 The Hitachi Information Forum in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley, big announcement today guys. Wow, very very un-Hitachi like with all this great marketing, right? Really tremendous messaging. We've seen it in the past a little bit from Hitachi but really seeing it today. Big, big stage, Jack Dome looking good, all pumped up, a couple customers, you guys here. Now DeVang, you were in Japan, right? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, it was an interesting trip and all the flashiness that we saw today here. I mean, it's just amazing. Did you go, Rick? Yeah, yeah, we had this. You guys are both there. Tell us about that. What was that like? Yeah, there were six of us, right? Yeah, there's six of us that had gone and three of those are here today. Basically it's a preview program, you know, NDA and all that type of thing basically. So we can kind of get a feel for the message, the product, and the supporting elements of the product. Guys got the inside scoop? Yeah. Bloggers getting the inside scoop. We're breaking new ground, guys. It was amazing. They gave us access to all the engineering guys there. Would you go to Odawara? Yeah, we went to Odawara. Could you see Mount Fuji? No, no, it was a quick trip. I've been there a lot. I've never seen Mount Fuji. It's always been under clouds. Yeah, so four days, but pretty good information and every night we had dinners with Hitachi execs. So pretty open culture from that perspective. Did you attend the Hitachi user conference? Yeah, there was this conference by the name of U-Value celebrating Hitachi's 100th year anniversary and it was great to be there. They started making turbines back 100 years ago and all the innovation that has happened in the industry that Hitachi sort of leads today. Yes, so you guys really got a flavor for the culture. Right, the conglomerate nature of the bigger Hitachi. Oh yeah, and there's the storage server elements and software elements. It was a good program in terms of access for a blogger. That's unique for a blogger to have that type of access. I know that the guys, we really enjoyed it and to see a product pre-release at that level, that was, in my experience, I've not been really access to that level of detail, that level of exposure to the engineers or the product, to the messaging, everything up and down. It's been a pretty good journey as far as providing us that information. And you guys were able to give them a lot of feedback as well, I presume. I'm sure they were looking for that feedback. Some more than others. Yeah, so I think everybody brought in their own backgrounds and because we all came from different backgrounds, it was good to see the mix of information that they were looking for overall from the blogger community. All right, let's get into VSP. You guys are experts in this business, and I don't use that term lightly. I see both of you out there blogging extensively. You see each other on Twitter. You really have a deep knowledge. What's your take, DeVang, on this announcement? What are the highlights for you? So I think it's market changing. First of all, you know, as we talk about SaaS, we talk about power consumption, you know, the SaaS to technology that they are incorporating into the VSP, sublime tiering, that's going to be a big announcement again. That's something that being it's being released as of as a version one. And an overall with virtualized storage, or with virtualization these days, and virtualized data centers, customers are looking to bring more efficiency to the data centers. And this is sort of that leap into storage and interfacing VMware from that extent or any virtualization and delivering the message of efficiency and doing more with less really. How about you, Rick? What are the high points of VSP from your perspective? Well, definitely to see a, I don't want to call it a purpose built virtualized storage engine, but that's kind of what it is. Yeah, exactly. If you have to describe it, you know, it's not off the shelf, right? This is not the suit you buy a JC pen. So this is custom tailored. It's exciting in that sense, because it's going to reflect the the infrastructure requirements of the day. Okay, and I'm a VMware guy. So, you know, anything that is virtualization optimized from the start is good. I know that the VAI integration will be rolling in. It's an incremental release. So that's good to know. But you know, it's definitely not a hindsight element to the product, because you know, as I'm talking to the HDS folks, it's clear that that's not just a dot rev of the firmware. There's a lot of work that goes into VAI integration. And then that's only where we are right now with these three, you know, functions, and then what's going to come more with it. So it's good to see that virtualizing up and down the data center. And you know, outside of the VMware world, you know, you'll see software integrations from from like in the hyper V area start rolling in. So that's going to be attractive to the, you know, to the typical data center, and you know, forget the cloud message, there's still people that have to keep the drive spinning and keep the servers up, you know, like me, and that's going to, you know, apply, you know, be applicable in that sense. Well, the the VMware messaging, I thought was very good. And it was somewhat unexpected. From my standpoint, I had been hearing more hyper V from Hitachi. And I think they flipped that and really recognizing that the VMware is where it's sort of the IT economy right now. And I was impressed with the VAI integration and the timeliness of it. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think you have to reflect the market in my personal opinion, regarding the market is that the VMware's market is really only going to go down. I hate to say that for the typical server virtualization environment, hyper V is only going to come up. So I think that you have to start, you know, with the purpose built infrastructure right now, to be aware of the market and those two forces are just undeniable. And to an extent, you can roll in Citrix and Oracle VM and, and anybody else you might want to but definitely you have to have those two players from the start ready to go, you know, there's the message and then there's what's available. And you know, from the VMware side, I have a good, you know, handle about what's available and what's coming in an incremental release. But as far as hyper V, not quite as informed as I'd like to be, but that's, that's not really where I scale one to 10 Hitachi in VMware, in terms of competitiveness of offering, you know, one being do over and 10 being, you know, world dominance, where would you put them? I would put them, I would put them at a nine simply because their other product was VAI ready on day one with their AMS series. It's a lot easier to roll modular storage into that type of feature set. But there was a very small list of people that were ready on day one. Yeah, so obviously, EMC with Clarion was ready. Yeah, I think three par was ready. Yeah, three par was ready in AMS with the Tati MS. I think HP just made an announcement. I don't think they are there yet. I can't confirm, but I think equal logic had a product ready equal Dell equal logic and net apps a little further. That was an announcement. So, okay, and then you're seeing all very high marks there just because day one that's important. I mean, you know, it's it's available to the vSphere administrator. You know, if and if I remember correctly, I can't remember the revisions correctly. But it was available to the existing product on the floor. So it was an update available. Rather than rip out the controller, that's a whole nother burden, you know, because some situations is a new product that has it. Let's talk about scale up scale, deep and scale out. This is new messaging that I had not heard before. You guys maybe heard it in Japan. What does all that mean today? So so I think there have been several blog posts in the past by Michael Hay, even by Hugh about 3D Cartesian scaling. And as you start reading into that, you know, this message that they have for VSP sort of falls in line, being able to manage your storage and being able to scale it in the right manner is is the key. So the command suite seven has a message around management, while the VSP has a man has a message around the the scale out the scale deep and the scale. The third I'm forgetting about and up right. But the idea is to have your storage that could scale out as the VSP allows a customer to have 255 petabytes of storage behind a particular particular VSP system being able to leverage your infrastructure in the right way scale up and then being able to scale deep again is using different manufacturers behind them and and help virtualize and optimize your environment. So when I think of scale out, I think, you know, sonass or isilon or you know, check, let's kind of scaling out is different little bit different philosophy here, isn't it? So let's let's grade them. So scale up, scale out, actually take them in this order scale deep, scale out, scale up. So on a scale of one to 10, no pun intended, you know, one being just a bunch of marketing hype, 10 being, you know, it's here, it's ready, it's industry leading. Where would you put scale deep? Scale deep, I would put at nine or 10, actually, because of the maturity of the technology. They have been talking about the scale deep wasn't there, but the technology was there with the with the USPV. So the the VSP sort of enhances that whole experience for the customer, the whole storage virtualization experience, have any commodity storage behind a VSP, and we'll help you scale deep really into whatever you have. Okay, well, how about the how about the scale up? It's sort of been Hitachi's ethos, right? The scale up was also high marks there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would say probably eight, nine on that messaging. And then how about the scale out? Absolutely, you know, you put them up high as well, even without some of the clustering technologies, I think the clustering and other things are probably in the works, I would say, again, when you look at the Vplex or, you know, the other EMC technologies out there, they're sort of more enhanced from that perspective. But I think Hitachi sort of like catching up to that whole, you know, having more of a cluster environment. So scale out scale up scale deep, you see them as all pretty mature and ready to be purchased, right? I mean, it's real, it's real, it's not it's right, right. So it's not just marketing bus creator around it, it feels like there is substance to each of these things that they have mentioned as part of the marketing message. Rick, anything that's missing from from this announcement or, you know, this day? Oh, well, my, my only nitpick is that, you know, this day is focused on on the larger solutions with VSP and the new control suite seven. But I'm always a big fan for the the mid and smaller environments. Okay, so we did have a incremental update on the modular storage, I think in June, you know, from the HDS product line. But, you know, I'm always looking for the little guy. Okay, and so this stuff isn't doesn't really apply for the little guy. But I'd always want to see a little bit more from in terms of features from the from the small end storage. And they've generally done a pretty good job with that, especially with the new control suite seven. But and the software offerings with the modular storage is is pretty much on par with what you know, pretty good for the small storage requirement. So I can't really think of anything that's really missing other than just don't forget about the little guy. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think actually a big challenge for for Hitachi. It is because historically my sense is that Hitachi has been they've certainly done very well with the AMS. But for instance, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the USP VM, the USP VM diskless. You know, there was a product that I think had a lot of potential in the marketplace. And it was very to me, SVC IBM SVC like, I almost think that that Hitachi gave that market a little bit to IBM because it was afraid that it would eat away at its high end margin. So I think this is a real challenge for Hitachi. And I think they're up for the challenge, the whole content cloud coming together, it sort of changes the perspective where they're just not in this big high end OLTP niche. Do you guys agree with that? What do you think about that? Talk about that a little bit. No, I think it makes sense from that perspective. When we the the VSP again, based on its existing technology will you can buy it without drives or diskless version, as well as you can buy it with 2048 drives, it helps you scale from that perspective. So you can have a baby bear basic version or scale out from that perspective. Also, the messaging around cloud and some of the secure multi tendency, I don't think they use the word secure multi tendency, but it's more safe multi tendency. You think they're purposely avoiding that? It's very hard to find that word secure anywhere. But because of there are virtual partitions that are in the system, it does enable the system to be much more like cloud ready. Right. Okay, we're here with Rick van over and and DeVang Panchagar. Hey, guys, how do people find you DeVang your blog? So I blog at storage nerve.com. And my Twitter handle is at storage nerve, right? And, and Rick, how do we find you? My blog is rickatron.us R I C K A T R O N dot US. And you can find me on Twitter at Rick van over. Believe it or not, they can't hear they can hear it a little bit. But these mics, that's why we asked you to get so close, you know, our engineering team, Michael, Sean Wright and Mark Hopkins have engineered the cube to be to be, you know, ambulance proof, right? We're at, we're at VM world. You remember, the ambulance is going by we were broadcasting the whole time. And our guests came through loud and clear. So great job, guys. No, no, actually, it sounded great. So, Rick and and DeVang, thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing your insights about the trip you guys took the Hitachi sounds fantastic. You know, I was on vacation, I would joined you but but but I'm envious and jealous and really appreciate your insights. Thanks a lot.