 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and John Walls. And we are your hosts, John Walls, along with Stu Miniman. Thanks for joining us here at VMworlds. We wrap up our day one coverage of a show that's had a lot of excitement, a lot of enthusiasm, and a lot of big announcements today. We're now joined at the tail end of our coverage here by Rob Cummins, who's the VP of Marketing in Fantasia Island. Rob, thanks for being with us on theCUBE. We appreciate the time. Thanks for having me. Got to ask you about the t-shirt right away. It's catchy to say the least, but what you got going on there? Yeah, and it's stark contrast to the suits and ties I'm sitting across here. So, we've got a flagship product we've been shipping for a while called Intel Flash HD for a high density flash system. And we've expanded that and we're announcing it today as a brand new product. And it's called Cloud Platform, so CP. So, in our brainstorming, what's it do with the booth? So, HD, CP, HD, sounds like ACDC. So, we've got to wrap the whole booth theme around that or actually having some rock and roll playing in the booth, having a good time this week. Yeah, you got the tunes going over there too. So, you've only bought into the whole concept. Yeah, we're really annoying the vendors around us. It's great. So, all flash all the time. I mean, what's happened? I mean, what's been the tipping point you think that all of a sudden it's gotten everybody's attention? Yeah, and actually what's funny is we actually started in 2012 as a hybrid company with Flash and Disk. So, again, there's two layers of high performance and better economics, low cost disk on the back end. And we had entered the all flash business about a year and a half ago, but now we're starting to see the flash business start to bifurcate into very high performance with NVMe flash and then we're partnered up with Sandisk on their Infiniflash, very high density, low cost flash. So, we're able to leverage this bifurcation and be able to put some English on the ball with the customers saying you need the super high performance system, I can move this way. If you need more bulk, high capacity, maybe long term retention of, let's say video surveillance, you don't need this up here, so we can bulk up down here. So, lots of our competitors, they kind of sit right in the middle, I call it JBOF, it's kind of a spin on an old term as we storage guys have where they're kind of stuck in the middle, they can't optimize for performance and economics where we're able to leverage what used to be considered almost like a second class citizen product to the hybrid business, the flash guy's like, ah, that's just a toy. Now we're turned the tables on them and say, look at this big, high performance, high density system that's five times faster and a fifth of the cost of a garden variety, all flash systems running. So, we're super happy about it. Yeah, Rob, so those of us that have been in the storage industry for a while understand that it's a highly fragmented marketplace there's so many different solutions and niches inside the marketplace. There's a great line I actually heard today, said, sometimes you try to say, it's not that one size fits all, as a matter of fact, one size fits none when it comes to storage. So, how do you guys look at that kind of architecturally because you're right, there was this big push, there was hybrid arrays and there was all flash arrays. We don't look at, there's a category that you can count but not all flash arrays are the same, there's scalability, there's performance, there's latency and you've got new technologies like MVME and 3D crosspoint and changing things a lot. So, how do you guys look at, position your architecture and some of the options that are out there? Yeah, we completely buy into that that just one size doesn't fit anything. So, we've got one, what we call one flash platform that can support hybrid, it can support all flash and now this multi-tiered high performance, high density flash, all run in the exact same software. We run block with fiber channel, high scuzzy file, which is very unique with Flash Guys. It's very hard to find a flash vendor that runs NFS and SMB as well. So, lots of people come by the booth and they say, what do you guys do? What makes it unique? I said, we're the best storage platform for the indecisive virtualization manager. Well, yeah, I mean, I'll show my age in the storage industry. 15 years ago, SAN versus NAS was one was for performance and one was just for, I need accessibility and there's files and everything. But it wasn't a performance environment. So, yeah, so talk to us maybe a little bit about that. What are some of the performance use cases in there? Does that, I think of kind of scale-out NAS has been a big category for a while. How does the kind of performance fit into that file category? Yeah, I'll give you one of the greatest stories I love about our teleflash HD. I was born and raised in Chicago. So, I love Chicago sports and things like that. One of our customers is United Center where the Chicago Bulls and the Blackhawks play and they've got a system that during the game, one of, let's say, one of the basketball player makes a killer three-point shot. They go into a sequel database, find the athletes, all the statistics about the last five years of his play and that's pointing to the file portion of the system of the video clips of the last five years of that guy shooting from that one spot. They munch that all together, pass it up into an avid video editing system and they've got that video playing before the competitor is throwing the ball out for the next round. It's phenomenal. Then it's playing on 2,100 skirrings in the United Center. So, you need the high performance, that database finding it in a high throughput and low cost for that video content all running on the same system. Great. So, how about the customers? You know, what are some of the biggest challenges you're seeing and how does Tage Isle in a very crowded field differentiate itself? Yep, yep. And a lot of it has to do with this being able to move around and change your mind over time and then to get back to kind of the cloud piece with this new product. I don't think any of us in the Flash business, we don't win or lose on performance anymore. The garden variety mid-range system ran about five to 10,000 IOPS, maybe 20 for a real good system. Our entry level system starts at 50,000 IOPS and now we're going up to millions of IOPS. So, we're so much faster than what the use cases are used to driving. You know, that's not an issue anymore but this whole cloud thing has become really interesting. So, we recently released a program we call Lifetime Storage where we take this whole how do I technology refresh in three or five years off the table. As part of your maintenance agreement, we can put in the cost of a tech refresh in three or five years and we'll come rolling out whatever the current technology is, we'll come give you at least the same capacity and performance as you've got today in the maintenance contract renewal. So, we like to say this will be the last storage system you ever buy. And then to take it one step further, we have what we call Intellipay, which just like you and I, we all have a smart meter on the side of our house and measures our kilowatt hours consumption. We've got the same type of meter figuratively in our software that watches how much capacity is written to in a given month and we send a bill in a gigabyte month fashion and that starts to feel like a lot of public cloud too. So, you get to own your own array. So, you got all the security, control, performance, integrity of on-prem but you've got the business model, like you said, an operational model feels a lot more like a blended public, private, hybrid cloud. Okay, great. So, if I understand that right, when you're talking cloud in this, it's really kind of the operations and attributes of like what we talk about when we think about a public cloud. It's not that you're, you know, putting something in Azure or the like, right? We do have hooks if customers want to connect to Amazon, Azure, Teramark, guys like that. But our true bread and breader is on-prem. You know, I mean, one of the challenges there is, you know, you think storage guys making that operational change is challenging for them. They're used to doing things a certain way, used to managing their storage. How do you kind of pull them along or are we actually, are you seeing the customers, you know, embracing that and asking for that now? We do see a lot of them asking for that because they've got so much, what I'll call business unit pressure. Oh, I saw a commercial, I read something in the Wall Street Journal. We must go to the cloud. And the IT guy goes, why? And he goes, I don't know. Let's go through the business reasons why you might want to do that. And I'll show you all the technical and these program reasons why I can deliver to you all those things that you think you need and want with the very, what I'll call traditional on-prem business model, but it looks and feels like that public cloud of operational model. So take me through a lifetime of storage again. I think I might have missed the point. But if I want to upgrade basically in three or four years, I have some certainty in that I'm not going to lose the capabilities, the efficiencies and the speeds that I have now. You're just going to bring the new stuff on my deck. I'm going to be off and running. So how does that improve my performance? How does that make me better? Yeah, so what we do is let's say you bought a Ford Mustang today. And what we do is inside of the, let's say inside of the insurance policy, or if you bought the extended maintenance policy, we would put the cost of the 2019 Ford Mustang into that cost. But because, and here's where it's really neat, where it makes it work, because these flash and NAN vendors are completely throwing Moore's Law out the window in how fast they're advancing densities, that system in three or five years is going to probably be 30, 40 cents on the dollar for what you're paying today. So for what looks like an uplift, like a standard 24 by seven, four hour response time maintenance agreement, we can slide that in and amortize it over 36 or 60 months, and you can barely feel it. And that was three or five years out. We come rolling in with a brand new car in your garage that has all the new bells and whistles, all those things like this next generation NVME and all that, it just happens. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to go, oh man, how am I going to go get another $100,000 of capex? It just kind of happens along the way. Almost like if you're rolling a lease over it with that car. So you give IT certainty, you give budget certainty, all those things, and so you bring stability to it. Right. Otherwise a pretty nail-biting time for people, right? Exactly, and then I'll even make it smoother with this gigabyte pricing model. Sure, yeah. All right, so Rob, how about kind of the VMware hooks here? Usually we come to the show, we talk about things like VVOLs, talk about the various integrations. What updates do you have as to kind of working with VMware and what are you hearing from customers? Yeah, what's nice is with this cloud platform we've got here, we were able to deliver the performance and capacity scale for large enterprises to get a couple million IOPS and let's say six raw petabytes in about 10 or 15 U. And then what that does, that lowers a lot of the operational cost and complexity of managing racks and racks of gear. We can typically get one rack of traditional gear into one U of our new gear. So all that fussing around with performance optimization, all that goes away. So the VM administrator can then go focus on the applications that are running on. And I tell you, I think most of us in our position in this market, we're all doing the VVOLs things, we all do all the VAI primitives, we're all there. This cloud platform's neat, because then we can really enable that hybrid cloud model that Amazon or the Azure, as I mentioned, can hook into and customers can build that hybrid cloud. Absolutely, we heard in the keynote this morning from Pat Gelsinger, customers need to push up the stack. And so we need to do things from the infrastructure layer to free them up, to be able to do that. Do you see that shifting, what do you see on the ground from your customers that are implementing your environments? How does that impact what they can do to kind of serve the business better? Yeah, we had a customer panel just recently and one of the people in the audience asked one of our end users say, how do you like all the reporting tools and things with Tageout? And the guy goes, I don't use them. And at first I'm like, oh my God, this is the worst answer, I'm doomed, my boss is going to kill me. But then he followed up and said, I don't ever have to look at them because the thing just runs. It's so fast, it's smooth, my end users never complain about performance or anything, it just works. So back to what I was saying, he's able to up level his job, he doesn't have to play around with storage too anymore, he's up there maximizing the value of those applications. Yeah, we actually, I did a little video coming into the event and said, if we do what we really want to do, we should have this be the storage list conference rather than the storage world that we've been talking about the last few years. Well, if you look before the Industrial Revolution, everybody put their factories on a river and had their own paddle wheels generating their own power. Now we don't even think about it, we just plug it into the wall. Storage is getting there. So if you can get out your crystal ball, because you're always trying to solve the next problem. I mean, what is it, maybe back in the scientists in the laboratory right now, what are you working on or what do you hear from customers? Okay, this is great, but this is the next hurdle we have to get through, the next barrier we need to solve. I think the barrier is actually on our vendor side that supplies the flash to us because our architectures that supports these multiple tiers, we're always on the lookout for the best performance optimized media and the best capacity optimized media. And our engineers continually qual that and find that best product and that best technology and we just integrated into our roadmap over time. So we're not having to crack big code in terms of big architectural changes. We're just taking the best of both worlds and rolling them into our platform and then delivering them into our customers and more and more on that lifetime storage program. Well, Rob, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. And I know it's an AC-DC thing, but I was thinking jumping Jack Flash should work his way somewhere into your booth. Let's work on that for next year. Thank, I appreciate it. All right, good deal. Thanks, John. Tisha, thanks for being with us and we'll continue our coverage from VMworld here in Las Vegas right after this. You're watching theCUBE.