 the Masonic in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Tech World 2016. Brought to you by Lenovo. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and John Walls. And welcome back to the Masonic Auditorium here in San Francisco as the Lenovo Tech World continues. John Walls along with Stu Miniman here as we continue from the keynote stage where they had just a parcel of announcements about two, three hours ago, consumer product side. And of course on the infrastructure side, which is what we're going to talk about with our next guest, Stuart McCray, who is the director of product planning, storage, and networking at Lenovo. And Stuart, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here again. Nice to have you here. We appreciate the time here. You know, SDS, it's kind of the buzz right now, right? Why now? You know, what's happening to generate so much consumer interest in, and what's Lenovo's focus on at SDS? That's an excellent question, John. So as data's really exploded over the past number of years, right? It's SDS is a solution that addresses that. So customers, when they think about their storage environments from a legacy model, they really don't scale to where they need to go for the, you know, we heard about the internet of things and all the data being generated from the phones and everything. A lot of that's business is generating that data for them as well to do analytics on. Traditional storage legacy controller doesn't really scale to that scope. So customers and the industry's looking at a different approach, right? That's one thing that's driving it. I think the development model for storage is changing. You can innovate much faster in software, right? And so when you separate the hardware from the software, the software can innovate on its own pace and the hardware can innovate separately. It's a much different model from a, you know, development piece where Lenovo, for example, we like it because we sell lots and lots of servers, right? One of the largest server manufacturers in the world. When we can move the storage to a server, it eliminates that entire development burden for the ISV and they can focus on what they do really well, whether it's scale up file or scale out file, object storage, providing innovation that customers are looking for when they're going from, they're like, there's small stores today to the petabytes they need to manage. So is that what store select's all about? New product that you've launched? It sounds like that's, this is how you're trying to address what's going on out there. Absolutely, store select's a really big part of it. So store select, when we look at the market for software to find storage, like anything in storage, it's not necessarily simple, right? And we view it from a continuum of, there's a do it yourself solution, maybe a more open stack solution, which is really important and you can get things out of it. But a lot of customers want a complete, finished, easy to implement solution. So that's what we looked at in the market. And one of us done different things with ISVs to kind of get our feet wet in that. And what we learned going through that was, it didn't really meet what the storage administrator wanted. Right, it was kind of what we call a meet in the channel. So we might take a Vesta Breed software and our hardware, but when you put it together in the channel, you can only do such a good job, right? It's not integrated, it's not optimized. Who are you gonna call for support, right? Cause if your storage goes down, and the plan is it doesn't, but you know, occasionally it might, you won't want one phone number to call. So that's why we did store select. We picked partners to go to market with who are really good at what they do. So really good at object storage, cloud in, really good at scale out file and block unified storage with an Xcenta. Work with them to optimize, integrate in our, in our labs, in our factory, and then ship that with Lenovo service and support. Stewart, could you kind of walk us through the storage portfolio, you got the store select, there's the Nutanix OEM, there's some other products, kind of, you know, what's Lenovo IP, what's OEM technology, and what would the new stuff, is that an OEM, is that a partnership? Can you clarify that? We're very much partnered, right? So if you think about, you know, from a storage perspective, Lenovo is very new, right? So we've got a huge legacy in servers, very well there for storage. You know, if you had talked to me 18 months ago, we had, you know, zero revenue and most customers in the industry would say there's, what is Lenovo storage? So we're building that business, it's very much partner based. So we have a range of offerings, we have our traditional block fiber channel storage, which is really, you know, still kind of the heart and soul of small, medium business, as well as enterprises for their core applications. That we have a mix of S-Series Organic. We also announced our V-Series products, which is a Lenovo branded, that we partner with IBM for their store-wise stack. And that's their first Lenovo branded mid-range, traditional mid-range storage, which gets us into a new area, very important for us. And then we also partner for areas that, you know, as many people in the industry do, partner for best of breed. Nutanix is a solution for hyperconverge, very complimentary to what we do. And as you're combining, you know, the data that you store on traditional storage that needs to be near your compute, it's a great solution for that. Store select and our appliances are really driven more for like a tier two, tier three tier of the storage. And so we partner with them from a best of breed provider to say, if you want scale out file, massive petabyte scale object storage, those are the things we're looking to address with that. So it's a journey I think for most customers and for us as we build out that portfolio. So give us review on the storage market. I mean, storage has always been a very fragmented marketplace. And until recently, I would have even called it very entrenched. So you've got, you know, no player ever owned more than usually a third of any part of the market. And, you know, there's so many sub niches and solutions out there yet today. Things are changing so fast. New technologies are coming up. Market share even seems to be shifting rather rapidly. So, you know, it's interesting and I guess opportunistic time to build a new brand in the marketplace. Yeah, absolutely. We're really excited about it. I mean, it's a, you know, it sounds cliche, but we really talk about it as being like a once in a lifetime opportunity in the storage market. And that's why we're investing so much from a Lenovo perspective. There's really a few things driving it. One is consolidation and just the traditional players are changing, right? And with the consolidation of major players, that's going to force a lot of change with customers, right? No two companies get together and don't rationalize their portfolio. So as products go away, it's a new opportunity. Customers are going to move to something different. They're going to move to either a different traditional storage and obviously migration to storage is one of the hardest thing customers have to do. So when your provider takes one thing away and you have to move to something else, it's time for those customers to look for new alternatives. Some of those will be traditional offerings. Some of those will be software defined. So that consolidation piece is a huge, huge driver. The second one is just flash. I mean, the flash, the ubiquity of flash that we will see over the next two or three years, I think will drive more changes in storage than we've seen in a long time. And it's not just going to be at the high end, right? So AFA has a lot of the sizzle today. I predict if I come back in two years, we won't talk about AFA at all. We'll just talk about flash is the media that's in your storage and it's going to change not only how storage is designed and delivered but how customers use it. So I always like to use car analogies, right? Cause that's something people can relate to. And what we talk about is the move from like traditional spinning media storage to flash would be like, if you move from like an internal combustion gasoline car with a manual transmission, you might be too young for that, but 30 or 40 years ago, that's what everyone had. I remember. Okay. I could drive sticks. So if you move straight from that to electric car, right? So the things about a gas engine that, you know, it's kind of ineffective, right? So you have to add a transmission to it to get performance low, medium, high. Just like we've done lots of stuff with spinning media and storage because it's a bottleneck. You have to tear it. You have to do lots of things to get around performance. When you move to electric car, guess what? There is no transmission, right? It's just fast. It's good if you're going slow. It's good if you're going fast. Flash media and storage will be pretty much the same way. I know by the way, as a storage provider, I don't have to worry about putting my transmission in. I don't have to worry about that complexity to do that. It'll also change the use model, right? So the use model, if you remember driving a stick, it wasn't intuitive, right? You had to learn it. You had to pay attention while you were driving, just like storage administrators today, have to worry about tearing their storage. Where's my hot data? Where's my cold data? Flash storage, not just in the high end, but from entry to mid-range will alleviate all of that. And enterprises will think about it differently, right? You know, years ago, if you liked driving a stick drive and you came to San Francisco where we are, there would be no stick drives here. I was just thinking that on the bus on the way over here today. A guy from a small town in North Carolina cannot drive a stick drive in San Francisco. So it just changes the way the use model and the way enterprises think about deploying storage. That's why we think it's a really exciting. And then the final one is scalability, right? Things like object storage, we think will be transformative, still relatively small today. We project it to grow pretty fast because it's the way for customers at scale. And most customers will be at scale because they'll have, as they generate lots of data, they'll want to store it one way or another. You mentioned you're talking about customers or you're talking about traditional storage versus SDS. Is it either or? Are they complementary in some respects or is there just a, it's got to be one way or the other. How are your customers deploying that? It is, it can be complementary, absolutely. And I think it will be a journey for many customers, right? So we're a big believer in the Wikibon projection of traditional storage giving way to software defined. We absolutely think that that's the model. It's what we debate constantly in our strategy is how fast that will happen. Storage, traditional storage as we know it is not going to change overnight, right? Storage is like a bad infection. Once you get a storage, it never goes away, right? You just can't get rid of it. So customers don't always like that. But traditional storage is good for what people want it for. And that's why we're investing in our new V-Series line as well as our S-Series to provide that because fiber channel block storage for basic storage for my core applications, people know it, they love it, the network is so strong, it just works really well and it keeps developing. But it's not good for petabytes, right? So if I'm a manufacturing or healthcare where I'm just generating petabytes of storage all the time, you cannot manage it like that. And you can't manage it with a really traditional scale up storage controller. You gotta scale out and throw lots of, you can throw lots of x86 servers at it and it scales very effectively and very cost effectively. All right, so if you look at the Wikibon model, traditional is being disrupted by two pieces. One, software defined storage, the other is the hyperscale in the public cloud. Is that the self-driving car in your car analogy or, and how does Lenovo see, fit into that part of the hyperscale and public cloud discussion? That's a good question. So we have a sister team that's focused on hyperscale and Lenovo does very well in parts of the world on hyperscale. Very focused on that. As you know, it's a completely different model. We think, and it's a direct model, custom kind of delivery. The, from a large set of customers, not just consumer, we'll move to the hyperscale because it just makes sense for them. What we see for enterprises, it's interesting, but they typically want to move back. If they move there, they really want to move back to owning it themselves if they can. No customer wakes up and says, I want to go buy public cloud today. They just don't think like that. They're interested in it. They would like their team to be able to build that internally. And I think it is driving a lot of what they're doing internally. That's why cloud in is a, from a partner perspective because they're so unique in their S3 implementation because Amazon drives a lot of the application development with their S3 standard. That's one reason we pick cloud in because we're taking what they said as kind of an industry standard and so customers can build their own cloud environments. So one of the things we see, talking to what customers want and how do they get really the operational model of the public cloud and how do I migrate from that? Because as you said, how do I get away from kind of the siloed environment that I have today where I'm spending way too much time just doing the geek knobs on my infrastructure. I need to move to a model where it's more automated and orchestrated. So, how do you move towards that model? I think it's really in the software layer we provide and that's why we're partner based on that, right? Whether it's Nutanix or Nexcento or cloud in, giving them the knobs and controls to do it and really from an appliance perspective, I mean the industry standard world is conditioning customers to consume technology as a custom thing, right? I can always design something better as a customer if I tweak the wells and knobs and choose this processor and this memory and this drive. Making it simple and an appliance, that's why we're doing the appliances is we've done all the testing and optimization. Could they eke out another 3%? Probably. Do they need to? No, because they're not getting that in the cloud either. It's gonna be much better when they implement it locally with what we've already pre-tuned than putting it somewhere where it's completely homogenous across all of their hardware. You've given us a couple of very interesting analogies so far, all right, with the electric car and the bad infections and what have you. One more in you, I don't know, about where the next two to three years of storage is going. Do you have anything maybe you can come up with for us about where you think this is headed or what you think the next big wave might be? I think the, I don't have an analogy, but I'll work on one, maybe it was pretty good. But a perspective, yeah. I think there's going to be a lot of change and again, the flash piece of it's going to fundamentally change how customers are deploying it. So it creates a lot of new opportunities. Customers don't really, you know, one thing I always say is like when customers come to talk to us in the briefing center and I'm in our headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, so I get to talk to lots of customers, but they never come in and I always start with, hey, what's the biggest problem you're trying to solve with your storage? They never come in and say, Stuart, I really need consistent latency, right? They, the big things they say is, look, it's way too damn complex. It costs too much, not just to buy, but to maintain and support and it's not scalable. I think we'll see the industry and flash will drive a lot of part of this and software to find is we'll strip out some of the complexity. I've been in storage in a while and my analogy is storage is always over the years, right? We keep meeting what customers want, but we always meet it with a new solution, right? So I wanted to share storage, so I did shared storage. I wanted to network it. It's not fast enough. I'm going to sell you an accelerator. I'm going to sell you caching. I'm going to sell you all flash. I'm going to sell you something for your backup and your archive. What customers really want if they'd like for what we sold them three years ago to still do what they need to do? So I think, and one of the things we're going to focus on is trying to strip out those layers. How you reduce costs is much like what you talked about, convergence, converging those layers of storage, right? So the model of I've got tier one, tier two, tier three, I've got backup. If we can take those layers out, that will really drive efficiency. And I think what you see, even in traditional, you'll see that happening for a lot of customers in the mid-market size, because again, it's not going to be an all-flash world in 12 months, but hybrid storage solutions where I can have high performance and petabyte scale, all kind of behind one controller, and it will still be tiered. So we're not going to get rid of those things. They can wipe out three different solutions they had with one really robust mid-range kind of storage thing for their customer size. For the big customers, they've still got to have different solutions for their infrastructure. Well, Stuart, thanks for being with us. Thanks a lot. Here on theCUBE, great day for Lenovo here in San Francisco, and we're glad we could be a part of it. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Stu and I'll be back with some final thoughts here on theCUBE after this.