 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 23. This is the live coverage of SiliconANGLE and Wikibons. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We'll go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, I'm co-hosting with Dave Vellante. Hi, everybody. Gary Orange-Tien is here. He's an executive vice president at Fusion I.O., focused on the product side of the business. Gary, welcome back to theCUBE. I love having you on. We might even talk about Fusion I.O. a little bit. We might even get there. Thank you for having me. You guys have a great setup here. Boy, it feels like Times Square at VMworld being here on theCUBE. It's so fantastic. Great, it means it's our fourth year. This is our original spot. Dave and I in 2010 were actually on the other side, but Moscone's now open. And everything happens right here. It does. I joke, you know, might even talk about your company, but whenever we have you on, we talk about trends, you know, what's happening in the industry, and so I want to start there. Let me, let's do a checkpoint. We're seeing sort of VMware. It's interesting, we were saying before, DeFi convention, they're becoming mainstream. In a lot of ways, they have, they've become convention. So now they're trying to, you know, move beyond. So what's your take on where we're at with this whole virtualization trend? It really is amazing how far the conference itself has come, how far the user base has come. And I think, you know, we've seen a lot of statistics recently that the number of virtual servers deployed is now greater than the number of physical servers. So it's no longer a matter of if virtualization is going to happen, but it's happened and now how quickly can we get from the 50 plus percent virtualized servers to 80, 90 percent virtualized servers. And, you know, I think sometimes people forget too, just the flexibility that you get with these configurations about being able to move virtual machines around, the ability to grow these things at scale is just so much that can be done compared to ways we've done things in the past. So I think the attendance and the activity and the number of people demonstrating and showcasing solutions at VMworld just goes to emphasize that point. Like you've been following our progress with theCUBE. We've been following you as well. And obviously we talked to Fusion IO here in 2010 when they were private and they got since gone public, but Fusion IO really pioneered Flash, right? At a level that no one could ever imagine. Big name, web-scale companies, hyperscale companies. Now Flash is kind of going mainstream in the data center. So why don't you get your take on this? New entrants are coming in. You've got competition. The markets are exploding, you've got acceleration. Also everyone's seeing the vision. Server compute, storage being kind of continuing to grow, but not as an island, but connected into a Flash-like kind of hybrid or full Flash arrays to full-on data center, like the brains and the heart, the heartbeat and the brain. So one, do you agree with that? And what's your take on this movement on the mainstream side? Because you've been kind of in the future doing with all the futuristic guys you've heard from Newtonics, building the best of Facebook, Google into a box. And you guys now have done that with Flash. So what is your take on this data center? Yeah, well, the industry's come a long way. Fusion IO, we're about delivering the world's data faster. And we're doing that today with some of the largest enterprise customers and some of the largest hyperscale customers in the world. It's really fun to be part of it and see the activity of people really changing the shape of their data center. Not just improving the performance of the applications, which is obviously critical, but reducing the amount of infrastructure from a cost savings perspective. With Flash, we tend to talk a lot about the performance aspect, which is a very big part of it. But equally important is the ability to reduce budgets and reduce costs. And one of the interesting things is that when you reduce the cost of computing, you increase the size of the market. You increase the number of solutions that you can serve. You increase the number of people you can serve. You know, earlier this year, we did a product launch at the Open Compute Project. We launched our new IOScale product line. We've just seen tremendous growth of that product. But now over the last couple of years, we've dramatically increased the Fusion IO portfolio. We're not only do we offer solutions that go directly inside the server, but shared solutions, which are a big part of the portfolio now, either in an all Flash configuration or a hybrid configuration or a mixing Flash and disk. And of course a whole suite of virtualized solutions, both for server virtualization and now for desktop virtualization. So yes, we're seeing a lot of folks who are talking about things in the market. We haven't seen so many folks who can offer such choice for customers, not only across the favorite server platforms that they have deployed, but also the deployment method and how they want to see, go about it. Gary, a lot of people always ask me and Dave or individual together, why are you guys so excited about the enterprise? This is going back to 2010. And Dave and I had a conversation in 2011. We said, you know, people get all excited about the bells and whistles, the apps and all the sexy toys out there, but it's under the hood, a lot of actions have it. So in Newtonus, we just saw a great example. You guys, under the hood, there's a lot of action going on and the consequences and the prize is significant, it's the data center. Right, so you guys are powering that engine. Again, you mentioned some of the scale, but I got to ask you specifically, talk about the mid-range of the marketplace or the sweet spot of the enterprise market. Everyone's rolling that way. You've had, you know, we all know about Apple, Facebook and the Oracle, so big, big monster deployments are kind of one-off, but they call them the full-end hyperscale, but like the meat and potatoes enterprise, well, the engine that's powering those guys. Exactly, and I like to say that the web is the engine of innovation, but the enterprise is the engine of our economy, and that goes to show the importance of working with some of the most mission-critical applications in Fortune 100 environments, Fortune 10 environments for that example. For example, so across that spectrum of enterprise solutions, we have a lot of activity in the database market, dominated by Oracle and SQL Server, but SAP HANA is rapidly becoming a very important deployment, and folks are using Fusion IO to accelerate the ability to make business-critical decisions that change the face of their business. Server virtualization is another big market for us in the enterprise. Virtual desktops, we launched a new IOVDI product today at VMworld, changing again the economics for people with flash memory and virtual environments, and then of course on the big data side and increasingly even in the enterprise we're seeing the adoption of some of the popular big data, no SQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra and HBase, so we feel really excited about being able to cover this spectrum of solutions, database, server virtualization, VDI and big data, for enterprise accounts, and let them do it in a way with flash memory that not only speeds up their performance, but reduces the cost, and gives them the choice of how they want to deploy. Some people like to deploy flash where they can share it as a shared storage resource, some people like to go for the maximum performance and minimal latency right inside their server, and some people like to go in the virtual environment, we're obviously talking a lot about that here today at VMworld, and so we have solutions there also too. A big VSAN announcement today. Another one, yes. So you see VMworld, you guys got some software chops of your own, VMware throwing its hat in the ring, and obviously a big part of that is aimed at flash. Right, right, so for folks who haven't seen the VSAN news, VMware is talking about that extensively at the show. VSAN is the ability to take local storage resources that we just used as an example, three servers. For VSAN, you have to have some flash memory and some part drive space in each of those servers, and then VSAN sort of packages that all together as a SAN, but it's right inside that server layer, and so it's very convenient for a lot of customers who for whatever reason don't want to have an external SAN, but like that shared storage functionality, we have a demo of VSAN at our booth. We're at booth one, two, four, five down on the show floor, and we're showcasing a VSAN demonstration, and obviously we think that when you combine VMware's VSAN software with FusionI, you've got a nice combination. Well, and you've seen over the decades, software companies like Microsoft and Oracle grab storage function, so as a supplier of infrastructure and infrastructure software, you've got to pick your spots, and you've got to pick spots where there's white space that's sustainable that you don't get eaten alive. So at one point I would've thought that that function that VMware announced today would've been your domain. So help us sort of squint through where that white space is for FusionIO. Yeah, so there's so many answers to that question, but at a high level, there is a fixed stack, so to speak, in terms of the application going to storage, in some cases people will find that using the tools out of the box from their software vendor will provide them what they need. A great example to take a slight divergence from the VMware side is some of the popular databases come with their own built-in volume management and replication tools, so you can just use that as is. When we get to the VMware side, what we've seen is while folks are continuing to increase some of the mainstream functionality, so like this vSAN announcement, which works great with FusionIO, there are other elements about providing acceleration in VMware environments that don't come out of the box. So being able to provide extreme server density using Flash as a cache, but while retaining all of the built-in VMware features like vMotion and disaster recovery services and HA and SRM, those are places where the ioturbine software that we use to help with virtual environments really kicks in. Or in the desktop world, if you want to have a combination of keeping your existing storage, but accelerating with Flash memory at the server and want to go into some cool new IO optimization capabilities to really boost the IO to the virtual desktops and minimize the IO that goes to the sAN, extending the investment, helping save costs, these are areas where we continue to provide additional value for customers that integrate perfectly with the VMware tools that they know and love. Also integrating with the storage systems they know and love, one of the big focuses of the FusionIO solutions, whether it's the ioturbine software for server virtualization or the new IOVDI software and Flash memory for desktops, is if you have a storage system that you know and love, don't change it, we don't want you to change it, you like it, so we want to find a way to augment that, that makes it easy for the customers. Gary, there's a panel going on right now, Mark Andries and Pat Gelsinger and Andy Beschlestine and Graham Hay, who's with Credit Suisse Strategy Guide. They should be having that panel here. So, you know the queue. That's why everyone's watching us over them, the real, the signals here. I got to ask you, what is the future of the data center? I mean, you know, they're going to have a take on, it's going to be all its grade, you know, rosy colored sunglasses they're going to have on. So, you know, we know what they're going to say. I mean, Mark Andries is going to say, stop, we're eating the world, Pat Gelsinger is going to say all his messaging. But I got to ask you, you're in the trenches, you're leading the marketing, you've been in the product side of Fusion. You know, what is the future of the data center? And will SDDC, Software Defined Data Center, happen? And what will it look like? What's your prediction? What's your view? Sure, well I think the software capabilities are already happening now. You could say, depending on your definitions, that just putting in the virtualization layer gets you to step one of software defined. And I think that's a great starting point. You go from managing physical resources to now managing virtual resources. And so, consider that step one on a path to a more fully automated software defined data center. At Fusion IO, we're paying very close attention, understandably, to the all flash data center. And we really think that in 2013, we've come and crossed the threshold from people thinking about flash to people getting to a point where they want to really plan an implementation path to get there. Now, when I say the all flash data center, disks aren't going away, tape is not going away. Oh darn. Oh, we can't, there's no fight here on that front. Someone's got to dive, it's the end of the movie. Come on. One thing I've learned, paying attention to this is it's much better to predict the arrival of new media than it is to predict the death of any media. Well, tape was supposed to be dead, but a long time ago. Tape was supposed to be dead, and a year or two ago, Google has an outage and the recovery came from tape. So, you know, barring them on. You mean full adoption of flash? It's a full adoption of flash in a way that helps people with their databases, with their server virtualization, with their VDI, with their big data. We're at that point, and what's exciting is that there's so many combinations of both hardware deployments and where that goes, server layer, storage layer, virtual layer, as well as the software options that help help them. So, if we're not going to go into it, we're not going to go into it. You can say this though. All active data was out on flash. So, what was other media? Not me saying it. We've had customers who say, if I'm running my application and I have to leave the motherboard to process something for my application. That's a problem. That's a problem. So, the active data set, as you identified, yes, that has to be in flash. Because when is the last time you use your phone? Like, I can wait. I can wait for that app. We don't have any patients who live in a real-time world. Nobody wants to wait. It's not necessarily something to be proud of, but it's just where we are as a tech society. The iPhone certainly killed a few phones. To use the movie analogy, someone dying at the end, but keep with the movie analogy. The guy gets the girl, the girl gets the guy. So, in the ecosystem, I got to ask you the question, who's with who? Who's dancing with who? Who's winning? Who married who? What happened? There's a lot of stuff that has to play out at many levels. Many, many levels. So, I'll let other people speak about their own partner ecosystem. Here at VMworld, we're showcasing solutions from all of our OEM partners, and that includes Cisco and Dell and HP and IBM. So, if you make your way down to the booth, we actually have four pods set up that showcase the work that we've done with those partners. That's years in the making, not only having the IO memory products or IO drives and IO scale products that can be purchased through our OEM partners, but being able to have validated, tested configurations, reference architectures, the whole like. So, we talked with D Raj from Nutanix. He talked about his success. They made some good bets early. Yeah. They're not just improving performance. What bets did- Using Fusion IO as well. What did Fusion bet on that is making you guys continue to be successful? That's a great question. I think what people always said, well, what's going on with Fusion IO? Why is Fusion IO different? From the get-go, Fusion IO made a decision that we were going to look at flash as memory and not as a disk drive. And while it might come up and show to the operating system like a piece of block storage, we've really tried to exploit the media to do everything that it can do. And that's paid off for us in terms of solutions that offer the lowest latency and the highest performance at the lowest overall cost for our customers. It's also allowed us to go out and acquire companies like NextGen Software and now what we call the IO Control Hybrid Storage Product. So IO Control implements flash memory as memory whereas almost every other hybrid storage product is tucking flash memory behind SAS and SATA controller. So really again, not exploiting the media for what it can do. And when you look at the future, if you want to talk about what's coming, we're going to have more memory-centric architectures. Certainly in 30 days, there's another big database conference coming up. The whole talk is going to be about in-memory this and in-memory that. So when we look at flash and we say, how can we take this new media that's exciting and it's potential and allow customers to exploit it? It's been flash as memory. And then I think beyond that is just having the products as one step but being able to offer people a complete solution is the next step. So you're going to see a big focus from Fusion IO across providing database solutions, server virtualization solutions, BDI solutions and big data solutions so we can help customers get to more and more of a flash-ready, all-flash data center. Okay, Gary Orenstein here. Cube alumni multiple times. He keeps getting promoted. So theCUBE has been a good luck charm for him. He's now EVB of marketing. Do we have time for one more little piece? Yeah, absolutely. One piece I want to make sure people are aware is we've opened up the Fusion IO Performance Cafe. It's a retail show space, coffee, morning snacks just around the corner next to the Western Hotel. 28 Third Street for the Fusion IO Performance Cafe. We've got demonstrations, giveaways. So not only is there a great booth down on the VMware show floor, but the Fusion IO Performance Cafe make it a stop sign on the roster. If you were facing the Western Hotel, it's just to the right-hand side. Look for Fusion IO. Look for the crowd, the swarming men. Also the Fusion wagon is out there. Fusion wagon, a 1968 VW bus wagon. It's free. It's free, it's running around, take pictures. Can we get an entourage, a cube entourage, a Fusion wagon after we- Next episode in the Cube. Day one, Gary, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for having us. And you guys have been on the Cube for a long time, been following Fusion. A leader in Flash, the all-Flash data center. That's what Mark Andries and those guys are probably talking about on that panel. We're going to go audit that in a second. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE. Stay with us for multi-day coverage, from wall to wall, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We'll be right back after this short break.