 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We're here at the new Wikibon studio in Marlboro, Mass, inside the Cube. We're here with Craig Nunes and Sean Kinney of HP. Guys, welcome. Yeah, thanks Dave. The very thin Craig Nunes. You're looking great. Thanks, yeah. Thin provisioning, thin guarantee, that's right. That's good. He lives it. I like it. That's good. Marketing all the way. Right on. So we're here to talk about the new HP announcement, the August 23rd announcement. You guys have been busy. It feels like we were just at HP Discover. Yesterday, I mean, just the great event. You guys have recovered from that for the most part. And we had the Cube there, of course. Yeah, right on into the next thing. So the summer has always been a big time for three-part announcements. You've kind of been on that cycle. And here we are again. Sean, you have a variety of background. You joined HP relatively recently, right? Yep, four a year ago. Just ahead of the three-part guys. So well, anyway, welcome guys. Appreciate you guys coming on here. So why don't we start off, Craig? Tell us a little bit about what was announced today, and then we can dig into it a little bit. Sure, yeah. So we announced a couple of things. One is kind of building on what we talked about in June. We introduced our Converged Storage architecture. And what we talked about Converged Storage is really being storage without boundaries and kind of driving storage much more closely to your applications and breaking down the boundaries between server storage and networking. We're kind of taking that to the next level today in announcing peer-based storage federation for HP storage. And what that is really doing is, again, delivering on that storage without boundaries theme and really allowing our customers to turn on data and keep that up and running wherever it might land, wherever they might need it to be. Peer-based storage federation, one big part of our announcement, the other big part is a platform extension to our HP three-part family called the P10,000 v-class. The HP v-class, three-part v-class is a platform that delivers new scalability for your virtual machines. It delivers really untouchable efficiency in terms of some of the new enhancements we've driven into silicon and software. And we kind of view it with the peer-based federation capability and everything that the platform has brought to bear over the last several years, the benchmark for federated tier one storage for Cloud and virtual data centers. So, Sean, we were talking off-camera about thin provisioning. So you were not a three-part classic, right? You weren't part of the acquisition team. And so now, thin provisioning is now part of the portfolio. And you see a lot of companies have announced thin provisioning. As a quasi outsider to the three-part, what has thin provisioning meant to the insider at HP? And talk a little bit about thin provisioning and why your contention was it's different than all the other stuff out there. So talk a little bit about that. It's really core to the three-part value proposition because it's built into the architecture. And as Craig was saying, we're now in our fourth generation ASIC, which includes the three-part buzzword, thin built in. And that's the difference is that it is built in. It is native to the architecture versus where it's bolted on and sometimes called a feature. Well, my guess is it's not always that well used. Three-part, almost every customer uses it because that's kind of why they bought it. And we guarantee that, hey, give us a chance. We'll guarantee you're going to save at least 50% in your storage, and we'll actually buy the rest. That's a little bit conservative to us. We usually do better. But where it's a bolt on to check the box on an RFI, it's probably not being used. And I'd question whether all the other arrays and their customers are getting anywhere close to the benefits the three-part does. Yeah, we've quantified some of that on Wikibon. I mean, if you search three-part on Wikibon, we actually did a customer survey where we actually pulled data. It was only metadata. It was no customer data. Out of the arrays, and David Floria did a detailed analysis. And it was pretty impressive. No doubt about it. You guys pioneered that whole space. So now you're getting into this whole federated storage area. Talk about what you mean by federated storage, and then we'll talk about what's different about what you guys are doing. Yeah, so here's kind of the background. We've come a long way in highly virtualized storage platforms. There's the benefits that one can realize on a highly virtualized storage platform from tiering and ease management, et cetera. Very clear, right? But what our customers still struggle with is in this new data center where you're deploying large-scale virtualization, you're deploying your cloud-based architectures, you run into a couple of different situations. One is that data center is very unpredictable in its workloads, right? You've got a lot of diverse and changing workloads. And so part of what we hear from our customers is I sometimes find I've got a workload trapped on a set of resources, and I'd really like to get it to a set of available resources elsewhere in my data center, maybe even in another data center. But I can't take the downtime to do that. The other thing that we find is when it comes time to take advantage of storage technology refresh, lifecycle asset management for storage, again, in a cloud data center, a virtual data center, we've got many, many applications consolidated. That, the ability to take your multiple applications down, your multiple tenants down and do that refresh, very painful, very difficult exercise. And then the final thing, and it builds on the point you guys are talking about with thin provisioning, we have loads of thin provisioning customers. And what they see as an opportunity is they've gotten thin and high utilization results from thin provisioning. They actually see an opportunity whereby they can share free capacity resources across their data center with technologies that go beyond in the box virtualization. And that's squarely where we're aiming storage federation. OK, so it's a collection of independent arrays that you're actually managing as one. You called it, I think, peer to peer. Right. Yeah, so I would describe storage federation as the following. It is distributed volume management across peer-based storage systems, a federation, really interacting in native in-band communications between them. They're relying on no external devices to actually do any of the functionality we're talking about versus virtualization. Think of virtualization as sort of a hierarchical technology, a sand-based virtualization appliance, virtualizing arrays beneath it, or within a storage array, a storage controller, virtualizing disks beneath it. What we're talking about is a peer-based technology. And what the advantage that brings you is you don't have an additional layer of equipment, an additional management point, an additional failure point in your architecture. Keep it simple, keep it more efficient, et cetera. OK, and you talk a little bit about the use cases and the problems that it's solving. It's not heterogeneous, right? We're not talking about an appliance that goes in and manages other storage, right? That's right. So what problem does it solve? Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, and I think Sean's got a great take on this. But at the end of the day, what we're aiming at is solving the problems of unpredictability in your cloud-based architectures and really tackling that for our customers in a better way than anyone's ever been able to do before. So Sean, when you talk about cloud-based architectures, that's a term that you used previously. What are we talking about? We're talking about private clouds. Are we talking about cloud service providers? See, all of the above. So cloud service providers, they're some of the three part biggest best customers. But corporate IT is moving that way, too. And they're saying, hey, I like the flexibility because, yeah, I have a data center with unpredictable workloads. I need an array or I need an architecture with sort of multi-tenancy built in, again, not bolted on. And so taking that as a model, they're saying, but I don't want to outsource either because it's too much risk or lack of control or my CIO doesn't want the data to leave the building. So they're moving towards this private cloud model. And the good thing is the service providers are leading the way and now corporate IT is following. And they don't have to go, it's not nearly as risky as it used to be because other companies have built successful businesses on it and on three part. Is that gap closing in your opinion between the cloud service providers and the internal IT or the cloud service providers going so fast because there's so much demand that they're actually innovating even faster than they've ever been? I think they're innovating on a business model, perspective, on a technology. I'd say that the corporate IT is catching up. The biggest difference for me is still charged back. That's their business on the cloud service providers. Yeah, we figure maybe 15% of the people out there are doing charge backs, that's a little bit right. Is that as good as any? So if you're not doing charge backs, is your private cloud really a cloud? Well, by the technical definition, I guess not. But I think more and more people are gonna start doing that because people are gonna want to see that visibility. I think it's we're making it easier. The technology supports the business, also has to enable the business. And now with Federation and Peer Motion, as you can add more storage, and as part of the software suite within three-part, to be able to automatically rebalance the system and put the right resources and at the right price at the right time, not only within the array but across arrays. Now a lot of that human management in the game of who's got the best spreadsheet, it's gone. The intelligence is in the array. We love managing by spreadsheet. And then so the V-Class, Craig, is another arrow in the quiver of the three-part portfolio, right? That's right. A little bit about the V-Class and maybe the details there. You know, if you step back on what folks are after in this new data center, they're trying to handle, you know, kind of this unpredictable multi-tenancy, right? Handling all those mixed workloads and changing workloads. They are trying to deal with security and quality of service. They're trying to maintain kind of persistent access to data that's maybe moving around their environment. They, you know, are thinking about pay-as-you-grow models and keeping capacity utilization as high as absolutely possible. And, you know, they're driving on self-configuring, self-provisioning, self-tearing systems to kind of keep the operational side down. So you've got a, you know, a set of criteria that frankly is showing the cracks in the architectures of, you know, 20 years ago, that, you know, we've kind of been working towards and with the new V-Class, it's our latest extension to the family that's really built on that. And what we kind of view the V-Class as sort of a benchmark for folks who are trying to deliver mission-critical storage capabilities in this new data center. The V-Class extends the lineup about 50% higher in terms of overall connectivity and to IO and disk. It supports some workloads as much as three times faster. From a virtual machine perspective, it really drives up the scalability of VMs in your environment. And it does all of that with a whole new level of efficiency really built into that Gen4 ASIC. You get, you know, fat to thin conversion faster. You get a more granular reclamation capability. Even your remote copy or DR capability between arrays gets zero detection, gets a thin capability to it beyond the thin aware capability built into it before. It's built on that, you know, it's more granular around thin provisioning. We used to do it at 128 megabyte block sizes. It's now 16K. So whatever that math is, it's 10,000 times more efficient, what have you. So it, you know, we're really sucking out all the extra unused stranded space and then giving it back to the general storage pool. Then, very, very thin. Well, who does, can I say anorexia? Yeah, anorexia, yeah. Three-Power platform, what's the primary competitor that you see in the marketplace when you go sell three-Power? I would say traditional thinking. Yeah. I would say the approach of application servers and storage and basically silos within the environment. As opposed to an infrastructure that's gonna support multiple applications. If you have predictable workloads, you can buy predictable storage. If you have unpredictable workloads, you need multi-tenant architected from the ground up storage. That's three-Power. And so it's that shift. Now, I know you've got some announcements, left-hand announcements coming up, we're not gonna talk about that today, but I wanted to ask you where EVA fits. A lot of people in the Wikibon community have asked us questions about EVA, what's the roadmap look like? Can you talk a little bit about EVA, where the fit is and what you're doing there? Yeah, absolutely. Back in June at HP Discover, we announced, we're now shipping our fifth-generation EVA platform. We have over 100,000 units installed in the field. For customers that like EVA, love EVA, we're gonna continue to invest in it. We're gonna continue to make it better. And we added thin provisioning. We're gonna continue. You'll see more investments and announcements coming from us really in the fall this year and then into 2012. EVA's not going away anytime soon. We have a loyal customer base. It's still, according to third-party analysts, 20% easier to use than other traditional mid-tier architectures. And it's a successful business for us, with loyal customers. Of course, we're not gonna walk away from it. Good, so Craig, you missed being a $200 million public company. Yeah, how's it feel to be back part of HP? I mean, how's it going? No, that's your first question. Look, so, three-par at HP. What three-par is done for HP, I think it's hopefully pretty visible. Three-par is an anchor storage platform. It is a basis for our path to the cloud and cloud system. It is a part of our virtualization, our best-to-breed virtualization stack and virtual system. It is a part of our mission-critical metro and continental cluster offerings. It's very rapidly become a fixture across the business. What HP has done for three-par is give it the avenue to really grow and touch far more customers than a $200 million company was able to do. Thousands and thousands of channel partners, thousands and thousands of sales people, all making calls with three-par and having a conversation that, to be honest, is a conversation, especially for our EVA customers, feels like a big brother. It's a virtualized platform with a lot of great ease of use benefits and feels like a perfect fit in the family. So, from that perspective, the growth we're seeing is no surprise at all to any of us. Yeah, that was a big, obviously, huge acquisition. We covered it very closely, we're very high on it. We've always, I've said a zillion times, it's a better use of cash. Many times in R&D is acquiring a successful company. So, well, good luck with that. We're going to be at VMworld, we're going to have you guys on. I hope we can do more discussion around federation. Sure. Maybe dig into it a little deeper, that would be great. So, that's coming up very shortly here. So, we'll see you in Vegas, back in Vegas. So, Sean and Craig, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us a little bit about the announcement. Look for coverage on wikibon.org. We'll be covering this announcement like a blanket as we always do, and good luck with it. Right on. Thanks, Dave.