 It's the Cube, covering Sapphire Now. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console Inc, the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier at Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at SAP Sapphire. This is the Cube, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Dave Mason, SVP, Big Data and SAP at NetApp and Czech GoRinger, Cisco Global Partner Organization. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having us. So, NetApp and the file business, the file storage, disk, flash, flash is taken over the enterprise. Certainly, it's powering a lot of the stuff under the hood. Everywhere. And success of FlexPod. You get a lot of big accounts like SAP. HANA and cloud, on-prem, is exploding here in performance numbers. What's going on under the hood for you guys? How are you guys involved in the SAP equation? How does all this connect? So, let me start, Chuck. Let me kick off just for a second. I mean, so we've had a long-standing relationship with Cisco, I mean, over five years in developing our FlexPod solution, which is a convergent infrastructure solution. It's been an amazing ride. We've built a multi-building to our business out of that, and it's been a keystone to a number of customers in developing our business practices around it. Actually, we just released the latest version of that with Flash, enabling an all-flash solution, or all-flash fast, in there. And that has grown so fast. In fact, it's the fastest-growing product, one of our fastest-growing products at NetApp. We've seen the history of the company. It's 22 years. Flash is a crack of storage. Flash is not, Flash is a crack of storage. It's going crazy. You get people stuck on that. They never go anywhere else. In fact, what's going on in the industry, is the reason it's not the media, and people keep saying it's the media, right? It's not the media, it's the experience. Because right now, Flash is changing so fast on the size, the capacity, where that used to be the last frontier. Used to see that you could never get more than maybe a terabyte of Flash and it cost a fortune to do that. Prices have dropped through the floor. Capacity has gone up through the roof. We're releasing a 16 terabyte drive in one month. On all Flash, that'll be incorporated into our Flash array that's going to be part of the FlexPod ecosystem. That enables people to do so much more. And as I said, it's more experience than it is media. Because once you get people, as you said, to get them stuck on it, they never go back. What they do is they put all their workloads onto it. It simplifies their environment. And the reason they do this is because we're seeing people get away from tiered architecture and going to a performance tier for persistent storage and a capacity tier. And that simplifies their services. But object storage has been booming on capacity, right? Absolutely. And object storage is where we see it or an S3 connect. Either one's going to go that way. Well, as digital and software and analytics get more deeply embedded within the business and becomes an increasingly crucial asset to how any business behaves in its marketplaces, then the physical constraints of capturing moving data become very real and they're starting to become part and parcel of the whole concept of business design, business model design. How are leaders starting to think differently about designing their business or their business models as it pertains to this notion of data availability anywhere, move quickly over distances that satisfy experience requirements? I'll let Chuck take the first one. I'll take the second one. How's that? Absolutely. Well, first of all, as we kind of talked about the partnership between Cisco and NetApp is actually very, very important to Cisco in general because over a multi-billion dollar business but it's really important to our SAP strategy. NetApp and Cisco today have been innovating around total cost of ownership of deploying SAP applications into your question about the digital enterprise as these applications start to bring data in from different sources, you're trying to take advantage and deliver new business outcomes through the applications through bringing data in from that management and that total cost of ownership is crucial. And we started down a journey many, many years ago with using the FlexPod as the basis. And what we've done is we've been innovating together with SAP around how to bring that total cost of ownership lower and so that you can bring these new business scenarios. And one of them is around how do we share in HANA? How do we do things like tailored data center integration? How can we share more resources? How can we take better advantage of the infrastructure to deliver those outcomes? It used to be very dogmatic back even just five years ago but we'll go back 10 years for real, people putting their heels into the ground and digging in around architectures. Scale out, scale up or two different notions, almost two political spectrums, right? It's like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I don't know if it's a bad example, but, you know. One wants to build a wall, it's called a firewall, that's Cisco, but I mean now have scale up, scale out now are completely indescribable. No one is independent of each other. It depends on the workload, right? So, you know, UCS has been, we've covered some of the UCS stuff with Cisco. So, you know, in and of itself, storage has their own challenges with, you know, high performance and certain workloads just on the storage side, you mentioned tiering. When you start to get into stuff where optimization and automation comes in, now we're kind of in the Cisco, so I'm trying to piece this together here, and if I get that right, that's kind of where I see the action here. So, can you guys share where the complexity gets extracted away? What are you guys doing with FlexBod specifically and with Cisco, say UCS or other tools so that the customers don't have to go through all the hassles? Because, again, the simplicity angle is huge, right? How do you make it simple as what everyone wants? But, you got to automate in order to get there. What's being automated? How does that affect the customer? What are some of the things? Can you put some color around that? Yeah, I mean, going back to the total cost ownership story and like you said, how do you enable these? So, there's a couple of planning principles. The first one is, you know, we want to get better asset utilization. So, that's through, you know, virtual servers, that's through shared resources and optimizing all the tiers, whether it's network storage or compute. The second piece is we've been working with SAP, not just to automate the infrastructure, but also to automate the requirements of the application, specifically things like SAP HANA, and now as we're going into big data solutions, SAP HANA Bora. We've created co-innovation labs. We're working very closely in very tight partnership with SAP, together with NetApp. You know, the three of us are coming together to have that end-to-end, starting at the application requirements and then with a single click, being able to deploy those applications, configure the infrastructure seamlessly and then by using automation, we bring another element, which is what we call security and governance. So, by not having a manual, you know, reducing manual processes and all that, we have a service assurance, we know how things are deployed, we have an audible result at the end of the day. And that's been a founding principle of our work on FlexFOD. Absolutely, absolutely. FlexFOD was all about simplicity from the ground up. I love Bill McDermott's keynote this morning, talking about lending on simplicity and the focus on simplicity and the whole deal with make it consumable for the end customer to use. And that's really what we've been talking about and that's what our relationship is. And by the way, the relationship for SAP, I look at this as kind of the perfect marriage, so to speak, well, maybe a three-way marriage, but perfect marriage, you know, I don't go that far, but I'm just saying that we have got a incredible relationship with SAP over 12 years. We've been doing business with SAP five or six years with Cisco. It's kind of like the Russell Westbrook and the Steph Curry of the industry joining together and we are just so proud of that relationship. And you know, and the goal to say warriors, you mentioned them, the offense, you know, Steph Curry's the MVP and what's going on is going on with him, but you look at, that's a team chemistry and their approach is different. They've thrown a lot of three-pointers. So you have a new game. So I'd say Cloud is kind of the new game now and you're seeing that. Cloud is the three-pointer of the IT industry. It's the new high arc three-pointer. But back to the business model question that Peter brought up on the storage and now I was teasing it out earlier. The apps themselves are the business model, right? So what you have is, it's easy to say, oh, Facebook's one big app. Okay, that's their business model, make billions. But enterprises as they connect and SAP is integrating with a lot of touch points. You guys obviously are two big companies. They're a big company. We had IBM on earlier. If all these things, they're integrating well. So that requires mixed workloads. So this is the big question. So how do you guys deal with the diversity of workloads? Are they, and how do you deal with that? Is that built into the system? Because that's an issue right now for the enterprise. It's not an easy saying, hey, it's a clean sheet piece of paper. There's multiple apps, different workloads, different times, real time. What's your take on this mixed workload perspective? I think the way I see it from a number of customer meetings I've had is everybody is struggling with how to lower their overall cost of operation. I mean, that's kind of the net of it, right? And so they look at every opportunity they have and they look at their toolbox. They say, well, what am I going to put on-prem? What are we going to put off-prem? What are we going to keep internal? And what are we going to give off to a third-party solution? And what we see is many customers, in fact, almost all customers, are using some sort of hybrid solution, that hybrid cloud opportunity, where it says I'm going to have some element of my workload in the cloud, through an S3 connection or into Amazon or into Azure, whatever it is. Or I'm going to have, and I'm going to have some element of that on-prem, okay? We believe that's the architecture of most companies. And in fact, I think that's where we see our value, because the value benefits- That's the hybrid cloud, basically. That's the hybrid cloud. And the value benefit of the hybrid cloud with Cisco and NetApp is that that on-tap was built for that type of ability to go back between clouds. It's agnostic to clouds. It doesn't matter if you're in Azure today, in Amazon tomorrow, that ability to snap back and forth and then bring it back in if you need to deal with the workload change, okay? And that's where we see most customers moving to. Chuck, what's your take on the relationship with NetApp? Because obviously Cisco's evolving as well. Everyone's retooling for digital transformation, whatever trend they want to call it, but it's the same trend. People digitizing their business, dynamic, perimeter-less security. You got hyper-converged out there, so you guys know a lot about conversion for structure between Cisco and FlexPod. You guys are in that business. You got hyper-converged, you got real-time apps. Talk about the state of the relationship with NetApp. What's the future look like? A lot of people have been talking about it. What's your take? Yeah, I mean, right now, our relationship with NetApp is basically one of our most strategic relationships. And when it comes to SAP, it's really foundational. We're doing all our co-innovation with SAP with NetApp. We've built out labs at SAP with NetApp. And the reason for that is, at the end of the day, these are mission-critical systems. Cisco's strategy is to work with best-of-greed partners like NetApp to make sure that you have the security, reliability, and also the innovation engine to deliver these applications. So right now, we're doing a lot around SAP together and I don't see that changing in the first year. SAP is very much co-development-oriented, aren't they? Pretty much. They're from a long time. From day one, and that's why I can find a better partner than Cisco in going working with SAP and enabling SAP. We're the core of the HANA Enterprise Cloud. We actually are that core. And in fact, I met a couple of the EVPs over at the charge of this business. They are saying, Dave, our resiliency is critical and our ability to deliver our customers' needs in HANA are the number one thing we have as a priority within and across SAP. Where is the customer's challenges from you guys' standpoint? And obviously, the market's changing. I mean, internet working was created by TCPIP that basically creates Cisco. But now with cloud, is there an inter-clouding technology that's similar to what routers work? Because you again, we've mentioned perimeter-based securities down. Is that now a fact that you get security? And now you got cloud traversal. You got HANA, you got BlueMix and IBM, are we going to see cloud bridging or is this whole thing going to get flattened down so there's a common protocol for dealing with cloud? I'll give you my point of view, and it may be wrong. I'll just tell you right now. Yeah, I mean, it's futuristic, so we want to kind of tease it out. I think the reason that cloud bridging, as you said, it's going to happen because competitive natures are going to stay in place. The competitive environment is going to push for that. And so the ability to go between clouds or ability to go in the cloud, I was actually talking to a customer about a month ago, they actually have their dev tests, their test dev into one cloud, and they have their archival data in another cloud. And they want to move back and forth between those two clouds. And the ability to flex back and forth as changes and pricing goes up, especially as you have demand pricing now, it's so critical. I was going to just add that the pace of change and what we're seeing right now doesn't lend itself to a flattening. That's when you see technology slow down and things, I think there's so much change out there. We call it the world of many clouds, and we're seeing that. But one thing I do want to call out is, we've seen a change over the last couple months of our business where SAP workloads now, it used to be, well, maybe cloud, a percentage now. We're seeing now almost all customers are like, how do I leverage the cloud, obviously, for SAP specifically? That means they're mission-critical workloads, and that's where you have to think about what kind of infrastructure you're running in the cloud. Does it have the security, the controls, the innovation that companies like Cisco and NetApp are driving? And it's got compliance, you've got integration, there's automation, it's not trivial. You have disaster recovery, you have all the aspects that are needed in the cloud that you're used to from the on-prem solution. Yeah, and still, data is growing too. So if you're in the storage business, I don't think it's going to be a depression when it comes to storage. There's more storage needed, but more and more capacity optimization is huge. Well, we keep storing everything. Do you ever throw anything away? No, I keep upgrading. People build on top, this is an evolution of layers of innovation. It is, it is. I don't see a destruction, I think, more in advancement there. Absolutely agree. Well guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Chuck, Dave, appreciate it. Welcome to being a CUBE alumni. I'm on theCUBE, really appreciate it, and thanks for the candid insight. Just go to NetApp here inside theCUBE at Sapphire. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE. Thank you very much. There'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness.