 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE. We're here live in Silicon Valley. The OpenStack Enterprise Forum. O-E Forum is a hashtag. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Am. I'm joining my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. And we are here, breaking down all the action going on inside the, under the hood for OpenStack. And that's what we're here all about. Our next guest, Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire, hosting this great event. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So who, hey, the Enterprise is really hot. No. For OpenStack. It is. I mean, the interest level is, it's through the roof at this point. And there's a lot of tire kicking, but for a, I think a lot of good reason. And I think this year is the year that we're going to see a lot of adoption as well. And as people, through events like this, kind of start to understand what OpenStack is, where it fits, and what it's good for, you know, that we're going to start to see that. So I remember when I first met you guys, you guys were to start up, get your funding. I think you were in stealth mode still. And I remember the conversation we had, and you said, hey, you know what? We are very focused, and taking what we've learned, kind of reminds me of the Apple Homebrew Clubs in celebration of the Apple 30th birthdays, that you built a cloud, you know what you wanted. You guys were focused on the cloud service providers from day one. Has that changed at all? You seem to be right there. You really haven't really wavered in my opinion. I haven't seen much movement on that. Are you still on the same track? I mean, right now this conversation is bursting out. You guys are putting on an amazing show with great traction. So is that the same? Well, you know, really at the end of the day, we built a product to help people scale storage in large-scale infrastructures. And public cloud was really the first manifestation where that was really happening at a lot of places at large scale. And we've helped a lot of service providers deliver high-performance storage services in their cloud environments. But particularly in the last year, we've seen this growing interest from enterprises who've said, look, I am beginning to act like a service provider internally. I'm building scalable infrastructure. I want to move into that internal service provider model. How can you help me bring that internally? And that's really what we've been trying to help customers on the enterprise side do. And in some cases that's on VMware because that's what they're familiar with. But more and more, we're hearing the question asked about OpenStack and how does that fit? Your service provider customers are using it. How can I use it? And how can SolidFire make that transition happen? I think you guys are in a good spot position-wise. Obviously, hyperscales bleeding into the enterprise is seeing that aggressively. People are looking at OpenStack for flexibility, agile, looking under the hood, having that open source. So that's cool, great stuff. I want to ask you a specific question around some of the things we heard at the Open Compute Summit yesterday and then this morning we were there for Mark Andreessen's keynote. And you know, he's a big time founder of the browser, Andreessen Horowitz. He said, I'm looking at all these deals and Dave and I kind of were laughing at each other because we've been in the storage business, following the storage for many, many years when it was not sexy, then sexy. Now it's apparently really sexy. Mark Andreessen said he thinks structurally storage is going to be massively disrupted even more than people think even now. So I want to get your take on that comment because you're been close to it. You've looked at different approaches, you've done some good commenting on some other companies announcing certain approaches. What does he mean by that? In your opinion, what are the big disruption areas around storage vis-a-vis all the macro trends of cloud and mobile social? So I would totally agree that storage is ripe for disruption. It's actually in the storage space, there's a couple of trends converging to make that happen. Cloud and large scale infrastructure is one of them. Flash is another one of those things, right? It is dramatically disrupting the architectures around storage and creating new opportunities for new approaches to leverage the dramatic advantages that Flash has over spinning disk. And so there is a market that's ripe for disruption and you can draw definitely parallels to some of the things that are happening on the compute side and networking side because there is this movement to remove the lock-in associated with storage as a single vendor solution and an entire stack of software hardware, top to bottom, that ties an enterprise into a specific solution. And this move to, you know what, I want a converged infrastructure layer, a software layer to manage my infrastructure, my pools of compute networking storage and then I want to plug the right solutions in underneath and I want the flexibility to plug in the right solutions for my needs and my infrastructure. And that is disrupting storage and particularly because it has been such a proprietary vertically integrated vendor specific technology where there was an incredible amount of lock-in and things like OpenStack are removing these layers and layers of lock-in that vendors have built around their tool set over time and creating opportunities for customers to plug in the right solution. What are you guys doing right now? Talk about your disruption because you guys have been on the straight and narrow for a while on the cloud storage. Is it large-scale only? You guys playing in the flash area? Can you just share with the folks your disruption point right now and where you're innovating? So, SolidFire delivers a scale-out all-flash storage system designed for larger-scale infrastructure. So anything kind of 50 terabytes and up, but we can scale up to three and a half petabytes in a single storage system. And really where we're kind of adding disruption is giving the scale that you historically don't only be able to get with disk-based systems on a platform that is all-flash that has 10 to 20 times the performance of a disk-based system, but is also very cost-competitive with a disk-based system on a capital-cost basis while being significantly less expensive operationally. And that's really just the start, right? That's the, I bought a storage system and it's fast and it's inexpensive and it works great. We're really then taking it to the next level with integration into technologies like OpenStack, but also traditional management infrastructure like VMware with the ability to deliver quality of service around storage performance to thousands of applications at the same time. And that is really the differentiator and that's really the enabling technology here that's making people comfortable to say, you know what, I used to have three different storage systems for all of my different performance needs and my really critical applications, I wouldn't put on a storage system with anything else because they'd cause problems and I'd have noisy neighbors, I have all these problems. The ability of our quality of service technology to guarantee performance to a large number of applications in a shared kind of multi-application, multi-tenant environment is kind of breaking down all of these barriers that have been built up over the years in the storage world. I want to go back a little bit and talk a little bit about the anatomy of how you came into OpenStack. So we first met in May of 2011. It was at EMC World and we had a little small meeting, you're kind of lurking there and nobody really had heard a solid fire and you really weren't that forthcoming in what you guys are doing. And then at VMworld 2011, you laid out the vision of targeting cloud service providers and this whole notion of quality of service and how cloud service providers were going to be able to take advantage of that and offer new services and so forth. And then in the fall of 2011, at the OpenStack conference in Boston, I met some of your guys and coming out of that conference, they said, you said, because you're running the show we're going after the white space which is block storage and OpenStack. This OpenStack at the time was this little grassroots movement. So that took some balls to do that and you basically made the decision back then. It seems to be obviously the right one but what led you to that? What gave you confidence then that that was the right thing to do? Because the other thing I'll add is you guys, I don't have the numbers in front of me but I've seen them, you make a huge contribution to OpenStack and you're right up there with HPE and IBM in terms of the code that you contribute. So what led you to that back then? You know, obviously we are deep seated believers in the power of cloud computing and where the infrastructure is going into these cloud and shared orchestration, multi-tenant models and in both the public as well as the private cloud and really what we saw when we started the company is there was a need for a new platform out there to help enterprises as well as service providers to build out these cloud offerings because everybody is not on Amazon, right? Every company and every service provider is not on Amazon, it's not on Google. They don't have a thousand engineers to go out and build their infrastructure automation platform and it wasn't clear early on whether that was going to be a bunch of siloed proprietary models or whether an open source model was going to emerge and when I saw OpenStack even early on start to emerge and offer the promise of a vendor neutral open source, open platform for cloud orchestration and management it was clear that even though it was very early there was the kernel of a great opportunity and it was an opportunity I wanted to personally see successful and as solid fires a company wanted to be successful as well and so we very early on started contributing to that effort and particularly around the storage side which is obviously where our expertise was to add capabilities to that platform to mature it very quickly to where we did feel it was production grade and we've seen that now in service provider environments as well as enterprises that has reached that level of production grade on the compute side, on the storage side, on the networking side. So you guys drove the initial sender development I think I'm stating that correctly. We did, we saw the need, originally block storage was just a small component inside. It was Swift, it was Object, Object, Cloud, Cloud and you guys came and said, no, we need, and that's fine but there was clearly a need and you look at what people were running on Amazon and the use cases they had there was clearly a need for a robust block storage performance oriented storage solution for OpenStack and that only could happen if you pulled it out and put a lot of resources into it. Okay, so now I want to, now unpack I got this, I got sender, right, I got that standard now but what about underneath? I mean, I can run, if I'm running sender on, you know, company ABC's array versus solid fires array what's the difference? Yeah, and you know that's an important part of how we developed and contributed. We obviously could have contributed a bunch of stuff that only fit solid fire and was only benefits solid fire but we designed in such a way that it had a plug-in model and that meant that any vendor on an open platform could plug in their solution into it and then you're able to compete on the differentiation of the actual product, right, because any product can plug into it and then you can actually bring to the table what you have that's unique and in solid fires case it was the scale out capabilities, the ability to start with a small footprint and linearly scale capacity and performance. It was the quality of service ability which we've extended all the way into the open stack layer and the open stack APIs so that you can dial in specific guaranteed levels of performance for every virtual machine provision through open stack on top of solid fire and it was the richness of the APIs and the integration points that we provided. Sender is a very large project, there's a lot of ways to integrate it, there's a lot of capabilities that provides and not every vendor supports all of those capabilities. Solid fire is very comprehensive in the set of functionality that we support in open stack. We've got one of the deepest integrations available today and that's enabled by the automation and API capabilities that are very unique to the solid fire system. Yeah, now when you talk about quality service, you're talking about both ceiling and floor. Are you, do you believe you're unique in that capability to deal with the floor piece? I mean, a lot of people can do max. Sure. Are you the only one that can do the min? I mean, maybe, I don't know, maybe kind of an oracle can do it or not but there aren't a lot of examples. Yeah, and that's what's really unique about what we call the guaranteed quality of service piece of technology and solid fire, which is the ability to dedicate an amount of performance to an application and guarantee not just a rate limit but actually a minimum level of performance that would be enforced regardless of what else is going on in the system, including failure conditions. And that's the thing that people have struggled with in multi-tenant environments is how do I give these applications that are sharing a shared set of storage infrastructure a consistent level of performance day in, day out regardless of what else is going on in the system. And historically, the only way to do that is to physically isolate them. And that model just doesn't work at cloud scale. You wrote a great piece over a year ago, it was November 2012, setting the record straight on software defined storage. I go back to it all the time because you basically challenged the industry, can you provision capacity and performance, et cetera, et cetera. Can you make a single API call? All those things you talked about in that piece, can you do them today? Yeah. Okay, you can. Yeah, absolutely can. We can do them back then. And the point of that was the conversation around software defined storage, software defined data center. You know, it's obviously very kind of confusing. A lot of vendors are trying to twist that from their perspective. I wanted to turn the conversation away from how you ship a product, whether you ship a piece of hardware, whether you ship a piece of software, whether you ship a piece of hardware and software together, whether you ship a virtual machine, to really the conversation around, look, software based orchestration is the future of the data center. That is the software defined data center. That is software defined networking, software defined storage. It's always going to have hardware, right? That's really not a question. It's really a question of, how do you orchestrate and manage that? Is it something that you've got a siloed stack of proprietary management that you've got to go through? Or do you have a standardized open set of APIs that any tool can plug into and use to control that infrastructure? And again, that's where OpenStack provides this fantastic industry standard vendor neutral layer to plug into. John, I know we got to go, but got to get the company update from Dave. Where we're at, you know. So obviously, successful startup. It's a couple of rounds. Where are you guys at right now with your progress? You know, so SolidFire is doing great right now. We've been around for about four years. We have raised a couple of rounds of funding, $68 million in total. We had Samsung come on on as an investor last year. We've had tremendous success in the service provider space, literally dozens of service writers around the world are running SolidFire in production in both OpenStack as well as other technology based public clouds. But we also see a large number of enterprise customers that are coming to SolidFire to solve their large scale storage challenges as well. And we kind of position SolidFire as the all flash array for the next generation data center. Because that's really what we're trying to do is not solve just a point problem with performance, but provide a platform to build that next generation service provider or enterprise data center on. And we're doing that at, you know, a number of customers today. Thanks. Dave Wright, CEO and founder of SolidFire here inside theCUBE. Our exclusive coverage of the OpenStack breaking out in the business. Go to crowdchat.net. We've opened up our beta preview for everyone. Crowdchat.net slash OE forum or OpenStack Enterprise OE forums to hashtag. 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