 From the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for Amazon re-invent. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles, Stu Miniman, Chief Infrastructure Analyst at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Phil Brotherton, Vice President of the Data Fabric Group at NetApp. New term, love it, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you, CUBE alumni. Yeah, I know it's going to be here. I love this place. So, we've talked in the past, obviously NetApp, big storage, great technology company, but you made a bet as a company three years ago to partner with Amazon. People were scratching their heads like, whoa, whoa, why would you move storage into the cloud? They're competing with you. It was this state of the art at that time, thinking was, whoa, box, keep the box out here. What's the update three years later? I mean, it's really going well. I'll give you a little bit of a history. I was right in the middle of that three years ago. It even goes back before that. Me and a couple of some of my teams, we were working actually on a lot of hypervisor work and a lot of stuff related to Microsoft, Microsoft was working on Azure. There was a lot of interesting, how do I manage data in a hybrid cloud world? There was actually the original thinking related to the hybrid models, Microsoft was working on Direct Connect. Amazon, our teams up in Seattle saw this going on. Amazon opened up Direct Connect. That was a prototype, which is now a product for us. And that was a product, it's actually a prototype for Cloud Ontap, what's now called Cloud Ontap. We start working on Amazon. We began to see our customers in the cages at Equinix. We began to see the value ourselves of working in this hybrid model. And it's really just taken off from there. So it's been a customer driven thing. Totally, it's a little bit, it's typical NetApp. It's a little bit, sort of our technology was taking us there, was one piece of it. But you couldn't miss the fact that I'm looking into it and some big customers sitting in cages right next to my experiments. And you can, if you go into an X of an X, you can see who's cross connected. So that's how it kind of started. And we were just with Bill Voss from S3 talking about how to go faster. This relationship just seems to go faster at this point. Bill, can you share any momentum numbers, kind of order, magnitude, how many customers you have or any other metrics that can share kind of the success? The most mature solution with Amazon is known as NetApp Private Storage for Amazon Web Services. That's the one that goes through the direct connect links. That one is in hundreds of customers today. So it's not huge like compared to our installations with VMware or on-prem, but it's big. And these are substantial customers doing substantial work and ranges all over the place from sort of high techs to government all over. Cloud OnTap, the easiest statistic I can quote, we've been doubling hours used. It's still not as big as we'd like, but it's been doubling quarter on quarter actually recently. So we're seeing the same kind of rapid growth numbers on Cloud OnTap that Amazon reports for its platform. David Floyer was talking about the challenges of transformation, David Floyer, analysts at wikibon.com, about full transformational replatforming. A lot of enterprises just like it's just too hard. The cloud is a nice little stepping stone into the cloud and Brian Gracely was talking on our opening about that if you're at this show today, the big takeaway was it's a data show. It's all about data, this is all about data at the BI and the front and center day one. And that's some tooling, getting on board easier, kind of connector, if you will, concepts. And then today with IoT, it's all about the data. So you guys now have the data. And the processing of it. But where we live, the data is this stateful thing that you have to manage and almost everybody, our customers end up in hybrid models mostly. And so if you don't manage that data across these hybrid models, you can't do, and the tools are so powerful that being announced here the last couple of days. That's what I'm trying to look at. Yeah, and this is what I want to ask you directly because the data fabric group, that's the name of the group that you're managing, this is a huge opportunity and no one's cracked the code in my opinion, cracked the code on this market. And that the data fabric opportunity, that's where the middleware will play in my mind, software. So it's all software. It's software data modeling will be big. What are you guys doing in the fabric group to address this opportunity? So think about it this way is, let me tell you a quick story real quick is, cause there's two ways to look at this. One is sort of enterprise to the cloud and the other is cloud back in. And I'll do the cloud back in view is, so Suncorp was on stage, CIO's Jeff's on stage here last year talking about he's all in on the cloud. We've been working with Suncorp since Jeff was the CIO of Telstra 12, 15 years ago. What Jeff's trying to do is get all the advantages Andy talks about and everybody talks about. As we work on the data planes, the compliance issues, that actually ends up being an NPS operation. We standardize an on tap on-prem, they lower footprint on-prem. It's been a really, it's grown our business actually with them. It's been really good. Another, so when we keep looking at it, is how do you manage data across these planes of on-prem to off-prem, even flash. We brought out our all-flash fads about six months ago. So you have this hot database on-prem that you don't really want to put it to the cloud yet or whatever you're thinking, but you want to integrate your data management all the way to the cloud. So the cloud's become a real selling proposition for us on our all-flash fads. And it's just the more we blend that idea. That's just, hold on, hold on, pause right there cause that's really key. What I see is an enablement with the cloud and you nailed it. You can sell more on-prem because you're managing the fabric piece of it. That is critical. I have to have two things. So I always say it's like Apple, is the reason you buy Apple is two reasons. One is like your iPhone and your Macintosh are really cool products. But then you start, they stitch together and they start adding value services on top of each other and they keep adding valued services. So the way, the data fabric group, the reason for the name of my group is, our cool platforms are like the all-flash fads or the all-to-vault or the internet private storage. But then you start stitching together services on top of that and data management services look to us to be a really interesting area to innovate. So we've got little bits and pieces of that idea now. We're still putting in really the infrastructure of the fabric. But the upside in a sense, the services on the fabric- There'll always be some horsepower involved but software is the critical piece of it. Software is a critical piece and then latency, I think latency and data sort of sovereignty is generally speaking will define whether you do appliance model or software model in your deployments. So Phil, you guys sit in an interesting spot in the industry. You play with a lot of players that are trying to lead in what we would call hybrid cloud. Amazon this week came out and said, well, if customers are doing hybrid, we're in the mix and we've got services that will reach in such as what they're partnering with you. Does that resonate with your customers? Where do you see about Amazon's what kind of role in the hybrid discussion? Well, something that we're working on right now, we've referred to it as the infinite FAZ. So if you know NetApp's product names of FAZ is our appliance, we add S3 connectivity to our FAZ. It just became infinite because of the size of S3 here at Amazon. And then again, you can add services on top of crazy services on top of that. And so our customers are, we have tons of customers here that I'm talking to at this event, almost. I don't think anybody hasn't said that's a good idea to do that. Try to think, nobody would come to this event and say that's a bad idea. It's a real interesting area. That another thing we haven't talked about a little bit, we see compliance and different geos and things setting up multi-cloud requirements. So that becomes an interesting topic too. What's in the NetApp model, it's really important that we're, same model we've run on-prem for years. We have to partner with Microsoft and VMware. We have to partner with multiple cloud vendors. But you really focus where the customers are and obviously we all know that's Amazon. I'm hoping you can shed some light on something because when you hear discussion of Amazon everybody says Amazon's sticking straws into everybody's data centers and all these solutions. And any data movement is one way. It's into the cloud. Of course you guys have been partnering for years. So what's Amazon's position? Is this strong arm sales force? Is it just general fud out in the marketplace? And what's the reality today? I can get my data outside of Amazon if I need to, right? Sure. And I mean the reality of it is you've got to think through your data. And I actually think that over time people are going to start, man, the more software defying moves on it's still early days. But the more software defying storage moves on the more you'll think about managing your data in kind of a virtual concept. And where is it will be in Amazon, on-prem and those types of ideas. And when you look at Amazon I mean there's logistical things. Data's heavy, it has gravity we always say so it's never easy to move it. And that makes challenges of going in or out. And you saw Snowball which is an approach we have our approaches, that's another actually kind of a migration tool, that type of thing. And I just see it as a sort of open platform. They've been very good on APIs. I think you guys have a lightning in a bottle with this data fabric positioning. No one really has put the stake in the ground yet on what it actually is. Does it sit below the app or below the virtualization? So there's always been a debate. Where does it sit? Oh for us, it's easy. It's, I mean I'll tell you the technical answer to this. It starts with the foundation is cluster data on tap. And so cluster data on tap is a fully virtualized storage management operating system that's much more tied to the, it's much more efficient than something like Viper or something up at the next level. And then we can run it and we've proven we can run it on, we run it in VMWare VMs, we run it in Amazon. So we're just extending all the portability places we run cluster on tap. We run it in appliances. And then you start adding on to that. You start adding on an object store, the ultra vault products. You start bringing formatting together. And now you've really built a fabric. And this is a little bit like if you watch Apple how they work. The products didn't talk to each other a whole bunch in the beginning but over time they talk to each other more and more. And that's exactly the process we're on. And then if you think about us from a product line point of view, we're going to be a much more streamlined product line than traditional storage competitors are not so interesting to me anymore because they're all built by acquisitions. There are too many piece parts to put together. It's crazy. Not just the acquisition cobbling together. Even pure play companies like Pure Storage which just went public. It's not your grandfather's storage. It's too narrow a solution. It doesn't solve the problem people really have. And even you guys were really in my mind the last storage company that was born and went to a billion dollars in revenue plus now obviously. But that was a storage business model. You sold storage, people bought it, you got paid. Storage has changed. Amazon is a successful storage company doing some argue billions and billions of dollars. And we still had some of those numbers. So here's the question. With pure IPO kind of flat, that's some data could be the market, could be the product. The storage business has changed. How are you guys changing with the fabric group? What is the positioning shared with the folks out there? How is NetApp evolving with this new model? It's not just storage anymore. Absolutely not. I think if you think about the history of NetApp, NetApp invented the category of NAS about 20 years ago now, 15 years ago. We made ourselves into an enterprise storage company over the last 10 years. And I totally agree with you. The market or the business of storage is in the next 10 years is going to become the business of managing data. Not literally, it won't. And we'll instantiate that in products. We'll instantiate it in appliances. We'll instantiate it in software-only models. And you'll see, I believe, you'll see a huge number of data management services which I think in many cases will not be professional services. They'll be more like cloud-based services. Start to emerge. And that's what the new storage company will look like. And I think we'll be it. And you believe that Amazon's relationship actually helps you sell more product on-prem? Or both? 100% is, think about it. We're 15%, you know the market shares. We're 15% market share. We can gain share on-prem all day long as people start to go, look, I'll standardize on NetApp because they help me on the cloud. It's such an easy, and it's almost every customer wants to use the cloud. Yeah, and it says, no, Brena, why would you not give customers what they want? Exactly. It's, and I think if you actually look at most, this is true of when you think about, if you will, the disruption that Amazon causes in the whole 408 area code, if you don't follow your customer and you start following your old business model, you're just on your way to the Computer History Museum. Yeah, and if you even make it that far, you might not even, you might be a footnote of the Computer History Museum. You might be like, and also ran. Phil, thanks for sharing the data. You've got an event coming up for NetApp, share the data, and then we'll wrap up the segment. Awesome. Yeah, sorry, I get to stay in Las Vegas for a whole nother week, and we have our big user conference here next week, which is sort of, it's awesome to come do this with all the Amazon customers, and then we'll have all the NetApp customers coming. So, thousands of NetApp customers at Mandalay Bay next week. And if anyone's listening wants to come, please come. It's a hybrid world. You guys are demonstrating the success on prem and storage, and hybrid with the cloud. Flash to disk to cloud, man. That's the storage story. What is it? Well, it's the flash to disk to cloud. Flash to disk to cloud. These days, if you're a storage guy, think like that. That's the future. Thanks for coming on, Phil. Thanks for sharing. This is theCUBE. You're watching live here at AWS Reinvent. This is theCUBE. We'll be back after this short break.