 In Barcelona, Spain, this is HP Discover 2013 in Europe. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced extract the student from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. And we're pleased to have here inside theCUBE, Craig Nunez, Vice President and Marketing of HP, Converged Infrastructure Storage. Craig, welcome back, CUBE alumni. I mean, you're up there now getting into the annals of a top echelon of CUBE guests. I'm angling for host. I'm angling for it. So, welcome back. Great to see you. And thanks for all your support. You've been great supporter of theCUBE, great guest. And a lot of action happening here. But let's first talk about the most important thing that we were talking before we went on live was the Stanford Cardinal now, Bowl Big. Stanford Cardinal, back-to-back Rose Bowl since most of our viewers, before they were born, in fact. Of course, HP headquartered in Palo Alto, the home of Stanford. Again, Pac-12 champions, BKSU, exciting game, Rose Bowl. Yeah, it wasn't looking too good a few weeks before the end of the season, but... So, what made them? It was looking great, and then they fumbled the ball and then lucked out back then, right? They, and... So, who they playing in the Rose Bowl? They're playing Michigan State. Okay, what's the, do we know what the line is on that game yet, or? Big upset. Big upset in that Michigan State game, so... So, Michigan State's favored. Is that right? I don't know. Good question. I think Stanford's ranked above Michigan State. Yeah, so they would be, so Stanford would be favored. Oh, actually, I think they're four and five. Okay, so that's good. So, I got to ask you, what do you think Stanford's, why is Stanford so successful? What is your take on Stanford? My take on Stanford is work ethic, great defense, and probably the, I think the reason they have won so consistently is they have an offense that just pounds away. A lot like HP storage. Power football, power storage. Yes, indeed. I mean, blocking and tackling is what it's all about. I mean, Stanford does an old school, right? Old school football and storage is your world right now. Absolutely. So, guys are playing some power football storage. Give us the... Power storage. And I'll say, the eligibility for you guys is significant because Meg Whitman's recent earnings call, again, highlights 3PAR as a success in the HP results. So, give us some color behind the mirror. Sure, yeah, let me tell you. Like a Pete Sampras serve 3PAR, I mean, just keep moving. So, first of all, we've talked in the past about how 3PAR has gone. It's been a tremendous success with our customers. The growth particularly since the introduction of the tier one mid-range, the 3PAR store served 7,000 last December, just a year ago. Since that introduction, according to IDC's most recent numbers, we have grown 68% HP in the mid-range, 6.9 points of market share, and guess who's down in that year, right? Our friends at EMC, big time. Ooh, I never heard of them. Okay, so you're taking share from the EMC mid-range? Absolutely, in the mid-range fiber channel space, HP has grown while EMC has grown. Well, this is one of the reasons why HP bought 3PAR, right, is because you had an architecture that could go from high to low, and you were participating in that sort of tier one, we call it tier 1.5, I know you don't like that term, but then the mid-range announcements, really brought, well, but the mid-range announcements, you're bringing tier one down to the mid-range. Tier one down to the mid-range, mid-range affordability. Which was always kind of Phil Soren's vision, that compelet, but you have a little different flavor. Well, it's tough, so let me tell you, and if you, I think you've talked to Ashok Singhal in the past, our CTO, Ashok's view is, you know, the high-end clustered architecture is, you know, it's an easier thing to do, to leverage that architectural capability down into the mid-range, then start with a dual controller and try to make it grow, right? It's, there's enough of a discontinuity there that it's, you know, it's tough for an architecture like compelence, it's a nice architecture where it plays. But, you know, in a world of growing flash, like our announcement in June, in a world with growing flash adoption, you need that clustered architecture more than a couple of controllers to throw it. Now, would you make the same argument with EMC VNX? I mean, essentially a dual controller architecture, but EMC would say, oh, I will go to the VMAX. Now, you guys would say we have the same architecture. Yeah, again, so if you look at VMAX, here's the issue. You need very high IOP performance with very low latencies, number one. Number two, you've got to have very tuned efficiency so that you're not consuming a ton of that expensive flash capacity and you've got to handle the ware leveling issues. Those traditional architectures, pick VNX or VMAX, lots of folks have them out there today. Those were not built with those capabilities in mind and it's a struggle for them to achieve those two capabilities. Thus, money down on Extreme I.O. for EMC. The problem with that is Extreme I.O. doesn't bring with it all the- The stack. All the stack that people depend on for that most mission critical data they want to run on flash. That's nice architecture, but it's got a ways to go in terms of the maturity. Now, back to the three-part growth. Where's it coming from? Is it coming from on HP platform? Is it off platform, both? It is combination because we have a number of accounts where we are going in and we are net new with our customers. First time on the floor, a lot of cases replacing EMC but replacing HDS and IBM as well. And of course we have an EVA base and we've purposefully developed this platform to be a very seamless move from EVA to three-part. So it's, in their view, it's the logical next step. We have technology built in that actually makes that data move very seamless. So whether it's an EVA on base or an EMC takeout, we're going. Well, you're in a much better position now for your on platform. Before you came back to HP, HP was giving up a lot of its storage business and now just gaining share in your own base has got to be a big hit and obviously it's easier to do that. So talk a little bit more about the three-part news. Let's go through the news. Sure, yeah. So the all-flash stuff is really what's hot these days. So there's, I'm going to do it in a little different order, if you don't mind, because I think a big, big headliner for our news yesterday that broke was the new Next Generation StoreOnce family. This is the first time we've rolled that family from low to high, so a big, big platform announcement. So top-to-bottom refresh. Top-to-bottom. So now we've got brand new StoreOnce capabilities from built into our data protector backup software, built into our virtual storage appliance, our software-defined storage appliance, and all of our hardware appliances. And the real value with this refresh has everything to do with reducing our customer's risk when it comes to recovering data. We will recover their data, restore their data from the appliance faster than any system in its class. And in fact, our 6,500 at the top end will restore customer data 10 times faster than EMC's best than the DD990. So that kind of value is huge for CIOs, VPs trying to reduce their risk. And if you think about a significant outage, most studies will show if I'm out for days, a lot of companies are going to have a hard time recovering from that. So you've got to have in place a plan to avoid those potential disasters, right? Yeah, and most recoveries are for relatively fresh data, so you obviously want to do that from disk. You want it to be super fast, because if it's fresh data, it's like, I need that, all right? Okay, so that's the store once. Some other stuff on store ones too, right? The other bit on store ones is we've introduced some software-based encryption. So security is top on our customer's minds. We've got that in place, data at rest encryption. We also have a new- They said it couldn't be done. They said it couldn't be done, but we did it anyway with store ones 6500. We also have a new program called the Get Protected Guarantee. A new guarantee, Dave. You guys got a new guarantee with a product announcement? I think you predicted this. The Get Protected Guarantee is awesome for customers, because basically what it does is when they move to store ones, we will guarantee a 95% capacity reduction from their fully hydrated backups to what we store on store once, and if we cannot do it, capacity is on us, we cover it. Okay, you're like the poster boy of these guarantees. Have you ever had to pay one of these off? Never, not once. Never, never. Go back to even three par days. Ever, never. Okay, and customers test you on them, right? Absolutely, so here's the deal. This is, look, it's a great program. Customers love it, but it's built on, you know, real assessments that we do with our customers. When we present a Get Protected Guarantee, we will actually do a backup assessment. We'll find failed backups our customers didn't even know they had going. We'll identify the different data types. We'll talk about data that's going to de-dupe well and data that won't, and we're going to set very clear expectations. And we do that upfront, no charge. It's just, you know, part of our, part of our. And that's where you set the guarantee. Exactly. Do you ever walk and say, wow, we don't want to guarantee you. Look, if somebody said, hey, we are 80% video and audio files, it's not happening. Right, right. But if you're 15 or 20% video audio. Great, talk about some of the macro trends. I want to get in and tease out some of the trends around software-defined storage, because we've been, sure, we've done some crowd chats with some other vendors around software-defined, you know, fill-in-the-blank, and that's the rage right now. I mean, it's nice, SDN, HP's had, Bethany, you know, got to go back three years ago here at Barcelona, which, by the way, Dave, you know, Barcelona was our coming-out party with theCUBE at HP, member at the hotel we had. The David John Cube. Yeah, David Scott and Craig was on. But since then, software-defined networking, we've had Bethany on, you guys were the first ones shipping OpenFlow, AKA SDN back then. But now, it's storage, right? So, what does that mean? I see signs up there, software-defined storage. What does it mean? Define software-defined storage. Software-defined storage is storage software that runs on a virtual machine. It is hypervisor-independent. It is hardware-agnostic. It is the full stack of software that runs inside maybe a storage controller. And it is scale-out and federated so that you can really populate and take advantage of this across your server infrastructure. We have been doing software-defined storage, albeit by a different name, software-defined storage, kind of a new term for everyone. But we've been doing this since 2006, 2007 with Store Virtual, formerly Left Hand. And in fact, November 12th, we actually made this very real for our SMB customers. We bundle a free terabyte of Store Virtual VSA with every virtualization-enabled, Proliant server. So if I'm a small, medium, small or medium-sized business user thinking about virtualization, going to spin up some VMware maybe, part of the deal is need shared storage, right? Well, with Store Virtual VSA free on your Proliant, shared storage is handled. Deploy your server, deploy your VMware license, you're up and running, no hardware required. Dave, what's your take on it? So that was a pre-discover announcement, right? Okay, so I just want to take through the rest of the announcements just so we have that. So we went to Store once, but we missed something on Store once. You did something on Oracle, didn't you, Armand? Yeah, so we, one of the cool things about Store once technology, there's a software called Catalyst, and what Catalyst allows us to do is a couple of things that allows us to offload the deduplication to media server and even application server. It also allows us to integrate into customer's applications. So we've integrated into backup applications, you know, NetBackup and BackupExec and of course Data Protector. But what we did this last time was integrated directly into Oracle Armand. So from Oracle Enterprise Manager, you back up straight to Store once. You control the whole backup without having to deal with a separate backup ISV or even deal with the Store once element manager. We also did that with Bridgehead software in the healthcare market, so a similar approach. So this is really important because Armand is the predominant way in which Oracle databases get backed up by Oracle DBAs. If you're not doing Armand then you're doing some hack that really is not the best practice. So Armand's the best practice, but the Oracle DBA doesn't like the Oracle backup admin because the Oracle DBAs are control freak and he or she wants to know everything that happens and they can't get control of it. So basically you're allowing that to become a self-service option. Exactly, yeah. The DBA can actually choose the set of services that he wants to deploy to back up the database. That's right. Without having to go beg, borrow, steal from the backup admin. A different workflow. Now the other bit of news we had was more in the data retention area, archive area with Store All. Now Store All is a platform we introduced about a year ago and when we introduced that it's a very scalable platform. We talk about a hyperscale storage platform and we introduced that with an embedded NoSQL metadata query engine. So you can go in and search very fast, very large repository and to put that kind of into context, a traditional file system scan of 500 million files or objects, 42 hours, okay? With Express Query, 1.4 seconds, right? So it is real time search of your repository and what we introduced with Store All was first of all an entire refresh of the platform. New 8,200 gateway and 8,800 system. We introduced some new template based reporting. So very simple reports based on Express Query. So it's ultra fast and ultra simple. And we integrated OpenStack, Swift based object store and the identity service right into the platform. So you've got this cloud portability developed maybe in the cloud and then moved that application to run on-premise for security or whatever motivation. You refresh the hardware as well, right? Yeah, new hardware. So that's now the Store All, 8,200 and 8,800 platforms. So Craig, I got to talk to you about some of the innovations of storage. So I want to get your take on an update on where we are relative to polymorphic simplicity. Where is simplicity going, John? Okay, polymorphic simplicity. Remember when we got the man coming on right after Craig, so we can do that. So I want to take David's thunder wave up. So how are we doing with polymorphic? Okay. One, is this still around? Are we still talking polymorphic? Or did we drop that? Absolutely. Or are we going to? Absolutely. And I tell you by another, by using different words, we're already seeing the copycats pile in, right? Keep your eyes peeled, because other vendors are trying to say, hey, I've got a platform that goes from low to high. Well, low to high of the mid-range doesn't count, right? A small dual controller to a big dual controller doesn't count. What a polymorphic design gives you is low to high end, tier one capability. Spinning media to flash media, file, object, block, right? One platform anywhere you deploy primary storage. Let's take a look at the alternative that customers have to slog through today. And I pick on my buddies at EMC. Most people are familiar with what they've got. You've got VMAX, BNX, BNXE, ExtremeIO, RecoverPoint, Bplex, okay? How many does it take, right? We think one. What about Centera? So let's drop into information retention. Centera, Atmos, Isilon, or Storol, which in fact is built on the same architecture as Stor1. So let's throw in Avamar and DataDomain. Five, in information protection and retention. We've got one architecture with two different service offerings in Stor1 and Storol. Which is better. The big race is how do you get, how do they take and sort of simplify all that? Which is not an easy thing to do. And then how do you popularize and bring forward your three platforms? And does it all end with an object store that's sort of layered on top? Yeah, I think it is easier to innovate and move fast when you're doing that on one technology base than trying to do that on 11 and try to stitch them together. All right, good. We got to hit the three-part stuff too. Three-part. I want to get one more question and probably more back. So to me, you know, interface, is there one interface? What's the deal with, as you mentioned a lot of other vent, EMC in particular, all those things. The trend is towards single interface. What, you guys have a single interface into that? We have a high to low. Yeah, so in fact, we have a single interface today that is bigger than just storage. It's really storage, networking, and server. And you guys know Tom Joyce, runs our Converged System group. And Tom has introduced across EG HP OneView, and it is one management platform that manages a cross-converged infrastructure, right? And the work we're doing with Tom is really driving great storage value into that one management platform. Yeah, we got United Airlines coming up. We're going to talk about that. So we're already getting the hook, so I want to make sure we get all of it. Yeah, United Airlines is coming up? Yeah, coming up. I'll talk about OneView. So, the three-part. The three-part. The news on three-part. So we... UOS. Yeah, so we've enhanced version of our all-flash array, the 7450. We've introduced new software that has taken performance up 60% to 900,000 IOPS. We have introduced new hardware and software that's allowed us to take the cost of flashdown about in half, so new MLC drives. Some software we call adaptive sparing that pools our spare and the MLC spare capacity for greater efficiency, gives capacity back to our customers without them necessarily having to dig deep in their wallet to pay for that capacity. The other important announcement with three-part is some new quality of service software. So whether you're flash or a tiered storage platform, our quality of service software allows you to guarantee IOPS bandwidth, now latency control with a maximum threshold and minimum thresholds that we will keep performance above. So the question everybody wants to know, right? EMC had to go out and buy a company. Well, Cisco, of course, bought a company. IBM bought Texas Memory Systems. Is this a stopgap move? And does HP need to go out and buy somebody? Or is this the platform for the future? That's what everybody's asking. So we've said for a couple of years now this is the platform of the future. This is the all-flash strategy. And the benefit of it is data services that work across the portfolio. And I would say it's working, right? From last December, the 7,000 announcement to the all-flash array announcement in June, the 7450, were up markedly as a business. Customers are voting with their wallets and they're voting on three-part. Right. Craig, so I want to just get your thoughts about the show itself. And now let's take a step out of storage, talk about HP. What's the vibe here? We share with the folks out there. You know, you're a good presence, obviously in Europe. What's the dynamic here at HP Discover? What's your take and share with the audience your perspective? Obviously day one, we've still got some stuff to drop. The shoes will drop with announcements. Meg's keynotes at two o'clock here, Europe time. What's your take? Share with the audience some of the things that you're feeling and knowing the inside baseball what's coming around the corner. What will you expect to see? And just share your perspective. Yeah, so I think generally speaking, you're seeing a huge focus on innovation, right? We're doing it in storage. It's all around us. You walk up and down to Discover, you're going to see a big move in technology that customers want. You're going to see a pace that maybe you've not seen in a while from HP or our competition. There's a real sense of urgency back home in California where I work. But across every HP site in the company, and it's from the top of the company all the way down to our engineers and sales people, everyone feels that drive, that need to move fast and respond quicker to what our customers are after. The smoke is clear. I mean, the clear, the ship, the aircraft carrier is throwing off some serious wake. It's moving in the direction so the financial results are pretty impressive. Hit the gas. Give it throttle. Gardener conference is going on in the U.S. Gate data center conference. That affects your world. You guys are getting some tweets already in there. Great. So the data center is changing and the cloud is right here. Yeah, yeah. Big transformation. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Craig Nunez, obviously the success of 3PAR continues to leave its mark on the world within HP. Certainly changed the direction of the infrastructure product portfolio. You're seeing the converged infrastructure gain, continue to accelerate. Certainly there's been no stopping it from this point forward with the migration of private cloud and hybrid cloud. Craig and the storage group, congratulations on all your success and continued innovation. We'll be watching the polymorphic evolution of the HP storage here inside theCUBE and continue the next three days. This is theCUBE, we're live for three days. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.