 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE and we're at IBM Edge 2015, our fourth year at IBM Edge. We're here in Las Vegas at the Sands. Alex Chen is here. He's a business line executive for XIV. And Oscar Levina is a project manager at ITNOW, a service provider in Barcelona. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to see you. So, well, let me start with you, Oscar. So, first trip to Edge? Or have you been to other Edge before? No, it's first time here. First time, what do you think? What do you make of the? That's great. Great session, a lot of people. Good group, audience, right? I mean, the content is good. Meeting some peers. You come to a lot of these shows and how do you put Edge into context from an IT practitioner's perspective? Well, as a customer, I mean, it's great to be here because you, you know, you got a lot of new announcements. You got a lot of, you know, news from IBM, new products. So you get in touch with some other people and, you know, you can share your problems, your daily problems with them and, you know, how to solve them. So that's pretty fun. Pretty cool. So Alex, you know, XIV's had a very interesting history. You know, small Israeli company. That's right. Very little revenue. IBM paid in retrospect a rather low price comparative to some of the other virtualization array companies that got acquired. I recall it was around 350 million. We've seen exits of 2 billion plus 2.5 billion, you know, billion eight. So you got a good deal from that standpoint, assuming you could ramp the product and put it into your, you know, your revenue stream, which you've done, you know, it's been years now that you guys have made that transition and very successful one. But give us the update now on XIV. What's the status? Certainly, certainly. So XIV, you know, as the, as exists today, is our, you know, one of our premier cloud offerings. As you all know that XIV users loves, you know, once you kind of gone XIV, you don't go back because of the simplicity, the great scale, easy to manage, easy to scale and easy to deploy. And efficiency as well come with energy start certification. The high density comes with it. Last year, towards the end of the year, we upgraded the capacity of XIV to be about half a petabyte in a single rack. And this year, we are currently, we announced today the availability of wheel time compression integrated with the grid architecture. And with that wheel time compression, we can hold more than two petabytes of storage in a single rack and also reduce the total cost of ownership significantly. Further, since as a part in the enterprise storage space. Yeah, so XIV, I think of XIV, the architecture spreads data out. Correct. Right, so it's used high density, high capacity, SATA devices, so about driving cost down, that was always the sort of ethos of XIV. So how, Oscar, tell us your story of XIV. What was life before XIV and why'd you bring it in and what are you doing with it? Well, it was back into 2012 and we need a new storage solution that as Alex mentioned, it was easy to manage. It got a lot of performance and a lot of capacity with a very little footprint is when XIV came into place. So we did test it and we love it for the very first moment. So we are building our private cloud reliant on XIV. So far we have like almost six petabytes of storage alone, I mean, only on XIV and it's running really, really good. One thing I like the most of XIV is, it's consistent performance. So no matter how hard applications try to write or read data out of the box, I mean, response times doesn't keep bouncing up and down, so for us, you know, for me as a storage manager, XIV makes my life much easier. So can you describe that a little bit further, add some color to that? I mean, in what sense, what was life like before? What was like after and how do you quantify that? Well, big difference probably is that before you had to do like a lot of tuning on your storage, you know, to survive to the applications. And right now, I mean, we have a capacity, we put different workloads on an XIV and you forget about it. So it's quite simple in that sense. So tuning was a big chunk of your time prior to, I think of arms and legs, you say, left leg, left arm, right arm doing tuning. What percent of your time roughly did you spend on tuning then versus now? Well, it depends on the week, but. Maybe take it in like a 12 month chunk. I know it's a hard question because it varies, right? And you're putting on fires, but. But probably it was like 10, 15% of my time. Okay. And now it's barely, you know, close to zero. Zero, okay. So you gave to 10 or 15% of your time. Oh yeah, definitely. Tuning's never that fun, you know, you're never going to get it right permanently. So what other, so I mean, basically, if I understand it, XIV made your life easier, simplified, what else would you spend time doing that you don't spend time doing now? Well, management, I mean, managing the box is something that it's really easy. It's got a nice graphical interface so you can just, you know, map new volumes in barely a few seconds. So deploying capacity, moving stuff around. Oh yeah. Servicing applications, you mentioned performance tuning. So adding capacity. So if you think about that pie chart of where you spent your time, how much of your time got freed up? You mentioned 10 to 15% on tuning. What about other sort of mundane, non-revenue producing tasks? You know, how much more time did you gain percentage wise? Well, it's hard to tell, but I would sell it 25, 30%. Really? Yeah. So that including the performance tuning. Yeah. So okay, so a third, almost a third of your time is essentially freed up now because of XIV. What do you do with that time? Some of the things. Yeah, but they're like what? Like come to edge. They come to edge, okay. Oh, you come to Vegas with your time. That's right. Yeah, thinking about, you know, thinking about new solutions. Asking Alex, you know, to bring new features to XIV. Okay. Okay, and so, speaking of new features, real-time compressions, the newest feature. That's right. And that's brand new. You don't have that installed yet or do you actually have a complete... We are better testing actually. You are, okay. How's that work? I'm a customer of XIV and I'm not a beta customer. How do I get real-time compression? Do I flick a switch? Is that a software update? Yeah. Is there a fault? Is it a full report to charge for that? Well, so first of all, real-time compression is released in the Gen3 code. So all models of Gen3 are, you just have to upgrade the code and you get real-time compression. You get a 45-day free trial license. So anybody, you know, there's no key enabled. They accept the license, you go to this website, you get a 45-day trial license. And what's really good about it is that in this 45 days, you'll get a very good understanding of how much capacity you'll save. Because inside of XIV GUI integrated is by loan how much capacity you can save if you enable that compression. It was one click a button. And how much capacity you have saved by enabling the compression. So again, all Gen3 clients on their existing system upgrade their microcode, get the real-time compression, get the 45-day trial, go start using it and see the benefit of it. Now it is a license, it is a separately purchased, because it's capacity related. It is for a very reasonable price. You can purchase real-time compression on the existing systems. Now, we are also announcing for limited time only because we're trying to get as much clients to use the real-time compression as possible, at least in North America. And we'll down the road look at the worldwide as well for new systems that are purchased between now and end of September. So until end of three Q, you get free real-time compression and a subscription for a year. For a free year? For a year. Well, after that is software AMA, but you get the perpetual license sort of speak up front cost, one-time license charge. Okay, so the business case, the value proposition is less storage required. You get some kind of compression factor. What have you seen so far in data? Is it too early to tell or can you share with us some early results? Yeah, I mean, testing actually has gone beyond expectations because we expect to have a compression about 50, 60 percent and we've been able to even compress data up to 93 percent you know, we want some. So it's essentially doubling your capacity almost? No, no, 93 percent is more than three. Ten times. Oh, oh, oh, sorry. Yes, oh, oh, okay. Right, right, yeah. Fuck my numerator and denominator. Right, right. So, okay, so you're seeing a 10x compression ratio. Yeah, in average it's probably like 70 percent in the world with tests. And as Alex mentioned, I mean, it's really easy to deploy. I mean, and what is really cool is that it tells you upfront how much space you're going to gain. So it tells you, you know, which volumes it's worth, you know, to compress them, which volumes are not worth to compress them. And for a capacity point of view and a company as mine that we double this amount of storage every three years. So you can imagine the amount of storage that you can, you know, save using compression. So it's very, very promising. Are you charging him 10 times more? No, absolutely not. We're bringing a lot of value into this enterprise platform that's already better than five nine availability. Have, you know, all the enterprise functions and features. Now just imagine stop paying for, you know, the, you know, several dollars per gigabyte price of capacity by just buying the software innovation that's available on all gen three machines. So we're getting close to our time, but I wanted to ask about software defined in Spectrum. Absolutely. The XIV code has been extracted fundamental part of your Spectrum offering. How's that going? You know, what do you think about? I'm interested in what Oscar thinks about software defined, but give us the update on that. Well, so as you know, we launched software defined for Spectrum Accelerate in one Q, a G8 in March. And it is, you know, we extracted the software out of XIV so that's available to run on any virtual machine with a recommended hardware configuration. A lot of our clients sees a lot of value in these use cases in development tests, in remote and some are in disaster recovery. They're looking at perhaps leveraging Spectrum Accelerate for lower cost of a DR solution. But I think the predominant use case is for people who wants to build private clouds or public cloud infrastructure for MSP because these are the folks that has the engineering knowledge and has the hardware capacity. They're just looking at acquiring the software and the intellectual property and the software form factor so they can apply to their existing infrastructure. Those are the clients that are going to see the most benefit from this offering. So your service provider, does that appeal to you? Is that something that you're looking at or are you sort of happy with the current situation? Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're looking always for new solutions and I'm here at Edge, so I'm looking forward to get a lot of knowledge on software defined. And I have a 45-day trial version, USB, hand it to him and 200 other clients. The freebies are given away here. Exactly, exactly. Come to Edge, get some freebies from IBM. But okay, but so it's more than just sort of a industry buzzword, do you Oscar? Something you're seriously looking at. Oh yeah, definitely. It gives you more flexibility, better cost, combination. I believe it's going to give us more flexibility in moving data around. It's one of the biggest problems, you know? Yeah. To get stuck in an array, so you have to move data around. You talked before about how much time do you spend doing something, and probably, you know, moving data around from one solution to another solution is, it was quite a time that we've been spending. And the bigger it gets, the slower it gets when you start moving around. All right, we're getting this time, we have to go. Okay. Alex and Oscar, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, it was really fun. Thank you, appreciate it. All right, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Edge 2015 in Las Vegas, right back.