 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is Silicone Angle and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicone Angle. I'm joined by my co-host, the co-founder of wikibon.org. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Craig Nunes is here. I think Craig Nunes has probably been on theCUBE as much as anybody except Pat Gelsinger. So, and maybe Jim Gantia, I don't know. No, you've been more than Gantia. Kind of like a cube groupie. Yeah, kind of bad. Well, welcome back. It's been really good to see you. Thank you. Yet another VMworld. We're very happy to be in San Francisco, I have to say, because we've spent far too much time in Vegas in deference to HP Discover, which we love as well. But it's good to be here. It's good to see you. Yeah, so we're hearing a lot about SDS, Thought for the Fine Storage. You guys have been doing that for a while. You and I have talked about it, maybe not with those three letters, but in some way, shape, or form for quite some time. So what do you make of all this SDS trending? Yeah, so it's, to be honest, about a year ago when the catchphrase, I think kind of catalyzed a lot of, certainly where we were kind of viewing the market. It's helped us a lot because I think we've been trying to, in our own way, explain kind of where the value is for folks and why it's interesting. And I think the, just hanging under a common label in the industry, software-defined storage, you can have the conversation. What is software-defined storage? And when we talk about it, we say, look, it is, first of all, it's software. It is, you know, abstracted from the underlying hardware, hardware agnostic, which means you can run it not only on HP servers, you can run it on other servers. There's no restriction there. It's software-defined storage ought to be pretty independent of your hyper-vider choice, right? The other thing about software-defined storage, and I get the question from time to time, well, what do you mean, what do I get in the software? It is, you know, a full complement of data services of storage software that you would expect in a storage array controller, right? Snapshots, replication, federation, right? You should get all of that and go run it in a VM, right? You run it on bare metal if you're wanting to do that. But it is software completely abstracted from the underlying hardware. And then kind of the flip side is, it's manageable by an open published API. We kind of like the open stack stuff. I think that's got a lot of juice to it. But, you know, so we believe it's a way to get into highly available storage without, you know, kind of locking yourself in to a particular hardware approach or management approach. Right, Greg, I want to ask you before we get into some of the HP conversations, more market space. Obviously, we were talking on theCUBE about Flash. Yeah, compared to Winchester, possibly a bubble, and that's always great speculation. It's good for views and good job controversy, but really, Flash is very, very important. But I want to ask you more of a bigger market space question, because when you were at 3PAR, you guys were an innovative startup. You were the disruptor, okay? And now the market's maturing in storage, and now Flash enters the scene. Now, software-defined data center has a lot of momentum. We heard Carl Asherbock really going hardcore. This is a, they're marching to software-defined data center. So the question is, who leads? Storage or networking or servers? So it's all three. Storage seems to be the theme here with Flash, but then it's server-side for acceleration. All this stuff is interplaying, the convergence of, what's your take on this? Someone who's been both on the entrepreneurial side of the disruptor, and now you're at HP with a huge customer base. Yeah, so I think the, maybe the way to think about it, it's a great question, is depending on the problem you're trying to solve, and let's pick on software-defined, right? The problem that a lot of folks are trying to solve with that is a cost problem, right? I don't have the space, I don't have the budget to bring in a standalone disk array to run my virtualization deployment, right? So it's cost, and so it becomes very much a convergence theme, which often starts with your server platform, right? So that's kind of compute-led, but storage is a big consideration. I think the other end of the spectrum might be when you're thinking about quality of service, right? Flash, HDD. Suddenly, where your data goes and how you set that up might be a more storage-centric conversation, right? With compute more as the peripheral. So you kind of have to start where you're optimizing, right? Are you optimizing for cost or optimizing for service levels? So I like your definition of software-defined storage. I thought it was straightforward. I mean, that's kind of similar to what we say with Debond, it's not, you don't over-complicate it. So I want to ask you why software-defined storage? Why the hype now? You guys have been doing it for a while. We weren't calling it that, but what is it about? What's happening? What's the inflection point of the marketplace? Is it just Intel cores? Is it other stuff, costs coming down? Why now? It's a combination of things, I think. Perfect storm, right? You have a lot going on on the microprocessor front. Very powerful CPUs in our servers, right? So a lot of available compute not being otherwise spoken for. You have drives that are what? Like four terabytes now per drive and you have servers with 24 drive slots. So you've got capacity that abounds in your server infrastructure. You've got compute that abounds in your server infrastructure. So now more than ever, you have the resources to tap if you've got the right software to tap that, right? Finally, virtualization I think is the final ingredient because virtualization drives shared storage and this is the most cost-effective tap to shared storage, right? So virtualization, compute, and capacity resources, right? Okay, and then the other thing is it's server agnostic, it's hypervisor agnostic. Those are two differentiators from, for example, so VMware has its own version of software-defined storage. And talk about what that means to HP. And you see VMware pushing on like that. I mean, you see what's happening in SDN and you see the logo slide and it's one obvious company missing. But so what does that mean from a storage standpoint? Is we've seen this for years from Microsoft and Oracle. They'll grab pieces of the storage tech. That's not a new trend. But it's one that you must be watching and contracting. Yeah, here's how I think about it. And we talk with our pals at VMware about this all the time. Look, they are taking vSAN. And first of all, it is only deployable in servers that are shipping with Flash. And Flash is up and coming, but Flash is very much about, I mean, it's very, from a footprint perspective, think of the number of server shipments on the planet day in and day out. The number with Flash in them is pretty darn small when you agree. Single digits, yeah. Then within that, you know, they're aiming vSAN to enable their business around client virtualization, big data, stuff like that. So they're kind of within that, taking this little box, this little focus area to drive their business, right? Good idea. Our approach is a little different, right? We're looking at that entire server market, not just HP servers, right? The whole server market going, hey, you know, insofar as those are being driven into virtualization environments, we have a value proposition for customers to bring more cost-effective storage into those budget-pressured virtualization environments broadly, right, across the board. So we have a mature approach with data services that are built on for six years. And we think we also have the combination of a great storage and server business at HP to really deliver value to customers. So what do I buy? Talk about the product set. So if I'm interested, okay, Craig, I like your story. Tell me something. Yeah, so you will start with, well, first of all, let's talk about where you would want to put software to find storage, right? It's a big world out there. So think about generally speaking, a small site, right? You are budget-pressured for your small site, especially if you have a lot of them, right? SME. Compound. So think remote office of a large enterprise or a government agency or a mid-market shop, you know, small space limitation, not a lot of on-site expertise. So you're focusing there. You're probably starting with a couple of servers, right? A few servers. You will buy a couple of VSAs, right? Store Virtual VSA for shared storage. So that's going to give you the shared storage you need to get virtualization off the ground. That's going to allow you to have highly available storage that you can create snapshots, you can replicate, you can move hot data around your servers on really any environment. The other thing you could do. So full stack. Yeah, full stack. And I'm talking, what, how many terabytes? You could go, so our VSAs, we just had a nice announcement recently with some licensing options. You can have a VSA that supports up to 50 terabytes, if you want. Just say 10 to 50, 20 to 50, I'm somewhere in there. Sure, yeah, so let's pick 10. There's 30 terabytes if you picked up three VSAs. What you might also do is we also have, brought this concept to our data protection, our backup systems, our store once platform. So you can drop a store once VSA on one of those servers for a deduplicated local backup out of your remote office or without having to go again by hardware. So I need, well I got to have servers obviously in there and I got to have some capacity on those servers. The point is though, your storage capabilities are living on a VM right next to your VMs. So I don't have to buy another box. It's at the provision on another virtual machine and make sure I have enough physical capacity on the disk. That's right, yeah, so that's what you buy, server and a few VMs, server and a few VSAs I should say. Okay, all right, so I can't. Server, VMWare, of course, and a few VSAs, right? You got to run an OS. VMWare, there are other hypervisors that you could run and we'd support, right? Right, well so, okay let's talk about that. So VMWare, Hyper-V. Microsoft Hyper-V and we're looking at some demand for KVM so that's in a storage space. So KVM, a lot of traction in service providers. Are you getting demand from service providers? Well you're going to hear a little bit about that later. Today I think the service provider space also think about what they're trying to do. They're trying to deliver an experience at the lowest possible cost, right? And particularly for service providers who are trying to bring a bit of multi-tenancy to the services they're deploying, like with StoreOnce, a backup as a service, it's a great way to deliver backup as a service infrastructure without having to throw a bunch of hardware at the problem. You stand it up, tear it down as you build out your customer base. And you're going to hear a little bit about how you can take advantage of StoreVirtual VSA from service provider perspective from Oaks Interactive. They've got a nice use case. So I can buy data protection as software. I can buy block services. Primary storage and information protection all delivered as software as a service, right? So I got to ask you, I can't have you on the queue without asking about 3PAR even though. Yes, thank God, we got a 3PAR question too, love it. All my favorite topics. Now to the other end of the spectrum, a lot of software in 3PAR but it's tightly coupled with the hardware, cool asics in there, doing unnatural acts and driving main frame class. I wouldn't say unnatural. Well, for modular storage. You make it sound dirty. Right, I mean you're doing things that usually you don't associate. 10 years ago you wouldn't associate with modular storage. So 3PAR is a very different storage experience from what a lot of folks are used to if they've kind of been raised on the traditional dual controller model. And I'll tell you the approach with 3PAR, in fact, we're talking a lot about software defined and what a software defined data center experience brings the administrators is a reason to not have to understand about what's going on with all the hardware out in the infrastructure. And 3PAR delivers you that experience within the array. You don't need to worry about where you're provisioning, where your snaps are, all of that stuff. You forget about the hardware and you think about what you're trying to get done in your data center for your business. And the platform is absolutely on fire for us. Fastest ramping platform in the enterprise group for HP ever. We introduced a few quarters ago now a new mid-range 3PAR platform. So we kind of packaged the secret sauce from the high end. Big and total available market expansion. Yeah, brought that down to a very affordable price point, but really delivers you all the tier one capabilities of the high end 3PAR store-serve platform. And so you really have opened up a lot of possibilities for folks who before really weren't able to touch it. So the platform growth we've seen year over year probably triple the shipments of 3PAR from a year ago. Tripled, right? And we're already on a pretty steep growth path. We were right here when 3PAR was in play. It was our first one in 10. We accurately predicted it would end up at HP, but so good move, good move by HP. Okay, so now you announced the all flash array as well. Yes. What's the update there? Yeah, so the 3PAR store-serve 74.50, flash top to bottom. And again, the value of the approach we've taken here is you've got, first of all, the performance you'd expect with some great efficiency, right? If you put flash in the most efficient array on the planet, good marriage, right? With all of the data services that 3PAR has become really known and highly regarded for, multi-tenancy, autonomic management, replication, federation, all of these mature data services on this really great flash platform. And alongside the mid-range platform, the high-end platform, so you're really not only able to run QOS within each of these arrays, but you're able to shift data between arrays non-disruptively as data moves through its life cycle, only because you're running the same storage operating system across these platforms. It's a powerful, powerful platform for us. And you got, we had Stephen DeWitt on yesterday. Oh, good, yeah. And he was high energy, you know, Steve. Oh, yeah. And so we meant to ask him, who said, he's going to show us a little leg for Barcelona. And we forgot, we ran out of time. So can you give us a glimpse of what's coming from Barcelona? What should we be looking for? Well, so the, yeah, yeah. So here's the stuff that's really, you know, happening all around storage. And it's, for Barcelona, it's next month, it's just coming at you. And we've been talking about it, 3PAR, right? We didn't talk enough about it, but you know, StoreOnce and Information Protection Retention. Big focus for our business. StoreOnce is a high growth platform, growing in double digits, a lot of happy customers, extended into the software defined realm with the VSA. So a lot going on there and Information Protection overall. We have a huge opportunity in the mid-market. So we're doing a fair bit of work with new MSA platform. It's just in the market, high volume, high performance, really providing a great entry platform to HP Storage for folks who are wanting to take that path in. And then of course, you know, software defined broadly. You're going to hear a lot about that. And that's those four things. 3PAR, StoreOnce and Around Information Protection, are what we're doing for our mid-market customers, SMB customers, and software defined. All right, Craig, well listen, we really appreciate you coming on, John. Going wall to wall. How you holding up over there? Good, holding up, love to have theCUBE. Day two, this is three days of live coverage. We may even go on a Thursday, we were so excited. So I think we had a great location. If you're watching, you know people here, we're at Moscone South Lobby. If you're watching, go to crowdchat.net and weigh in. Crowdchat.net slash VMworld. Go to wikibond.org or go to SiliconANGLE for all the content. All replays will be on youtube.com or SiliconANGLE. I'm Rock, I'm getting my second win. We're going to be live tonight as well. So all day, day of wall to wall coverage. Just theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.