 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. At the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Oh, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to The Cube. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. Here at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Love to go to all the enterprise shows, help extract the signal from the noise. At this show, talking a lot about virtualization cloud. Going to talk a little bit more about storage today and the future of IT. Joining me for this segment, a guy I've known for a lot of years and somehow I'm in shock. It's first time on The Cube, Jeremiah Dooley, cloud architect with solid fire. Jeremiah, thanks for making the trip up here to New England in the cold. It is cold. Yeah. That's for sure. It's actually my second time that I got to be on The Cube. I was on The Cube back in 2010 as a customer. Wow. Was that VMworld? It was. It was VMworld 2010. It was VMworld 2010. Wow, I can picture it now actually. That was a long time ago. The beard's like a little bit more fuller and stuff like that. It's amazing. We've done, I think somebody said it. We were north of 6,000 interviews, but that VMworld 2010, that was early days. You were one of the pioneers on the program. I was happy to stamp the multiple visitor badge. All right, so great. So welcome back. You know the format. Especially somebody I've known for so many years. We just want to continue the conversations we've had. For those people that don't follow you on the Twitter, don't read your blogs, haven't watched your career, give us a little bit about your background and then what you do at that solid fire. So I've kind of been all over the place. I started on the customer side, primarily in healthcare, and then moved over to a service provider based out of Charlotte, and that was the customer that I was on theCUBE with in 2010. And my job there was building out the VMware, their public cloud platform. And so that was kind of my introduction to the virtualized environment, my introduction to the industry. When they got acquired, I moved over to VCE and spent probably the better part of four years over there ending up in the office of the CTO, talking with customers about how infrastructure makes platforms and platforms run workloads and let's talk about workloads. So I've been with solid fire since April and we're kind of doing the same thing, right? Solid fire is interesting because they are an all flash array company, but they really, they operate like and they go to market much like a software development company does. And so it really lends itself well to that kind of infrastructure is boring. Let's work on the applications and the workloads and the platforms that are going to run them. And it's been a lot of fun. Yeah, you know, Jeremiah, I love, just give a little insight to some folks. Like on Twitter, you and I go back and forth on this. It's like, I'm an infrastructure guy by, you know, it's been the most my career. I'm a hardware guy by training. I mean, I love a good designed sheet metal. And you know, we love, you know, gosh, Andy Bechtelstein, you know, does phenomenal layouts of boards and everything. And it's the stuff that just makes, you know, somebody like me go like, wow, this is cool. I look at what Amazon's doing and you know, working on the power supplies and I'm like, there's a lot of awesome stuff that can happen in hardware. None of it's easy, right? I mean, none of it's easy and all of it's important and you can't have a good platform that provides the availability and performance of the applications that the customer wants without having the hardware pieces that make it up. So I don't minimize the, I mean, particularly some of the stuff that they're doing down there at the low level, reinventing the server as a platform or as an object is incredibly important work that we're doing. But for the vast majority of enterprise users who only care how fast the application is and whether or not they can log into it, those details are now and kind of always have been boring. And so it's fun to sit in the middle and understand and respect what has to go on on the hardware side and understanding what goes into building a distributed storage array. But then how do we translate that value into something that the end users, something that the administrators, something that the virtualization admins are going to be able to immediately see and take advantage of in a real way. And largely today that's a software question and not a hardware question. Yeah, so no doubt we've been watching SolidFire since it was in stealth. David Floyd of the CTO, Wiggy Bonn, wrote a big piece talking about how new architectures should be built and SolidFire scored very well in there. What I wanna ask you, Jeremiah, is in the industry we built up a whole industry around storage and there are storage buyers and there are storage administrators and their job is they look so much at the speeds and feeds and price per gigabyte and how many IOPS they can get right there. It's got to be a challenge because you guys, as you said, focusing on the data services and the applications, walk us through. Do you talk to the same storage guys? Do you have to go upstream? Where does that live? Well, what we know and what you know having seen the industry the way I have is that flash broke everything. The flash, when we put flash in any part of the infrastructure as a cash, as a tier, as a platform, flash broke everything that we use traditionally in the storage environment. It broke cost per gig. It broke how do we manage services or how do we manage the data centers? It broke all of the calculations that we had both on the selling side and on the consuming side. So we talked to the same people. What we're trying to do is explain to them the questions you have to ask, the questions you have to ask and understand from an application standpoint, but the questions that you have to ask of the vendors and what they're capable of delivering to you have pretty significantly changed. So I don't know that it's necessarily been a different conversation or a conversation with a different group of people, but there's an immense amount of inertia, right? And you and I know that the people who benefit most from the inertia are also going to be the people who are slower to adopt some of the new technologies. And so helping them get over that, we saw it with converged infrastructure. There was inertia slowing that down. It's not any different with flash. I mean, the onus is on us. We need to show use cases. We need to show value. We need to show economics. We need to start to paint a vision of the future of where that platform's going. And if we do that well, the use cases and the customers will follow it. All right, so Jeremy, I'm gonna put you on the spot. You brought up convergence. Truffin, you lived at VCE. VCE's been going gangbusters. I mean, they get a lot of stones thrown at them by a lot of people, but they're over a $2 billion run rate right now. They're doing quite well. SolidFire doesn't ignore converged infrastructure, but what is your viewpoint? You do some interesting things with it. It was actually what I came to SolidFire to do was to build them a reference architecture program. And we've partnered with Dell and Red Hat on the open stack side and Cisco and VMware. And our job is not, we don't sell converged infrastructure, right? We're not gonna do, I mean, VCE set that bar for converged infrastructure really high, both from what customers expect and what it costs to support it. Our job is to make the process of acquiring all flash storage and using it to solve workload and use case problems as seamless as possible. So the reference architectures are great. We see lots of customers that are consuming pieces of them, particularly the ones that tie off directly to a transition from disk to all flash or from fiber channel to iSCSI or any of the transitions that customers are making an addition to acquiring SolidFire storage. The content library that that reference architecture has allowed us to build in the last eight months has been really fantastic. All right, so Jeremiah, you talked to a lot of users out there. How are they doing with understanding kind of this wave of flash? Do they, you know, I said four years ago, people thought, you know, they just heard flash and they didn't understand whether it was a single drive in, you know, a VMAX or if it was Fusion IO and there's a lot of different pieces of the market and boy is a huge spectrum of what it can do out there. You know, how are we, everybody think understands they need to use it, but you know, how's the maturity and adoption out there that you see? So the presentation that I gave here today was about the evolution of the data services side and there's a first generation of data services that is, it's me trying to bring a little bit of order to the chaos of the things that are out there. The first generation of data services to me is dedupe compression, cloning and snapshots, right? All as metadata functions, not as actual block copies and I think customers understand how those services impact their economics, right? They are using those data services to translate this new scary thing into economical metrics that they can use to measure it against on the spinning disk side. So I think there's a level of understanding there that is rudimentary but is consistent across all of the all flash array vendors. It doesn't matter whether you're pure extreme IO, everybody has kind of that baseline of services. I think where we are trying hard and me personally am trying hard to help customers understand is the data services that go on top of that are the ones that don't just focus on economics. They focus on operational efficiency, they focus on how do we tie off with integrations into the platforms, the open stacks and VM worlds and cloud stacks of the world and ultimately they become the only real differentiator that one flash provider has from another, right? There are architectural issues, do you scale up? Do you scale out? How do you handle block sizes? Like there are lots of minutiae there but at the end of the day, it's how does your architecture facilitate your ability to use metadata in a way that helps solve problems as far up the stack as possible and I think that internal to the vendors we understand that that's kind of the next direction that we have to push customers and what it is that customers are doing but I would say that by and large we're at the beginning of that process, not at the end. All right, so Jeremiah in our wrap up today we're gonna talk to John MacArthur and he wrote a blog post about a week ago, your blogger maybe you read across it but he talked about the theory of one and especially for a startup what he talked about was you need to have kind of that elevator pitch is the old way of thing or in our world kind of that tweet, what differentiates me, what sets me apart, what should I think about? What's the theory of one for solid fire? QOS, now tomorrow going forward I think that solid fire is one of the only storage vendors all flash or not that has done a great job of defining what metadata can be and how it can be used from an operational standpoint. So the ability to say volume at a time regardless of what application you're running on top of it we're gonna give you the ability to guarantee a minimum limit a maximum and allow a burst of IOPS so that we can run as many workloads as possible on a single array so that we can make the Tetris pieces as varied as possible to be as efficient as we can in filling that array up that's I think that right now both from a solid fire perspective but also from an industry perspective that's the first of the really differentiated meta-data based services and that's really where solid fire shines. So great points here Amaya, I think back to when I first joined Wikibon almost five years ago now metadata was just one of the things that David Floyd beat on and said this is the future of storage and everybody came back and they were like they didn't understand it and it was way too manual. I mean to give users kind of the example is to think if you've ever had a Flickr account it's one thing to just put your photos up there but oh I wanna tag them and I wanna put them in folders as opposed to like Facebook, Facebook auto recognizes the faces now and puts them into like location and everything like that it's on the phone that metadata is built in so have we come a long way on metadata? You know where it was. On the back end, holy cow. So it's Dave Wright did a great storage field day presentation at the middle of last year where he went through and showed kind of the architectural comparisons between pure and solid fire and extreme IO and one of the things that that went over was data placement and metadata management and how those work and it was interesting to hear him say that solid fire metadata is one of the ways that we use to drive garbage collection, right? And if we were to go back five years and you were to try to explain that we're going to use metadata in a block storage array to do a garbage collection process in order to streamline what it is that we're doing from utilization standpoint like that would have been one of those things that we just really wouldn't have looked at as a viable usage for it, right? So we've come, I think we've come a long way in what metadata can be used for and frankly I think we're probably limited more by what is the market willing to see metadata as a useful solution for than we are what could we do with it? I mean, you know, the metadata is only as useful much like the tagging in Flickr it can be as detailed as you want it to be provided you have the resources, right? The time and ability and knowledge to be able to go through and do all of that tagging. I think we're there particularly solid fire from an architecture standpoint now it's just a matter of how can we exploit that to best value to solve the use cases and the problems that the customers are having. All right, so Jeremiah I want to kind of switch topics a little bit. I saw you present once talking about kind of careers in IT. Yeah. And you got a standing evasion at the end of it. I mean, it's a great thing. So you know, when I was on Geek Whispers and you know, they were talking about my career path I'm like, it's a little bit of an odd one. And they're like, Stu, they're all odd ones. There is no, you know, in our generation it's not, you know, I grew up in New Jersey and I knew people that, you know, worked for AT&T for, you know, 30, 40 years and stuff like that. I was like, I'm never going to work for them. Well, I worked for Lucin actually a couple of years after they spun out. So, you know, it used to be the person that sat at one desk and the company's changed now. It's, you know, everything changes all the time. You know, what conversation do you have with people? What's, you know, we don't have a ton of time but what's the, what are the big questions you're getting asked and what's the advice you're giving? I think, so things are changing really quickly, right? And we see guys like Kenny Coleman who have spent 18 months essentially reinventing their careers and for a lot of people they look at that and it's intimidating, right? There's so much to learn. What direction do I want to go? I have things I need to have from a career. I have things that I want to do and what I try to explain to people is there is no wrong answer, right? And if you step back from it and everybody says I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, none of us do. What do you want to be now, right? What is it right now that you feel like you could throw yourself into and that you could have enough passion for that you're going to push yourself through the learning and adoption curve and those things to become a useful part of that ecosystem? And if that changes every two years, it changes every two years, right? Trying to put a pin in there and say I want to be this for the rest of my life in our industry, it's limiting at best and I think it's kind of blocking yourself off from a significant number of both career opportunities from a financial and a growth standpoint but also just from a go learn cool stuff. Yeah, so I hate to do it but can I poke a little bit at that? Yeah. Because, look, I'm with you. It's like I read Gaping Boyd and it says, find what you're passionate about, work more on it, iterate, iterate, iterate. There's people that go to work and they do their job. As I had a manager once that said there's people that will wait until the amusement park comes to a complete stop and they're told to leave and then they'll get out and there's those of us that'll run around and go from one thing to the next. So, what about the people that, I'm happy doing my configuration today and managing my environment? Everybody wants something different out of it, right? I mean, everybody, I know lots of really smart people who work from nine to five and they use that job and their enthusiasm for it to fund the rest of their life and there's nothing wrong with that. What I think you and I know is that there's a large group of community people that we're involved with on a regular basis where that's not enough. It's not enough for me to have something that checks the boxes that I need to and then I have to go find a hobby. Like this is my hobby. This is when I'm not on the cube with you talking about this, I'm in the hallway with somebody talking about this or I'm on a plane with somebody talking about this and my job, and I think all of our jobs is to transfer enthusiasm. My job is to be passionate enough about something that I can transfer that enthusiasm to you and make you want to be more educated, more involved with the community or the technology or the vendor or whatever it is that we're doing. I don't, I mean, sometimes I wish that I could just punch out at five o'clock and not worry about the job for the rest of the day but I'm not built that way and so my job is to always find something that I am passionate enough about that I can share that enthusiasm without emptying the well. Awesome, so yeah, Jeremiah, you're still relatively new at this job but it's brand new year, what excites you for 2015? Is it Docker? Is it new SQL databases and Hadoop and all this stuff? Is it deep into coding? Everybody's becoming coders again, I've seen. Yeah, everything old is new again. I think that we have as an industry not just storage and not just public cloud and not just these individual technologies, we have at our disposal as an industry so many ways to tie the workload and the performance and availability and needs of those workloads back to any number of infrastructure constructs and my hope is that we really start to see some of those become easily accessible, be that platform as a service or infrastructure as a service or private cloud or VMware or OpenStacker, whatever the expression is of where that application runs, we have more tools and weapons in the shed today to be able to match up what the end user and the customers need out of the application with what it is that we provide from an infrastructure construct than we ever have, I think we've just uniformly done a pretty poor job of exposing one to the other. There's this whole group of people who fill that void who have to try to translate from I'm an SAP user, I'm an Oracle user or I'm a web app user into I'm an infrastructure buyer and I'm an infrastructure administrator. My hope is that with many of the technologies you talked about and others, but even the big guys, the VMware's and the Oracle's that we start to shrink that gap of translation because I think if we do, it ends up making those applications perform that much better. Yeah, great point. The applications at the center for all we've done on the application, on the infrastructure side, it's actually one of the things, I haven't talked about Docker much today, but what gets me excited about Docker is the unit of measurement. For Docker, it's the application, it is putting the app front and center, it's not some box, it's not even a VM which was a construct that did great things, but it's the app, it's a single app, it's not Linux containers was really about a bunch of stuff, Docker's single app, put it in a hub, do some really cool things. It's early days, but that's why I'm seeing startups and other people tying in. Yeah, and it's the weird math that is enterprise infrastructure. On one hand, the smaller the unit of measure, the more granular we can be about consumption and provisioning and all the things that are important from an operation standpoint. But from a business standpoint, the larger the denominator, the more capable I am of consuming everything at scale. So the more virtualized I am or the bigger the pool is that I can provision into, there's this odd dichotomy between, from an economic standpoint, I want things to have as much scale as I can, hence AWS and all of these things that are designed to share cost across multiple customers. But from a consumption metric, I want it to be as infinitesimally small as possible and I will put the Legos together, however that workloads needs them. We all live in between kind of those two poles. Yeah, Jeremiah, distributed architecture is absolutely number one thing. On my radar is where it fits. If only we had really good quality of service across the board to help with those introdescal things. So really appreciate you joining. Yeah, absolutely. Solid Fire is a company, we keep a close eye on. All right, it's going to be a wrap for now. We're going to be right back with our wrap up with John MacArthur. It's been a great day here at VTUG event. Thanks for watching, we'll be right back.