 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, John Furrier and John Walz. And welcome back to theCUBE coverage here at VMworld. We continue our week-long coverage here at Mandalay Bay Convention Center. As we look at what's happening in the world of VMware. It's been a big show, great show. Exhibit floors pack a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of energy. And we've been really privileged to bring you a lot of guest insight. And we continue that trend here today with Colleen Sanchez. Who's the VP of Enterprise Development at IBM. Colleen, good to see you. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks for being with us. All right, so tape is dead, long-lived tape. What's that all about these days, right? Because there is truth in half of that, but not in the former. So there is data protection, but then also you transition to this idea is like how to play in the cloud. We want to be cloudy tape and we're there to support that as well. And so there's a number of cloud service providers, et cetera, that we provide a support from a tape perspective. And then just in the general marketplace, as far as tape being used, what's the applicability there? Who's using tape still and what are they doing with it? Yeah, so Fortune 500, 90%. Fortune 500 backs up to tape. So that is a beautiful thing, because we're relevant. And by the way, I'm not necessarily your old father's tape. I don't look like it, right? I hope. Talk about the innovation of tape, because Dave Vellante, who's not here this week, he and I always talk about tape because it always is dead and someone's going to kill tape. But the medium, there's mediums for different type of backups and different storage techniques. And the media business obviously tapes all of it. Let's go to NAB. All they do is talk about tape, for instance. Here we're doing so much terabytes a day in video. Where's the innovation of tape? Give us a quick snapshot. Demystify that tape is boring, tape is dead. Share with us the coolness of tape. So we chase capacity for the best amount of price because we want you all to use tape. So from our perspective, it's all about sewing more, more data as data is growing, and then also this idea that we want to do it with a tremendously cost advantage. Just about the engineering that you guys are doing, because people might not know the nuances of how much engineering goes into the advancement of tape. What are some of the techniques? Share some stories. Tell us a little about the engineering behind tape and making tapes successful. What if the tape's old? What if the tape's shredded? How do you get it back? All these things, there's all kinds of engineering that you've been involved in. Yeah. So I'll start with like a real short story real quick, is so 1986, unfortunately we had the challenge of mission disaster. While the team in Tucson, Arizona abstracted in partnership with NASA, bits of tape media basically cleaned off the crud. Chemical engineers as well as data scientists came together to abstract data off that. Not that we had the government clearances to listen to what happened on flight recorder, but we gave the data necessary to NASA. So that was... So you recovered the Challenger Explosion, which is one over Texas. That's the one that sprayed all the debris. It was Florida. Florida, okay. But the debris field was wide, right? Exactly. Had tape scraps, if you will, and extracted data off that? Yeah. So, well, the engineering rock stars that I worked with, they're the ones who were the data scientists that abstracted the media. So when you say you, I'm like, I don't know. Tucson team. The Tucson team. Where you work. Yes. Okay. So Tacey, give to the government, then what happened? So we gave the information to the government and we expanded our tape portfolio to where we recognize reclamation on the enterprise side. So we have the Jaguar line that focuses on delivering enterprise tape to various partners worldwide. For example, seismic activity, the data that we collect to track like weather patterns, as well as what we do with earthquakes is stored on some of this enterprise tape, as well as what we do with linear tape open, the LTO line. So LTO is an exciting set of technologies and we publish a roadmap with the LTO consortium because we have partners from an IBM perspective to establish innovations as well. And that allows us to scale down to support entry as well as mid-range clients. Well, I was going to ask, sorry, John, excuse me. You know, we hear so much or there's so much discussion these days about flash storage and all those capabilities and what have you. Why is tape still relevant then? I mean, what advantage does it provide that these more sophisticated, at least hotter terms or buzzwords or capabilities can't or doesn't? So I would say economics. It's all about the price, price per gig. So like we're basically at a cent per gig to store with lots of data. Clients find that extremely attractive worldwide. Is there anything that makes it safer? I mean, in fact, if John's got, he can hold this cartridge of tape and you can stick it in his pocket, you know exactly where it is. And as opposed to some kind of intrusion, internet work and... Security. Those things. So that's what I'm wondering. Encryption. And we support a significant access to what we do from a security perspective across the tape portfolio and solution-wise. And then also just side note, we're greener. We don't have this at disc media or things spinning. We actually just sit there and we're much more greener than other storage media. Yeah, potential landfill issues have gone away because they store those tapes. I got to ask about the form factor because I'm intrigued, because this is again the key point. The reason why tape is so attractive is price per gigabyte. One. That's correct. Two, it's been around for a while. People are used to it. And three, I wanted to ask, what's the form factor innovation? How big are the cartridges? What's some of the sizes? Are they getting smaller? Just generally, what's the... So we focus on improving the overall density and also with each generation. So we can be as efficient as possible with regards to the tape drives going into the libraries in order to store more based on existing library technologies, et cetera. So great. So what's new? What's the next big thing in tape? Well, so I would say in shortly, we will do an LTO-8. And that will be coming out within the... You'll hear deployment in partnership with what we do or the work we do in the consortium. So I got to ask. I'm curious, because I'm a curious mind sometimes. Tape engineers, what's it like there? Who would you paint the picture of? What's it like to work there? Your peers, what do you guys work on? How do you guys work? What's the culture like? So a great team to work with, no doubt. The reason why I tracked what went on in 1986 is that I wanted to work with data scientist rock stars. And I remember my father being a professor told me, it's like, oh, well, maybe I should teach you what a real rock star is, right? So it's... He was down on the whole tape thing. I wouldn't say down, but I think he was disappointed based on rock stars to me were data scientists. And the people that I work with are polymer scientists, chemical engineers, right? Mechanical engineers, like it goes, the list goes on. So talk about holistic elements. Straight off the reservation from the parent expectation. I know. But back then, I mean, data scientists wasn't as hip-packed. I mean, I have a database degree and in the 80s, it wasn't real something you brag about. Today you'd be like a rock star. Yeah, well, my first compiler was Apple and I wrote code on Pascal. So I like always felt like I've got to move to technology and so for someone like... So you must love the data science explosion that's happening now. Oh, big time. Hence why I'm in storage. Storage is where it's at. Love it, live it. And by the way, it's sometimes the hardest. Whether we're talking flash... We had Tim on earlier who said storage is where the action is. That's where the big innovation's gonna come from right now when he said complexity. Do you agree with that? Oh, totally. Two examples of the most fun I've had in the years is working on the linear tape file system which is Spectrum Archive and also which feeds NAB from a media and entertainment perspective and the other is Easy Tier. The idea of optimizing with the best media type between hot and cold data. I tell you, the tape is super exciting. You're making me excited about tape. And I think that is the thing that, I mean, we talk about cost all the time when we look at our backup strategy, like if you could just store it, if you have the space to store the cartridges, why wouldn't you do tape? Correct. I mean, that's really the question, right? You just put the punchline with regards to the selling process. So thank you so much, right? What do they lose? What do they lose? Do you have to have the cabinets? I mean, is there hardware involved? Yeah, of course. Are people afraid that hardware might become obsolete on the cartridge readers? My VHS, I have all these great tapes with my kids and they're like, I can't find a VH recording. So with all due respect, hardware infrastructure to me, like the whiteboard that I have in my office hardware equals toilet paper. You kind of have to have it toilet paper. Thank you guys, that's what I thought you said. Yeah, I just made sure. So it's necessary, right? Yeah, you got a point. Yeah. I won't argue with you. I'm not necessarily. My basement, that's for sure. I got 386s and 486 machines. But you deal with software too, right? I mean, DS8000 and that whole array of services there. So you're not all tape all the time. I'm not all tape all the time. And DS8000 is exceptional, especially based on the work we've done in ensuring that we have flash across the entire family, product flying family we enable with DS8000. So I apologize for the model types, but the 8888, which is all flash, the 86, 8886, 8884, and soon to be the 8882. You got all those, John? Yeah, can you say that one more time? Yeah. And so the goal is to really substantiate where we feed the enterprise clients in the marketplace, as well as the mid-range, as well as the entry. Based on the data is growing, we've got to serve them. Based on the access time, we want it to be 2.5 million IOPS is what we're working on, and we're there. So we want to see even better. So the performance, you get in the gains and performance, form factor, great engineering on some of that stuff, and the costs just keep going down and down the per gigabyte cost. Agreed. Yeah. It's kind of like a throwback. I mean, it's the tape is not, I mean, in a bad way. I mean, like vinyl record sales are at an all time high right now. There's a throwback concept with vinyl records. Now tape is coming back. I agree. That's very hipster of you, by the way. Well, thank you. For your PizzleP collection. Thank you, you know. Digital world, analog world. No, but I mean tape is effective. Yeah, and as DS8000 is as well, and our focus from an IBM perspective across storage, which really feeds what we're doing with analytics as well as big data. IBM, aka cognitive, right? Okay, so what's the coolest tape story was besides the Challenger one, which by the way, that's very cool. So let's back that out. I mean, what's the, some cool, one cool story you can share. Could be cool, could be weird, it could be a corner case. What have you seen share a story about tape? So my best friend is actually a director. She went to the American Film Institute. She talked about some technology associated with Avid. And then we started to go into a deep discussion about what technology they have in their stack, which included linear tape file system. So what it allowed me to do is like, even movie editors care about what we do in tape. And they're like, yeah, because we want reels and reels of data associated with capturing the media so we can go and edit. And I was like, oh, that's the reason your movies are like three hours long that need to be lower. But what's great about that is I really oddly thought to myself, well, yeah, and hearing NAB and the value from media and entertainment, I thought to myself, well, I don't know that it's so real. Until I met my friend who's editing her movie to deploy to the marketplace or sell it to a warehouse at some point. So they're, people are comfortable with tape. So there's a really kind of a habitual kind of workflow. I agree, I agree. Well, if we take nothing else from this interview, it's the tape is cool as our LPs. And I think you've got a T-shirt in the making there, actually. Awesome. Yeah, let's work on that for next year. And that sounds good. All right, good deal. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you very much for the time. Yes, that's a good deal. Thanks, Sanchez. Back with more here on theCUBE and just a bit from Las Vegas.