 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016, Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. We're back at HPE Discover 2016 in Las Vegas. Just coming off the keynote, Meg Whitman had a spring in her step. You know, I have to say, just as my analysis of watching HPE and now HPE Discover keynotes over the last five or six years, I think it really underscored the breadth of the customer base this year. I mean, I love Jeffrey Katzenberg. I love the DreamWorks story, but this year we saw a lot of diversity. Meg said, we are a digital transformation factory, and she talked about, of course, the idea economy in cloud, the introduced Dropbox, the CIO of Boeing came on, Ben Gallup, the CEO of Doctor, who's a Cube alum came on, the CISO of Microsoft was here, Home Depot, and it was really underscored the similarities, but yet the differences between these organizations, but the underlying unifying thread was digital transformation, really as a competitive necessity is what Meg said. So props to Meg, you know, very good job on the keynote. We're going to talk about a journey, a customer journey around storage, around integration, around data protection. David Lewis is here, he's a senior program manager of IT within Microsoft, and he's joined by David Jones, who's the senior vice president and general manager of the information management and governance business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Yogesh Agrawal, who is the VP of strategy solutions and technology marketing at HPE. Gentlemen, great to see you, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So David, number one, let's start with you. Talk a little bit about what you do at Microsoft in your role, and then we'll get into it. Great, so I'm David Lewis, and I work at the learning services, so we create all the content and courseware for all the Microsoft technologies that we produce through Microsoft, so that everyone in the world can enable our technologies to learn more about it and also become more successful in their careers. So within my group, I manage the infrastructure team, and obviously storage is a huge issue because storage is always growing, and so several years ago, we had several different OEM, different partner storage devices, and we basically moved over to 3PAR. We were the first 3PAR customers at Microsoft, and it was a hesitant transition initially, but now, where we're at today, it's been really, really successful. So we started off as 3PAR, and now we've migrated to StoreOnce for all of our backups, for all of our labs and courses and our databases that we have on a day-to-day basis, and we've also continually deployed several other 3PARs as well, so it's been an excellent transition from having multiple vendor storage solutions to having one solution that will not just do the hard drives and the storage, but will also do the solution with the management and the usability. You don't need to be an architect anymore to manage a sand, which is really, really important because as a manager, I don't want to pay someone a lot of money to manage a sand, or to manage the backups, so I can have a young kid that is relatively new in technology and he can go and create the sand, deploy the volumes, do all that, manage the data, and through 3PAR's management consoles, through data protection, you can do everything from absorbing the data and backing up the data through Data Protector and also managing the data to make sure the data's secure. So you basically run a big knowledge transfer engine inside of Microsoft and we'll come back and talk about that. David Jones, every time I see you, you've been promoted, so congratulations. I don't know if it relates to coming in theCUBE or not, but... I think it's hot air rises. But information management and governance kind of used to be this topic that made people go, oh, they got the general counsel involved and data is a liability and now all of a sudden data's an asset. Yes. So that's changed your world, hasn't it? Oh, dramatically, dramatically. And you're absolutely right. It really was all about mitigating risk. That typically is how organizations think about and made decisions about information management and governance solutions, things like archiving, records management, legal hold, e-discovery. All of that is to mitigate risk, but if you think about it today, and it's really driven by what's going on outside, it's all the data being created. I mean, there's just too much of it. And so the traditional way of managing data by hauling it to a data warehouse somewhere and then analyzing it, it just falls apart. I mean, first of all, it's too much. You just can't do it. Second is, it's always on business. And so if you're going to make a real-time business decisions, you need to be able to do it by managing in place. And so where has that done? I mean, sort of within systems like your archive, your other retention management systems. And that's the big change, right? It's sort of moved from mitigating risk to how do we then open up that information and provide it to be part of the analytics footprint of an organization. Now, Yogiash, when we first talked on theCUBE, you and I had a one-on-one conversation. You had just come on as your running strategy. And a big part of that strategy has been all flash. You guys had some announcements today. You're really pushing on the density, obviously software defined. Give us the quick update on what's going on in storage. Yeah, so Dave, we have done really well on the old flash data center side in the last one year. And first of all, the reason we have done well is because we innovate at the intersection of three vectors. One is affordability. Second is performance. And the third is enterprise-grade data services. So the announcements that you're referring to. So on the flash side, the first announcement that we made is we are introducing higher density disk drives today, 7.68 terabyte drives and 15.36 terabyte drives. So over the last 24 months, we have essentially been able to reduce density by 16x and reduce the price per gigabyte by almost 40%, right? So on the affordability side, we have really driven things down. The other announcements that we have made is on the data protection side, we have a protocol recovery manager central, which essentially gives you application-centric protection, right, and allows to move the data between a three-part from three-part to store ones under the catalog management of data protector. So there we announced application support for Oracle, for SAP, HANA. And the third big announcement that we have made today has to do with our composable data fabric that is not related to old flash. But essentially what we are saying is as the world moves from the world of external storage to internal storage inside servers, which we talked about about a year ago, what you need is a storage intelligence layer, but which gives you the right data mobility with it. So the same storage intelligence layer, you can put it on a server in a VSA form factor, it can be available in an array form factor, it can be available in a hyperconverse form factor, or in a composable form factor. So being able to compose the resources through the right intelligence layer is a major announcement we have made today. So David Lewis, when you started down this journey, what was the problem that you were trying to solve? You mentioned that there was some concerns you had about going to 3-par. What were the concerns? What was the problem you were trying to solve? So I think one of the concerns or considerations was obviously price. I mean, a lot of disks are really expensive and traditionally sands are normally very, very costly. And when I first started working with the presales team, they were offering me really, really economical solutions. So I think that's the great thing about 3-par is that there's so many different models you can choose from that will really fit your solution. And for me, as not a huge data center, but something that is modern in size, but also has a lot of room for growth, I was able to find a model that was really, that fit my needs. And I think that's what was really important is obviously economy is huge. Obviously everyone's worried about the budget. And I think the second thing is performance. 3-par itself is almost indestructible. In the last couple of years, we've had a lot of issues with our data center with everything from the roof literally lifting up and almost blowing off, air conditioning, dying and whatnot. Regardless, the 3-par just chugs long. If the temperature goes over 100 degrees, 110 degrees, the 3-par is there. It's still going, if one of the shelves blows up, then the data's intact, your IP is secure, which is really the most important part. So after seeing those demos and seeing my kind of considerations, that's really what sold me with 3-par. So you started with the storage, the sand, 3-par was a gold standard for simplicity. But then you brought in the data protection piece, is that right? That's right, yeah. And you were a data protector customer at the time or no, that was? I wasn't, no. I had other vendors that I was using for backups and because of the kind of sustainability with 3-par, I was like, all right, I'll check out store once, see how it works. And I think the thing that really sold me, it was obviously using architecture from 3-par, store once is obviously going to be solid. But also looking at the use, the manageability of data protector is phenomenal. And so like I said before, a young kid just come up and they can manage and administer the backups, which is really important. So David, data protector is still in your group, correct? It sure is. We've had this conversation before, I just like to double check. This integration play, is that a common theme amongst your customers? Yeah, very much so. How are you leveraging that? Yeah, very much so. I mean, candidly, if you look across the industry and backup data protection software, lots of similarities. I mean, any given day you can say one is better, the other is better, one scales. The truth is, they all do a really, really good job. And so then you begin to look at other things, right? Which in a lot of those other things are things like ease of use, like supportability, like the serviceability. And that's really where we're putting a lot of emphasis with data protectors, something we call adaptive backup and recovery. So the whole notion is that these data sets today are just growing exponentially. And so the old approach of just apply more resource to it, you just can't do it anymore. You run out of minutes in the day. You begin to infringe on the operations that the organization is there to do. So you have to get better ways to be able to manage your information, take the active data set, reduce it, back up, move some off to the side. So there's a bunch of things that we're doing just to make all of the information, all of the chores of the backup administrator really diminish, really, I mean, ideally go away. They never will, but go away and just make it super easy to use. The joke is always that it's really not about backup. It's about restore. And restore is a really hard thing. You never really know until you fully restore, is it all there? But if you think about it, that's the value you sell in your customer. It's an insurance policy that it will be there, right? And so there's a bunch of things. I mean, you can engineer all you want into the software, but if it's not easy to use, you introduce human error into it and you can't engineer that away. And so we're trying to engineer that away with things like adaptive backup and recovery. Just make it super, super simple and easy. My backup is one thing, recovery is everything, is the how the joke goes. Now, did I hear that the data protector has the catalog visibility or is that somewhere else? Okay, so how, or are you changing the way or leveraging that catalog in any particular way? For example, with space efficient snapshots, are you changing the backup paradigm, evolving the backup paradigm? Yeah, I think one of the great things about data protector is synthetic backups. So we have a lot of cold storage, a lot of data that's just very static. And instead of backing up the 100 terabytes, 300 terabytes, whatever, a week on your full backups, you can just do a quick snapshot. See if there's anything changed, nope, so it goes on. So instead of taking 48 to 72 hours for a backup, it might just take 30 seconds. And that's revolutionary for us. One way we are changing the backup paradigm a little bit is I would say the lines are actually blurring between primary and secondary storage now, where depending on your SLA, you may want to take the copy on primary storage, or you may want to take the copy on something like store ones. So the reason we invested in a data movement capability between three power and store ones is by doing that, we can enable the backup to happen 23x faster than any other mechanism. And the recovery can be seven x faster. But what you can also do is depending on your SLA, for example, if you are a DevOps person and you say I need an application-centric copy on a Flash architecture, available through the DevOps ecosystem, you want that copy to be on Flash. So that concept of a copy for a DevOps need and a copy for a backup need, these are concepts are blurring the boundary between primary and secondary storage. And the catalog has visibility on all that so I can eliminate copies once I don't need them anymore. Because copy creep is a problem. I mean, you've found it, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's true on backup copies. We were also talking just before we came on, it's true sort of throughout the enterprise, just on file data, sort of the proliferation. And we find all kinds, it's not in the backup arena, but a product called ControlPoint that is in what's classified as file analytics. And it simply goes out and then crawls what you've got within your data estate. And you find the same copy distributed 8, 10, 12 times across the enterprise. Now, in many cases, it's a copy that for legal reasons, you want to have deleted. But how do you know where it is? So this goes and finds all of that and it lets you reduce what we call rot, sort of redundant, obsolete, trivial data. But you can take it and purge it from your infrastructure, another great way actually to squish down your active backups. Well, defensively, delete will all right. So that's huge. Absolutely. You're one of the working process stuff hanging around, back to data as a risk before. That's right, that's right. That's all within this ControlPoint solution. Likewise, as part of we introduced it actually today and showed for the first time publicly, a new product line called HPE Verity, sort of single source of truth. And it's taking all of the assets we have across the information governance portfolio, not the products themselves, but the core IP from those. And we've combined them all together on a single common technology stack. So common corporates of data, common index across all of the governance portfolio, and then the applications themselves are simply portals into that information. Let's you reuse the data, let's you use what you need when you need it and just what you need by who needs it. So David, how would you assess the business impact of all this great integration and this journey that you've been on? Well, obviously there's an economical impact. We're paying cheaper per gigabyte with three par, which is huge. Obviously data is always growing. We're always continually going to add more data. So the price per gigabyte is an obvious thing that we need to keep down. Performance itself is huge. And we've mentioned it a little bit before with data duplications and redundancies, but also just the IOPS itself, three par is a beast. So it will keep running and just the way that it works in its mechanisms, it will just have superior service compared to other partners that I've experienced. So the performance is great, the price is great, and the usability, as we mentioned earlier, is great. So those are really the three things that I've seen with my past experiences with my team using three par that has been excellent. And where's Flash fit into your roadmap? You know, Flash is definitely a consideration. Right now it's more of a capacity versus performance. And because we're able to use SaaS drives and still have great IOPS with the three par because it works as a whole system not just with single individual drives, we don't necessarily need to go down that route with us. I know that's definitely a huge thing for us with dealing with data warehouse and big data to have that performance, but we're getting great performance with our non-Flash drives right now. Which is still more economical. It is. Yeah, it's economical and we need the space. And if and when the price crosses over, that will be the determining factor for you. I think it's going to be inevitable. I mean, obviously the price per drives are going down. The sizes are going up. So you just have to find that happy median. And again, it's just kind of, find the right solution for what your requirements are. So we're getting close with, I guess we're there with 15K RPM, right? That's crossed over. 15K is pretty much dead in my view. And I would say spinning media actually has hard limits beyond which the cost will become prohibitive. But Flash still has a long way to go. My other advice to David would be, look at the overall benefits of Flash, productivity for backup, right? Floor space, density, all of that. Then the benefits of Flash are enormous. Absolutely. Well the whole DevOps discussion is interesting. We were talking copies before, being able to spin up current copies, instead of older copies for your development team, sharing data out of Flash. Have you seen that as a strong use case? And again, this integration story I love because I can make a zillion copies, space-efficient copies, but they still take up space. And with the catalog, I can reduce those copies. What are you seeing there? So I see two areas, I would say, one was the DevOps thing that I talked about, which is you take the copy on Flash because what the developers care about is agility. And agility comes with Flash because the developer is able to work on it faster. So that's one aspect. The second area of copy that I would say we are seeing is people want to be able to create a copy but bring compute to that copy. So that's where you see the concept of copy in the cloud, where they're saying I want to leverage the compute power of the cloud to do that, right? So those are the two areas where I'm seeing the new world adopting copies in a different manner. All right, we have to leave it there, but David, I'll give you the last word. Customer, I guess the last word. HPE Discover, new HP, leaner, meaner, growing again. What's your take on the vibe of the show? I think it's a great show. It's a huge turnout and it's a lot of diverse people here. There's a lot of people from a lot of different technical industries from health to IT to automotive. So a really, really broad group of people, pretty exciting to see them all getting really excited about HP products. And so obviously there's a lot of great solutions coming out, not just hardware anymore. There's solutions, which is pretty amazing compared to, you know, when we were young whippersnappers that was just HP was just hardware. So now you have the full suite with HP and so it's great to see the, you know, all the products that are available and all the, you know, revolutionary things that HPE can do for companies. All right, David Lewis from Microsoft, David Jones and Yogesh Agarwal from HPE. Thanks very much for coming on. I'm really excited. Thank you, Dave. All right, keep right there, but we'll be back with our next guest is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover in Vegas, right back.