and networking. And my focus in the organization is pre-sale storage architect. Okay, and is there a solution set that you focus on more? What kinds of problems are you focusing on? Storage is actually our largest business segment. So we do all kinds of storage solutions from high-end DS8800 through XIV to V7000. We also have a specialty area in both system P, AIX, and system X as well. And now Pure Systems coming online very quickly. You were part of, if I understand correctly, you were part of the XIV launch team. Is that right? Correct. Prior to joining Evolving Solutions, I spent two years at IBM and joined them from another major vendor to help launch the XIV technology. You can mention the other major vendor. It's okay. It's not a problem. We have history of both Hitachi and EMC. Okay. Tell us a little bit about why XIV is winning, when it's winning. So I think the key thing about XIV is a very powerful software platform when it comes to storage with extreme ease of use. And those two combinations reduce customer cost and reduce our time as a business partner for implementation services as well. So the perfect time to value with the product is being very performance-oriented and very powerful from a software feature standpoint. Is there an application set that's sort of a best fit for XIV? We do everything from VMware to Oracle to we have an SAP customer that's in production on multiple XIV systems. So it's really a broad breadth of technologies that we've been able to deploy very successfully on XIV. Evolving specializes in the healthcare business in the Twin Cities area. And we spend a lot of time on that. Do you reach down to Mayo Clinic? We do reach down to Mayo Clinic from time to time. We're not actively down there at the moment. But yeah, we've dealt with them on a storage basis on multiple levels. So I'm interested in how you decide between the different products. They've got different platforms. They've got the V7000. You've got the XIV. You've got four or five different ranges. For example, how would you decide between a V7000 and an XIV? What are the factors you take into account? Maybe you've got a situation you could talk about that's been recent where you had these options open to you. Sure. And cost is always a factor. The other thing that we look to is what platforms are supported. For example, we did a very large IBM I implementation recently and that was on DS8800 because that's where the synergies are with the I systems and the storage. For XIV, it's pretty much anything open storage or open systems. Again, there's a capacity entry point with XIV that's a little higher than with V7000, for example. Sure. It's about where? Probably about 50 terabytes on an average basis for XIV. If it's below that, we're going to be looking at V7000. Because above that, we're starting and leading with XIV in all cases. We've had great success with XIV across multiple industries and that is our go-to platform. There's been a lot of discussion about sand volume controller here. When you're doing an XIV implementation, are you often doing it with sand volume controller or not? I would say early on that was the case. When I initially joined the IBM team to launch XIV, over 50% of our implementations of XIV were behind SVC. I would say that number is probably down in the 20% range on average now. One of the value propositions of SVC is the ability to migrate data easily across platforms. I'm thinking about the customer, maybe they're a V7000 prospect today, but maybe they're going to be an XIV prospect down the road. Because they're growing fast enough, they'll hit that 50 terabytes limit. Maybe it'll be 100 terabytes. How would you recommend the migration of the data to a V7000 to an XIV? Multiple approaches. XIV does have a built-in migration capability similar to what the SVC does for image mode migrations. If it's a one-way migration, XIV can offer that kind of same capability that SVC can. If you want the true any-to-any vendor storage migration at any time, that's where SVC has the strength. Can you talk about a particular case? What are the issues? The customer just interested in talking about particular implementation and the issues that come up. What have you heard about this announcement? With either SVC, V7000 or XIV, if you want to use the array-based migration capabilities, you're going to take a brief downtime to reassign the volumes from the current storage over to the new storage system or the new virtualization platform. If the customer doesn't want to take those outages, then we'll use some host-based utility. Maybe it's a logical volume manager at the host level with storage VMotion with VMware. That gives them the option of doing a completely non-disruptive migration across any storage platform that they want to do. That's the deciding factor about whether we use the storage array migration capability or whether we use the server capabilities. Either it's viable, either it works. Is there a time advantage for one? Yes and no. When you move up to the server level, when migrating large amounts of data, you've got to bring all the data up to the server and back down again. There's a performance cost for doing that. There's a time associated with doing that in conjunction with a regular production workload. If you're using the array or virtualization engine migration capabilities, that can all be in the background. We use the storage array cycles to do the work as opposed to the server cycles. Pluses and minuses for each one. I think the deciding factor for most of my customers is whether they have the downtime available to do a one-time cable swing, if you will. Making those, that time available, it's often a big negotiation. And the good news is with all those products, you can do it volume by volume, or you can do it server by server, or you can do it array by array. It's just a matter of how you order downtime windows coincide. So what's in the event here today? What's been the highlights for you of the... For me, it's just networking with all my friends at IBM, I think. It's been just wonderful to see everybody again. I used to be more on a national presence and now I'm more local again. Did you come down with customers? Did you bring customers? Yeah, we came down with two customers, Prime Therapeutics and Medpronic. So we're supporting them across multiple levels and attending a lot of sessions with them. And then just catching up with some of my XIV colleagues, session to session, and some of the people that do great work out in the IBM ATS team that I've had a chance to deal with in the past. It's been a real pleasure. What about the compression announcement? Is that to draw some interest? Absolutely. In fact, I attended a session on that this morning and I'm going to do another one tomorrow. Very interesting technology. I think it'll give IBM a competitive advantage for high-capacity v7000 environments. And we're just going to kind of tweak a little bit and find out exactly how to configure best practices, those kind of things as we go forward. But yeah, good introduction by IBM and the RTC technology that backs it was a very good acquisition by IBM about a year ago, I think, if I remember correctly. From store-wise? Yeah, from store-wise, correct. Cool technology. How do you see your practice sort of evolving over the next year or so, a couple years? What do you need to do differently? I think what we're focused on right now is kind of what I would call our more white space accounts, growing our business presence within the Twin Cities community. Storage-wise, now I think we've got a portfolio that's second to none kind of thing. We've got a whole bunch of different offerings for different levels of customers so it's going to be taking those different technologies and applying them to the right business model, right business size in the Twin Cities market. So how are the pure system announcements going to impact you? Do you have any pull-on news from the customer? We do. We're still kind of qualifying how the storage existing and internal to that offering is going to work from my standpoint. From a server standpoint, all of our guys that are in the mid-range P-series market or any of the system X markets are looking forward to the pure systems model coming out because it's going to simplify the hardware packaging and deployment as well as, if you look into pure system application level, being able to spin up clones of user environments very quickly is going to be very attractive. And when you think of sort of Bester-Bried versus Integrated Solutions, what's the pull from the customer perspective one versus the other? I think if you look at from the pure system standpoint, it's the integration, right? We want to be able to do everything from one control point. We want it to be very automated, very simple. If I look at kind of the technologies in general for external storage, then I'm a big fan of XIV. I spend so much less time with my XIV customers than I've spent with traditional rate-to-rate kind of customers. So to me, that's the platform of choice. Not from only my time standpoint from a customer value time standpoint. When you're selling XIV, who are you going up head-to-head against? Anything from EMC's high-end systems. The VNX line, it's kind of a no-brainer for me. We can go differentiate ourselves there very quickly. But it's tackling the VMAX systems. I think it's kind of the point that we really go head-to-head with the EMC and XIV. And so when you're positioning against VMAX, what's your strong selling point? Ease of use and cost, those two things. How much of a difference? I don't watch the cost side as much, but I'm going to say probably if I had to guess two to three to one at least for same capacity. And if you start getting into an EMC VMAX environment where software licensing is heavy and predominant, we could be as high as four to one or six to one. How important is the disaster recovery or data replication capabilities over distance? You know, EMC's got a pretty robust set of replication technologies. EMC's got competitive offerings there. Correct. I know the licensing is a big issue with EMC. Licensing is a big issue, and I would say there's something called an incumbent advantage. Converting from one replication technology to another replication technology still has some difficulties about doing that all in parallel with the ability to recover the remote site on either technology at the same time. We can get close to that with a combination of logical volume mirroring and whatever the incumbent replication technology is and the new one whether it's XIV or DS8800 or SVC for example, but converting or getting the customer to buy into a conversion based on cost savings. It's a pretty sticky sale, isn't it? These are pretty sticky sales. Yes, they are, yes they are. And I understand EMC's relatively competitive in this on sale side. Yeah, just relatively, yeah. I spent six and a half years at EMC, so I'm very familiar with that. And sometimes I'm still trying to take out what I put in. That's good. What about backup archive? You had practices there? Yeah, we have a couple of really good size successful invitations with Protect here as a deduplication in virtual tape technology. A couple of good accounts for that. Once we kind of bundled our implementation services as a business partner with the products set from IBM, and we also provide some ongoing maintenance activity and services for the customer, that the blend of that kind of model makes protective deployment very easy and reduces the customer need to keep up with some of the software upgrades that IBM comes out with from time to time. So once we get to that model of combined product services and maintenance level activity, the protective implementations run very smooth. And customers see a huge realization. One customer seeing over 16 to 1 on a deduplication factor. Maybe we're in 8 to 1, 10 to 1 on other accounts, and that makes the price point in a virtual tape technology competitive, and then releases some of the management needs around physical tape technology. And what do you make of the new announcement on the file system access to... LTFS? You know, I haven't worked with it personally yet. I think there are certain places in our customer environment where they need to do 7-year holds on things where I think that's going to be very attractive to them because they don't have to maintain an application or other kind of software interface in order to get at the low cost storage capability of tape. So we're looking forward to finding where that fits in some of our environments and then maybe simplifying customer procedures that they're doing something custom to get to tape for long-term archive today and moving that to a file system-based model instead. Doug, I hope this was not too painful. Oh, not at all? You're very welcome. I appreciate it. Doug Babcock, Solutions Architect with Evolving Solutions here with David Fleuer. We are live on SiliconANGLE.TV at IBM Edge 2012. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back. Thank you both. Thank you for joining us.