 Live from San Francisco, California, it's The Cube at VMworld 2014. Brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Okay, welcome back. We're here live in San Francisco for VMworld 2014. This is The Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here with Jonathan Cassane, Chief Strategy Officer at NetApp, and Dan Nault, Senior Vice President of Data Center Swiss Group with NetApp. Guys, welcome to The Cube. Great to see you. I just had Pat Gelsinger talking about his vision, hybrid cloud. And I want to bring in the NetApp perspective. But first, I want to get the update. Jonathan, tell us what's going on with NetApp right now from the business standpoint. Obviously, you guys, major player in the industry, classic Silicon Valley startup, success story, growth, love following the founders on Twitter. Just a great culture. You guys have a great company. I'm a big fan of NetApp here in Silicon Valley. But filers are a great part of your product. But the world is going cloud. But yet we're seeing box solutions aren't going away either because people still want to buy storage for all that data they're getting. So the storage business is certainly in the epicenter of all the action. So what's the update? Where's NetApp at? So I'd say you're spot on. I think that we've had some great success. Actually, seven out of the eight last quarters, we've had market share gains against the traditional competitors in storage. And so our arrays and offerings continue to go very well in terms of meeting customer needs in those traditional areas. But I think the headline here is we have really embraced hybrid cloud as a means for meeting customer needs. And customers are very excited about the opportunity we offer them with our full spectrum of cloud-based offerings, which are predominantly around cluster data on tap, our release of on tap that's our flagship offering for data management and storage management. So, Dan, I got to ask you. I wrote a post on Forbes a couple of months ago, maybe a year ago, called Software-Defined Storage. NetApp getting really into that. You guys were a big part of that. I think Julie was on the cover. I got a lot of page views. But the whole story was really around the NetApp vision is software-based. And this is before all the buzz, by the way. You guys had the software kind of defined approach. I think it was Software-Defined NetApp. How has the Software-Defined Hype and Buzz with customers affected you guys? Because you were kind of been there, done that before it got rolling. And what are you guys doing now as a result of that? But the popularity of Software-Defined Storage gave us the opportunity to talk about the foundation of cluster data on tap and the technologies behind that, that we talk about really making storage cheaper than the disks, if you will. And all of the integrations that we do in order to bring out that value for customers, that efficiency for customers, the ability to weave things in. People are used to those conversations now, so they're actually easier conversations. So whether it's something like our virtual storage controller for VVOLs today, the announcement that we just did, people are used to looking to that for us. So it actually, it opens up the conversation for us a lot more. Because indeed, that is the foundation of our company. Some people are saying that has been quiet. You guys have been quiet on the buzz side. Are you guys huddling up? Are you going to come out with an explosion? Is there something going on? People want to know what's going on in NetApp. Is there some secret thing happening? Well, we've got a lot of words. I'm going to try to dig into this thing. Yeah, I mean, we've had an innovation pipeline that's just been knocking the socks off at things the last few quarters. We've brought forth two all-flash array offerings and are shipping next month our flash array flash offering. That's headline news. I think our continued leadership in the FlexPod offering for converged infrastructure and our partnership with Cisco and others to deliver that easy to implement building block for infrastructure in the data center is great headline news. And then our continued embrace of this hybrid cloud through our software defined capabilities. If you look at cluster data on tap, whether it runs in your data center at a hosting facility or takes advantage of the burstable compute in places like AWS or Azure, we've distinguished ourselves by able to pan across those different IT infrastructure choices for customers and get them to a place that they achieve the highest business value. Those are all headline news. Have you guys had any impact from Pure? I know that, you know, Vaughn went to Pure. He was a NetApp employee, we did it in theCUBE. And I know there's a lot of poaching going on around Silicon Valley. But I mean, obviously they're going to have to more like EMC. I think they're nipping at EMC SEALs to describe any kind of predatory move that they have. But how has that affected you guys? Because obviously you're moving into flash pretty aggressively. There is a flash future for NetApp through this competition out there. It's pretty bubbly right now. So how do you guys deal with that? I mean, you guys have a good engineering team, but what's your response to some people saying it? Well, we have a great engineering team, and I think that's part of it. We've been able to look, in my role, that heads corporate development at four dozen different startups that are hybrid flash companies or all flash array companies. And each time we've taken the look, we've said, you know what, in-house, we have far more that we can achieve with the offerings that our engineers can put together. We have our EF 540 and 550 line. It's our first all-flash array out on the market that's had strong adoption with customers in Silicon Valley, some of them buying hundreds of these units and selling thousands of these overall. We've also had strong adoption now with our all-flash arrays based on FAS. And Dan will probably want to talk more about our FAS 8000 and some of the integrations that we've brought to market and announced today, because that's really changing the world of high performance end-user compute. But I'll add on top of that that flash array is coming as well, and we see that trifecta all-flash or hybrid flash. Those are all three all-flash array offerings in the market today. Some of them are oriented for those that really have high data management requirements and are really used to all that world-class data management capability that is in ONTAP today. And others are oriented through those that want to have data management more applied in the application. And so for them, the EF 550 offering has been a very strong offering in the marketplace. David Fleur always talks about how ONTAP and ONCommand are really nice software as an orchestration piece of it. But I got to ask Dan before we're going to FAS and talk about some of the products. Tom Georges is a pretty hard-nosed CEO. He's pretty technical too. He's kind of a geek like us. What's it like in there? What's he doing? What's he marching on? Is it the carrot and the stick kind of because you guys have a good culture? I mean, there's competition out there. How are you guys responding to it? I mean, what's Tom doing? It's great to see how Tom is so deeply technical. And of course, you know, he ran in Genio and then he ran cluster data ONTAP and then he ran all of the engineering. Now he's the CEO and now he's the CEO Chairman of the board. It's a very empowering culture. It's a culture that wants to bring out all the best of the ideas. And, you know, John talked about, you know, all of the different flash bets. You know, the first one that really emerged was his product when we acquired his company in Genio, right? So 550, 560 is coming out. And then Flashray, our own incubation, it came out under his leadership. And then there were some insights from that that turned into the all-flash FAS. He looks at all of those. He looks at the performance of all of those. He looks at the customer use cases, all of those. And in leadership, he just makes sure we're clear on how those all come together in the market. And he's very focused on share. John shared seven out of the Passporters. He's been growing share every time. Yeah, you guys are like acquisition proof as a company. David and Valentin, I always talk about NetApp. Because like, you're too big to be bought because you're successful because no one would ever pay the millions of dollars they would need to do an acquisition just on tender offer. But you guys are innovating. You have an innovative culture, great facility. You guys always win the award for employee satisfaction, it's pretty clear, great campus, love the buildings. But I want to ask you around the next corner, okay? I know Tom had a good sit-down with Tom over the years. And there's a lot of competition around this flash area. The question is, how will the customer's environment change? And we see EMC making some moves. It doesn't seem to be like a rip and replace. What are you guys afraid of? I mean, I guess the question is, what are you guys nervous about, afraid of? And where are you guys confident? Or were you guys investing if you're afraid? And where are you guys confident? Look, we're in Silicon Valley. So one can never be overconfident. But we think flash is an opportunity just as much for the big boys to play as it is for the startups, number one. And number two, our shipping numbers of flash that we announced the prior quarter were above what many others in the industry had shipped in their period of time. And some of that, in two quarters, we were able to exceed what some public companies that were pure flash companies had been able to ship in their lifetime. So there's huge demand for flash. So we're seeing high demand and we're seeing high receptivity, not just to flash as the technology, because everybody can offer flash to match against the workload. We offer much more, because data management and the software are key. And if people just have flash as a stand-alone, they need to hire more people with specific expertise against certain systems and certain workloads. In today's environment, people want to have a comprehensive data management portfolio. Agile. And they want to be agile, of course. And they also want to know that they've got a company backing them that has world-class support and worldwide coverage. And that's a company like NetApp. I mean, EMC and Directed Availability was selling a boatload of the Xtrema, but even before the general availability, so the demand is extremely high. But I got to ask Dan in the data center, how is that transforming how their architecture is? Does it affect on tap, on command? Does it highlight the benefits? What's your take? So one of the things that's been great about having a very strong all-flash offering in the form of the EF540 than 550 and also having the all-flash fast is we've been able to see exactly what's the all-flash sales and what's the mix of flash and spinning media. And because of the sophisticated data management capabilities and cluster data on tap, what we've seen is that customers use the right type of storage for their needs and performance. So usually it's not all-flash. We certainly have it, but you also see a mix of flash and the spinning media. Now, there's some workloads for which you do want all-flash. For example, we announced, as part of FlexPod, a coverage that is the all-flash for the VDI use case. More people are using VDI for high-performance workloads. So there's a case where you would want to have this all-flash capability in FlexPod. But for a lot of cases, it'll be a mix of flash and spinning media. And that mix is important because I would add, John, that we also have this view of the hybrid cloud and we really want to make sure people have the ability to have a universal data platform that allows them the maximum mobility to move their data and their workloads where it's best suited to achieve their business value. Flash is one pillar of that because in their data center or elsewhere, they want to get the most high-performance results with flash, and it's not to be spread across all workloads. But with that, we also have our on-command insight offering, which is very striking and that version 7.0.1 can go in and enable people to manage capacity, manage performance, look across multiple sites, see where they need to invest, and see which workloads in flash or non-flash are being best optimized and may need further reinvestment. So it's a powerful story across our software portfolio on-premise and through the cloud. Guys, at the range from NetApp here inside theCUBE, bringing the Signal, obviously NetApp, big player, certainly great success. The software is in the DNA. Let's see how that all materializes. The flash is hot, capacity flash, performance flash, total economic disruption. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.