 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our beautiful Palo Alto studios. One of the things that makes theCUBE so exciting is we get great guests from great companies coming on here and talking about some of their new products that they're trying to get into the marketplace so customers can do more with their technology. And we've got that today. Eric Herzog, CMO and VP of Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM Storage is here to talk about some new things that IBM is doing that are specially relevant to high performance, closer, more down market, branch-oriented kinds of applications. Eric, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Peter. Really appreciate it. Very excited to be with theCUBE, as always. All right, so let's start. Give us the quick business update in IBM and let's talk about how that informs some of the new announcements you made. Sure. So 2008 was a great year for IBM Storage. Lots of new introductions in the portfolio. Continue with our multi-cloudness, everything we've doing now for several years all about multi-cloud, hybrid, private, multiple public cloud providers. We continue that mantra. We also did something that was very interesting from a storage array system level perspective, brought out extensive portfolio around NVMe, the newest high performance protocol, both inside of a storage array and connecting a storage array into a network fabric for storage. Now let's talk about that NVMe because NVMe has been associated a little bit more with higher end stuff. Some of the new things you're doing are bringing NVMe and related classes of technology, flash to a new class of workload, new class of use case. Tell us about it. Absolutely. So what we're doing is bringing out the brand new, refresh, store-wise portfolio. We start with our V7000, which has NVMe both inside the array and support for NVM over Fiber Channel. We have our 5100 just below that, also supporting NVMe in the storage system. We're bringing out a new version of our 5030 called the 5030E. And at the very entry space are 5010E. These solutions all deliver dramatic performance gains, but incredible price discounts as well. For example, the 5010E is not only twice as fast as the older 5010, but it happens to be up to 25% less expensive, more for the money. That's the key watchword in the store-wise family. So tell us a little bit more about the 5010E. What kind of use, you left talking about applications, workloads, use cases. What kinds of applications, workloads, use cases are we talking about? So we've done a couple of things. So first of all, we're leading with all flash across the portfolio. Yes, we still sell hybrids and hard driveaways and we'll still do that in the 5010E, for example. So if you're using hard drive arrays, backup and archive workloads, of course. Now, when using all flash arrays in a smaller shop, it could be your primary storage. At Herzog's Barn Grill, that might be the great way to go. When you're thinking more of the broader enterprises, it's great for edge. So branches of a bank, all of the outlets of a retail location. And even a core data center, not every workload is even. Not every data set is even. So certain things need more expensive arrays. And other ways you can go with an entry product, still deliver the availability, the reliability and the performance you need. But you don't always need to spend the most amount of money. And storage gives you that breath, gives you the right price point, the right software. And it even gives you six nines of availability, which is only 31 seconds of downtime in a full year on an entry product. That's incredible. Well, I would think that the 5030E would just be especially relevant for some of those scale out workloads. Tell us about that one. So in the 5030E we can scale out into a two node cluster up to 32 petabytes. But we start small, you can get it at 12. Same thing, two X performance at up to 30% less money. And all of the store-wise family comes with our award-winning spectrum virtualized software, which delivers enterprise class data services, such as snapshot, replication, data rest encryption, tiering, migration, et cetera, et cetera. Not only for IBM's store-wise portfolio, but actually can work with over 450 arrays, most of which are not ours. Great value for the money, great software, and bringing better performance at a lower price. The 5030E and the whole portfolio includes our spectrum virtualized software family. Now, that's important because as we think about the relationship between these and other products in the IBM portfolio and multi-cloud, I know there's some work that's being done there. Tell us a little bit about some of the new updates that you've made to how that spectrum family is becoming even more relevant in a multi-cloud sense. Well, when you look at the whole family, everything in the spectrum family has heavy cloudification in a multi-cloud environment. Let's take spectrum protect. Not new from an announcement perspective of what we're doing and what we're launching and what we're doing from a new perspective, but it's been able to back up to the cloud for years. In fact, over 350 cloud providers use spectrum protect as the engine for their backup as a service portfolio. Spectrum virtualized Contudo cloud, but we also have spectrum virtualized for public cloud that allows you to do snapshot replication not only for IBM arrays, but for competitive arrays out to a public cloud and even supports air gapping with a snapshot so you don't have to worry about ransomware or malware. That's all with a spectrum virtualized family. Our spectrum sale product can automatically tear to the cloud. IBM Cloud Object Storage can go from on-premise to off-premise. So the big thing we've done with all of our portfolio, the software and then the arrays that sit on it when the case of spectrum protect backup is make sure we can work with any and almost every single cloud in the industry whether it's a big cloud like IBM cloud, Amazon or Microsoft or a small cloud provider. You may want to use a local cloud provider depending on where you're located and not use one of the big cloud providers. We work with that cloud provider too. But you made some, especially for spectrum virtualized, IBM spectrum virtualized, you're adding a new brother to the portfolio. So that's spectrum virtualized for public cloud. We first brought it out on IBM cloud only. It now supports AWS. We know customers multi-cloud, most end users, and you guys have written about it extensively at Wikibon and theCUBE and Silicon Angle that end users will not use one public cloud. They will have four, five, six different public clouds. So spectrum virtualized for public cloud delivers to on-site arrays all the capabilities. Spectrum virtualized for public cloud sits in a VM where virtualized instantiation out of the public cloud provider, giving all those enterprise-class functionalities and allowing us to move data back and forth to IBM cloud, allows us to move data back and forth to an Amazon cloud, not only for store-wise, but also for, again, over 450 arrays that aren't ours using the spectrum virtualized software. So that's a great addition. We had it for IBM cloud, now for Amazon. As we publicly stated, we first brought it out last year. It'll also be extended to more clouds in the future as well. So store-wise, gotten a refresh, new spectrum virtualized for public cloud, also getting, you know, adding to the portfolio. Great stuff. How do you anticipate that customers are going to respond? Well, we've already had a great response for those customers we've talked to under a non-disclosure agreement. Now we're public with this new portfolio. What's not to like? You get extensive software capability spectrum virtualized. With our 5100 store-wise and our 7000 stories, you now get the NVME technology, which is the White Hawk performance technology in the storage industry, except at a much lower price point that what our competitors have brought out. So we brought NVME high-end technology into the entry price point space, which is great. And we also have a nice portfolio that gives you certain products you could use at Core Data Center, other products that you would use at Edge, like banking at all the locations or in retail. So you're not going to put the most expensive product but you have a great six-nines of availability, extensive software, twice the performance. And it said up to 25% or 30% less, depending on which of our products, than the older product, bigger, faster, better, cheaper. So Eric, let me be one of the first to congratulate you. Thank you. The IBM storage journey since you and Ed, Ed Walsh have shown up at IBM or come back to IBM in some cases has been a great thing to watch. You've really refreshed the portfolio, made some great strides, and we're getting great feedback from customers about the effort. So congratulations and all that. Great, thank you. And the new store-wise is the latest in that and look for more just like we did in 2018, refresh across the pod. There's more coming in the second half of the year and other elements of our portfolio. Great to see IBM back and relevant in the storage world. Eric Herzog, CMO and VP of Worldwide Storage Channels, IBM Storage, thanks once again for being on theCUBE. Great, thank you, Peter. And I'm Peter Burris, thanks for listening. Until next time, thanks for participating in this CUBE conversation.