 Okay, we're back live inside the Cube in Orlando, Florida for IBM Edge 2012. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Siliconangle.com and theCUBE and we're here to extract the signal from the noise and share with you what's happening here at the event and I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here with Steve Watavich who is the vice president of storage software development at IBM. Now John, Apple had the waz. IBM has the woj. That's exactly right, woj. Longo. Hey, you know his Twitter account? Steve underscore W-O-Z. Mine's Steve underscore W-O-J. So there you go. So follow him. Welcome to the Cube, Steve. Thank you very much. Vice president of storage software. Tivoli. Tivoli software. So you build the products that all those guys say, we got to make this. We were talking before you came on about some of the challenges. So first tell us what you see as the landscape around the environment around storage. I'll see storage as a enabler. There's a lot of stuff going on around it. Ed was talking about the portfolio. IBM has a lot of different groups outside of storage. You guys got to work together. Talk about how that's playing in and how software sits with the hardware and all that good stuff. Well, so from an IBM perspective, we build software to optimize the IBM storage components, obviously. We also build management and protection capabilities for any hardware platform. So being able to do management across whatever vendor you choose as a hardware platform allows you to optimize and build capabilities and do management as well as protect the data on it. At the end of the day, it's about information. Yeah, and so putting the bits on storage devices, managing the bits across those storage devices and being able to protect those bits for retention purposes, whether it's compliance, business processes. We were talking, you had a very simple philosophy around storage, so share with the folks out there how you see storage, because there's a huge growth in data. There is. So talk about how you see that world. The physical part or the software? The storing bits, it's just a very simple equation. You got to store bits and then you got to protect bits. Right, well, so that's it. So we try and let our clients determine what fundamental hardware to put the bits on, right? Because at the end of the day, bits are bits, right? And customers tend to have a hard time getting rid of the bits. Yeah, we don't ever get rid of anything. Well, and there's good reasons and there's not so good reasons. One, an excuse. I got a compliance audit coming up. I got HIPAA regulations or I got Basel or Sarbanes Oxley. But, you know, the reality is you can implement technologies that exist already today and have been for many years to get rid of some of those bits. You can. You can get rid of the duplicate bits. You can actually compress the size of the bits. Or you could take the really, really hard step from an organizational perspective and have that discussion with all the line of business executives as to whose applications that are creating all these bits. Whose is the most important? Now, that's going to create a fight, right? But at the end of the day, you can decide your application generates the most revenue. It's the most strategic. It's the most client-centric, whatever the case may be. You get top priority. You get second priority, third priority, fourth priority. And then you can actually move those bits around to say application number one, business owner number one. Your response time to your clients, your end user is one-tenth of a millisecond. And application owner number five may not be one-tenth of a millisecond, it may be one millisecond. At the end of the day, you can actually make movement of those bits between the real-time storage and the long-term preservation of those bits and save a lot of money. Yeah, and you can align that as well with an IT as a service. Exactly right. Well, so interesting, right? So, IT as a service, both from a private perspective and a public perspective, right? And I will contend over time, and time, by the way, is not many, many years, that every IT infrastructure will be a hybrid, a hybrid cloud. You know, that's funny. Can I call you a woj? I prefer. So, you say that because we did a survey exactly a year ago today, and we asked the practitioners in the Wikibon community, you know, what's your primary cloud strategy? And only about less than 10%, 9% said that hybrid cloud was a primary strategy. We just did the survey, again, last week, we finished it. It was like 39%. Yeah. So, this is, and it was by far the largest strategy. Yeah. A dwarfed public cloud is the primary strategy. And so, you see in that needle, really. And I will contend, the other 61% just haven't realized it. Yeah, they don't know it. Right, so, I mean, and it's not to say that you're going to be 50% private, 50% public, it's going to come down to the economics of what is my most critical? How can I, you know, how do I pay for it? Who can provide me the service? Who is a partner that can allow me to get an SLA that I can live with based on the dollars and cents per bit, per application, per business to support it. So, it might be 90% private today and 10% public. Over time, it'll probably grow to 20, 80. And, you know, for very, very small customers, it might be 90 to want, 90 to 10. You know, it might be 90% public, 10% private. I mean, if the economics are there and a customer can feel comfortable about the vendor they're getting their private service from, or their public service from, why not? So, that's a big trend you've identified. How do you respond to that? What's IBM doing to capitalize on that trend? Well, we're embracing it, right? So, we know customers are going to go there. And so, being able to allow them to interact and manage between their private and their public infrastructures, allow them, through standards, through open interfaces, through ways to manage their physicalness of their devices with the virtualness of a public cloud, be able to move the data back and forth and be able to create dashboards so that they can look at their infrastructure. And, you notice I didn't say private infrastructure. The infrastructure to support their business process and their applications, independent of where it resides. So, allow a customer to manage their SLAs, drive the need of their business from an application and the end result that they want, which is to drive their business, client satisfaction, and look at it and measure it and allow them to bounce it back and forth. Doesn't it make your job a lot easier if that whole environment is homogeneous? Absolutely does. But the environment is not homogeneous. Yeah, but the, yeah. So, how do you deal with it? Exactly. And, you know, it would make my life a lot easier too if I had a tree in the back here that grew money. But that's not the reality of it all, right? The reality is. You got to get one of those. You don't have one of those? They'll ask my next project. But, so the reality is, you know, customers want choice. They want flexibility. They want to avoid vendor lock-in, right? But they, I'm one vendor of many. I'm one partner of many to my clients. And they know they can come to me. I will give them a roadmap. They will explain to me what they like about my roadmap and what they don't like about my roadmap. And my job is to change what I don't like about my roadmap to satisfy what they want. And they don't want me to highly optimize to a single hardware platform, to a single operating system, to a single stack, to a single, you know, storage type. What specific trends are you seeing on the software side that's in that layer? You mentioned you're building this layer to extract away the multi-vendor canning system. Right. Which is required. What trends and innovations going on at the software layer that you can share? Sure. So when I think of trends, I think of two, I think of it from two different angles. One is from a client perspective. And so from a client perspective, clients are finally getting comfortable with implementing software capabilities outside of the fundamental hardware base that have been around for a long time. So think about, you know, thin provisioning. Think about tiering. Think about deduplication on backup and protection. So you're saying there was silos before? There were silos before, but I think they were very, so many, you know, we all know that operation centers are very risk adverse. Right. It's working today. Anything I do different could introduce risk. My job is to not introduce risk. My job is to do my job as I know it today. And so we've got to, you know, it takes a long time to be a change agent to get them to implement things and prove to them that it works. Now, from a technology perspective, virtualization of storage is ramping up much faster than the server side did. So customers, as we all know, are very comfortable with server side, compute side virtualization, right? So the same aspects, the same value attributes, the same concepts can be used on the storage itself. And so allowing an application to interact interface with an abstraction layer to allow you to manage, virtualize, and protect the fundamental underlying bits. As I talked about the information, the ones and zeros on the disks, to that application is where they're all going. Independent of the hardware underneath it. And then being able to take that information and create disaster recovery sites, create replicated versions of it, be able to do hot standby or failovers in real time. From a technology perspective, being able to stay one or two steps ahead of clients and their willingness to implement the technology, because they're always lacking. Now, they always ask for, what are you doing about capability A? And that's because they read about it in some trade magazine or a competitive website, and it's really interesting and sexy, and what's it all about? What are you doing about that? Well, yeah, we're implementing that. So tell me again, when is your plan to implement that? Well, I'd have no plan or it's in my roadmap or whatever, right? So my job is to make sure that I'm one step ahead and to teach them, implement, it'll drive efficiency, it'll drive optimization, and it'll help you down the road to whatever your business objective is. We've been hearing a lot from customers in the practices of Wikibon community about automation. Automation is a big concept in DevOps or Ops in general. I mean, you mentioned Ops. Ops are very much, there's no downtime required, but DevOps is just a new cultural breed of client. Yeah, and so DevOps, so interesting, DevOps, if you think about DevOps from a storage perspective, you do a little bit of development, but it's not really the compute side of the development where you got to kind of test it out and run it and put an application on it and understand the performance attributes and understand the IO across the entire system. From a DevOps point of view, think about being able to manage your, for example, in storage, be able to do, okay, what if I wanted to insert this new disk from vendor B and move my workload from this volume to that volume, prototype it for me, click. Oh, my performance on this side went up or down by X percent, right? You can then take a really rational thought process and say, hmm, it's worth it for me to buy that. It's worth it for me to move this, or it's not, because my performance just went down by X amount of percent and my SLA just got blown. Maybe I don't want to do that. Maybe I do some other workload. So, inside of the management stack that we have, you can do that. You can actually do proactive testing in the environment that exists today without implementing it in the existing environment. How does that happen? What product is that? So there's a couple of specific products. Because that's been demand right now. A lot of people want that product. So there's a thing that we announced today on a statement of direction called the Smart Cloud Virtual Storage Center. It incorporates the IBM management stack around particularly productivity center, the virtualization capabilities around sand volume controller, and it includes capabilities around copy. So IBM has this flash copy, and inside of this suite also has flash copy managers. It's a snapshot. Snapshots are within the IBM framework of storage devices. So think about being able to include management of the entire infrastructure, not IBM disks, not the competitors disks. One window. One window, one place for the application to come in, one management stack, one virtualization stack, that virtualization stack, implements all of the specific code to run. You pick your vendor of choice on the storage side, and then it implements the ability to do flash copy management, snapshots, across your systems. It's interesting, Dave, you know, we just, Apples and oranges here. EMC has 42 product announcements at EMC World two weeks ago. IBM doesn't have a lot of product announcements, but there's a lot of integration. So there's two different cultures there. So Dave, what's your take on that? I mean, Well, you're right on. And while we heard EMC's approaches to try to create a product that's a mashup. Now, my question to you is, you're clearly delivering what customers are saying to us that they want. We're so sick of managers of managers of managers. At the same time, it's not trivial to put all the function in there because it makes the environment more complicated, more complicated to deploy. That's right. How is Tivoli Productivity Center dealing with that complexity? Can you do both? Well, it's hard. I mean, it's hard. So it takes a tremendous amount of effort. So let me just give you an example of kind of the process of method we went through for Tivoli Productivity Center 5.1 that is GA-ing this month. It's been in development from a GUI and Ease of Use point of view for 18 months. We've had clients working with early prototypes, screenshots, architectural diagrams, user groups, focus groups, customer advisory and business partner advisory councils all looking at how do you make this new user interface? And it looks, you know, the icons look exactly like XIV and store-wise. Structured on the panels the exact same way. Very, very, very, very strict architectural principles. No more than, you know, six icons on the left and no more than three layers deep and no more than, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Really disciplined approach. Very disciplined. I will tell you, that made it very hard from a development point of view to live within those architectural disciplines. However, that's part of the brilliance of it, right? You're able to, the customers don't have this jet dashboard where it's got 50,000 knobs and 2,500 lights and switches and a controller, right? They can do a certain number of things. And what we found is that with this very simple approach the day-to-day management of the storage infrastructure from an operations point of view, not the initial, let's roll in a disk and let's get it set up and let's, that's very complex. And that was all part of the base product to begin with. What you can see now is that when you use Tivoli Productivity Center with sand volume controller and flash copy, you can, 80% of the day-to-day tasks that a storage operations person would do everyday can be done in a very small number of panels. And so being able to deliver that in a way that's very appealing to the eye, has intuitive flow throughout the system and can do it across heterogeneous environments drives a tremendous amount of value. Now, storage infrastructures are going to stay complex, right? Especially when you're throwing networking and what virtual servers are connecting to and virtual storage devices and all these kinds of things. I thought virtualization made it all invisible. Well, yeah, yeah. Everyone except the operators that have to manage for us. I love the DevOps angle. I think that was really compelling, because that's really a hot area. Thanks for sharing with that. I know we were getting pressed for time. My final question, and Dave can get a question in is, what's changing in the software going forward? So you made some announcements today. Obviously the theme is integration, cross-functional capabilities within IBM. Bring those solutions to customers that actually deliver from day one. Great message. What's next in software? With the horizon of the tsunami of data, big data in particular, analytics building on top of that, more need for manageability, data's not going away. And automation. Automation. So it's all those things put together. So think about, let me just come right back to where we started, which is around the information life cycle. So, information's created all over the place. Everybody's application creates tons and tons of data and it's not going away, unless we make some changes. Technology point of view and a process point of view. So being able to take that information, move it across the storage infrastructure, use many, many different types of storage devices to capture that information and understand where it's hot, where it's not, move the hot close to the application for performance reasons, the not figure out whether you want to get rid of it. And if you don't want to get rid of it and you want to keep it protected for a long term, you want to keep it for 30 days, you want to keep it for three years, you want to keep it for 10 years. And move that information from hot, immediate, now stored on SSD to long-term data protection, one, 10, 25 copies, out to a archived tape pool and be able to integrate all that together into a system that allows a client to understand this information is important for today, this information could be important for tomorrow and then put it into your system. So, actually my final, final question is more of a culture one. Every company has a nuance like about them, like they ship early, they're a manner of a certain approach. What is the storage engineering team? What's that one thing that makes them different and better than- Let me give it, so you asked a final, final, like a good Congress, one more final, one more final. I'll give you a two-part answer. I was not in that picture, I swear to God. One is, I will not ship a software product until it's ready. And what I mean by that is client, client interaction, client feedback, change it. More client feedback, change it. More client feedback, change it. When I think it's about ready to go, I ask one more time. The final, final question. Final, final question. Now, I'm going to do all of that to where I am convinced that the client from a broad market perspective can use it, it's valuable to them, and they're willing to pay. So, shipping code product that meets the customer's requirements as defined by you guys in Bulletproof. As defined by the client that I implement. Yes. You can do it in a quality way. Okay. All right. Well, Jay, thanks very much for coming on this show. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. It was fun. VP of development, he builds the products, he's the man behind the curtain, making the trains, building the train tracks, and the train, IBM. Great commentary, appreciate it. Software is the key to success in this future hardware business, and we hear that all in all. So, appreciate that. We'll be right back with theCUBE right after this short break. Thank you.