 Okay, we're back. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's production of VMworld 2013. theCUBE goes to events like this. We cover tech in depth. We go out and find tech athletes. We try to extract the signal from the noise, bringing the best guests that are out there at these events. This is the software-defined storage spotlight. We're unpacking a lot of the SDS trends. You hear a lot of talk about software-defined Wikibon. It's called software-led. We started tracking this a number of years ago looking at some of the trends. Eric Holbert is here along with Brady Wilson. Eric's the CEO and co-owner of Opus Interactive and Brady is the CTO gentleman. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you. So let's talk about Opus. You guys are a service provider. Tell us a little bit about your business, why you started the company. We started the company to solve that problem that a lot of the companies were having around workforce or workloads that needed to put into the cloud and data centers. We actually started as an application development in a creative company back in 1994 and made that transition into actually hosting and managing that infrastructure for customers. So really just trying to be technology, meet humanity, actually have people behind the solution and VMware is the choice that we did on HP hardware. Yeah, the name implies creative. So you guys started there. You just didn't ever change the name, right? Yep. Yeah, we know that story. Okay, but so the primary focus now is you're providing infrastructure services, is that right? Yeah, infrastructure is a service and IT is a service. Okay, and talk a little bit more about that. So what do I buy from you? You buy anything from compute and storage services, whether you want just straight infrastructure, you know like a private dedicated cloud, not public cloud, you know like an Amazon or Azure or things like that. That's sort of the hybrid cloud and then co-location services and then any kind of managed services and security that goes on top of that. Okay, so you said not a public cloud. It's a private cloud solution that's hosted by you guys. Correct, and one of our five data centers. Okay, and talk a little bit about types of customers, name customers if you can. So the type of customers for us, we've got verticals, travel and tourism is a pretty big one for us. A lot of marketing agencies, so we do a lot of hosting of sort of like what we call Throwaway Campaigns. So it'll be things for like Intel and HP and Microsoft Cisco that neither side wants to actually host the information or you know that campaign like Superbowl ads, things like that where they're driving the traffic to the actual hosting infrastructure. So we'll do a lot of those being that neutral third party service provider. And then also finance and healthcare and some retail as well as manufacturing. So a pretty big variety on our verticals. So Brady, can you talk about your Superbowl ads got my attention? So I want to talk about that a little bit. So can you talk about the infrastructure a little bit, how you've architected it and what it looks like paying a picture of your shop for us? Yeah, absolutely. I think as long as I can remember actually we've actually really kind of settled on HP hardware actually across the board. And honestly it was left hand first is when we started before it was HP. So we were really happy when it was HP that bought. Yeah. But we have all HP blades, a lot of HP networking and now all HP storage as well. And that's kind of this record infrastructure almost 100% VMware virtualization and cloud. So virtually 100% of your servers are no pun intended virtualized. Yeah. And so can you give us a relative size of the environment? I mean, what are we talking about? I guess if you talk about numbers and things like that several terabytes of memory, several probably about a thousand VMs managed and several hundred terabytes of storage across the board. Okay, so you guys started as a left hand shop. So this whole, we hear so much about software defined storage. When you guys first heard that term, did you sort of shrug and say, okay, here's another buzzword? Or was it something you said, ah, this is what we've been doing. I mean, what was your reaction to that? Yeah, it comes across as a buzzword initially, but it is, I think like cloud, it's a way you kind of can tell that, yes, this is the way things are going. It makes sense. You know, a lot of what we do is all software based. We're managing operating systems. We're managing VMware as an operating system. So why shouldn't we manage our network? Why should we manage our storage in the same way? So, okay, so you're hosting these Superbowl ads. Let's just take that one example because everybody can relate to it. And obviously, you think, okay, you're going to get massive amounts of traffic if the ad's a good one. Can you share some experiences there and how you guys handled it? Yeah, a lot of it has to do with building the platform properly to begin with. Yeah, I want you to talk about that. Exactly, and when they come to us with something like that, we feel we've architected a platform that is going to handle that regardless, right? We really trust in, and especially since we're talking about storage now, we really trust that our storage through HP, this left-hand software, is going to be able to handle both from a performance standpoint, but it's called scale out, right? We can scale and grow as we need to. So something like that, we make sure we have the platform there to begin with so that when we do get that kind of load, or maybe we get it, or maybe we don't, like you said, if the ad's any good, we're ready for it. And we are confident that the software we've been using, left-hand and now HP, is kind of really ready for any kind of load, no matter what it might be, a mom-and-pop website or a Super Bowl ad. So what was the experience like when you first did this? You kind of stayed up all night, the night before, and just made sure everything's going to work, and what kind of traffic did you see? Can you share any metrics, or even rough sort of order of magnitude indicators? Yeah, I don't know. What kind of numbers do we see on that? I don't remember the specifics, but it was enough to justify, and we had redundant load balancers and redundant firewalls and three-tier stack on that, and they had a significant amount of traffic. So your business value to your customers there was we're going to be able to handle this. You're going to be able to get your branding out, or your direct response, or whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely. And it was nice too, because they didn't want to have to engage in buying all the infrastructure and actually do all that. And for us, we have a white paper up on our website that talks about it. It was three or four years ago, so it was really before getting to that kind of like, throwaway campaign stuff where you don't have to do that entire infrastructure. You can get exactly what you need, use it for that three or four months, and be done with it and move on to the next campaign. Okay, so you got this HP server infrastructure. What were they, Blade? Sure, they're all Blade. Okay, so Blade systems. And then you've got a left-hand array on top of that. So how about, we heard earlier about Store Virtual. You guys using Store Virtual now? So what was that like when you brought that in? Yeah, we started using that about a year ago, actually. So pure software defined, if I can use that too. Yep, so we are running that, of course, on top of VMware. So what was that transition like? Effortless, honestly. You know, we're already doing VMware, so putting Store Virtual VSA as a VM on VMware is old hat, obviously. And the software we already knew, because we're already using the hardware version of it, so the software we already knew, it's now exposed to VMware, we can just move workloads to it. Same management interface, same software, just different hardware, different means to an end. And you're a pure VMware shop, right? Not using other hypervisors, have you looked at other hypervisors? Oh yeah, I keep an eye on all of them, absolutely. But you're not using any for a product currently? Not currently, no. Okay, do you see that changing over time? If we had a customer who really required it, we could do it. Okay, so a customer says, hey, we'll be a customer if you do KVM or something, you'd say, great. Yeah, we've had some hyper-V customers in the past that have now migrated to VMware, and then some like Solace VM open stack type stuff as well, but it's a very, very small percentage of what we do. We try to be very focused on VMware. Yeah, just, well, talk about the benefits of that. From a standpoint of whether it's costs, simplicity, the manager allows you to focus on why a lot of service providers in your position will sort of chase any business, right? But you've been able to successfully stick with sort of a homogeneous infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, realistically, we want to be very focused as one of our core competency being specifically VMware for the hypervisor, and then on the HP side for both storage and compute. You know, being very focused like that across multiple verticals helps us gain more business and, you know, better reputation over the years. We've been doing it for a long time since 94. So, we did our first set of servers and colocation back in 96, did a little bit, you know, a little stint of internet service providing as well. So we've certainly been around for a long time doing it, and also developing the applications back in the day. Originally it has blended some experience for actually building these big apps across the board, whether it's commerce or, you know, complete content management systems, so. So that you guys are building? Yeah, we used to. We don't do that anymore. We split off from that part of the company, but Brady and I had that direct experience when we used to manage all the developers as well. Okay, so you got, your compute has virtualized, it's virtually 100% you said, and now you've got this software defined storage layer. Did it, when you went from sort of an array-based system to the software defined, you said it was seamless, okay. Did it change anything, however, in terms of management complexity, or, you know, what differences it make from a business standpoint when you made that transition? I'd say one of the things it's doing for us is it's kind of compressing our compute and storage, bringing it back together. I'm sorry, you said it again, compressing what? Compressing our compute and storage, our platforms, bringing them back together. We're a smallish company as far as headcount, so I don't have, well, I mean, we got 10 people, right? I got four admins that I need to manage everything. I don't have siloed, I don't have a storage team, I don't have a backup team, we have to manage it all. So, the closer that stuff is together, the more software that that is. We don't want to manage multiple boxes, right? Yeah, the more software all of that is, this talks about network as well, the better off we are. Yeah, you don't want to be a deep storage expert. I don't want to learn storage language, no. No offense to all you storage experts out there. Provisioning loans is not something that you want to deal with. Yeah, but realistically, like Brady was saying, even though we've got a smaller amount of people, right? We've got five locations, a little over 200,000 square feet of available data storage space to us, the amount of actual VMs we can manage and the infrastructure that we can do per admin, since admin, right, is just only growing. So it's been quite a change in terms of really, for us, getting it to a lower cost per gig, but be flexible on how many IOPS we can actually get out of it, despite which piece that we're trying to sell to a customer. Yeah, it's interesting about this discussion. You always hear, you know, small companies, you know, web companies go on Amazon, they can compete with the big guys. You guys are small from a headcount cloud service provider, competing evidently very effectively with larger firms, using infrastructure that is, you know, off the shelf simplified, you're not doing, you know, what a lot of, when you envision like hyperscale, right? PhDs, you know, putting bits together. So talk a little bit about how you're able to compete with the bigger guys and the importance of the infrastructure in terms of enabling that. Well, you know, definitely, like you said, right? Obviously off the shelf, high quality hardware and software, doing it well. A lot of the verticals that we hit around like travel tourism finance, they're typically applications that we've helped either build in the past, have some deep experience there. So we can provide that level of assurance for customers. We also have a lot of other software as a service providers like Sitecore, Ektron, Sitefinity that are pushing out there that will get a lot of business that way. And then e-commerce because of our experience there. And then obviously just being around for a really long time and relying on our partners like HP and VMware, we get a lot of business that way too. So let's just continue to be a good aspect behind that. I'd add to that really quickly that back to the platform side of that. The tools and the platform we get from HP and VMware as well, since that's our platform, that's what allows us to do a lot of work where we couldn't buy ourselves. We can't develop apps to do what VMware products can do. We can't develop that. But I can't go with an open source hypervisor and expect to get the performance monitoring, the management, the federation, the hybrid cloud, all of that. I can't get that ourselves. So that's why we have to get the right platform to be able to compete. So what do you think about the open source movement? I mean, we've had discussions on theCUBE this week. Some folks say, I mean, you got two camps, right? One camp says the open source is going to win the long game. Ultimately, they'll figure it out and get there. The other camp says, well, today anyway, it takes a long time and they may or may not get there. Our strategy is to stay ahead. Carl Eschenbach said, we're going to keep functionally staying ahead and you hear that. So from a consumer standpoint, you just don't have the time is what I just heard or the resources to go open source. So do you see that changing over time or do you see sort of a mixed model where you do more open source? I would say I would continue to see a mixed model. I mean, I love open source. We use it where we can. We're doing it. In certain places. Well, I mean, we used to use it pretty heavily in monitoring. We switched that up eventually, but we use that quite a bit. We are not opposed to using open source tools. Like we talked about earlier, if someone came to us and really had to have something that was virtualization from the open source world, we would do it and embrace it, but. But not for open source sake. You do it because it drives. The best tool to the job. It's the same reason where we're sort of operating system agnostic, windows or Linux. What's best for the customer in this situation? A lot of your colleagues are dogmatic about this issue, right? Oh, I'm not going anywhere unless it's open source. That's probably less than 20% of the audience, but it's a vocal one. So what I'm hearing from you is more practical. You basically got a job to do, get a business to run, get owner in your title, worry about stuff like that. All right, what else? I'll give you the final word on sort of your business. Where are you going? Relationship with HP, VMware? You know, we're growing quite a bit. We've actually had a really good quarter. We've just grown a little over 20% in this last quarter. We're continuing to do some expansion, both in the Portland market as well as Dallas, Texas. And we'll hopefully be bringing online another cloud pod for us in Vegas sometime later this year. Anything, I said last question, I lied. Anything HP and or VMware could do to just make your life easier? No, they've been doing everything that we need lately, especially with the Storiver virtual and then some of the new features released. This conference has been huge for us. That's going to be really good. We have a lot of work to do, yeah. All right, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Pleasure meeting you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We're right back. We're going to talk to FedEx and stay on this software-defined storage theme. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2013. I'm Dave Vellante and we'll be right back.