 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015, brought to you by HP, and now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2015. This is Silicon Angle Media's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. We're here for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is Bill Philbin, VP of Virtual Development Unit of HP Storage. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, Virtual Development Unit, HP Storage. Quickly for the folks out there. What is that? Which products? How does it all fit in? Yeah, so the easiest thing to probably, what I think about it is, we've got a couple of very large development teams within the storage group. You've got, of course, three-par. You've got our tape and our XP business. I don't do any of those, but it's virtually everything else, right? So it's everything from our NAS platform, which we announced, you know, the follow-up is on three-par backup, data protection for three-par, you know, store virtual, you know, essentially the rest of the product portfolio is part of Virtual Development Unit. So a lot of stuff happening in the storage world, the changes we heard from earlier with the cloud, CMO, legacy, and born in the cloud are coming together. Storage is seeing a transformation over the years, right? Quickly, I mean, just going to the all-flash, data centers now on the table, spinning disks as they say, might go before tape, as we always talk about. I mean, that's not true, obviously, but customers want to know where to put their investments, how to take their architecture and modernize it, right? That doesn't mean throw it away, no rip and replace. So how do you get involved in those conversations with customers, and what does that translate into from a product standpoint? Well, so I definitely agree with you that, you know, storage is, I was telling somebody last week, storage is really, it's a really exciting place. It's almost fritely exciting. You think of, look at not only the transformations around the cloud and the transformations around flash, but also you've got the upstart, you know, that are in there, you've got the, and trans vendors are all sort of, you know, trying to figure out what they do, et cetera. So it's probably no more exciting time to be in storage. The way I talk to customers about it is that there are trends in the industry that impact everything regardless if you are using the products or not. So let's think about cloud. A lot of our customers are probably unwilling to sort of put their data outside the firewall and leave it at the SLAs or privacy regulations of Azure or Amazon. But the easy provision, the cost, the fast access to the storage, et cetera, et cetera is driving those behaviors inside the firewall for storage applications they're buying. That's why you have customers looking at OpenStack and other related technologies. So I think one of the things that you're going to, you're seeing is there's external trends impact on converged storage systems like we sell here at HB. You know, second is the ease of use around what I would call application enabled compute and storage together. Right, we're calling this hyperconverged today, but basically it is turning over the keys to the application administrators, not the administrators who want to provision storage, data protection, you know, very, very quick and easy to use format and never actually see the storage box that's sitting behind it. So I'm sitting in vCenter and off I do that, right? I'm a database, I want to do a backup. I don't want to call the backup guy to do that. I want to do that directly from within the environment that we're talking about. What that's all about is, you know, better TCO, right, transferring the sort of the knowledge to the person who's most capable of making that decision which is the application administrator. We're seeing that trend very well alive in the industry as well. So and we're responding. So what happens to the storage administrator? Well, I don't think, I don't think it's like tape, I don't think it's like desk. I think the storage administrator's going away. I think the storage administrator's job is to actually work on defining a set of business policies and business practices that the other guys get to choose from on a menu. Think about it as creating the Girl Scout Cookie Catalog, right, so if you have a goal level application, that goal level application comes with certain expectations around latency in SLAs, or on data protection policies, et cetera. They define that. They work behind that in the data center. The application administrator, when they're provisioning the application, actually then starts to make some of those decisions which is the goal level app, the civil level app, whatever, bronze level app, and then they go from there. Now, so that vision of being able to sort of provide those services, those decomposable services, or reusable services, it's always been there for the storage admin. They just haven't had time, right? What's changed to allow them now to actually deliver on that promise? Well, I think a couple of things are going on, Dave. First, I think storage is actually getting easier and easier to administer. I mean, the storage administrator probably would, some of them would take exception with that, but if you look at the ease of provisioning, the ease of work for the three-part platform as an example, we've actually looked at the TCO for quite some time. I think that's number one. I think you're also seeing things like VVolce, which are making things like SAN a lot more achievable. If you look at sort of the vCenter to the three-part sort of transition with VVolce, I think that actually makes it easy for the storage administrator. So I think what we're seeing is sort of time from that perspective. So I got to ask a question on accelerating to this cloud architecture, right? What's going on with the customer? And this is interesting. I asked Pat Gelsinger a question four years ago when he was still at EMC. What comes first? The infrastructure, the application, of course, X Intel, that's what I wanted to ask him. He all infrastructure, and then now is now the way around. Workloads are dominating the discussion. So storage has to be in a position to be agile too, but yet you can't just deploy storage. I mean, you can't just, I mean, you can be agile, but what's the strategy for a technologist and architect to say, hey, I got to build a foundational service. That's got to be elastic at some level and be responsive to the needs of the workloads. And the workloads could come in overnight, literally in a week, two weeks. Sprints could create new apps. You know what's interesting is a fair amount, I don't know how to put a number on it, but a fair amount of the cloud infrastructure is actually still running on physical storage. It'll be called converged storage that we sell today. I mean, reality, the amount of, actually it's happening with software defined from that perspective is still pretty small, growing, but still pretty small. And so the same sort of elastic storage, the sort of capabilities that 3-par has about quality of service, et cetera, et cetera, as is meaningful in the cloud, as is meaningful in converged. The difference is how you get to it and how you provision it and how you orchestrate it, right? Which is sort of, if you look at OpenStack as an example, OpenStack, easy orchestration, easy provisioning, 3-par sitting underneath it, we're actually able to offer that customers through all the capabilities we have today. And that's what the innovation is, actually tailoring the new... Yeah, I don't think it's about new widgets in storage. I think it's new widgets in management, new widgets in simplicity, new widgets in best practices, et cetera. And I would agree with Dave, this has been the holy grail from storage tools to all the people out there that have actually been trying to do this for the last whatever it is, 10 to 15 years, you've probably written more about it than anybody, right? I think we're now on the cusp of doing that. And I think part of the reason is that applications being virtualized is actually helping us, there's more commonality than there is. Kind of like containers in cloud, like containers have been around for a while, but Docker hits the timing. You're talking about timing, the timing's perfect. And that's what you're saying, it's like this is the time now, all that dreams are out, realized. Hey, what do you think about that? Well, and it's interesting we had Jason Newton on earlier in talking about sort of these four sort of foundational areas of the messaging, the hybrid infrastructure, the security, the sort of data piece, the productivity piece. And you're starting to have conversations that tie into that. You know, you're talking about the orchestration piece, you know, the tie into the cloud layer. But at the end of the day, you're still a product company. Yeah. And you need to have hot products. So when thinking about sort of the hot products, you know, obviously it's a three par, everybody talks about three par, but your portfolio is store once, sort of EVA, right, is part of that. Backup products, it's where most of the spend is, right? So what's happening there? And what's HP story around that? So maybe not that I want to ask myself my own question, Dave, but maybe the answer is, okay, what are you doing about those trends in the industry, right? So if you take a look at the, what I'll call the application enablement trend, you look at products like Recovery Manager, right? Which provides application management, right? Of application recovery on a three par environment. You look at the HC200, the CS200 hyper-converged platform, zero to 15 minutes of serving storage for specific workload, but it's based on store virtual technology, which has shipped several hundred thousand copies. That's not only good for just VDI, but good for everything. And that actually relates to the other thing that's in your data centers, number two, you look at the work that we're doing around application enablement within the store once product line, where from Oracle, the database administrator can make backup copies for Dev and test without calling the storage guy. You know, so we've got a foot in each of those camps, so the trends that I'm talking about. So enabling those sort of foundational platforms is really where you're putting it. Because I think it is all about application enablement, making it simpler, easily accessible, et cetera. Well what we're poking at is, when you come up with a slide, and Meg presents it or whatever, Jason on the cube is like, okay, that's marketing. But what we're trying to do is connect the dots from development to the vision. So that marketing presumably comes from customer pull. Correct. All right, so what's the process for sort of translating that back into product development and then back out to product? I think the issue is how flexible are the architectures that we've actually built today to actually go do that. If you look at sort of again, we were shipping software defined storage 10 years ago before software defined storage was hot. We built the technology, and this goes back to this comment that David Scott made. I won't use the two words, you know what two words I'm thinking of. I'm going to get purple hair if I say it, it's a bet. Polymorphic. Is it going to stick? We've said that. But the issue with it's all about. He's stuck to his guns though. Yes, exactly right. He's stuck to his guns. Well, when you think about polymorphic, but it's actually technically accurate. But that's all about. So it's called dead fish. But that's all about it. That's sushi. Am I talking to him or am I talking to him? Not going to do it. I'll have to tap out now. Wait, wait, so I'm going to talk about it's all about, it's about the architecture underneath the product. The fact that you can deliver a block array device that does ice guzzies and fiber channel for software to find in a hyper-converged and a physical appliance, same technology infrastructure and architecture, same management plan above the top, regardless of what the workloads are. We've built architectures at HP, three part of the same way with the technology it has. We've built architectures at HP for this generation of problem. And that's what we're focused on. So if your question is from an engineering perspective, what are you guys working on? We're working on extending the sort of capabilities that we have internally. Same would be true at StoreOnce. Whether it's software only, VSA, physical appliance, once you ingest the code, you never have to rehydrate your backup and now transfer it to recovery manager. Same technology base. So that's not, it's not exactly sexy, Dave, but it's actually in a resilient architecture that we've built over the last five to six years that's preptice for the spot we're in today. Well, but it ease of use is the key with the management piece. Correct. I mean, that's, you know, say things that get boring means we're reliable, right? That's kind of like when you say not sexy. Yeah, Mrs. Philbaum would never say I was sexy for sure. She certainly would say I was reliable. Reliable's good. I bet you're Mrs. Philbaum would not say that. Yeah, and you're not going to ask her, Dave. You're not going to ask her. Let's get her on the phone right now. Okay, what about, let's talk about backup for a minute because, you know, it's again, not a sexy but really important. I kind of, I find backup sexy. Sorry, I just do. So, because the opportunity to completely transform backup is right before us. That's right. With things like snapshotting, you know, flash comes into play, it sort of changes data sharing. So what's the story around backup and how is HP transforming that? So it's really interesting about backup, especially look at the day and the age where we've got arrays which are, you know, five and six nines available. Customers are doing snapshot replication in the case of DR. And then they're using a traditional backup ISV to back that up where they pay a per license fee and they pay a per capacity charge on top of that. You know, that's belt, suspenders and duct tape effectively, right? We looked at that problem and what we determined was that if customers believe, and actually by the way, what we're starting to see is snapshot replication into a different, from a governance role perspective is the equivalent of actually taking a backup off site. The problem is that backup, that replication is actually on the most expensive piece in your data center, which is primary storage, right? So what if we could actually do that but also make a permanent archive of that snapshot in the event of a failure because a replication is not a backup. Cropped in data center number one, you replicate the data center so the corruption goes with it. What if we could actually provide a way to provide a very, very simplistic and easy use application consistent snapshot and capability that not only stored the most vital information on three-part, but stored backup copies on a store month's box? What if we could do that? And the benefit is, same old recover characteristics, much better TCO for the customer, okay? And with all the great features in store ones from a replication capability, we can do it extremely fast. So we've looked at data, then in backing up a virtualized environment through a traditional ISV versus using a product like Recovery Manager, 17 times faster to backup than it is through a traditional ISV product. And so I guess to answer your question, going back to whole application focus, application enablement, application, oriented product portfolio, it's looking at what applications are doing and delivering on benefits around the applications is what we're looking at. And then in terms of just, I think software defined or software led or whatever, I always think of metadata, because it's all locked in boxes today. It seems like part of the strategy is to elevate that long term and actually leverage that metadata. Is that a direction that the industry's going? So give me some more, for instance, give me an example on metadata. So to take your backup example, I have catalog data that's sitting inside my appliance. And I can only get to it from the path, but if I could access it across a portfolio, I could maybe leverage that in different ways. You want to only access it, but you want to be able to interrogate it. And actually, with products like autonomy, it'll actually look inside the backup and determine whether or not you've got data that's supposed to be backed up or not backed up, et cetera. Automate my policies in a way that the human maybe can't do. Yeah, and today I think the problem is you've got a proprietary interface at the point of storage, you've got another proprietary interface at the point of backup. Well, with products like Recovery Manager Central, you've got one sort of set of storage, if we will, that not only can you leverage the metadata that's stored at the point of inception, but also that's put in at the side of backup. And I think if you look at the work we're already doing with the autonomy guys about actually interrogating the data that's in the backup, we can actually provide a much richer data stream or metadata stream than you can do today with conventional mechanisms. Bill, appreciate you taking the time. One quick sound bite from Roy in the segment, what's the vibe like here at HP Discover for the folks that aren't here? Describe the scene here, what's it like here? Every year it gets better, I have to tell you. The customer vibe around HP storage, whether it's Flash or whether it's the interesting work we're doing around recovery or the hyper-converged platform, et cetera. We just left a storage leadership council meeting which is our top customers here in the Americas. And that room started with 10 people and now there's 50 people in it. And so just the vibe about storage in general here to show, and I think the vibe around HP is, it gets better every year. Storage group continues to deliver, certainly in the earnings, Dave and I follow that, but it's become almost a catalyst internally. I don't want you to make it too easy, John. So don't make it too easy because I have to work the other 364 days I'm not here. But I think the storage group is, if you ask Meg or Antonio or any of those guys, the storage group is leading around growth, is leading around operating margins, et cetera, et cetera, taking market share. But it's in the center of the discussion. You talk about all the transformation. That's right. And you got big data, you got cloud, hyper-converged, you got software-defined data center and infrastructure. Storage is the linchpin in everything now because then you go with Flash, you're now on the app side. You got systems of intelligence, Dave was talking about with Bobby, Patrick earlier. This is, it's got to come from somewhere. The brain, like you said, the data centers are, clouds are all run on infrastructure. There are storage somewhere. That's a dirty little secret, right? This story somewhere. The storage we're talking about is still the storage that we're selling. The storage somewhere and someone's drives. Okay, Bill Philbin, VP of Virtual Development Unit, HP Storage here inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with more coverage from theCUBE, sharing the signal to you here. Go to hpdiscover.social, check out the site, go to CrowdChat.net. Join the conversation, stay tuned. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.