 I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE with my co-host Dave Vellante with wikibon.org. We're joined Craig Noon as the vice president of HP Storage Marketing, a longtime alum of theCUBE. You've been on theCUBE, but so many times I can't count like you're rivaling Pat Gelsinger in terms of number of appearances. I think Pat's at seven. You're, I think seven. This might be your eighth. You might overtake him. You're a regular. Great to see you. Obviously at Eulah Packard, we all know HP. A lot of management changes have happened. Meg Whitman's turning the company around. You guys are taking your medicine. A lot of people talking about the open source of WebOS, a lot of other things, the tablet. But you're in the group of HP that's actually performing well. The storage, networking, and compute. The old ESSN 3.com was part of that acquisition. You guys are really doing well performance-wise. More importantly, you came from 3par, which was recently called out in the HP earnings call as a real highlight of the future of HP. So congratulations. Thanks for having me. But I want to ask you about this modern era that we're talking about, this data infrastructure which builds on a lot of the converge infrastructure work. And converge infrastructure has been going back for years. You guys are really the first tier one vendor to actually implement a converge organization with networking, storage, and compute kind of collapsed together. But now we heard new applications, new experiences, mobile with SSD. You were at a startup that pioneered thin provisioning so you know this modern era. Now you're at HP, can you comment on where you see this modern era of tech? How's it, it's steroids free, no more cloudwashing, no more doping, this modern era of the future of the data center. What's your take on that? Yeah, so converge infrastructure's an evolution, right? And when it was first kind of called out and put in place in kind of a visible way in the HP lineup, you know I think a lot of folks at the time were still trying to figure out, understood but the picture wasn't entirely clear, right? And we spent the last couple of years making that much more visible, that direction. And if you look around here at this show, if you look at the, let's talk about SSDs, you were talking about that on your last segment. If you look at what flash and solid state technology's doing to storage and to server infrastructure, how can it not be converged, right? It's, if it's not, you're going to wind up living in the silos that dog you today, less efficient, no flexibility over provisioning to solve your problems. It's not how the data center's going to evolve, yeah. So, Dave, what's your take on, you've seen the historical view and you saw the three-par, you were the first one that I met in the industry that actually pointed out the whole three-par as a killer linchpin in the holy equation prior to the even acquisition. What do you think about HP relative to the converged infrastructure and data infrastructure transition that we're seeing? Well, so I think that, well first of all, the story at HP is the old is declining and the new is skyrocketing, right? Three-pars was growing in triple digits, I think your growth is slowing it down to 60% growth annually. You're right there with Fusion I.O., so that's good, right? I mean obviously three-par, I mean when HP acquired three-par, I think it was what, 200 million in revenue? That's right. So by my estimate, these aren't your numbers, you're tracking probably toward maybe even over 600 million now, you're close to triple what you were, I know you can't comment, but. I cannot comment. But you're growing very nicely, I mean I think you could agree with that. And so that's the big story, you got sort of EVA and transition and three-par rocketing, that's why Donatelli was so excited about it, we had Donatelli in the queue. So I think that my point of view, one of your comments is data infrastructure, for the last five, seven years we've been focusing on doing more with less, taking cost out, increasing utilization, that's a big part of what three-par did. Converged infrastructure is part of that theme and that's got to happen. But that's becoming table stakes. And then as we were talking off camera, the next step is you got to really get agile, so you got to put in processes to increase agility. And then it's all about, okay, how do I really drive incremental business value? And that's where this whole new flash trend starts to come in. So I wonder if you could share with us your point of view on that perspective. So I'll give you a couple of things. First, we kind of see converged infrastructure broadly as bringing server storage, networking, management technologies together in kind of one building block, right? Instead of multiple separate pieces. And the idea is things like virtualization, flash, cloud, are all fueling that convergence. And part of what we've been driving in storage is this idea of converged storage. Converged storage really is focusing on a couple of design centers there. One is, you know, what I'd kind of view is sort of converged utility storage, serving the multi-tenant requirements in this virtualized environment. A lot of unpredictability that has got to be handled as you drive a, you know, more converged infrastructure. In the old days you would silo everything to manage your SLAs. Converged infrastructure, no silos. You need that utility focus. The other aspect, and I think it goes hand in glove with a lot of what's going on here at the show and an announcement we had a couple of weeks ago. Converged virtual storage, which really drives storage right into the application, right on the same sheet metal of the server. And we talked a couple of weeks ago about our store virtual storage appliance. This is basically software running in a VM right next to your application VM, right? That is converged infrastructure. That is the convergence folks are looking for. And, you know, from management perspective, storage, server, network, all in one box. Great agility, handles the efficiency that folks are looking for in this kind of new era. Well, Herod kind of talked about that today. Said we've done a great job with compute and memory. I remember 2009, you know, where we were with kind of pre-VAI, VAI helped a lot with storage. We're still not completely there, but certainly much better off than we were. And then, of course, networking and security as a ways to go. But VSA is an example of what he was talking about. Bringing virtualization actually to the storage, which is your culture, and that's what 3PAR is all about. What do you make of, did you hear of Gelsinger this morning? So, basically one of the things he said was, we're seeing your serious competitor now is becoming your partner, right? And he said, you know, I worked with a lot of you guys when I was at Intel, and I'm really excited to be back working with you. And, of course, I'm thinking HP, Dell, IBM, right? All these companies that have been competing with you. So, what's your take on this? I mean, how do you look at that whole transition? Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, VMware as a partner for HP, you know, I think the fundamental thing we're looking for is that continued sort of partner momentum that's allowing us to drive, you know, the top server platform for VMware. You know, we are a development platform for VMware in a variety of ways. You know, it's a great partnership. I'm sure Pat's got a great agenda for VMware, but I think, you know, as I was driving up this morning from Mountain View, I thought, you know, VM world, it's a storage show. Am I right? It's a storage show. And it's, you know, I think it's not a bad thing to continue to drive great, you know, storage knowledge into virtualization. And, you know, frankly, I think a lot of folks are here to figure out the storage equation. It's not right out there, right? Well, it's interesting, actually, they have that CEO roundtable, you know, you got a bunch of storage guys on there, you know? I was hoping Donatelli would be there, but he's probably flying around the world somewhere. No doubt. How about the announcement of the end of VRAM pricing? That was the audience, that was probably the biggest, maybe the second biggest, the big claps from Maritz. But that one was more than, as John calls it, more than golf claps, the end of VRAM pricing. What do you take, what do you make of that? What does that mean for you guys? How do you capitalize on that? Yeah, VRAM pricing, you know, it's kind of the new Coke, right? It didn't go over very well for the customer base. And I think, first of all, I think it's good for, you know, VMware to give their customers what they're after, and we are being a great partner. We are there to help them out. We've been working hand in glove with VMware on a fantastic program built around HP's three-part storage called the Get Virtual Guarantee. And part of what folks go into virtualization and find is that the costs to scale out their virtualization environments can crush you if you're not careful. And what we've told folks is, look, don't worry, with the right kind of modern storage like three-part, you are going to be able to double the number of VMs you host on a given server. So you can get twice as much out of your server infrastructure. Well, what we are telling VMware customers today is, look, we've got the server thing handled. We announced that back in the springtime. Going back to per socket pricing for VMware, guess what, Get Virtual gets better now because you're not only making a more economical server infrastructure by in three-part, you're also, you know, tamping down the VMware licensing that's going on. So you've got a double, a double bubble. So good move, you're happy about it. You can play on that and spin up more programs. So Craig, I want to ask you some controversial questions obviously around some of the things that VMware did. For example, they spent a billion dollars from this year. That caught everyone kind of by surprise. It's also software-defined. Data center's the big message to Harrod's out there talking about that. When we've done a couple cubes with you guys and also your server guys on your server launches, you guys, it's not a new notion, software innovation within HP. Within your converged infrastructure now, your enterprise group. We had Bethany Mayer on at HP Discover. And she was saying, you know, quite frankly, you guys are actually shipping open flow in your products, in the networking group. What's the conversation like inside HP right now? Because you guys have that converged organization, you know, starting way back when with 3Com, you've got some great story, great performance. Can you share with the group and the internal kind of mindset right now within HP? I know you can't really disclose specifics because you know, you've got messaging and public company, but give us an insight into what's the conversation. Yeah, I'll give you the kind of my views and you'd open the segment with, you know, talking about some management changes and Megan, all that. And you know, I haven't heard that in a while and to be honest, the, you know, the enterprise group, you know, we've been at it same team for, you know, a couple of years or more now. And I think we have, you know, we've been there long enough for engineers to, you know, run a couple of development cycles and we know that, you know, enterprise infrastructure is about the software, whether it's networking or storage or server-based software provisioning or cloud, et cetera. And you know, we see now that those developments coming together and there isn't a day that goes by where I'm not talking to our networking team, our server team, our management software team. And you know, I feel like if you are, you know, running through, you know, a day in the life with a storage guy and he's not talking to, you know, networking servers, management, orchestration, but talking at Converge Infrastructure Store, you've got to call BS, right? It's probably not happening. And I tell you, that's what's happening every day at HP. We got a little power problem with the lights here. I will say though, I will give you guys props. I mean, you know, I wanted to say you guys are well ahead of the pack. Obviously, VMware is now trying to play catch up. Even IBM had a little separate storage organization. They're trying to get that back involved with Tivoli. We've covered some of the stuff they've been doing. So you guys do have a solid team. Obviously, Dave Donatelli is a maverick at the top there. Great stuff. Now, getting back to some of the emerging mark trends, right? We saw big data. We see that the Palmerettes playing out the slides, pretty specific, old way PCs, existing apps, server, moving to mobile users, new apps, big data, and then cloud. So we've been commenting with the advent of Flash that the on-premise migration to cloud just hasn't been there in flight that people had expected. People are tweaking their on-prem. So talk about the cloud, because you guys have a separate cloud group. How does that affect you guys at your enterprise group? Or are they moving in? Are they... Well, I'll tell you kind of our focus on cloud. It revolves around really kind of three separate focus areas. One, I kind of talk broadly about IT as a service and you've got the guys doing that within their enterprise that call it the private cloud guys delivering portal-based IT to their internal users. And we are selling a lot of that and I think for sure that's the calling card of the three-part stuff. The IT as a service, public cloud providers, very big focus there, great growth, again, great product fit. The third area is an area really led by what I'd call more data-centric computing infrastructure and it's the independent public clouds, the long-tailed data guys, very modular kind of infrastructure. And those guys are, that's the segment that we're really focusing on with these virtual storage appliances, right? A software-based approach to storage. If you think about those three approaches, that's where our focus is when you talk about cloud in the enterprise group. So I was going to show you a screen here. Obviously, I tweeted earlier, go look at my tweet. I tweeted that we're going to be featuring some new technology from one of our stealth startups, products called V-Finder, not to be confused with anything related to VMware. But here's the conversations in the storage vertical. So V-Motion's popping up at the top, disaster recovery, replications, some of the usual suspects around some of the metadata. That's real-time top conversations. Of those keywords, which ones do you think are the most relevant right now for you guys, the V-Motion? Is it the data in the cloud? Is it backup and recovery? You can see some of the conversations there. Yeah, it's hard to pick one. I mean, backup, data backup, and backup recovery. I mean, the part of what we see when we go talk to folks about their virtualization environment is how are you going to back it up? Hadn't really thought about that yet. And when you do back it up, how important is recovery? We've probably got the only platform in the market that'll match recovery speeds with backup speeds. I love the V-Motion conversation going. Part of the storage challenge is, you have physical storage arrays that hold your data. And when you gotta move virtual machines, you might have to move data with it, right? And so this technology built around what we call storage federation. But think of it as, you know, V-Motion for data from any server, any hypervisor, right? Big deal, big deal. I want to ask you one final question, at least from my standpoint, I'll let Dave get his final question in. Because you have a unique perspective. You worked at HP, went out, and started up with 3par, which is very aggressive. It's lean and mean, and then a great exit. Now you're back in HP, great team. Now you're really happy there. But cloud storage is really hot right now. You're seeing everything from box.net, doing some stuff with the consumer, people down the credit card, to them dipping their toe into the enterprise, not being too successful, because of some sphere of data. You got other companies like Nervanos that are kicking butt, and you have a variety of other different approaches to cloud storage. As a startup guide, and guide at HP, and kind of with your experience, how do you see that world evolving? Is it going to be a pure play? Is it going to be one of those hybrid situations? How does cloud storage, how do you view that market? So I have the quintessential answer. It depends. It depends how you're coming out the infrastructure. If you're coming at it from a Google Amazon, and you've got a very modular kind of infrastructure, you're going to be very, what I call again, sort of data centric computing infrastructure, built around your servers, and you're going to drive basically advanced capabilities in through software. But we look at the guys who are very strong in IT as a service, and the big public cloud guys like AT&T, and TerraMark, and Verizon, and those guys, they are also moving in this kind of cloud direction. And so I think those guys are going to be an impetus to drive in more very efficient shared storage models. So it's going to depend, and I think there's no hard line between those two architectures and those two value sets. Awesome. So I know I don't see our next guest here, so I think we can keep going. I got one last question. So EMC had its symmetrics back in the 90s, and then NetApp with everything waffle. I think they still do. They still do, right. They still do, but it was like the platform, right? It was everything. It was the flagship, right? And so my question is, and then to the NetApp, same thing, everything around waffle, are those days gone, for instance, could three-par become that be-all-end-all platform? Or is it more of a converged infrastructure play that becomes that platform? What do you see there? So the days for the symmetrics are gone, right? So the big, and in all seriousness, the big monolithic cash architecture at this show, really? No. Yeah, not happening. 4,000, David Fleur said that's the last one we'll ever see, 40,000. Yeah, it's, I don't think you're discreet, by the way. That architecture was built before we knew about web browsers and smartphones and stuff like that, right? Given what is coming, flash architectures, big data, and these kinds of things, the whole discussion around convergence we're talking about, that dictates something new. And built with the challenges in mind, right? So I think that stuff is, was good for what it was built for in the old days, but for virtualization, for cloud, for multi-tenancy, you gotta think differently. And I think we've got an approach, at least at HP. I know there are others in the industry trying to figure it out, but you gotta start with something that is considerate of these new challenges, right? It's a big inflection point, and we're in what, 2012, 13. Over the next couple of years, I'm telling you we haven't seen anything yet, right? Excellent. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We love HP. We love working with you guys. I will say that, I will say the software aspect of this new data center operating system was first on our radar with HP. HP Labs going back to 2008. You guys certainly had a lot of announcements, moonshot and a variety of others on the server side as well as networking. So I think you guys are well ahead of the pack, and hope to get the word out, and obviously VMware's following your path with the whole abstract pool and automate, which is code words for operating system. I know, whoa, you know. So congratulations, HP, get the word out. You got lightning in a bottle there, and congratulations, good to have you. Okay, we'll be right back. Thanks, guys. After this outbreak. Thank you.