 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Las Vegas at HPE Discover 2016. First show as HPE Discover in Las Vegas, so we're excited to be here. And we wanted to, we thought it was hot, so we thought we'd go to Switzerland. We have the Switzerland of the tech world Q-Logic. I'm really excited to have Greg share on the CTO of Q-Logic. Welcome, Greg. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So, you've been on theCUBE, but, Tom, you've seen a lot of change in the industry. And again, we call you Switzerland because you guys are really the stuff that connects everything together. If the cloud doesn't work, if you guys aren't in there helping power. So, what are your impressions of the show this year compared to some of the other HPE Discover's you've been to? Actually, I'm really impressed with it. I think that the amount of traffic, the amount of new things that are being talked about, there's enough forward-looking things in terms of HPE's focus on the machine, in terms of future capabilities. But also, I think we're starting to see more and more the reality of the composability, the composable solution in synergy. That was announced last year at Discover in London. But this year, we're right across from the synergy arena. And I really love it because I think it's bringing a much clear, much simplified story in terms of what synergy is. I think there's some level of confusion of, oh gosh, what's the difference between it and a blade server in the past? And this year, they actually have a rack of servers right next to the synergy composable servers showing with the addition of one view, the integration of both sides into the same environment. So I think it's a very, very healthy story and a lot more explanation behind it. Because it's a pretty important point because there's a lot of legacy stuff out there. There's a lot of infrastructure that's already out there running big apps and legacy apps at the same time. It's a lot of greenfield opportunity. People are putting in new apps and we just heard about the partnership with Docker. But those things have to work together, right? They can't work in an independent silo. That's very true. I mean, I have the luxury that being a CTO, I get to live most of my life in the future and then I get the wake up call when I talk with folks about things like 100 gig ethernet and 64 gigabit fiber channel and all these neat nifty things that are really a ways off in the future for most people. There's a little bit of 100 gig ethernet that's installed now. But it's not broadly deployed in the data center. So I get the wake up call to say, okay, you're right. We do have this very broad environment where we have the old and the new mixing together because people can't abolish their investments that they have today in technology. And I think that's one of the great things about Synergy is that it really does leverage the existing environment of rack based servers that are very popular and will remain popular even after the full deployment of this Synergy composable platform. But it gives us a great fit between them. We have a footprint in moving forward in both fiber channel and ethernet across blade and composable as well as rack. Today we were actually excited. We announced along with HP our 25 gig ethernet solution. So that's 25 gig ethernet is sort of, we see it as sort of the new 10 gig. But to your point, it's probably not going to take the world by storm overnight. But we see it as a wonderful upgrade path of deploying something that's 25 gig ready. Even though it was at our booth today and it was really funny because customer came up and he saw our tagline and he saw 25 gig and 25 is the new 10 and he said, ah, crap, I just upgraded to 10 gig. I said, no, no, that's good, that's good. 10 gig, the infrastructure that you have today will work perfectly with 25. And you can install this product in the host adapters today and just upgrade whenever you're ready. And so it's a 25 gig ready story as well as, because the whole world doesn't change overnight even though some of us technology wise get to see the future in advance. And we think, oh yeah, everybody's got 25 gig. Everybody's got 50 and 100 gig. And it's maybe not everybody. So the other thing that's changed a lot over the last couple of years is obviously the cloud. And I don't know, we're talking a little bit off cameras as with all things, right? You get pendulum swings. And there was a tremendous pendulum swing aggressively towards public cloud. And it seems to be, as we've had in a number of CUBE interviews today, that it's kind of swinging back a little bit where people are maybe a little bit smarter about what can't move to the cloud. What is the right place for what workload? What are you seeing around kind of this thing? You know, we see very much green field opportunities. We see a lot of, certainly a lot of startups, they don't buy their own infrastructure anymore, they start out in the cloud. But in terms of enterprise-based customers, we saw this big movement of, hey, we're going to move as much as we possibly can. And frankly, many of the applications are moving back now. A lot of it's because of SLAs and even control issues in terms of customer lists, sensitive data, what's my protection in the cloud, things like that, that have really caused some bigger issues. And so I do think we see the pendulum swing back. I mean, even in what we would call our mature business, I hesitated to call it legacy, I'll call it mature. Being as though I have a greater- Seasoned, we go with season. There you go. There you go, I like that. Our seasoned mature technology. We've seen our port counts in terms of our port count shipments on fiber channel host adapters actually move up over the course of last calendar year. So, you know, where a lot of folks have said, oh gosh, it's way past its prime. I think some of that is people who had anticipated moving all their workloads into cloud-based storage, and now they're realizing that they had a pent-up demand and they're actually increasing their investment in their existing sands. So the other huge trend that we've seen, and it just keeps growing, is flash, right? And flash and all flash arrays and, you know, the growth of flash, and we hear over and over that, you know, flash isn't just for low latency, super high-value applications anymore. It's for everything, and then, oh, by the way, you get all these second-order benefits that you never anticipated when you put in more flash. At the same time, it puts a lot more speed pressure on the rest of the system, right? It's your basic assembly line. You fix one thing, you move to your next point of failure. What are you seeing from your perspective on the adoption of flash, and how it's impacting your business directly? Oh, that's a great point, because, I mean, I think that's been one of the big growth drivers, both in higher-speed Ethernet, as well as higher-speed fiber-channel. You know, not just a year ago, 80% of our business was 8-gig fiber-channel, of our fiber-channel business, and now we see about 35% of it shipping at 16-gig, and especially on the target, or the storage array side, we see those as the first adopters for 32-gig fiber-channel, mostly attributed to the all-flash array folks. Because, you know, they used to be gated by their storage being rotating media, and the bit rate for rotating media disk drive, a sass or a SATA drive, was relatively low. Now we've got NVMe SSDs that can drive at whatever, however many lanes you want of PCIe, it can drive that forward. We recently did a demo where we filled a 100-gig Ethernet pipe with just five NVMe disks, five NVMe PCIe devices. That was enough to fill a 100 gigabit sustainable pipe, and you think, well, shoot, that drives a huge amount of bandwidth because most of the AFA's are moving into the enterprise. The enterprise predominantly uses fiber-channel as its sands. We see a huge adoption of higher-speed fiber-channel in sands. For the green-field environments, we see them moving over to both 25-gig Ethernet, as well as some of them, even as much as 100-gig Ethernet. And the other thing is people want to hold more data longer, right? So the economics have flipped from being a liability with too much of this stuff to, wow, it's an asset, and I don't know what I have in there, but I better keep it so I can mine it and see what's in there. Well, and that's the fascinating part, is that yesterday's liability, we all saw the issues that we had years ago about, oh my gosh, this data's a liability because we might be sued for data that we didn't know we had, and now all of a sudden it's, hey, we can mine this stuff and sell it. And you look at the likes of the public cloud guys, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and I don't know about you guys. You can't go on to any of the social media. I get advertisements for what I searched last on the web, and I think, holy smokes, these guys know way too much about me. That data mining is becoming a reality with all the analytics, and so it's a huge new field. But to your point earlier about the whole flash-based issue and looking at the total cost of ownership of it, it's amazing when people actually look at the full cost of storage over a course of years, power becomes a very important factor, and flash takes a fraction of the power, even though it's today considerably more expensive, but if you amortize that over a longer period, people are being able to justify using flash, as you say, for primary storage. I love it. Law of unintended consequences can work to the pro and the con, right? Yes, very much. All right, so give you the last word. What are you looking for the last couple days here at HP Discover? What do you hope to stumble upon? Oh boy, I tell you, this show is such a powerful show for us. HP is our largest customer. We sell through HP a tremendous amount of our equipment, and for us, this is just a terrific environment to both meet with HP execs, as well as customers of HP. So for us, the Switzerland is the right approach, and it's lead with whatever the customer's interested in. If that's Ethernet, or Fiber Channel, or some combination thereof, that's what we do. So it's a fabulous show from that perspective. Excellent. Well Greg, thanks for stopping by. Greg, Cher, Jeff, Rick, we're going to get some chocolate. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.